Chinese head for home in disaster-shadowed festival
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Xinhua, September 12, 2011
Two places, one moon
However, not everybody could return their home for the festival.
A survey by China's portal website of Sohu showed that 40 percent of the respondents wouldn't celebrate the holiday at hometown.
Tsega Tashi, A Tibetan student who is studying in the engineering vocational school of Nanjing in east China's Jiangsu Province, received two boxes of mooncakes from his teacher.
At a festival party in the school Saturday, he and other Tibetan students presented Hada (a greeting gift made of silk) to their teachers. "They took care of us like parents," Tashi said.
In two years, the school has received 131 Tibetan students.
For many people who couldn't go back home, their distances from relatives were shortened by the Internet.
Zhang Bowu, a girl from east China's Anhui Province who is studying in the George Washington University, chatted with her parents and friends online while taking a bite into a mooncake she bought in local supermarket.
"I will watch the festival gala online together with my parents," she said. "It makes me feel that I were with them."
It has been the seventh year for Han Li, from northeast China, to celebrate the Mid-autumn Festival on her own. But this year, she bought her parents a computer with webcam.
"We could talk and see each other in the computer," she said. "We are under the same moon."
In shadow of disasters
However, this year's Mid-autumn Festival was shadowed by disasters.
In central China's Hunan Province, 12 people died as their ferryboat sank Friday. Most of them were students from two primary and middle schools going back for reunion with their parents for the festival.
On the bed of 13-year-old Peng Jiming, a yellow doll lay quietly waiting for its owner.
But gazing at two bags of fruit on the table, her 63-year-old granny knew her granddaughter would never be back to celebrate the festival with her.
For two days, the old lady surnamed Xiao didn't eat anything.
"I brought her up," she said in tears. "She had been so sweet."
In Xi'an, capital of northwest China's Shaanxi Province, 10 people died in a scaffolding collapse Saturday while two others were killed by toppled wall of a shopping mall.
In eastern China's Anhui Province, Nine people died and 13 others were seriously injured after a bus rear-ended a cement-mixing truck Sunday afternoon.
In online communities many people mourned for the dead.
"The loss of these lives made this occasion, which should have been jubilant, extremely sorrowful," said a netizen nicknamed Qipinzhixian.
"They were supposed to be with their relatives, but accidents took them away forever."
"May the dead rest in peace. May such tragedy never repeat."
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