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Couple Recount Day In Rubble

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The New York Times

Published: May 19, 2008

SHIFANG, China - At the moment of greatest despair, Wang Zhijun tried to kill himself by twisting his neck against the debris.

Breathing had become harder as day turned to night. The chunks of brick and concrete that had buried him and his wife were pressing tighter by the hour, crushing them. Their bodies had gone numb.

Then there was the rain, sharp and cold, lashing at them through the cracks.

"I don't think I can make it," he told his wife, Li Wanzhi, his face just inches from hers, their arms wrapped around each other.

She sensed he was giving up. "If God wants to kill us, he would have killed us right away," she said. "But since we're still alive, we must be fated to live."

And they lived. They were pulled from the rubble of their collapsed six-story workers' dormitory 28 hours after the May 12 earthquake, spared the end met by at least 32,000 others.

Their tale of survival is also one of a rekindled love, of two people who might have died had they been trapped alone.

They whispered to each other. They talked of their 14-year-old daughter - who would take care of her? They recalled their life together, the shape of it before and the shape of it to come, all the changes they would make if they ever got out alive.

Days after their rescue, they lay in separate beds in Shifang People's Hospital, a loud place with too many patients and too few doctors. Wang's stout body was covered in cuts scabbed over with blood and pus, and he drifted in and out of sleep while talking to a reporter.

Li, 38, her petite frame dressed in a pink nightgown, spoke softly and stared at the ceiling with tears in her eyes. A white blanket covered her left side, where her arm had just been amputated. She had pleaded with a doctor not to cut it off, but there had been no choice: It had turned gangrenous after being trapped beneath Wang in the collapse.

Yet they were both thankful. "My colleagues said, 'You're the lucky one. You don't know how many people died,'" Li said of the reaction of her fellow factory workers.

'Facing The God Of Death'

Of the 28 hours, Wang said, "It was more terrifying than facing the god of death." Like millions of Chinese, the life they knew was completely eradicated at 2:28 p.m. May 12, when the 7.9-magnitude earthquake sent wave after wave of tremors through the river valleys and glaciated mountains of Sichuan province, one of the most beautiful areas of China.

Wang, 40, had returned home two days earlier, after traveling around the country for half a year and trying his hand at small businesses. He had lost a lot of money. He and his wife rarely spoke. He spent Chinese New Year in the city of Guangzhou by himself, skipping China's most important family holiday.

Wang is the kind of itinerant worker found in China by the millions, wandering from city to city in these boom years, and so it was chance that brought him home two days before the earthquake.

Li was raising their daughter, Xinyi, on her own while working at a chemical factory in the town of Luoshui.

"My husband doesn't have a stable life," Li said. "He goes wherever he can get a job. I told him, 'Why don't you have a rest? Stay away from business. Just try and enjoy life for a while.'"

From Pain To Numbness

On Monday of last week, she and her husband had just sat down in her fourth-floor apartment to watch a police soap opera on DVD when the dormitory, which houses dozens of factory workers, began shaking violently.

He flung an arm around her as they sprinted for the bathroom eight feet away. The entire building collapsed as they got there, knocking them to the ground. The wooden bathroom door slammed against Wang's back. Clouds of dust filled their lungs.

They were frightened but did not feel pain at first. "In our minds, everything was clear," Li recalled. "We were buried in the rubble.

"As a woman, as a mother, my first thought was, 'What about my daughter? Who'll take care of her if I die?'" she said.

They lay entwined on their sides, not knowing whether they were bleeding or any bones had been broken. A large chunk of concrete loomed inches above their heads. Shifting their bodies, they knew, could cause it to drop on them.

Li's left arm was wedged beneath her husband. The pain was excruciating at first, until the arm went numb.

"My mobile phone is in my pants pocket," said Wang, who was wearing a track suit. "See if you can get it out."

With her free hand, Li managed to fumble it out, but there was no signal. She thought she heard her cell phone ringing elsewhere in the rubble. It rang over and over for a while.

Li tried to focus her mind on two things: How can I get out? How can I stay alive? But of course she and Wang thought of their family and friends, whether they were suffering in the same way. Their daughter was at school when the earthquake hit.

"I want you to make it out," Wang said. "We have a child, and I want you to raise her."

Through a crack in the rubble, they could see the light fading. The rubble was pressing down, slowly crushing them. They no longer felt any pain, because their entire bodies had gone numb. Nor did they feel hunger and thirst.

They had to take turns breathing. When Li took a deep breath, her chest expanding, Wang held his breath.

Li looked at the cell phone at 11 p.m. Still no signal. But at least they had the phone, their one lifeline. They kept it on. The battery meter showed one bar of power left.

The cold rain started sometime during the night. Wang could hear it pounding the debris like a drum: da-da-da-da-da. It came down through the cracks. Wang also heard other noises, stones crashing against stones. Were those landslides?

The cell phone battery died.

"I gave up hope that night," Wang recalled. "No one was going to save us."

He thought about what it would be like to die slowly, minute by minute, and he made a decision. "I tried bending my neck against the wall to kill myself," he said.

That was when Li told him that since God had not killed them right away, they were meant to live.

Then slowly the daylight began coming back through the crack. Hours later, they heard crunching footsteps on the rubble. Their voices were hoarse, but they began yelling again.

Someone shouted back, "Who are you?"

Li recognized her boss' voice. "I'm Li Wanzhi," she said.

Then came the words: "Hold on, we're going to save you right now."

Nearly a week after the rescue, both were still in tremendous pain. But their daughter was unhurt, and she was with them, refusing to leave their side in the hospital.

"The only thing we had was each other," Wang said. "We encouraged each other to live on, and we said once we got out, we'd live a good life and care for each other. Now we have a new start."

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