最近开始阅读Time杂志，觉得有些文章很不错，朋友们多读读可以提高英文水准
每期我精选出一篇~希望大家会喜欢
这期最吸引我的就是这篇四川大地震的后记报道
很无奈的读到中国还是用压的方式把对房屋质量有怨言的民众们给打压回去
再来看到一些后续报道还是很心酸
Rising From the Rubble of the Sichuan Quake
Once a playground: Parents pray among the ruins of Beichuan No. 1 Middle School
Photograph for TIME by Ian Teh / Panos
Piles of red brick clutter the roadsides. Stacks of concrete drainage pipes fill parking lots. Newly resurfaced roads snake past rows of temporary housing, while stores do a brisk trade in paint and window frames. Like countless places in China, this corner of central Sichuan province is undergoing a building boom. But this is no typical growth story. When I was here six months ago, bodies jutted from the pancaked floors of collapsed buildings and lined rubble-strewn streets. Tens of thousands of homeless crowded into sports stadiums, and millions more slept in tents. The highway was riven with cracks, and smashed vehicles crowded the shoulders. Grim-faced survivors trudged past on foot. The surface of the Zipingba Reservoir was covered with a brackish film from the tons of boulders and soil loosed into it.
Now the water has returned to its normal milky jade hue. Even some of the gashes caused by landslides have begun to green over as nature struggles to match man's furious pace of recovery. The reconstruction campaign following the May 12 earthquake, which killed 87,000 people and left 10 million homeless, rates as one of China's most astonishing endeavors. Even for a country that likes to think big, the numbers are staggering: over the next three years, Beijing has pledged to spend $176 billion on rebuilding, roughly $50 billion more than the U.S. has devoted to post-Katrina work. By early July three-quarters of the Sichuan homeless had been moved into prefabricated shelters, with all the displaced promised permanent housing by 2010. Much of the recovery effort is expressed in the vocabulary of Chinese socialism — a popular government slogan printed on giant red banners reads "Sweat Today for a Beautiful Home Tomorrow." The exhortation echoes China's 30-year economic expansion, which lifted millions of peasants out of poverty. But it also carries with it an implied coda: earthquake survivors can expect a better future, as long as they don't delve too deeply into the mistakes of the past. "I think Sichuan is very much like China as a whole right now," says Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based scholar. "You can't help but be impressed at how far it's come and you can't help but be worried about how far it has to go."
If there is a theme to the reconstruction effort, it is "Don't look back." Despite pledges to punish those responsible for the substandard construction of dozens of schools that crumbled during the earthquake and resulted in the deaths of thousands of students, no one has been prosecuted for it. After nearly four months of investigation, the central government announced what any parent could have told you on May 13 — that an act of God may have triggered the schools' collapse, but that shoddy construction and dangerous locations near fault lines left them unnecessarily vulnerable. Even as the rebuilding reaches frenetic levels, the political pressure for accountability has dissipated. Parents of dead students, who once promised to take vengeance if justice wasn't served, have largely been silenced by intimidation and payoffs. In early September, local authorities blocked a group of more than 100 parents from voicing their complaints to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao when he visited the site of a destroyed school.
In the aftermath of disaster, a need to put aside painful memories and move on is natural. But in the mountains of Sichuan, the impulse to look forward is also a political decision. Too open an examination of the collapsed schools would expose deep flaws in regional governance and could unleash a flood of discontent that might be difficult for the government to control. Yet even among those who are pushing ahead, the memories of the horror are unshakable. Here are four survivors' stories.
从这边开始是一些真实故事
这一片最让我心酸。。特别是这句"Just what evil have I done to deserve this?" he asks.我当时就红了双眼
The Official
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."
The local government tentatively plans to turn the remains of the city into a memorial park and build a new downtown 12 miles (20 km) to the south. Zhang now heads the Beichuan Department of Commerce, working to attract new businesses and industrial development. He hopes to bring in building-material companies that will develop earthquake-resistant products. Once Beichuan is rebuilt, a process that is estimated to take three years, Zhang hopes that the firms can then produce materials for seismic hazard zones elsewhere in China and abroad. The strain on Zhang and other local bureaucrats is severe. A quarter of government officials died in the quake, and the disaster continues to take victims. On Oct. 3, a Beichuan official who lost his only son to the quake killed himself. Zhang says his job keeps him from remembering what happened to his wife and daughter. "When I'm buried in my work, I think they are still alive," he says. "But when I look up from my desk and see that drawing, I remember they are not."
The Father
While Zhang works to rebuild Beichuan, Lu Shihua toils to figure out why the town collapsed. The single father lost his only child, daughter Lu Fang, when the Beichuan No. 1 Middle School crumbled. His wife had died 16 years earlier giving birth to her and Lu had resolved to raise the girl on his own. Friends and relatives, including his mother-in-law, offered to help the farmer find a new bride. "I turned them all down," he says. "I could not risk any possibility of my daughter being mistreated by a stepmother."
It is with a similar determination that Lu fights for an answer to why the Beichuan No. 1 Middle School caved in, crushing his daughter. Lu had just had lunch with her in town an hour before the quake struck. He felt the earth move as he waited for a bus back to their mountain village. Rocks tumbled down from a nearby peak, but as soon as the tremors eased he ran to the school. "The five-story building was completely flattened and young, broken bodies were everywhere," he says. "There were parents here and there, crying and digging for their children, and I did just the same. I cried and cried, dug and dug, until the police stopped us."
Four days later Lu found his daughter's body in the rubble of the school. He identified her by a pair of cloth shoes, which had been handmade by her grandmother. "Just what evil have I done to deserve this?" he asks. "I already feel very guilty for my wife's death — she died giving birth to my daughter. For my daughter, I had not gotten close to any woman for 10 years, and now she is taken away from me, too." A few days after identifying his child's corpse, Lu posted petitions at earthquake shelters calling for an investigation into the school deaths.
At the time, grieving parents seemed like an immovable political force. They agitated for answers and, having lost what meant most to them, appeared unwilling to compromise. But local authorities began blocking access to the sites of demolished schools where parents and journalists would gather. The government offered compensation to parents, hush money that reportedly ran as high as $14,000 in exchange for a promise to keep quiet. Those that didn't acquiesce faced official intimidation. Lu says police frequently questioned him and demanded that he cease his calls for justice. The only shop with a fax in his village has been told to not let him send documents. Nevertheless, Lu continues. In late October he received a statement from Beichuan officials denying any flaws in the building. Lu's not satisfied. "As long as I am breathing, I will seek an answer to my question: Why did the classroom building of Beichuan No. 1 Middle School completely collapse?" he says. "I just want to have a answer so all those who passed away in Beichuan can rest in peace."
The Shopkeeper
A short walk from where Lu's daughter died, a temporary town has sprouted. Nearly 4,000 residents from the mountainside village of Tangjiashan, which was destroyed in a landslide, now live in makeshift houses with gray, Styrofoam-lined aluminum walls and concrete floors. A school, bank, police station and local government headquarters are all packed into these oversized gray boxes.
Luo Xiqun, 22, runs a tiny shop selling soft drinks, beer, toothpaste, hot sauce, instant noodles, cooking oil and toothpaste. She and her 28-year-old fiancé had planned to marry this year. Then the earthquake struck, flattening their house and burying their wedding nest egg, which they had just withdrawn from the bank. At the time, money was the last thing on Luo's mind. "I wanted to live," she says, as she stands inside her store wearing a puffy orange jacket to ward off the chill. "No one else in the same building made it out, but somehow I survived." Luo walked five days with an injured foot and no shoes, braving runaway boulders and mudslides to make it to safety.
That survival instinct remains. Luo and her family put aside nearly every cent they earn. Her fiancé, Yang Yong, leaves early each morning to find work on reconstruction projects. "Even when he's sick he works," she says. "It will be even harder in the winter, but we have to live, so he goes." Although unemployment is as high as 80% in some areas of the Sichuan disaster zone, Yang says he doesn't have much difficultly finding work. Indeed, the extent of rebuilding still required means he can expect construction jobs for years to come. His 50-year-old father works with him, but the family worries about how long he can handle manual labor. So Luo runs her small shop to save money for a life beyond a gray box. "We don't have plans," she says. "We don't know where we will go. Right now the most important thing is money."
The Son On May 14, Deng Zhuyuan sat with his family outside a foot-massage parlor in the devastated town of Hanwang, resigned to the fact that he would soon find his mother's corpse. As rescuers moved debris with a crane, Deng, 18, told me in nearly flawless English about life in his mountain town, about how he was preparing for his college-entrance exams before the quake struck. Eventually, I left to walk through the wreckage of Hanwang. Unclaimed bodies lay under bloody sheets. A 20-ft.-tall (6 m) statue of a rider on horseback had been decapitated by the violent shaking. The hands of a clock in a tower in the town square were stuck at 2:28 p.m. When I returned to where Deng was waiting, two covered corpses were lying outside the massage parlor. A family member identified Deng's mother. A soldier yelled at a dog that sniffed at the bodies. Deng called me over. In a voice cracked with emotion, he offered me a final few words. "You must cherish life," he said. "You must cherish every moment you are alive."
Deng has done just that. When we met six months later, it was at the new campus of top-ranked Sichuan University, where he now studies electrical engineering. In July, Deng took the college-entrance exam and passed with the highest score among his schoolmates. The head of the university asked him to give a speech commemorating the new school year. "If you're still alive, then there is no reason to despair," he told his classmates and teachers. "I am living, and my life is hopeful." But in private, there are moments of doubt. "To get used to [the fact] that my mother is gone, it's very hard," he says. "But I am not the only one to suffer." Among the 36 students from his junior high school class, four died in the earthquake. "When we get together, we talk about those four," he says. "But we look to the future, not to the past."
— with reporting by Lin Yang / Beichuan
如果你有耐心有时间，就读完全部吧~
如果你没耐心没时间，就读紫色部分的字吧，那是我觉得比较重要的一段~
在 我是我 斑竹的地盘占地很爽~哈哈
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