Suddenly, China Seems Not So Far Away

The young mother cried out to her 2-year-old son buried beneath the rubble: "Mom is coming to you!"

She yelled in a language I do not know, but I slowed my car after NPR's Melissa Block translated. For a few minutes that lasted forever, I listened to the time-lapse account of two Chinese parents' anguish that portrayed every parent's greatest fear.

I heard Fu Guanyu's screams for help as the rescue workers dug through the debris of their collapsed apartment building in the city of Dujiangyan, China. I heard her blame herself because her little one, like little ones around the world, had begged his mother to take him with her to work that day. As so many other mothers must do, she gently pried herself away, saying: "I must go. You must stay."

After the excavator had cleared away some of the bigger chunks of debris, Fu called out to her son again.

"Wang!" she cried. "Mom is coming for you!"

Hours passed with no sign of life, and Fu's hope began to hemorrhage. I could imagine her face after Block, in a steady but stricken voice, described Fu falling limp with grief into her husband's arms.

"I should have brought him with me to work," the young mother sobbed. "He didn't want me to leave him."

Her husband, Wang Wei, begged her to stop. "I need you to stay strong," he said. "I cannot lose you now."

Like millions of listeners, I clung to the same hope that eventually would fail this family. I knew by Block's voice that the news was bad. The workers had found bodies, and one of them was a child.

"Was he about 2, wearing a striped shirt?" asked the mother.

For a moment, silence. Then the wails.

The boy and his paternal grandparents were dead.

Fu tried one more time. "Did you call out to him?" she asked them. "Maybe he just fainted."

I pulled to the side of the road. I never had met Fu Guanyu and Wei Wang, but tragedy dissolves differences. They no longer could be strangers.

China has long been in the cross hairs for many Americans for trade practices and shipping dangerous products to the U.S.

Its abysmal human rights record, including the recent crackdown on protests for Tibet's freedom, led for calls to boycott the Summer Olympics in Beijing. But our grievance is with the Chinese government, not its people, and it is those people who are suffering now.

It is hard to stand helplessly by and witness others' suffering, especially when their pain so easily could be our own. A ferocious earthquake split open the ground in China, and thousands of miles away, our foundation trembled. Borders evaporated as we comprehended the enormity -- and the randomness -- of their loss.

Some of their rituals of grieving are unfamiliar. Survivors covered the faces of the dead so that others could not see them. They set up altars around the dead, so many of them children, and burned money to give them luck, lighted firecrackers to ward off evil spirits.

But our many similarities poison any attempt to dismiss this as only their tragedy, their loss. Photo images collapse the distance: A child's pale, dusty fingers hang over a parent's hand. A mother clutches the face of her lifeless daughter. Brightly colored toys stick out in the debris from a collapsed kindergarten. Parents drape their children's bodies with their favorite blankets. Their blankies, my daughter would say.

News accounts describe Chinese parents as very much like American parents in their inability to understand how this could happen to an innocent child.

"Why did you leave your mama? Why did you die?" one mother cried as she draped clean clothes over the body of her 10-year-old son.

"Our grief is incomparable," 39-year-old Li Ping told The New York Times as he and his wife carefully pulled a pink pair of pajamas over the bruised, naked body of their 8-year-old daughter, Ke. "We got married late. She is our only child."

Fu Guanyu lost her only child, too. But like women around the world, she always will be a mother. And so that mother called out to her son even after she knew that he was dead.

"Wang!" she cried. "Mom is here."

Thousands of miles away, this mother cried, too.

To listen to Melissa Block's report, go to www.NPR.org and click on "Chengdu Diary."

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and the author of two books from Random House: "Life Happens" and "… and His Lovely Wife." To find out more about Connie Schultz (cschultz@plaind.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
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