Amy Cao was in the back of a taxi with her 2-year-old daughter the day skyscrapers began to sway like saplings in a storm.
The doors of the buildings flung open, and people poured out.
“I knew the buildings are new, so I wasn’t worried they would collapse,” said Cao, 38. “I was more worried about holding a toddler and having tens of thousands of people next to you. If someone pushed you and you fell down, you’d be crushed.”
Cao doesn’t know why, but her taxi driver began moving the car straight into the crowd, and between the swaying buildings. Cao jumped out of the car, held her daughter Panya close, and ran.
It was May 12, the day a 7.9-magnitude earthquake shook southwestern China. Nearly 70,000 people are dead. Ten thousand of those are children who were crushed when their schools crumbled on top of them.
Yet in the teeming city of 11 million people, Cao found safety at the place that changed her life 19 years ago: her school.
Cao was a student at Shishi Middle School, which would be considered a high school in the U.S., in 1989. That year, Peter Bohlke, a math teacher from Snohomish High School, was teaching English there through a Washington state exchange program.
“She was just an English junkie,” Bohlke said of his student. But he noticed Cao’s health was failing because of the city’s poor air quality.
“We sponsored her, and she came and lived with us,” he said. “And it worked. Her health turned around.”
Cao expected to live in the U.S. for less than a year. Instead, she earned a diploma from Snohomish High School, then graduated first from Edmonds Community College then Evergreen State College.
Now, she’s a U.S. citizen.
That day in May, Cao’s citizenship meant nothing. She was just like millions of other people, frantically trying to escape a danger that paralyzed the region.
Shishi Middle School may be the oldest school in the world. School officials there say it was founded by the Han dynasty, around 140 B.C. The school’s buildings have been replaced many times. The buildings there now are newer than those in which Bohlke and the other Snohomish High School teachers taught.
When other schools crumbled, Shishi Middle School stood firm.
Cao found her parents at the school. With their neighbors and friends, they huddled in tents and in cars for five days.
“There were at least a thousand people in the school,” Cao said. “People were extremely generous and extremely kind to each other. If one person could get in contact with their family with their cell phones, they sent messages for other people.”
Most of Chengdu’s taxi drivers volunteered to help evacuate people from the earthquake’s epicenter, about 30 miles away.
“It was a benefit of a Communist education,” Cao said. “Without anybody telling you to, we were helping each other. I felt I was going through this thing with everyone else, like a big family.”
Bohlke and other Snohomish High School teachers who had spent years in Chengdu worried for their friends. The exchange program began in 1985 when Ralph Davis, a history teacher and former Snohomish mayor, taught English at Shishi Middle School for a full academic year.
Until the program ended in 1998, more than a dozen Snohomish teachers went to Chengdu, and more than a dozen Chinese teachers came to Snohomish.
Some of the Chinese teachers have been found safe. Davis and Bohlke say they haven’t been able to reach others. They take comfort in the fact that the quake’s epicenter was about 50 miles west of Chengdu — and that the city’s recent prosperity meant many of its buildings were new, and therefore able to withstand the shifting earth.
Six days after the quake, Cao and her daughter caught a plane from Chengdu to Shanghai, then to Seattle and their home in Redmond.
A vacation meant to last a month had been cut in half.
“Everyone was helping each other, but I felt so selfish, because all I could think about was my daughter,” Cao said.
The earthquake and its aftermath are now memories for Cao — alternately vague and piercingly real. She will always remember crushing a piece of candy and slipping bits of it between Panya’s lips to calm her down when the massive crowd of people began to feel suffocating. She’ll remember tents in the yard of Shishi Middle School, alternating with other adults to sleep in them and the school cafeteria, churning out trays of food.
She also remembers feeling relief.
When millions of people had nowhere to go, Cao cradled her daughter on an airplane that took them far away from danger. Aftershocks scarred the region for days after the quake, and heavy rains have swollen rivers that now threaten to flood tent cities of earthquake evacuees.
Cao left China, but she hasn’t forgotten her home.
She is working on a plan to raise money to translate emergency-preparedness posters and other information to teach children and teachers to take cover and evacuate buildings in emergencies.
“It was hard for me to leave,” she said. “I feel so bonded to my people. I need to do something.”
Reporter Krista J. Kapralos: 425-339-3422 or kkapralos@heraldnet.com.
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