A Book Dedicated to Our Youth - Tong Hua

Prologue

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The first few pages are some quotes/short sentences:

When I was 5 years old
When I was little I always had a dream
To be like soap bubbles
Lightly dancing in the air
Floating until I've reached the moon
See the stars twinkling around me

When I was 8 years old
My childhood's sweetest memories
Always had to do with different types of sweets, mom said I couldn't
eat too much lollipops, so I found the old grandpa in the alley way to spin
a sugar candy instead, a little tiger
sugar candy.

When I was 10 years old
Too many years have gone past, I've forgotten many of the news on the blackboard bulletin,
Except for a few wisps of warm memories, I sincerely wanted to draw things from those years
but I couldn't draw out the same memories to those in my mind.

When I was 12 years old
English, used to be the subject that gave me incomparable pain, every time I think about it
I would get a headache, because I couldn't pronounce the words properly, I used to secretly
write Chinese pronunciations to the English words in the textbook, I was shouted at so harshly.

So many years,
I've always been learning one thing,
to not look back.
To only regret the things I haven't done,
not the things I have experienced.
Every step in life,
has a price to pay,
I have the things I've wanted to have,
Lost the things I didn't want to lose.
But for everyone on earth,
who isn't like this?

Preface: Covered in rain and wind, I come up from the sea.

May 12th 2008, there was a 8.0 magnitude earthquake in Wenchuan [Sichuan]; Shaanxi, Gansu, had aftershocks from a magnitude of 6.0 to 7.0.

That day, Luo Qi Qi, who was in San Francisco, drove to work like usual, arriving 30 minutes earlier at the office. She drank milk while checking her email online. Suddenly, she saw a news article of the Wenchuan [Sichuan] earthquake. Astonished, she opened the link, confirming that the news was true. After a few minutes of numbness, she realised that Sichuan was on the border of Shanxi- if Sichuan had such a big earthquake then Shanxi would definitely also be affected. Not caring that it was before dawn in China, she phoned home but no one picked up; she tried calling her dad's cellphone, no one picked up; tried mom's cellphone, no one picked up; tried her little sister's, still, no one picked up.

Qi Qi phoned her parents' numbers again and again, but as the sound rang with no one picking up, her hand started to tremble.
Her Chinese colleague Xiao Ling's parents were in Chengdu [Capital of Sichuan]; with no one picking up her continuous calls, Xiao Ling leaned on the desk sobbing uncontrollably from pain.

For the entire morning, Luo Qi Qi did nothing other than phone home again and again while refreshing the news site, but as the earthquake had just happened, even the magnitude of the earthquake was still unconfirmed. The reports online had so little information that it was pathetic.

To properly understand the shock wave Shaanxi Province had suffered, Luo Qi Qi searched up the Chinese map. She used a ruler to measure the distance between Xi'an [capital of Shaanxi province] and Wenchuan, and after calculating the actual scale of the distance, she phoned her university friend who was currently researching crustal movements at MIT to inquire about the laws of earthquake transmission. By the time work ended, she had become half an expert on earthquakes.

That night, her call finally got through. Her dad said: "everyone's fine, the house is fine, though the ceiling is a bit cracked and the television's a bit deformed from all the smashing and shaking. But you don't have to worry, Yuan Yuan has been with us the whole time."