The eight-story building is showing its age, with paint peeling from the yellow wooden doors and a 1990s vintage bicycle shed. Everything is dated.
Zhang Zhijing, living in apartment 701, opens the door and lets me in. “Sorry, it’s so basic. Please have a seat.”
She points to a black-and-white photo beside the sofa: “This is my husband.” She speaks in a matter-of-fact way, as if the man in the photo will stand up and greet me.
Her husband, Li Yongqiang, died rescuing comrades from the sea on Feb. 23. Li was on a mission to upgrade a meteorological station.
“I know several months have passed, but I still can’t believe he’s dead,” Zhang sobs.
“Every time I hear a steam whistle of a returning ship, I run out and realize I will not see him off the ship again, I....” She cannot complete the sentence.
“I’m always there for the Nansha Islands.”
Li Yongqiang was born in Baofeng County, Pingdingshan City, in north China’s Henan Province. He was an engineer at the Nansha garrison of the South China Sea Fleet.
He became a weatherman at Yongshu Reef in July 1993. UNESCO required a meteorological station to be built there. The first time Li went to the Yongshu Reef, the construction was going through a crucial period. It was August, and the sun was blazing. Li Wenbo remembers clearly how Li Yongqiang got so sunburned that his skin peeled.
“His shoulder was injured, and the wound festered after being exposed to cement. But he worked hard for months in a row, and led the upgrading of ten facilities, including a satellite system that receives meteorological statistics,” says Li Wenbo.
Li Yongqiang was always the first to do everything, including painting the basketball stands, transporting goods, sentry duty and research. Yuan Feng, a soldier who was then new to the reef, recalls a terrifying storm in December 2005. “A typhoon hit the Fiery Cross Reef so fiercely that the waves reached the third floor,” recalls Yuan. But Li Yongqiang grabbed a safety belt and climbed to the roof top to collect data, because he knew extreme weather data was very important to meteorological research. The raindrops were as big as peanuts.
With such courage and perseverance, Li and his fellow soldiers overcame various difficulties and compiled China’s first textbook on South China Sea hydrological and meteorological observations. All the data included in the book were considered of high value.
