Beichuan official Zhang Kangqi, 36, lost his wife and daughter in the earthquake
A gallery of photos by Ian Teh from the Sichuan disaster zone is now up here at time.com. It includes the above image of Zhang Kangqi, an official in Beichuan country who lost his wife and daughter in the May 12 earthquake. Here’s some more about Zhang from our six-month anniversary piece:
Zhang Kangqi lives in his office. Five feet from his desk sits a single bed, a small table and a television. The focal point of the room is a pencil drawing of the family he lost on May 12. An art student drew it from the ID cards of his wife, Wu Shanshan, 33, and their daughter Zhang Duo, 6. All other photos were lost in the rubble of Beichuan, a mountain town where 15,000 perished. An 8-ft.-tall (2.4 m) fence topped with barbed wire now surrounds the town to keep people out, lest they be harmed by still frequent landslides. Former residents gather on the hills overlooking their destroyed homes, lighting incense and firecrackers for their kin entombed in the collapsed buildings and mud below.
Zhang, 36, has little time for such expressions of grief. As a Communist Party cadre from Beichuan, he was working in a village in nearby Xuanping prefecture when the tremors hit. The hamlet’s 2,000 survivors were cut off from the outside world. For days there was no news from Beichuan. Finally, Zhang learned that his hometown had been flattened. “Everybody cried, but I couldn’t cry,” he says. “What would people think?” The next day Zhang trekked six hours to a rescue command center to get help for the villagers. People’s Liberation Army helicopters arrived on May 18, bringing supplies and evacuating the injured. It would be more than a month until Zhang was able to visit the remains of his home back in Beichuan. His wife’s and daughter’s bodies were never found. “Now I put all of myself into my work,” he says. “The dead, there’s nothing you can do for them. All we can do is make Beichuan better.”