Monday, May 12, 2008 was just like any other day. Except this was the day of my 19th birthday. As I turned on the TV first thing in the morning to CNN, one of the first news segments of the day was about the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that had just hit the mountainous region, WenChuan (汶川)county part of Sichuan (四川)province, located in the Southwestern part of China near Tibet.
I was literally shocked to the core upon hearing the news of such a tragic disaster. Almost immediately I began to bawl my eyes out as I heard about the escalating death toll of students trapped under the rubble and their parents desperately trying to find them amid the devastation, only to find the dead body of their child by the end of the day.
A feeling of utter helplessness overwhelmed me most of the day. I felt that I could not help the earthquake victims directly because I was all the way in New York and nowhere in China. In between classes I would constantly check on recent updates about the WenChuan earthquake online. The earthquake was all I could talk about with my peers and co-workers. I would inform other students about the earthquake and asked them if they had heard the news of the earthquake in China.
As the day let on, there was little time devoted to celebrating my birthday. The WenChuan earthquake had already become the fixation for my birthday. I decided to split the birthday money I received to help the earthquake effort by donating to The International Federation of the Red Cross and UNICEF.
Having stayed 3 years abroad in Shanghai at an international high school, I had developed the misconception of China becoming a developed country like the U.S. and Canada and that China was no longer a developing country. I had grown accustomed to the extravagance of the city and had forgotten how rural the countryside in China was. This tragic natural disaster made me realize that the superficial elegance I had seen in the cities of China was no remedy to cover up much of the poverty that was present in most of China.
