Why were you so interested in the Chinese Wenchuan Earthquake at eleven?

It happened at exactly the right moment in my life—when childhood was loosening its grip and larger questions were beginning to surface. I had just started wondering who we are, where we come from, and who we might become. Then a national trauma arrived, sudden and merciless: collapsed buildings, grieving parents, children my age buried under rubble. It was impossible to look away. The Wenchuan Earthquake was the first disaster in modern China to unfold live on television—raw, intimate, relentlessly visual. For many of us on the edge between Millennials and Gen Z, it became a defining collective memory, something later compared to what the Vietnam War was for an older generation.

And then there was one moment that changed everything for me.

In a news report, I saw a boy being pulled from the debris. His right arm was badly injured, blackened from crushing and a lack of blood flow. And yet, as rescuers worked frantically around him, he smiled and joked, asking, “Uncle, can I have an ice-cold Coke?” Something inside me cracked open. It felt like lightning. I followed his story instinctively, pulled toward him without fully understanding why.

Perhaps it was his aura—like a young lion scorched by wildfire, or a tree split by lightning that somehow kept growing. Perhaps it was his calm, his humour, his refusal to collapse under the weight of catastrophe. Or perhaps it was simpler than that: I had questions about life that I didn’t yet know how to ask, and he seemed to embody the answers. Not in words, but in existence.

As I grew older, those questions changed. And somehow, he kept answering them—not by explaining, but by surviving.