Looking back, 1976 was the most tumultuous year in modern Chinese history. Zhou Enlai died in January, Zhu De in early July, and Mao in September. The three main founders of the PRC were gone, unleashing a new era. And in late July that year, Tangshan in Hebei province suffered the worst earthquake in China’s recorded history with a conservative death toll of 242,000. Another 164,000 were injured and over 4000 children were left orphans overnight.
Aftershock is a 2009 novella by Zhang Ling set around the Tangshan earthquake. Made into China’s first IMAX movie in 2010, it is now available in Shelly Bryant’s superb English translation. At 208 pages, it reads more like a proper novel than a story to be consumed in one sitting. And while the earthquake features prominently in the novel, the aftershocks of the title are about what happens to families in the months, years, and decades afterwards.
The backstory to the 1976 earthquake starts almost a decade earlier when a teenager named Li Yuanni has her promising stage career cut short from an injury. She’s sent to work in a state-run bookstore in her hometown of Tangshan. Dejected, Yuanni passes her days crocheting at work.
The days in the county seat were like a narrow alley whose end could be seen at a glance. In two months, she would be eighteen. The age of eighteen was the season when the rice was blooming, but she had already predicted that it would end with no harvest. How hopeless were the rest of her days? Even if she bought all the yarn in the city and crocheted a bag for every person in the world, she would never get rid of this void in her life. The days were too long, too hopeless.
Life improves after she married Wan. They have twins in 1969, a girl named Xiaodeng and a boy named Xiaoda. When the twins are seven years old, tragedy in the form of an earthquake is chillingly foreshadowed.
It had been hot. Summer nights were generally hot in Tangshan, but this particular night was outrageously so. The sky was like a large clay pot that had baked all day, overturned and sitting atop the earth, blocking out even the slightest hint of a breeze. It was not just the people who were hot, but the dogs too. They barked from one end of the street to the other, filling the neighborhood with the sound of howling.
The earthquake traps little Xiaodeng and Xiaoda under a boulder, but on opposite sides. Yuanni, who has already lost her husband in the quake, is faced with an unbearable decision. She needs to tell her uncle which side of the boulder he should lift up: one child will be saved; the other crushed. She chooses Xiaoda, the boy. Since the story jumps around in chronology, it becomes apparent that Xiaodeng is not in fact killed that day, yet she knows of the choice her mother made and this will haunt her for decades to come. Found still alive later on, long after her mother has left the scene of her agonizing decision, Xiaodeng is adopted by a childless couple and ends up studying in Shanghai, going on to become a famous writer.
The aftershock of the earthquake lasts for decades, as Xiaoda and Xiaodeng navigate their lives. Xiaodeng moves to Toronto with her husband and young daughter. Her relationships with both are rocky and she first appears as a mother in the book—very early on—after yet another suicide attempt in Toronto. She’s put in touch with a psychiatrist who helps her deal with the trauma from the earthquake and her mother’s choice to save her brother. But what Xiaodeng doesn’t know is that Yuanni really wanted to save her, but caved into internal pressure to put her son first.
When Xiaodeng finally returns to Tangshan thirty years to the day after the earthquake, she finds a sort of closure. But can people really ever get over something like an earthquake that killed a quarter of a million people? Xiaodeng reflects: