Is it possible to calculate the human cost of an earthquake? A fault line shudders and buildings fall, lives are lost. After a while, the buried stop crying out from the rubble. Hope fades and hardens to grief. The death toll is counted and the rest of the world gets distracted by the next big headline.
What then? What are survivors supposed to do to mend their wrecked lives?
Two years ago in China, a magnitude 7.9 earthquake tore apart Sichuan province, killing an estimated 87,000 people (including the nearly 18,000 still officially "missing"), wounding some 400,000 and leaving 5 million homeless.
Dizzying statistics like that miss the humanity of the tragedy. The quake meant the loss of sons, daughters, husbands, and wives -- sometimes all of the above -- for thousands of people. How do you move on from that?
The Chinese have an answer: earthquake marriages.
In a gut-wrenching story in last week's New York Times Magazine, Brook Larmer profiled how everyone from locals in a refugee camp outside the ravaged town of Beichuan to entrepreneurs to government propaganda officials have spent the last two years attempting to stitch the province's social fabric back together, largely through marriage.
Earthquake marriages are estimated to number in the thousands across Sichuan.
They are an attempt to urge (some might say force) grief-stricken earthquake survivors to move on from the unimaginable tragedy of May 12, 2008. Matchmaker Deng Qunhua united as many as a hundred couples, but she said they can be easily riven by complex emotions (not to mention financial situations) leftover from such massive loss:
“The earthquake survivors often feel that it may be too soon to look for a new spouse,” Deng says. “But when they see other people with a warm family home, they want that for themselves.”
Finding such a refuge, however, is no simple task. Grief and trauma still consume many earthquake survivors. New companions must also deal with the remnants of their partners’ former lives: debts, disputed property, in-laws and parents and, perhaps most important, children.
On Deng’s list, the most desired trait in a partner, repeated on almost every entry, is not money, looks, character or education; it is simply “no burdens.” Those saddled with the heaviest burdens -- especially middle-aged women with children -- move slowly off the list, while the young and the elderly tend to have more luck. Even so, some of these hastily arranged “earthquake marriages” have already fallen apart. Deng recalls one that ended in divorce after just 12 days -- “a record,” she says.
The marriages are also a hopeful message of healing and looking toward a brighter future. Xue Ying lost her fiance to a landslide in the quake, while Yang Chun lost his wife and young son. They met in a shelter outside of Beichuan, and didn't like one another at first. But as Yang bordered on suicidal, his family pushed him to seek a new relationship.
The strangers met again. They slowly found in each other a way to navigate the mixture of loss, guilt, and terrible memories they shared:
Would a new relationship dishonor the dead? Were they both too broken to build anything new? ... From that day on, the two survivors spent their nights together in the shelter, comforting each other through the darkest hours. They rarely talked about the hideous images that occasionally flooded their minds. It was enough that they had both gone through a similar experience. “She suffered a lot, too,” Yang says, “so I think she understands me.”
There is also a darker side to the marriages. The government actively encourages and arranges the marriages, perhaps as a way to force survivors to forget about the loved ones who died in shoddily-constructed buildings:
To blunt criticism over the collapse of thousands of poorly built schools, which killed more than 5,300 students, the government silenced parents who lost their children, giving them compensation only after they signed a pledge “to obey the law and maintain social order” — an implicit warning against ever raising the issue again. In February, Tan Zuoren, an activist who was compiling an exhaustive list of the dead students, was sentenced to five years in prison on unrelated charges that many suspect were politically motivated. Remarried couples, it is presumed, will have their eyes too fixed on the future to raise uncomfortable questions about the past.
It's easy to look at the story of these marriages and think about how horrible it would be to have the government covering up its own negligence with a message of progress. And in America, we might balk at the idea of any official involvement in our decision to marry, or remarry.
But can we make a judgment as to whether such a program, taken as a whole, is a "good" thing, or not?
At the end of the story, Yang and a pregnant Xue emerge from a doctor's office, beaming and holding an ultrasound image of their healthy, unborn child. Yang says: “Everything is O.K. It’s good to know everything is going to be O.K.”
When all is said and done, isn't that all anyone can ask for?
Image: AP
Tags: Anthropology, Earthquakes, Geophysics, Natural Disasters
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