5. After12 Wenchuan earthquake,
I'm repairing the national memory chain.
Author | Wang Yixin
There is a place called Beichuan in the northwest of Sichuan Basin, where the mountains are rolling. It has beautiful natural scenery, rich species resources and strong Qiang customs. About 1700 years ago, the ancient Qiang people moved from Gansu, Qinghai and other places to Beichuan and merged with the local aborigines. For thousands of years, the Qiang people in Beichuan have gradually formed. Beichuan, with a population of over 90,000 Qiang people, is the only Qiang autonomous county in China. The history, culture and customs of the Qiang nationality have been identified as key national protection objects and kept in Beichuan County Archives.
Su Yide, a simple and brave Qiang, was then the director of Beichuan County Archives Bureau. At about 2 pm on May 12, 2008, Su Yide was walking towards the archives in the county building. On the way, he met an acquaintance and they didn't fall. Suddenly, the earth shook, the sky was dark and the huge sound rumbled. A big earthquake happened!
Su Yide stumbled in the sand and stones flying, vaguely seeing the county building collapse instantly, and the archives on the fifth and sixth floors were instantly buried by the collapsed building. When the rampage of the main earthquake roared away, Su Yide realized that the county building that had been shattered by the earthquake had already crawled to the ground, and what would happen to the files buried in the ruins? If it can't be rescued, the culture and history of the Qiang people will be hit hard, and the consequences will be unimaginable.
All this made him at a loss.
A few days later, after three excavations and rescues, although the files were rediscovered, there were still more than 10,000 volumes of files buried in the soil, flooded by rain, and began to rot in the high temperature and high humidity climate! The paper becomes rotten, and the handwriting becomes blurred, faded or even disappeared. Many files are turning back into pulp under the dual action of mold and hydrolysis. With the development of time, the phenomenon of damage will further develop, and the information contained in the archives will be in danger of being difficult to read and disappear.
In fact, the level and ability of local archives in disaster prevention and relief are limited, lacking both large-scale rescue equipment and corresponding professional and technical personnel. Once major disasters and secondary disasters occur, they will immediately get into trouble.
At the critical moment, Sichuan Provincial Archives Bureau requested the support of the National Archives Bureau.
Disaster is command, time is life! The National Archives Bureau immediately sent a three-member expert group to support. Wang Liangcheng, then director of the National Archives Bureau and the Technical Department of the Central Archives, was appointed as the team leader. This doctor, who studied in the UK, has rich theoretical and practical experience in disaster prevention and reduction at home and abroad, especially the ability to accurately control the dynamic judgment of large-scale disasters. The other two members belong to different majors. My strengths are insect and mildew prevention and file restoration. Sun of Shandong Provincial Archives Bureau is good at developing emergency rescue technology and equipment.
Because we all have the professional rescue qualifications needed for earthquake relief, we resolutely accept the special mission in this special period. After the order was issued, the expert group shouldered the trust and expectation of the National Archives Bureau and rushed to the disaster site.
When I stepped into Beichuan, I saw the house collapse. Where will you go? I once again felt the fragility of life and the ruthlessness of death.
I remember the first time I knew that I died when I was 17 years old. The educated youth who moved from the mainland to Yunnan Production and Construction Corps suffered several deaths one after another because of their lack of immunity to subtropical forest epidemic diseases. Seeing that boys and girls in the flower season lost their lives after three days of high fever, I fell into an unspeakable fear. Unexpectedly, 40 years later, I witnessed a greater death disaster.
8.3 earthquake, only in Beichuan county,15,000 more vivid lives disappeared instantly, more than 4,000 people disappeared, and Beichuan county was razed to the ground. I can't help but feel deep fear about this. When I was a teenager, my mind was not fully mature, and my understanding of life and death was ignorant and chaotic. But after life's tempering, I have a clear and mandatory understanding of life and death. Standing in front of the ruins where thousands of victims were buried, I made a wish to them. I said: although I can't save your lives, I can unite all the archivists who went to the front line of earthquake relief, connect your broken history in series, let the immortal memory of your nation be passed down from generation to generation, and let you live in the blood of your own history and culture forever!
The expert group who rushed to the temporary storage place of the disaster-stricken files immediately got into the on-site investigation as soon as they got off the bus. What a scene this is! The local temperature is 34 degrees, and the heat wave in the temporary warehouse is scorching and stinking. Like dirty and wet sweaters, fish and booklice breed and spread; Saprophytic bacteria grow vigorously, and the dense colonies of Aspergillus Niger, Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus versicolor are wrapped like flannel. Mushrooms that grow wantonly on the file, in just one day, where spores spread, new mushrooms appear; When a few grams of soil were gently swept out of the archives and put on the culture medium, dozens of larvae hatched from eggs in the soil a few days later.
The expert group knows better than anyone that it is self-evident to work in such an environment full of microbial pollutants. However, they are fearless. They race against time, shuttling around every corner without sleep, finding out the types and degrees of damage of all the disaster-stricken files, and putting forward systematic rescue and protection strategies and workflow for the severely damaged files. After the plan is approved, the emergency disposal procedure will be started immediately, and the seriously damaged files will be transported to Ya 'an Freezing Point for overnight freezing.
This is a test of speed and professionalism! For the life of archives, this is a special battle with time!
On a sultry sleepless night, there is no cool wind, the branches are motionless, and mosquito bites follow. In the process of packing and handling, everyone's clothes have already been soaked with sweat, and the dust, dirt and sweat on the documents have mixed together and turned into mud, and the whole face is covered. The big bag bitten by mosquitoes is very painful and unbearable. In order to prevent infection, we should also prevent scratching. However, no one flinched and no one gave up. Such a large-scale emergency transshipment work was carried out quietly and methodically in the middle of the night when the moon was high.
Under the rescue of hard work and sleepless nights, an urgent, arduous and huge emergency disposal project came to a successful conclusion! Freezing can effectively prevent the deterioration and cross-infection of damaged files and win time for subsequent repair. After vacuum drying, the frozen document sublimates directly from solid to gas before the ice on the document can soak the page. Without the process of melting into water, the handwriting of the document will not be destroyed again. If freeze-vacuum drying brings dying files back to life, then the next repair and reinforcement is to "renew their lives" for the preserved files.
The locked brows shrouded in the fog of Bashan turned into a bright smile. According to director Su Yide, "You can breathe a sigh of relief!"
However, problems are always one after another. The most difficult file recovery in history has brought severe challenges. The damaged files that have entered the repair and reinforcement process are all suffering from incurable diseases, and the number and degree are shocking. Even a well-informed and ingenious repairman will be discouraged. Due to the limitation of local repair technology, some particularly damaged files are considered to be unrecoverable and ready to be shelved or even discarded. With the revival of national memory, the expert group believes that all our efforts at this stage should be devoted to maintaining the integrity of the national memory information chain. Those broken files that seem to have no hope of repair may be important historical facts or links in the memory chain. In order to solve this bottleneck and boost everyone's confidence, the expert group is trying to develop a variety of special repair equipment and explore new repair methods according to the damaged characteristics of Beichuan Archives. The expert group combined the two and adopted a variety of comprehensive restoration methods to repair and demonstrate the typical damaged files one by one, and successfully restored their original appearance.
It is possible to turn decay into magic! Through demonstration and training, the expert group has rooted the belief of "don't give up, don't abandon" in the young repair team, and held up the hope of the survival of archival information.
Every time I successfully repair a damaged file, I feel the meaning of life again. As a member of the expert group, I have the obligation to help all the links that need help, and I also hope to give full play to my expertise and do more to save the memory of the Qiang people.
During their stay in Beichuan, the expert group of the National Archives Bureau worked day and night, forgetting to eat and sleep, and successively overcame technical problems such as low-temperature freezing, vacuum drying and sterilization, restoration and reinforcement, and digital processing. It has become the largest and most difficult successful example of file rescue and restoration since the founding of New China.
When I completed my mission and fulfilled my oath, I took a deep breath of Beichuan's humid air and suddenly felt the smell of mountains, similar to the smell of Yunnan Construction Corps' red land! The pickled pepper, douchi and moldy tofu in Beichuan are the same strain as those in Yunnan red land, and they taste exactly the same. Two adjacent lands are so close! That red land taught me to be hard-working, brave, strong and persevering. I didn't know until I grew up that it was that hot land that gave me a completely different life gift! It turns out that there are such gifts in life! In the earthquake relief, I was able to bravely shoulder heavy burdens, face difficulties, constantly break through myself in challenging work, and make selfless contributions to the people in the disaster areas, all from the accumulation of this life gift! Although I have never returned to that red land, I am doubly awed and grateful for Beichuan and that land!
Now the new Beichuan is thriving, and the mark of the disaster 1 1 years ago gradually fades away. But my memory of the rescue in Beichuan Archives and my friendship with the leading comrades of the rescue team have not faded with the passage of time.
The file restoration work I am engaged in in Beichuan is actually a tribute to life in our special way. Those archivists who step on aftershocks, risk their lives, dig up national memories with their hands and lay down their lives to save archives are linking the long history of the nation. It is they who use the power of life to summon up the courage to fight in the disaster and hold up hope, so that there is no fault between Beichuan's history and the history of the nation.
Therefore, I must pay tribute to our archivists. Pay tribute to life.
2019 April 18
Wenchuan earthquake monument
The author of this article (middle)
This article is published with the authorization of the author, and the pictures and texts are provided by the author.