All is not well in An county, near the city of Mianyang,in Sichuan.Grief is turning to brewing anger.
On the main road into An county, I see an old man in his 70s. Seeing that I am a foreign journalist, hetells me he’s upset with how the domestic media have been covering the quake: “Therewas no organized evacuation. After the quake we lived in tents for two or threedays, and no one from the government looked after us. If the county partysecretary and the county chief dared to show their faces now, they would becrucified. Eventually we got some food.”
“The people see things clearly. It says in the newspaper that the wrath of Heavenis merciless but the compassion of human beings is merciful. I would say, thewrath of Heaven is merciless but the officials in our county are even moremerciless. Reporters should speak to us more, instead of to the government. Howtruthful are the figures they get from the government? How much can you trustgovernment officials?”
A crowd begins to gather when passers-by see my tape-recorder. A man in his 30sstops and speaks into my mike: “Our town is a forgotten corner in thequake-devastated area. Seventy percent of the houses here have been rendereduninhabitable by the quake.”
The crowd keeps growing.
One man complains that many people remain missing. Another says he wondershow much of the relief material will reach this part of the country: “If thegovernment doesn’t do a good job with reconstruction, if we are still living intents when the cold and damp Sichuan winter arrives, there will be trouble.”
Lin Di is a pseudonym to protect the reporter and his family. He reports forRFA's Mandarin service and filed this notebook while on assignment in Sichuan.