There are photogenic people in Wenchuan. One is the Wenchuan man I described in a previous Phavorite Photos blog, and another is the young lady shown in the large photo above. For lack of a better name, I’ll call her Apple Annie. Some of you folks my age or older might remember the 1961 feel-good film A Pocketful of Miracles, in which Bette Davis played a character named Apple Annie.
Bette Davis has nothing on our Wenchuan Apple Annie. After Gresh and I got out of the Wenchuan police station (we had to register as foreigners), we were walking along a main street through Wenchuan. Apple Annie was selling fruits and vegetables on the sidewalk, and somehow her bushel full of apples tipped over. Before you could say “Oh, no!” in Mandarin, apples literally rolled into four lanes of busy Wenchuan traffic. That’s when our pocketful of miracles occurred: Traffic absolutely stopped, Gresh hopped into the street before Annie or I realized what had happened, and then we jumped in, too, along with a bunch of other Chinese good Samaritans. As traffic patiently waited (not one horn honked), we recovered every one of Annie’s apples. She gave Gresh and I one as a small thank you, along with the beautiful smile you see above.
In 2008, Wenchuan had one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history (a magnitude 8.0 quake), and between 65,000 to 80,000 people died. Something like 80% of the buildings in Wenchuan collapsed.
Some of the damaged buildings were left standing as a tribute to Wenchuan’s victims. We saw those. People are resilient, perhaps even more so in Wenchuan. You can read more about what we saw in Wenchuan and elsewhere in China in Riding China.
Earlier Phavorite Photos? You bet! Click on each to get their story.
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