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At Chinese Tent City, Order and Incongruity
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Jiang Guozi, 84, stood in line for two hours Tuesday for a rice and vegetable lunch. He carried two bowls in his trembling hands, one for himself and one for his wife, who had a broken leg and waited inside the stadium on a quilt on the floor. Volunteers, he discovered, would fill only one bowl per person.
"A lot of people care about our life, but there are too many refugees here, so it's kind of hard to get supplies," Jiang said.
As he struggled up the stadium steps with his bowl of rice, faltering midway, two students came to his aid, helping him the rest of the way. Once inside, he gave the hot lunch to his wife, Liu Yuzhen, 80.
"I'm fine with instant noodles, but my wife doesn't like them," Jiang said. "So I'm okay."
Jiang and Liu have no idea what they will do next. Almost no one does.
"This is very complicated. We're not very clear," said Zheng, the hospital accountant. "It's not the right time to think about the next steps."
Tent city life, Zheng said, revolved mostly around meals and asking neighbors where they were when the earthquake hit, how they escaped and whether their families were safe.
There was order amid incongruity. Some refugees wore oddly dressy donated clothes as they washed their underwear in buckets and separated recyclables from garbage. Rows of smiling fourth- and fifth-graders were temporarily schooled in a large white tent erected by the Mianyang Foreign Language School; all the boys ran around with newly donated pink backpacks featuring Snow White and Cinderella.
Uniformed police officers patrolled the grounds in pairs but seemed small in number. Residents said they had no complaints of theft, crime or backed-up bathrooms. An ambulance turned up in mere minutes to take a woman complaining of a stomachache to a hospital, but her worried mother had already bundled her into a taxi.
At the end of a dirt path leading away from the stadium, a smiling volunteer in a new T-shirt waited for a delivery of supplies. "The volunteers are increasing every day, and most are unofficial, unorganized volunteers like me," said Zheng Yan, 18, a student who worried about the shortage of thin, padded mattresses.
Asked why she signed up, Zheng paused and fought back tears.
"I'm a student in Mianyang but I'm from Beichuan," she said. "My mother is still missing, so I came here to wait for news of her. And in the meantime, I try to help others."
Correspondent Edward Cody in Beijing and researcher Liu Songjie contributed to this report.
