They don't want to talk about the earthquake any more.

That was my general impression when pressing Tangshan residents for their recollections of the horror of the earthquake that measured 7.8 on the Richter scale, 30 years ago.

The first person I talked to was an old lady who lost all her children on the night of July 28, 1976. She broke down and refused to answer any more questions.

I felt like I was opening up old wounds that had healed.

Some of the locals I interviewed gave me a look that basically said: "We've got on with our lives. Why don't you take a look around and see how our new Tangshan has turned out?"

And look around, I did. The transformation is nothing short of amazing. You can find hardly any trace of the temblor that killed a quarter million people. As a matter of fact, there are only seven isolated spots where the debris has been preserved as a reminder of what the city was like in the wake of the most destructive earthquake in recorded history.

Children play in street-side parks and senior citizens practice opera arias along its main boulevard. Everywhere you look, it is a picture of normalcy and harmony. On top of it, Tangshan is the biggest economy in the whole of Hebei Province.

A 70-year-old, who recounted his experiences to me, did not betray any hint of sadness when mentioning that he lost his daughter, who was then a toddler. "It happened so long ago. I have accepted it as part of my fate," he said stoically.

Many Tangshan people think like him, he added.

Young people are even less willing to touch the topic. As something that happened before they were born, it appears only as a few paragraphs of cut-and-dried description in textbooks. I have a hunch that they have difficulty grappling with such an enormous tragedy and feel that it is better to know as little about it as possible.

It seems obvious that survivors have overwhelmingly gained a sense of closure. That makes our commemorative event a bit cruel, in a sense, because as outsiders we choose to ponder on the frailty of human life on this particular anniversary while much of the time we can conveniently forget it.

Of course, my impression is not a scientific survey. There are plenty of anecdotes about survivors who tearfully recall their brush with death and their heartrending loss of loved ones.

When the earthquake struck Tangshan, China was at a stage when psychological health was not yet a familiar subject. For example, the 4,202 orphans were well fed and clothed, but adoption requests for them were categorically denied just to keep them together and maintain the good name that the State did not forsake them. Nobody thought that putting them into normal loving families might ease them into society. Many of them have grown up to be capricious and stubborn, according to a Southern People Weekly report.

There was a time when verbalizing the cataclysm was cathartic. Zhang Xiduo, a Harbin newsman who participated in the rescue mission as a 23-year-old soldier in the aftermath of the quake, has visited Tangshan many times since then. For the first decade, people could not stop retelling all the details, he said. It seemed that the calamity was so unbearable that they blocked it from their consciousness for a while and then slowly woke up to reckon with it by mentally going through it many more times.

But, in the past decade, things started to change. The local economy recovered fully and got on the fast track. Living standards rose dramatically. Most people who lost spouses or were handicapped had long settled into new families and formed new patterns of living. They had collectively turned over a new leaf.

If we had a national Freud, he could have designed a 12-step programme for grief management. But the Tangshan survivors have had to explore their emotional and psychological landscape on their own. When the time for mourning comes, usually at the Qingming Festival and the July 28 anniversary, they do not have a mass grave to pay tribute. Instead, they burn ghost money on the sidewalks . (The majority do not know where their loved ones are buried.)

If only a team of psychologists had provided counselling, both locals and we outsiders might have had an easier time living with memories of the quake. Grief is a corrosive force; it turns on the spigots of both strength and weakness in human nature. Different people have different timeframes for overcoming it. We should respect history, but we should also respect survivors' feelings, including their need for closure.

E-mail: raymondzhou@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 07/29/2006 page4)