On the plain, white card there is a heart-shaped figure with wings and Chinese characters that read: “I want to help cheer you up” and “I wish you peace and safety.”
Written to young Japanese survivors of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, this well-wishing card seems ordinary enough. What makes it special is that it comes from a nine-year-old Taiwanese boy who lost nearly all of his classmates in a natural disaster.
Wong Yong-sheng’s (翁詠盛) village in Kaohsiung was buried in a mudslide, leaving nearly 500 people dead or missing, when Typhoon Morakot brought a record amount of rain on Aug. 8, 2009.
Photo: CNA, Courtesy of Dharma Drum Mountain
Yong-sheng and his sister, aged 10, survived, but their older brother was not so lucky. Of Yong-sheng’s seven classmates, five also perished.
The boy, who now goes to another school in Greater Kaohsiung, often goes to a quiet corner in the school to hide his tears. During recess, he misses his classmates so much that he often cannot help crying, wishing somehow they could come back and play with him like before.
It has been more than a year-and-a-half since the typhoon devastated much of southern Taiwan, leaving about 700 people dead or missing, but Yong-sheng still finds it difficult to talk about what happened.
He did recall receiving a card after the disaster. It was written in Japanese, which he did not understand, and had a drawing of a teddy bear. He didn’t know what the message said, but said he felt encouraged anyway.
After the catastrophe in Japan, Yong-sheng remembered the card he received and decided to write one in return.
“I used to go to Siaolin Elementary School, which is now gone,” he wrote. “My friends are all gone so we are very sad. My heart is almost broken, even now. But when I saw images of Japan’s tsunami, I felt even worse. So I want to help cheer you up. I wish you peace and safety.”
The boy asked volunteers affiliated with Dharma Drum Mountain, a Buddhist education foundation, to pass on his card to a young earthquake survivor in Japan.
The foundation organized a meeting earlier this month of parents and children from Siaolin Elementary School to write the cards, which were then collected and sent to Japan.
Wong Ching-ya (翁靖雅), Yong-sheng’s sister, also wrote a card, which said: “I know how horrible an earthquake can be, but I believe that you’ll be able to rebuild your homes one day because we had a similar experience more than a year ago.”
In addition to writing a card, the fourth-grader collected fruit from two of her family’s grape vines and donated all the proceeds — NT$200 — after selling the grapes with the help of her friends.
Ching-ya’s father, Wong Cheng-shan (翁振山), said it was hard to describe the pain of losing one’s own son and so many friends overnight. The survivors had no time to grieve because there were people still waiting to be rescued, he said in an interview.
At the same time, care and sympathy poured into Siaolin village (小林) in Jiasian Township (甲仙).
“Financially, not much was changed,” he said. “However, we remember how helpful the cards and letters were to our mind and spirit so we want to give the same kind of help to Japan, which has been affected in the same way we were.”
The Wong family hopes that, through the cards sent from people like them, children in the disaster area in Japan can feel the love from a region similarly afflicted.
Their collective message to the young survivors in Japan: “Survivors in Taiwan can recover from their trauma. You can weather these difficult times, too.”
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