In China's Quake Zone, Aftershocks of the Spirit

Hardy Optimism Likely to Mask Despair

MIANZHU, China -- Inside Meng Futing's refugee tent, the air was hot and fetid. Outside, summer rain had turned the little earthen lane to mud. It was so sticky between the rows of tents that each step Meng took made a sucking sound.

There was no hope of leaving this giant tent city anytime soon. Meng's village, Qipan, was leveled by the May 12 earthquake that devastated central China's hills. The road to Qipan, 24 miles north of Mianzhu, near the epicenter, was still cut off by a landslide.

But even as he recounted his misery, Meng, a 38-year-old farmer, was smiling and, to all outward appearances, cheerful. He was looking forward to an imminent move into prefab barracks going up about 200 yards away.

"We have to face the hardship," he said to a visitor surprised at his equanimity over a disaster that left 85,000 dead or missing. "The earthquake hit us. Nothing we can do about that. It was the work of heaven. Now we have to deal with it."

Across China, children have been taught for generations that enduring hardship -- or "eating bitter," as Chinese like to say -- is just as important as overcoming it. The rugged farmers of Sichuan have developed a reputation for being even abler than the rest of their countrymen in this respect. And since the quake struck, they have earned their reputation anew.

"Our mothers and fathers teach us from an early age," explained Jiang Mixiao, 45, whose apartment building in Dujiangyuan, just northwest of Chengdu, was flattened by the quake. "We all know how to eat bitter."

The Communist Party has made its own contribution to the tradition. The mystique of endurance was a central part of the Long March, in which Mao Zedong led his faltering forces into a mountainous refuge and lived to fight another day. Millions of young people were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution for the express purpose of experiencing the hardships of peasant life.

Party propagandists have long relied on that history to rally support, even though three decades of economic reforms have transformed the way many Chinese live -- particularly party members -- and made the storied hardships only a memory. Now, the party has been forced to rely on the tradition in a new way, counting on the patience of 12 million refugees across the earthquake zone who have little promise of returning home for months or even years.

For them, the disaster has opened a new era of eating bitter. And once again, they have made enduring hardship a point of pride. "I could cry, but what good would that do?" said a homeless factory worker who identified himself only as Yang.

Vastly Better Than Tents

Jiang saw not only her home destroyed, but her factory, too. Still, on a recent day, she laughed easily while chatting with those around her inside her new prefab home, which she is sharing with family and neighbors, four to a room. Her husband was off to look for temporary work, she said, and her son had already found a job in the city center.

Jiang's daughter watched television on a set snatched from the ruins of their apartment, the sound loud enough for all to hear. Laundry hung outside to dry. On one side of the door, a neighbor fried greens in a wok over a little gas flame set up just outside the barracks-style unit. On the other side, another neighbor had some soup boiling. They would all eat together, Jiang said, and she invited a visitor to pull up a chair and dig in.

The earthquake and its aftermath have dramatized another trait that has followed the Chinese through their long history: the ability to live crowded together with a minimum of friction. What to a Westerner might have seemed like unbearably close quarters was neighborliness and making do for Jiang and fellow residents of the prefab city going up outside Dujiangyuan.