Eric's Beijing Diary

This morning, Elisha took me to the museum for the 1976 earthquake. After leaving the museum, we went to McDonald's for lunch. Both McDonald's and KFC tend to be very crowded at lunch, but we managed to find a seat near a young nurse, who watched me with curiosity when I got up to get a refill for my coffee. Elisha tried to explain to me patiently that I would have to pay for it, but I stubbornly persisted that I would not have to. When I came back with the coffee, both Elisha and the nurse told me that I got the free refill because I was a foreigner. I told them that the free refills on coffee was a McDonald's policy, but there actually may be some truth to what they were saying, in the sense that sometimes people who work at McDonald's may not be aware of the policy, and local people don't know enough about McDonald's to push the issue.

As we were leaving McDonald's to go to the park and climb hill overlooking the city, I saw a young guy with a short beard and a head full of curlers. It was a Kodak moment if I ever saw one, but I couldn't get my camera out quickly enough. You never know these days...more and more young people especially are adopting all sorts of interesting styles. Multi-colored hair, and punk-rock dress are not nearly as unusual as they would have been even a few years ago. In the eighties, when China first began opening up, you used to hear stories about women wearing nylons on the outside of their pants, obviously a wild guess at how they were supposed to worn. But today, both young women and young men are just as fashionable as their counterparts in the West.

We were going to leave the park to go to the church for a prayer meeting, but first Elisha wanted to introduce me to cotton candy.

"This is traditional Chinese food."

Hmm..... Oh well, she's young. You wait. Twenty years from now, young people will be introducing McDonald's that way.

One moment in time. The whole city was sleeping, totally unprepared for the monstrous catastrophe what was about to befall them. Well, not totally; strange things had been happening; the problem was that nobody knew what they meant. The day before, a thousand chickens in a nearby village refused to eat and kept running around in circles. An otherwise placid fish kept jumping out of its fishbowl. People reported hearing loud noises, and some even reported seeing fireballs shooting across the sky. Nonetheless, they went to bed completely unprepared for what was about to happen.

At precisely 3:42 on the morning of July 28, 1976, disaster struck. Thousands of people were instantly killed by the crush of falling concrete. Many thousands more, who lay patiently beneath the rubble, waiting to be rescued, were crushed when the powerful aftershock hit. The official death toll stands at 242,419, which would be about three times as many as died in the bombing of Hiroshima. But local people will tell you that many more died. Who knows? At least seven thousand entire families were wiped out.

The recovery was hampered by the political situation at the time, which made asking for outside help unthinkable. If it had happened today, the Red Cross would surely have been in there, but China was staggering through the last turbulent days of the Cultural Revolution. The Red Cross was not invited. One can only imagine how many lives could have been saved. Nevertheless, a plea for help went out across the country, and many, many people responded. The earthquake museum shows some pictures of the devastation--it's really mind boggling. When you look at the pictures, it's hard to believe the current metropolis that is Tangshan could have risen from that devastation.