Not long ago I wrote a post about Earthquake that happened in Beijing, but we didn’t expect a huge one on its way to hit southwest China. My husband’s parents and brother, who live in Chongqing, east of Sichuan province, about 300ks away from epicentre, felt the strong shake and ran off the building quickly. At about 4:30pm Canberra time, my husband was informed by his father not long after the quake through Gmail Chat when his father came back home to turn off the computer.

Thank the God that they are all okay and it seems at the evening time their life got back to normal, but we are worried about a lot of friends living in Chengdu, and one of my husband’s aunt living in DuJiangYan, in where JuYuan Middle School got collapsed and hundreds of students got buried underneath. We haven’t heard anything from them yet, but we know that both his aunt and her husband actually work in school as teachers.It’s such a worry.

Mom also rang me from Beijing to say they are okay. She didn’t feel anything at where they live, but my sister, who works in Dongcheng District, felt the shake at the time. I told mom to prepare an Emergency Kits just in case something happens again. Mom said she is going to collect all her fortune into a bag and carry it to run away, then she laughed.

It sounds laughable, even my husband’s parents got a bit excited about what had happened this afternoon on the phone, but it’s not very funny if you look at the situation carefully. Thousands people had died in the disaster and the death toll will certainly rise in the next a couple of days aftermath. We are lucky that we happened not be the victims, but it doesn’t mean everyone else is okay.

For most of western people, thousands of people’s death is a huge tragedy, while to normal Chinese people, it’s not something completely strange. China is a country (nation) full of tragedies and disasters over the past 5000 years. We deal with it and we move on. We grow up in a place that life hasn’t been easy but we develop a way to wipe our tears away and learn to be tough. It’s not that we don’t respect people’s individual life and easily forget number of our loss, it’s just that we have to learn how to live with an attitude of always looking forward and focusing on making the life of those alive better, otherwise there is no way that you can get yourself keep going in this world.

Life moves on, after sadness, mourning and grieving. For a lot of Chinese people, they are even quite used to saving their time and tears for crying out, as we all know that healing can only happen on your way of moving forward, and it definitely won’t happen when you are still dwelling in the past.