China survivors swallow instant noodles, lasting grief
YINHUA, China (Reuters) - In China's devastated earthquake zone survivors are patching together lives defined by a diet of instant noodles and daily stress, worries over an uncertain future and searing but often subdued grief.
Yinhua is one of hundreds of towns and villages in the southwest province of Sichuan wrecked by the May 12 quake, and in makeshift camps homeless farmers and workers endure daily hardships that could multiply in the hot, rainy months to come.
Watching over an extended family of 10 living under shelters of woven plastic sheets and sticks in Yinhua, Wang Falan said their biggest hardship was the lack of a real tent. Their makeshift one leaked streams of water when it rained.
"The second biggest problem is we don't have any cooking oil and we're getting sick of instant noodles," she said.
Without the oil, she explained, it was difficult to fry vegetables to relieve the unvarying diet of spicy instant noodle handouts that many quake refugees largely depend on.
"I'm thinking of many different ways to make instant noodles, but even those will run short soon," she said.
Her worries were echoed by many families camped along a road passing by mangled chemical plants, flattened homes, camps of troops used for relief work and landslides unleashed by the quake, leaving gashes of red earth on the surrounding slopes.
In a nation where many families prize education and exams as a path for children to escape into better lives, the disruption of schooling is also a concern beyond the tragedy of many schools collapsing in heaps of rubble.
"Many of the kids will be scared to go back to class," said farmer Wang Xingzhao. "But if they don't go, this will be all they have," he said, eyeing the scene of corn crops, flattened homes and landslides.
FEW UNTOUCHED
But throughout Sichuan, efforts to rebuild a routine are shadowed by melancholy over the tens of thousands of deaths that have left few untouched.
Between scooping out steamed rice for this visiting journalist, Qi Xingping almost off-handedly said her daughter Tang Jia was among perhaps 200 students killed when a four-floor building at the local middle school collapsed in the quake -- one of dozens of schools to crumple.
"I've cried and cried for her, but here we're also busy trying to get by so that I sometimes have to put her out of my mind," she said in front of her shuttered shopfront.
Down the road, helping to pass out cabbages and other donated aid, Luo Zaihong said he lost his daughter and only child, Luo Lin, at the same school, while his brother Luo Zaifu sitting next to him lost his two children at that school and the local primary school.
While some parents have angrily denounced their children's deaths, for others the pressures of coping allow little time for elaborate grief.
Sharing a ride into Jinhua, a flattened town next to Yinhua, Hou Yong said he had returned there to arrange to bury the ashes of his eight-year-old daughter, Hou Yuting.
She died when a concrete slab fell on her during a rescue effort a day after the quake, he said. But Hou said he had been too busy searching for his mother-in-law, missing after the quake, to handle his daughter's farewell.
He would return to his accounting job on China's east coast in a few days. "It's too sad here," he said. "And I will have to go back sooner or later."
(Editing by Nick Macfie and Sanjeev Miglani)
