The Earthquake
#6 of 1849
"It certainly feels empty without them here anymore" Chan Vulpino would often say of his grandparents and all the members of the interracial family. Clarice Vulpino and Sheng Lee would not be considered married and were as clergymen are wont to say "living in sin" in an apartment in San Francisco. These two foxes had many adventures and stories to tell from the California Gold Rush having lived through it and seen the best and worst of the men and women who sought gold. They had seen greed and nobility, anger and contentment, and everything that would shape California for centuries to come- but they could not be legally married as anti-miscegenation laws had yet to be repealed in California.
As a byproduct of this indefensible belief, the money and possessions that Sheng and Clarice owned had to be given to Sheng's brother before they died on condition that once their sons and grandsons had come of age they would enjoy it. And Sheng's brother turned out to be an honest fox but having a middleman in the will complicated things far more than what could be expected. The very least they could expect was to have a nice peaceful meal even in this section of San Francisco, not as ridden with crime as the rest of Chinatown but with visible signs of poverty. Chan and his wife, a wolf from the Chinatown district not yet familiar with Western utensils and her children from a previous marriage (she was a widow because of the crime in Chinatown) when suddenly they heard the voice of children.
"If I you, I run. Something bad is going happen." The attempts to speak English were not going as well for Chan and Annette Xiang-Vulpino's children yet the fact that these cubs, their bodies still largely naked having not grown their fur coats yet, were telling of disaster should have warned their parents. They did not know of the upcoming cataclysm, thinking that these children were a little messed up in the head. Some people had left San Francisco for Oregon a few days earlier, complaining about sub-sonic noises emanating from the earth's crust and many of the canids felt uneasy, their senses naturally attuned to the forces of nature. Yet there was nothing that could ruin this spring day in San Francisco, they thought as they prepared for dinner.
How could these two canids have known that deep within the earth's crust, strong geological forces which had been pent up for many thousands of years would come to the surface and create a catastrophe. These forces, which will one day, millions of years in the future, disconnect the Golden State from the rest of the country came to a head on April 16, 1906 and what could Chan and Annette, a fox and wolf from the Chinatown district have done to avoid or run away from the earthquake.
Within seconds, they could see a fissure appear on the opposite end of the house and instinctively, brought about by experiences with earlier earthquakes, they ran underneath a table made of steel, which served as their dining table. Every once in a while, the San Andreas fault would knock something off its moorings- a picture, a chair, once a priceless, irreplaceable Ming vase from China. But all the fox and wolf could do now was pray as the rumblings grew louder, more violent, and more intense. They could see the support beam of their humble abode give way and they prayed to God, knowing that soon they would in all likelihood be seeing Sheng and Clarice again, this time in heaven. The house collapsed, the sounds of the earth trembling and the furniture collapsing, and all hell breaking loose in Northern California, too much for them to bear. One of the folf cubs started to cry and Annette tried to calm him down- her voice lost in the rumbling of the earth. Chan himself was cut and bleeding- it seemed like it was the end of the Vulpinos...
But then, it stopped. The earthquake lasted for only a few minutes, though it had broken every clock the family had so no one knew how long it was. For them, it might as well have taken hours. The table was all that remained of their house- the steel on it dented and bent a little but still standing upright. When they cleared that table, everything in their home- all the furniture and paintings, even the walls of the house were completely gone. Annette and Chan could see the fires caused by destroyed gas mains raged throughout the city. San Francisco had within a matter of minutes been reduced from a glorious jewel on America's West Coast to a smoldering heap of rubble, filled with fires, and destitution, and homelessness.
"Hell itself has opened up on the city of San Francisco. What work of the devil is this?" Annette would say, her father's Catholic religion- her family were members of a Chinese-language church, apparent in every word. Clutching her babies and with her husband standing right beside her, Annette could see her father, Sung Xiang, his head bruised from a falling book, coming towards her from the house two doors down. He was still alive, though at least five of the congregants were dead and the church they had attended had been completely destroyed by the earthquake, he said in broken English.
He was hardly-literate, speaking in a Chinglish that only he and a few others could truly understand. But within the gibberish and with some help of nonverbal communication, she heard the words "Red Cross" and "tent city". Her family had become, thanks to the earthquake, homeless. So for the foreseeable future, she and Chan, the babies and Sung would need to live inside one of those tents, where they found that clean water and available food were not always a given. Perhaps they should have listened to the warning signs of the earth and left for Oregon or Los Angeles but they did not and they paid a price, although everyone they cared for was alive- Chan's unmarried sisters were on what would turn out to be a lucky vacation in L.A. and they could always live at their boyfriends' homes until things got better in the north. But for now, the wolf and fox surveying the hell on earth that this grand seismic movement had wrought on their beloved state of California, considered themselves truly blessed to be alive and to know that the ones they cared deeply about were still alive. After all, a lost possession, even a lost home can be replaced but a lost life cannot.