Season - Qian Huifang - #0505020371

I was born in a small village, and I remember my childhood being generally happy and I can recall experiencing some of the most carefree times of my life. There was an old saying that a dragon protected our village so that nothing disastrous happened to us for nearly a century, but the dragon didn’t protect us forever.

August 28,1998 is one of the most unforgettable days I remember. On that day, an unprecedented storm hit my village and it caused great damage.

It had been raining for three days, and we thought it would be clear in a few days. As luck would have it, we slept very early because the electrical power was off. My mother didn’t sleep very well because she was worrying about my brother who had been ill for a few days. At about ten o’clock, I was w o ken up by my brother’s coughing. Opening my eyes, I found my mother walking towards my brother’s bedroom with a few tablets in one hand and a cup of water in the other hand. A few minutes later, she went to bed again.

At about eleven o’clock, a scream deafened my ears, and I felt as if my heart missed a beat because the scream was a signal to me that something serious had happened. “Quick, get up, water is coming into our house”, my mother shouted. Having heard this, I jumped out of my bed, ran into the living room, just to find that my father was carrying a TV set in his left hand and a big box in his right hand. I was so shocked because I had never known my father to be so strong. All of a sudden, the door burst open because of the flood, a spectacular scene indeed like what you see on TV about a flood discharge, water running through the door and coming towards us, very quickly. My head was so blank that I didn’t know what to do; I just stood there stiffly. “Carry the quilts upstairs”, not until then did I notice that my father was barefoot. Oh, yes, quilts, but where were the quilts? My father seemed to know my thoughts. “In the bedroom”, he shouted at me as he was carrying a wardrobe upstairs. I ran into the bedroom and out of it in 30 seconds with three quilts in my left hand and a bag of clothes in my right hand. On the way upstairs, I bumped into my brother, as he stood against the wall to let me pass, not until I found him so pale and his eyes so red did I realize how crucial his health condition was. While downstairs, I bumped into my mother who was carrying two bags of books, so I helped her carry them upstairs. Then a horrible stink permeated my house, oh My God, my neighbor’s toilet was washed away, and it was so disgusting. “Bang”, what was that? A fallen tree broke our glass windows. Just then, I saw many villagers driving their pigs to the mountains. “Wow”, “Mew”, I looked upstairs, the dog and the cat were gazing at me in desperation.

Suddenly, there was the sound of crying from my neighbor’s house. Looking out the window, we were seized with panic—the house was washed away. My father asked us to stop everything, “Let’s leave our house and go to the mountains, and bring your raincoat with you.” I saw tears in my mother’s eyes, my brother was slightly shivering, but we didn’t say anything. After two hours, the flood covered all the houses in our village, and many animals were floating on the surface.

Looking back on this nightmarish experience, we realized how vulnerable human beings could be in front of natural disasters. We should cherish everything and everyone in our lifetime because there are always some things that we just cannot predict.