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In China, Slowly Reassembling Lives

May 28, 2008

Among those dispatching from China in the wake of this month’s devastating earthquake is Geoffrey Fowler ’00, formerly a Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at this magazine, now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

His latest story chronicles a family’s return to their hometown, where little is left standing, after living in a refugee center for two weeks. This May 21 article is also worth reading; it tells the stories of people who survived up to a week after the earthquake before being rescued. One is Shen Peiyun, a 52-year-old toll collector who spent more than six days buried in rubble and drank his own urine to survive. Shen told Fowler he went to stand under a doorframe when the earthquake began, having picked up this survival tip from the disaster-themed television shows he was fond of watching.

Read Fowler’s “Undergraduate” columns from the Harvard Magazine archives here:

Getting Lost

Why Not.com

The Anti-Thesis