Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

In the summer of 2002, my daughter Kristin, her friend Alejandra and I went to China. My daughter Meg was a Peace Corps volunteer there, and we met her in Beijing and took the long train ride together across China to the city of Deyang in Sichuan province. Meg had lived there the previous summer during her training period, staying with a wonderful family who had become her true Chinese family.

We had a wonderful time together in Deyang, riding around in the bicycle cabs, drinking tea and playing Mah Jongg in the park, and eating amazingly spicy food. Miss Qin and I stayed up late at night just talking and laughing like old friends. My favorite memory of that visit was making jiaozi with Waipo, Meg’s Chinese grandma. She doesn’t speak English and we had no Chinese but language wasn’t really needed as she patiently showed us how to make the perfect little folded dumplings, and then inspected our efforts. We could convey all we needed to with smiles and gestures and laughter.

Then we went on to Chengdu for a few days, visiting the temple and Dufu’s Thatched Cottage. This was the first week of my first trip ever to China, and it seemed so magical, just being there. At the end of the week, Kristin and Alejandra went off backpacking to Thailand, Meg went to a summer assignment in Beijing, and I went to seaside city of Dalian in the Northeast to teach English at Future School, the first of three such summers.

News of the earthquake in Sichuan was so horrifying. It took a few days before Meg could get a text message through to her Chinese family, and learned that they are safe and unharmed but living outside like so many in Deyang. The latest figures I have seen put the death toll in Chengdu at over 4,000 and the toll in Deyang over 10,000. Who can imagine such a thing? “After the first death, there is no other.”

My mind can’t comprehend such grim arithmetic. The Myanmar cyclone death toll is about four times higher, by the last figures I have seen, and the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 killed over 225,000 people. Sometimes it seems like natural disasters are like buses, there’s always another one coming along. That sounds horrible, but it does seem that as each new one comes along, the last one becomes old news, and earlier ones just sort of fade into generalized memories of misery. We watch the scenes of horror, we read the stories, we feel the pain, we send some money, and then we turn away. What else can we do? Life goes on.

It’s much harder, though, to turn away when it’s a place that you’ve been, and people that you know have been affected. It all seems so much more real, because it’s so much more imaginable. Afghanistan, Iraq, India, Indonesia, Rwanda — I’ve never been to those places. I know they’re real, but I’ve never been there, can’t visualize the place, can’t picture the people. But China — it’s just too real.