Naming The Nameless

• Source: The Global Times
• [21:14 May 04 2009]
• Comments

After being shunned by the Sichuan government, Ai began recruiting volunteers to help compile his list. About 50 people, with financial support from Fake, have conducted field investigations at 79 schools in Sichuan, while others have searched for related information on the Internet. Other, independent, groups have forwarded the results of their findings to help the cause.

The volunteers, usually working in pairs, have faced huge challenges and opposition from Sichuan officials, Ai said.

“They were regularly frisked and interrogated by police, and some were detained. The contents of their flash drives were deleted and their discs were confiscated,” he said.

“Some were sent to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, and two were even ordered to return to Beijing.”

In one instance, a group of volunteers was surrounded by police officers as they were trying to make calls from a phone booth, Ai said.

“They were treated fairly well at the police bureau, but they were very frightened when they were told they would be held overnight.”
Almost all of the visits the teams made to schools in the area were fruitless, he said.

“One headmaster told us the names of two students who had died from his school, but all of the others refused to tell us anything.”

Even the parents and relatives of the children that were killed refused to reveal their identities to the volunteers, as they had been intimidated and were scared of recriminations, Ai said.

“But the more the authorities try to thwart our efforts, the more determined we are to find out the exact numbers and complete our list.”

Ai’s volunteers were selected from hundreds of applications made via the blog, he said.

“Before we accepted them, we made them fill out questionnaires and asked if they understood the difficulties they might encounter during their investigations.”

The efforts of the volunteers have helped Ai to remain focused on why he began his mission, he said.

A volunteer wrote in his investigation diary that when asked by a police officer why he was asking so many questions, he replied, “The mother of a little girl killed in the earthquake said she just wanted the world to know her beautiful child had lived happily in this world for seven years.”

Another woman surnamed Liu from Beijing e-mailed Ai after reading his blog and offered her services. She now travels an hour by bus each day to work as a volunteer at his studio, sorting information and updating the list.

Ai said he fights a running battle trying to keep the information online. The webmaster frequently deletes the list and the diaries, he said. The most recent occasion was Sunday.

“But every time it’s deleted, we just upload it again.”

In a recent interview with Nanfengchuang magazine, Ai said, “What we’re doing and the responsibility we’re shouldering express what kind of society we’re looking forward to living in. We hope to show the parents of the children who died that society respects them. It’s not about money, or numbers on bricks, or an earthquake museum that costs 2.5 billion yuan.

“These people have suffered enough, they don’t deserve any more pain caused by the injustice of people forgetting about them already,” he said.