How a tragedy tested Chinese character

On the first day of class, a graduate student from Xi'an Jiaotong University reminded me that, especially in China, "there are always two sides to a coin."

Experiencing China's May 12 earthquake while living in Xi'an, Shaanxi province just north of the earthquake's epicenter in Sichuan with our two daughters, we have indeed seen both sides of what is beginning to be called China's 5/12 disaster coin.

When the earthquake happened, we quickly compared it to our natural disaster reference point - Hurricane Katrina, but within a day we realized that disaster and the Chinese response was quite unlike anything that we had seen in the US.