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HUALIEN – “Yun-ru, mom is here to take you home!” yelled a middle-aged woman as she stood at a nondescript construction site on a mountainside in Taiwan’s Hualien County on Saturday (April 3).
She was holding a colored cardboard tablet with her daughter’s name written on it and her son was holding it, the young man was also sobbing and holding it tightly.
Ms. Hsiao Yun-ru’s mother and brother were asking for the 22-year-old’s soul to return, one day after she passed away in a train accident.
The construction site sits above a cove where the mountains plunge inland, facing a single train track that leads to a tunnel filled with braided wagons. This was the site of the deadly train accident on Friday (April 2) morning that claimed at least 51 lives and injured nearly 200 more.
About 200 men and women carried tablets and bamboo sticks adorned with white cloth with the names of the deceased. They huddled under black umbrellas, a common sight at Taiwanese funerals, calling out the names of dead passengers to summon their souls home, a traditional Taoist funeral ritual.
When it started to rain, strips of white cloth fluttered in the breeze. The Taoist priests rang bells and chanted prayers amid the heart-rending screams.
A woman collapsed. Volunteers rushed to wake her up.
A calm voice rang out, “Hurry up, come and go home with us! So next time we can travel together again!”
The slow voice belonged to a man in a green sweater, bandaged on one cheek and leaning on a cane. He was still wearing green hospital slippers.
He was the father of six-year-old Yang Chi-chen, whose older sister is still in the intensive care unit due to a skull fracture and brain trauma. Yang had planned a trip to the east coast of Taiwan with her two daughters to spend the long Qing Ming Festival vacation together, but the train accident changed her life.
Paramedics recalled Mr. Yang’s plea to hug his lifeless daughter once more when she was finally released from the debris of the train on Friday.
“It was really like a nightmare for Mr. Yang, he was rescued first, but he kept asking about his children,” said Dr. Lin Shinn-zong, superintendent of Hualien Tzu Chi Hospital, where most of the seriously injured are being treated. .
Ms. Chang Ya-wen, a nurse at Tzu Chi Hospital, was on duty in the emergency room when a call from the Hualien County government notified staff of the arrival of the ambulances.
“It helped that we had color-coded vests for an emergency like this so that all staff know where patients with varying degrees of trauma are being treated,” Ms. Chang said. “But it was still scary at one point, when five ambulances came at once.”
This long weekend was meant for families to come together and visit their relatives’ graves to show respect, but this holiday will be especially heartbreaking for Ms. Chung Hui-mei for years to come.
When traveling home to Taitung for their annual grave-cleaning trip, Ms. Chung, her husband, and their two children had boarded the 408 Taroko Express just because they missed the original train.
Because the train was already full, they could only buy permanent tickets. However, Ms. Chung found her family three empty seats in the first car, which the children rejected.
Just before entering the tunnel, Ms. Chung told reporters, she heard the train operator honk the horn many times and then they were all thrown forward in a violent jolt.
She managed to get to her feet and went to check on her husband, whose face was “bloody and mutilated.” Neither he nor his son responded, but his daughter, who was trapped under the rubble and seats, screamed weakly.
“I tried to help her, but the debris was too heavy and others down there said I was hurting them with my efforts,” Ms. Chung said, her eyes red and puffy.
It wasn’t until around midnight on Friday that she was allowed to identify her children and her husband at the funeral home, and on Saturday, her entire extended family came to her side to look at the faces of their loved ones before they closed again. the zipper. .
As the investigation into the accident continues, family members eagerly await a team of 120 artists to make their loved ones look like before.
Late Friday night, 40-year-old mortuary makeup artist Chen Hsiu-chiang began working his magic on a young woman who had died in the accident.
“It took me about five hours to complete my work with her,” Chen said. Leading a team of 120 artists who work in shifts, Chen said it took them more than 12 hours to finish restoring 10 bodies, due to the amount of trauma the accident left on the dead.
While families wait, now what?
Sitting limply in her wheelchair, Ms. Chung now demands answers to her loss.
“I want the Transport Ministry to get to the bottom of this,” he said.
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