The rain grew heavier.
I was just about to help Mother back home when the crowd suddenly began to stir.
Then a child cried out in delight:
“Dad! My dad is back!”
Everyone turned toward the main road.
Through the rain, we saw four figures walking toward us.
Each man was carrying a large nylon bag.
They looked strangely light.
And strangely heavy.
One of the four was my second uncle.
Mother, Hai'ou, and I hurried toward him, desperate for news of Father.
Almost immediately, relatives began gathering around each of the returning men.
Mother's voice trembled.
“Your brother... Where is your brother?”
My uncle's eyes suddenly filled with tears.
He swallowed hard.
“Sister-in-law,” he said, choking back his grief, “your husband came back with me.”
As soon as he said those words, he instinctively tightened his grip on the nylon bag.
My eyes fell upon it.
It was a large bag with red-and-white stripes printed across it.
The other three men were carrying bags of roughly the same size. Their stripes were different, but all four bags looked brand-new.
Normally, I would have assumed they contained clothes or other belongings.
But these bags had an odd shape.
They looked as though they were carrying something solid.
Something heavy.
By then, the rain had stopped.
The sky was still dark and ominous.
Something inside me suddenly dropped.
It felt as though my entire body had fallen into a frozen pit.
I wanted to reach out and touch the bag.
I wanted to know what was inside.
But my arm felt as though it weighed a thousand pounds.
Hai'ou, however, had heard only one thing.
“Dad is alive! Dad is alive!”
He jumped up and down with joy.
Mother stared at my uncle in confusion.
“You said he came back with you. Where is he?”
My uncle sighed.
He had just taken the nylon bag off his shoulder when a piercing cry erupted nearby.
Then another.
And another.
It was as if grief itself were contagious.
Within seconds, cries of mourning were rising from every direction.
Mother, Hai'ou, and all the relatives gathered around my uncle turned toward the sound.
The other three men had already opened their nylon bags.
There were no clothes inside.
There were square boxes.
Ashes.
Cremation urns.
I turned back.
My uncle had opened his bag too.
Inside were the same square boxes.
On top was one with a name printed on it.
I saw the three characters immediately:
杨战良.
Yang Zhanliang.
My father's name.
The characters seemed to burn into my eyes.
I could barely see.
“Dad!”
I cried out and grabbed the urn, clutching it against my chest.
Then I began to sob.
Mother collapsed.
She fell to the ground and lost consciousness.
My father was dead.
My second uncle's friends were dead.
My neighbors were dead.
Thirty-eight able-bodied men from our village and the neighboring villages had been killed in the disaster.
The youngest was eighteen.
The oldest was fifty-four.
My uncle and the other three men had survived only because they had arrived late that year.
The mine where my father worked was already fully staffed, so they had gone to work at another mine owned by a different operator.
After the gas explosion, the owner of my father's mine fled during the night.
For a time, the news of the explosion was deliberately suppressed by people who were supposed to report it.
Help arrived too late.
All thirty-eight men trapped underground were killed.
All thirty-eight were fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, and neighbors from our villages.
They were my people.
They were home.
The mine was a small, privately operated coal mine.
Mines like it were scattered throughout the mountains in that region.
Coal was extracted with little regard for regulations. Employment procedures were incomplete. Safety measures were inadequate.
As for proper business registration and other legal requirements, those were hardly worth mentioning.
What was even more heartbreaking was what one official said while dealing with the aftermath.
According to him, the main cause of the accident was that the miners underground had failed to follow safety regulations.
The workers, he said, were far below the required standard and th
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