CHINA> Survivors
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CHINA> Survivors
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Jiang Yuhang repaying the favor
By Qian Yanfeng (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-12 09:52 Jiang Yuhang vividly recalls spotting the firefighters last year, glimpses of their orange uniform flashing through the cracks of debris that separated him from salvation.
When he was miraculously pulled from the rubble of the six-story building after 124 hours, Jiang immediately knew his new calling - saving lives alongside the same people who had saved his.
Jiang, a native of Guizhou province, was then a fresh intern at the Yingxiu highway administration after graduating from a college based in Chengdu, Sichuan's capital city. Six months after he was saved, Jiang enrolled at the Shanghai Firefighter Brigade, and promised to "repay the debt" and "continue the legacy of saving people's lives". After five months of training at the brigade, Jiang is sturdier, darker and living every minute of his life toward the promise he made. While he grapples with the challenges of his new career and "having many more tasks on the job than he had originally thought", Jiang says he has become more mature and developed an even stronger sense of responsibility as a firefighter. Best of all, he is living his dream - just a few days ago, his team saved residents from a burning building and helped prevent anyone from getting injured. In his first week as a firefighter, Jiang had already taken part in a dozen rescue missions that fought fires and saved people from car accidents. Jiang's performance has fully met the requirements of the job, his supervisor Huang Jiang says. The freshly minted firefighter has been trained to be instantly alert to the sirens and storms into action in less than a minute. "Despite his small stature, Jiang is strong mentally and stands tough before all kinds of hardship," Zhou Qingyang, deputy director of Jiang's squadron and one of the men who saved him from the quake, tells China Daily. The quake survivor also asks for additional training in his spare time, if he is dissatisfied with his own performance in the job, Zhou says. Jiang's comrade, Lu Ling, describes him as someone who is "tough and persevering," a man who "wants to do his possible best in everything", with traits that are testimony to the endurance he displayed as a quake victim who survived for one of the longest periods of time under debris. Still, as seen by journalists who deluged him with questions about his experience in the disaster, Jiang prefers not to dwell too much on his ordeal last year. "I don't want to think about the quake but I do write to my former colleagues in Sichuan because I want to know whether they are well or not," he says. Jiang had literally smelled some of the bodies of his former colleagues rotting in the debris while he was buried himself. But his strength of character and determination to be back with his family helped him hold onto life. There is not much to recall of his details before the quake, or of his time working at the highway toll gate between Dujiangyan city and the county of Wenchuan. |
