Last week I was in Sichuan, where post-quake reconstruction is just beginning but the sense of utter ruin has faded fast. The down-and-out, albeit, are a relatively small and hard-to-reach minority: I met an ER nurse who couldn't forgive herself for not having saving a soul, for instance, and an eight-year-old boy who'd barely spoken since seeing his teacher consumed in the debris. But the civic spirit I saw in action disinfected some of the cynicism I carried going in. This was particularly the case at the displacement camps I visited, where the mood blended forbearance, levity and melancholy. Imagine an encampment of Deadheads on tour - without the Dead.

The quake leveled not only towns and villages but momentarily, the class consciousness of an increasingly stratified society. It's been many a decade since so many people in China found themselves lumped together in such sorry straits, and perhaps never before have so many across the country genuinely banded together to provide a safety net. Perversely put, Sichuanese can take solace in living out the socialistic ideal of the People's Republic. Not that the damage was egalitarian or equitable. The Big One mostly hit the ill-prepared underclasses up in the mountains, much as Katrina submerged their American counterparts below sea-level. But I'd take life in a Sichuan displacement camp over a FEMA trailer park any day. Here, at least, it signified development.

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      My work didn’t take me to the worst-hit counties like Beichuan and Wenchuan. People I interviewed who did go likened the experience to rediscovering lost cities of antiquity. “Ghosts' towns” became a familiar refrain. In portions of the sticks that have remained habitable, resources  are often scare and peasants frustrated and angry. The day before I arrived, members from a small Chengdu-based “house church” piled into a couple SUVs packed with food and other necessities and drove to one outlying village they had been aiding.

     But they never made the drop. When they got to the village, their local contacts worried about accepting the offering because it was only enough for about one villager in five, said one church member on-hand. And officials they encountered refused the aid because, according to them, they had things under control. It wasn’t clear whether the bigger hangup was the giver or the gift.

     Such problems were not so visible in the official relief camps. Displacement grounds were blocked out in tidy city-like grids of tents, and residents had sunk into the controlled rhythms of ghetto life. The mood was generally constructive and cooperative.

     In the heat and intermittent drizzle of the days, people spent a lot of time just lazing around in their tents. Come meal times, they queue up single-file for the communal grub (no ration tickets needed). Late afternoon, the elderly graze under canopies reading or playing mahjong; the young cavort in school or group therapy activities – they sing a lot, and squabble a lot, especially over the odd luxury like a bicycle.

       Some days toward sundown, pop bands show up to play a benefit set. Stand after stand sells all variations on those now-ubiquitous “I Love China” T-shirts – some say “Go Sichuan” or “Go China”. Practically every other dweller wears them, many for lack of anything else.

      Police and military were constantly on patrol around the perimeter. Rotating in and out were teams of military specialists; telecommunications teams; official media crews; and volunteers from NGOs, academy-based psychotherapy missions, and large companies, who’ve flocked from all over the country. Their ranks probably peaked a few weeks ago, but they continue to assert a big impact on the work in the camps.

     The projects that remain have formal arrangements to work with state partners, such the schools or governments, official foundations, or local branches of the All-China Women’s Federation or the Communist Youth League. Kids and relief workers were frequent faces at tents set up to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric fallout. But this scale of "crisis intervention" is entirely new to the everyday masses in China. A lot of adults believed their biggest emotional problem remained, er, what was euphemistically referred to as "economics".

     Every day I noted positive signs. At a couple of camps outside Deyang, thousands of residents were being moved out of tent cities into newly built yards of prefab housing resembling shipping containers, the temporary kind usually reserved for construction teams building other buildings. From the camps in Mianyang, the Rizhao Iron and Steel Company was in the process of transferring 600 schoolchildren, predominately orphans, to the coastal Shandong city on the other side of the country. There’s the smelter will send them to one of Rizhao’s top school and has been building a new dorms to house them – free of charge (just two per room, the kids had heard). The company has also pledged to support all of them through college or vocational schooling. Total initial donation: $110 million yuan (about US$16 million).

        Despite all the counseling, we can only speculate how much emotional baggage has yet to surface under the weight of state propaganda, Olympic pride, and official coercion. Among Sichuanese, underlying complaints and appeals for justice abound: Could they have been warned ahead of time? How well are their leaders going to take of them now? Why did schools come crashing over their only children's heads, and who would pay for that irreplaceable loss?

       Though the reality on the ground lay in full flux, there was a numbing beat of routineness to the transition and it pervaded the areas I personally visited. Which is an oblique way of saying that Chinese society functions pretty damn well when it has cause to. 

All of the above comes by way of general observations. Since getting there is usually half the battle for us hacks, here’s the meta-journalistic breakdown, by the numbers:

1: number of trips it took me to process credentials to cover the quake zone. A week after the cataclysm, Sichuan’s provincial publicity department began issuing mandatory reporting permits. The new clearance regime helped the government get a grip over coverage after the initial free-for-all, and similar measures were extended to cover volunteers and non-governmental organizations. But the added layer of bureaucracy was not prohibitive in and of itself. Access-wise, I'd still call this story the anti-Tibet.

      At the Shiye Hotel in Chengdu, the application process remained a breeze. The sign outside the office said that as a general rule, each news organization would be limited to one to two passes. Newsweek already had two. I should have come with one my colleagues’ existing passes to renew it, one young press flak informed me. It was already too late for that, though. “So what do we do now?” I asked. Without a word with their superiors, they said not to worry – and processed my pass. It was a ten-day pass lasting from June 13 to June 22 - not bad, though the day I arrived was June 19…

2: number of times I was refused an official extension to stay in Deyang. Though the aforementioned provincial credentials cover most of the disaster zone, some cities have taken to requiring their own reporting permits to roam locally. Even the provincial publicity flaks were genuinely fuzzy about this, and I was never asked to present the Deyang pass. But official interviewees are known to ask in places where parents are agitating over in school collapses or where landslides and flooding remain a threat.

     When I pulled in to Deyang, the foreign affairs officer at the city government building was nice enough. She issued me a square slip of paper – my permit - in a matter of five minutes. But again there was a catch: It covered the period lasting from June 19 to June 19. No, that’s not a typo. 

     The next morning, I called the officer to renew. Conveniently, I was staying in a hotel right across the street from the city government offices. But she said she was down in Mianzhu, a hard-hit sub-city of Deyang, and it was not convenient for her to extend my permit.

“There’s some natural disaster out here.”

“What kind of natural disaster?”

“Some flooding, some landslides and so on.”

“But I’m just going to the displacement camps, nowhere dangerous.”

“You’d better stay in the city proper. You won’t need any permit there. You’ll be fine.”

      I ignored her, and nothing came of it. I spent the day reporting from a Mianzhu displacement camp, without the slightest inkling of interference.  When I called her again next morning, the Deyang foreign affairs officer gave me the same runaround. But again, not having a Deyang pass didn’t make a difference. By the fourth day, I stopped calling her. We haven’t spoken since.

2: number of tries it took to enter Shifang, another city in Deyang. Parents in battered mountain areas like Luoshui township are agonizing over the collapse of schools there. Many have been campaigning outside the township governments for weeks on end pending an investigation into shoddy school construction. Because of that, I was told by my volunteer contacts in Deyang, Shifang had barred journalists and foreigners from entering town. At the same, my volunteer contacts in Shifang had no reservations when I asked to visit, and I’d heard that foreign journalists had been waved in at police checkpoints in recent days. Mianzhu had been no problem the day before. Why should Shifang be?

       The next day I got into cab and rode over from downtown Deyang, just a half hour away. At the toll station ahead of the bridge leading into Shifang, a couple of uniformed Shifang policemen stopped our cab. I rolled down the window and showed the officer in charge my journalist’s pass. He made no effort to finesse the reaction.

“Turn around and go back.”

“Why?”

“Traffic control.”

“Then why are all those other cars going past?”

“No journalists are allowed. Period.”

“I’m not going in as a journalist. I’ve got other business.”

“No foreigners are allowed either.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you that. We’re just following are orders.

       My cab retreated, and I called my volunteer contacts inside Shifang. To my surprise, they offered to come to pick me up. A half hour later, a pickup truck with a large cab pulled up to where I was waiting, several miles beyond the Shifang toll station. There were four of them, all Sichuanese. Just enough room for me to squeeze in. We stategically seated the two women on the left side of the vehicle, the side closest to the police. The prettier of the two sat in the front. I pretended to be sleeping as we passed the checkpoint unstopped. I opened my eyes soon after we did.

3: number of free lunches I ate at the displacement camps. Favorite dish: the spicy tofu at the Beichuan Middle School displacement camp in Mianyang. I wolfed it down over lunch with several junior high boys in their tent.

     Funny thing was, each and every time we passed the food lines, some Chinese volunteer I happened to be with made a point of directing my attention to the scene. (The photo above shows that in Mianzhu.) All those folks queued up with their iron rice bowls -- probably looked as refreshingly retro to them as it did to me. “Excuse me, Reporter An,” an academic from Beijing remarked at one point. “Have you ever heard of Communism?”

5: number of text-pages in the longest of the many cell-phone messages I received from the Sichuan propaganda authorities while in Chengdu. Most concerned basic progress in rebuilding – bridges opened, road work to be completed, classes to resume, special regulations and courts to be established. But the direct marketing of model heroes also reached new and more sophisticated heights. The five-part text went like this:

“Dujiangyan interview notice: At the rescue scene of Xiang’e Township Middle School, the clever ‘folk’ engineer Ren Longfu recognized the need to use effective rescue measures in order to save some of the students. He used only those materials available at the scene...

…for instance a basketball stand and so forth, to build a makeshift crane, and began to rescue students. Around 10 p.m. on March 14, the body of Carpenter Ren’s daughter was pulled out, but the aggrieved Carpenter Ren did not carry…

…off his daughter’s body and leave the rescue scene. He continued to direct [rescue work] until the morning of March 15, when he transported his daughter’s corpse home and carried out the burial. And by that time, he had already worked at the disaster relief scene for about fifty straight… 

…hours. In all, according to the township chief Fu Mintao, he rescued five survivors from the rubble. Carpenter Ren’s deeds were invaluable. Contact person: Ai Guangming (Xiang’e Township Deputy Party Secretary. Contact number: 1388193…

 …9009. – Provincial Party Publicity Department.”