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A world full of sounds of silence

By Li Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-05-29 13:28

More than 1,000 journalists from around the world have been braving frequent aftershocks, landslides and other dangers in Sichuan.

All that only to keep us up-to-date, for instance, on how the local people struggle to pick up the pieces and what major battles are being waged to eliminate secondary disasters in the earthquake-struck areas.

They have to work hard and explore deeper, because the readers outside have an almost insatiable appetite especially for personal stories of the survivors.

The most heart-wrenching are those personal accounts of children - what they went through at the moment when the earth shook, how and why they made it alive, and what they hope their future to be like.

A few websites have also collected the diaries from surviving students and published the private thoughts of the teens on the Internet.

Working with my colleagues who have been reporting from the epicenter and villages and towns around ever since the quake struck, I find their best are also those stories about people, especially about children.

But I was still taken aback when I read a front page headline of the Science and Technology Daily on Sunday: Tears from a psychologist: "Please allow children to part with (their) pains quietly."

The story features the much-publicized new Beichuan Middle School, now located in the Changhong Group College in Mianyang, where hundreds of teenage students are living and attending classes.

From newspaper stories and photos, and from scenes shown on television, we have seen a vibrant group of teenagers who, in high spirit, are resolved to overcome all the hurdles the earthquake has caused and realize their dreams.

But in this report the psychologist tells the state of the students when the more prominent journalists are not hovering around. The report pleads with the media to stop sending reporters into schools and temporary shelters to interview children.

The plea has kept bothering me for days. I can picture the scene of a tent, outside of which toy tanks, airplanes, dinosaurs or even angels are lined in neat rows. Two boys are playing chess, but without the exchange of a single word when they are approaching the final duel.

The boys do play games in the sports ground, but often quietly. Sounds from a basketball match are no more than the ping or pong of the balls.

Sometimes, the students are just too quiet to be bearable for the psychologist, who also cannot forget the loud cries of a girl of 11th grade, who just finished an interview with several journalists.

The psychologist said she could not forget the fright in the teenage girl's eyes as if she had returned to the dark Monday.

She talked about another, a 17-year-old girl. By the end of last week, the girl had not had any word from her father. Only one student came out of the rubble alive from the class of her cousin, 10 days younger than she is, but that student was not her cousin.

It is only natural that she would often wake up in the middle of the night with the sound of screams imprinted in her mind on the day of the disaster.

Although I believe talking and sharing pains is a way out of trauma, I think the psychologist does make her point convincing as well.

Let us just remember her words: "Many people went away satisfied with what they harvested but the children have had to suffer because their mental wounds are being reopened again and again."

I do not think my colleagues and I want to reopen the children's mental wounds.

E-mail: lixing@chinadaily.com.cn