I came slow into awareness of the horror of the past week, and still it comes slow, but heavier each day. There are stories and pictures and Wen Jiabao flew in, old and frail as he is, they all sigh, to give commands and tell the little girls not to cry. Still they cried. They're estimating in the end it may be more than 50,000 dead.

On Monday afternoon I was on my balcony, squinting at the sun which glared off my laptop. At 3:30 I got an SMS message from my Chinese tutor (who's always forwarding me messages) about Sichuan, where he knows I used to live and love. An earthquake, 7.8 on the Richter scale occurred at 2:30 it said. "An earthquake," I think, "hmm." And that's about all I think. I'm trying to write through my thoughts from the weekend's existential psychology workshop. The will-to-meaning is what keeps us alive, says Frankl.

At 1:00 before the world changed ZX had called, wanting to know if I had ideas about how to donate in China for Burma relief. We talked for just a few minutes while I sat in the sun on my balcony with my laptop and my coffee. The world was beautiful.

At 4:00 when he calls again the world is still beautiful; I'm baking perfect cookies. I try to answer, it cuts off, and I can't get through back to him. "My phone must be out of money," I think. "I'll have to run to the LianTong place before going to the office this evening." But time slips away, and I end up hurrying to the office at a quarter to 7:00 just in time for the evening's workshop.

But when I arrive there is unusual energy in the conversation and FR and GX have a crazy story. There was an earthquake in the afternoon, they say. We felt it, and evacuated the building. They tell their story - how the floor began to sway underneath them, how they looked at each other, asking "what's happening?" and ran out the door and down the stairs. One flight down and FR decided she had to go back for the center's money. GX didn't want to let her, but she fought her way back up through the stream of people on the way down to grab the center's money, her wallet, and her MP3 player. GX told the software designers in the office next to ours, "There's an earthquake!" but they didn't move. Everyone else, it seems, flew down and outside to stand around with their bags and their cellphones, or whatever they thought to grab.

Suddenly there was connection and fear and I tried to call ZX again. And again. And again. I used FR's phone, and finally got through. He's fine. There's a big crack in his parent's building. Everyone is out on the sports field, and afraid to go near buildings, some in their pajamas, but fine.

We don't talk until later about how they all were sure the buildings would fall. His coworker screamed, "It's over!", sure she was about to die. Others were so frightened they jumped from the seventh floor and, tragically, did die.

Everyone I know is okay, but still it hurts. Former students, who are mostly from Sichuan, have undoubtably suffered losses, though I haven't heard specific stories. I want to be with my friends in Sichuan. I feel helpless and far away (as many of they do too). The horror of how lives have been turned upside down sinks in more every day.

Someone finds online a teacher's blog from the high school in Beichuan where a thousand kids were buried in rubble. The last post is pictures of the kids and teachers enjoying a sports day twenty-four hours before the earthquake. I find myself fighting back tears in the middle of the afternoon.

I call my friend Iris, who is a fourth-year nursing student back in Nanchong. The school is sending a group of nurses into the harder hit areas. Hundreds want to go, but there is space for only twenty nursing students. Iris says if she is chosen, she wouldn't tell her parents, knowing they would worry so much. But she isn't accepted, and I'm a little relieved, because I would have worried about her too. We laugh about how I might have been accepted to go - they were mainly looking for sturdy-built nurses - ones that could work long hours and not collapse without food and water. My roommate, who in general gets bright-eyed about soldiers, told me reverently last night how a bunch of them fainted from overexertion, or lack of sleep, or food, or whatever.

A big rescue team from Japan was allowed in today, a few days late, if you're asking some people. Why do they even bother with money? FR asks. Who cares about how much money has been donated when people are dying? The instant noodle factories should just load their trucks up and drive in there to donate it themselves. This is China, they say, shaking their heads how at a time like this, there are still people who can only think about making a buck. (But it's not China, it's the world, I want to tell them.) At the office I get laughed at for having donated money through SMS. She can't believe that I would be so stupid as to fall for the scams. But I've grown used to the ridicule, and it doesn't touch me. (At some point, I want to tell her, you have to start trusting, and if I was wrong this time, 12 RMB is not much of a price to pay.)

My friend William writes on his blog about his experience in Jiangyou (close to Mianyang).

sometimes it hurts

When I come back from Sichuan, my colleagues say, "You look good, happy. Sichuan made you prettier. You should go more often."

(These pictures are by Justin Unrau.)
I can't really argue. Fresh canola plants and pea shoots fried Sichuan style are good for the soul. A Saturday morning group bicycle ride - me, Deb, and Michelle on the three-seater - bumping past fields of bright yellow canola flowers. Our spirits were hardly dampened when the people at the soy sauce factory (after a call to their boss) couldn't give us a tour. We played and walked until we exhausted ourselves, then ate like we had earned it. The Muslim restaurant on Saturday night had crispy spring rolls that tasted like tacos. Easter lunch was noodles at another Muslim restaurant.

In the morning there were absolutely no seats inside the tiny brick church. The old ladies tried to force us to take theirs, but I followed stood with William outside and we stood our ground. A man seated on a folding chair in the doorway near us carried the makings of a lunch in a sturdy plastic shopping bag that read, in English, "Graceful."

The 33-hour train ride, apart from my minor depression (sparked by the news that I would be three hours from ZX and not seeing him) was more or less unremarkable. We didn't really talk to anyone, though the hallway seats were lined all day and into the night with chatter.
The girl who slept above me, a migrant worker I put at about 22, was strangely both polite and obnoxious. Once when she wanted to walk between our bunks to grab her cellphone from the second bunk, she asked our permission. I was so confused I didn't answer.

She bought food from the train attendants, and once, a noisy hand-held video game in plastic to play an hour or two. She talked non-stop, mostly about her boyfriend and how beautiful he said she was. She wore bright pink high heeled shoes that looked like they were made of plastic. At night when they rested under my bunk next to the aisle it was easy to find my way back from the bathroom. In the morning of the second day she applied full make-up, mostly in pinks and blues. I assumed she would get off soon, but apparently it was just for the short sloppy guy in the compartment next to ours. They joked and flirted by flinging insults the whole day and into the evening after the man had changed into his long underwear and was holding court on (from what little I could understand of his dialect) all affairs economic and political. I kept hearing "Taiwan" and "US" popping up in heated discussion. I didn't find out until the next day that elections (though it was called "leadership selection" or something by Beijing) in Taiwan had been held and the non-pro-independence party won, much to all of China's delight.

A prisoner with an empty eye socket was handcuffed to the lower bunk two compartments down for the length of the ride. Every few hours he'd be released to shuffled down the hall to the bathroom, shackles dragging along, his guard trailing behind him. Once when they passed I took the opportunity to go fill my water bottle when I wouldn't have to go by them. It made me uncomfortable to pass the staring red eye cavity.

Tibet. Still makes me want to cry. It's clear that the protest/riots have spread and involved a lot of people and places, and it's clear that there's been a lot of violence against the Han people and property. Apart from that, not much is clear, and for me that's frustrating, and scary. China has basically closed down everything west of Chengdu, and shipped in LOTS of troops. They claim that there are far more Han people being hurt than Tibetans, and that six hundred protesters have "turned themselves in" but how is anyone to know?

We rode the bus through the Tibetan area of Chengdu, and there were, literally, police cars on every corner. I asked two taxi drivers what they thought (taxi drivers are usually pretty honest and willing to talk) what they thought of the situation, and both of them just spewed prejudice against Tibetan people. When the meter reads 15 Y, they want to give 10 Y, one said. I can only take four people, and they demand that I take five. "Sounds pretty normal to me," I said. "I'm guilty of the same thing," and he laughed with me.

"We help them so much," I keep hearing over and over, "they get even more privileges than the other minorities." You don't get in a fight with a Tibetan, because they get more leniency than everybody else. That and how it's all under control.

ZX and I discuss Tibet almost nightly. Both of us bring hard core concern for justice . . . and the gigantic assumptions of our cultures. I want no government "protecting me." I argue that its our responsibility as world citizens to care about what's happening to other world citizens. For him avoiding chaos trumps a lot of things, and the hypocrisy of the Western governments and media is as bad as that of China. A lot of people here are pissed about the Western media's biased reporting, and I would agree that a lot of it is biased. I've been impressed with what The Guardian's been doing, and that's what I read. I don't go near something like CNN, and will not defend it.