Speaking Their Names in the Ashes:A Five-Year Remembrance of the Tianjin Port Explosion

Luna Tian

Preface: On Memory and Loss

This report was first completed in December 2017. At the time, I had just returned from Tianjin, carrying dozens of audio recordings, stacks of notebooks, and hundreds of photographs. I still held onto the urgency and duty of a journalist: I wanted to write their stories—to document the nameless dead, the mothers weeping in hospital hallways, the widows running between offices in search of “identity papers,” and the fathers who still clung to hope, waiting for the phone to ring.

I believed that as long as their stories were written down, they would be remembered.

Three years later, in 2020, I returned to the site of the Tianjin Port.

It was a personal pilgrimage—an attempt to “verify” something: whether the memories still lingered, whether the city had preserved any traces of that disaster, whether those I had once interviewed were still waiting for answers.

I visited the hotel where the families of missing firefighters had once stayed. It was now empty, abandoned. I stood once again on the perimeter of the explosion’s epicenter. In its place, a man-made lake and an eco-park had been constructed—no monument, no explanatory plaque. Just a gentle breeze blowing through, as if nothing had ever happened.

I also tried to contact some of the people I had interviewed back then. Some had changed their numbers. Some refused to respond. Some simply said: “Please don’t bring it up again.”

That was when I understood: not everyone has the ability—or the privilege—to keep remembering. Memory itself is a form of freedom, one that must not be suppressed.

I sealed this report away for three years—not because I had forgotten, but because I doubted. Could this kind of writing still make a difference? Or would it merely deepen the pain? Would it only prevent certain wounds from healing?

It wasn’t until the fifth anniversary of the explosion that I decided to revisit and revise these words. Not because I had found an answer, but because I believed this: in an era defined by rapid updates and collective forgetting, the only way to resist silence is to keep retelling the story.

This is a belated report, and also an ongoing mourning. It is not an indictment, not a monument—but rather an honest conversation about people, systems, memory, and dignity.

May the names written here never be forgotten.

And may you, the reader, be more than just a bystander.

Chapter One: The First to Enter

In the winter of 2017, I stepped for the first time into a hotel near the Tianjin Port, one that had once housed the families of firefighters. More than two years had passed since the explosion. The interior no longer bore any trace of its original setup—only a scrap of old plastic tape clung to a corner of the wall, marked with handwritten numbers once used to guide reporters during press briefings.

It was a cold day. One mother arrived carrying a stack of plastic-laminated papers—lists of names she had printed herself. “Back then, we stood at the entrance holding up these names for the journalists to photograph. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even read them aloud.”

Her son was among the first firefighters to arrive at the scene.

I reconstructed what happened that night through survivors’ testimonies, relatives’ retellings, and footage captured by other journalists.

“We didn’t even know it was a hazardous chemical fire,” said Liu Bin, who was 26 at the time and a firefighter from the Fourth Squad—one of the few who survived. His tone was calm, nearly emotionless. It was the kind of voice shaped by years of internal persuasion, a learned steadiness.

He told me that around 10:50 PM on August 12, 2015, they received the call to respond to a fire at the Ruihai Logistics warehouse. The flames were not particularly fierce. The crew followed standard training: laying hoses, spraying water. “We thought it was just a typical vehicle or warehouse fire,” he said.

“After using up the first hose, I went back to the truck to get another. That action saved my life,” he added quietly.

The explosion, now, can only be pieced together from fragments of memory.

“It sounded like… like the sky collapsing,” said another survivor, Wang Yuan. He, too, was from the Fourth Squad. He had carried out several injured comrades and barely escaped himself.

“I remember hearing someone on the walkie-talkie say, ‘Something’s wrong, everyone fall back.’ Then—there was nothing.”

I copied those words into my notebook over and over again. I wasn’t there, but I was being pulled closer and closer to that moment.

Liu Bin described the scene: the blast wave flung him three meters through the air. When he hit the ground, his ears were ringing. He lay flat, with only one thought in his mind: This is it. I’m going to die here.

That night, the first responders included the First, Fourth, and Fifth Squads of the Tianjin Port Fire Brigade. According to families’ later accounts, the Fifth Squad alone dispatched 25 firefighters. None of them survived. It was the deadliest incident for Chinese firefighters since 1949.

I can’t forget one mother’s account. She said that just before her son went out on the call, he had been chatting with the family on QQ voice messages: “Mom, it’s just a small fire. Don’t worry.”

A few minutes after that conversation, his final photo appeared on his social feed—wearing his fire gear, standing before the blaze, holding a hose. His slender figure looked like it was facing off against some massive, unknowable force.

“If he was posting on social media, that means they didn’t know what kind of fire it was,” she said.

A minute before the blast, a firefighter shouted, “Fall back!” But it was already too late. The explosion engulfed the site like a volcano. When nearby teams arrived for support, every call over the radio received no reply.

At the press conference, someone asked: Had the first firefighters on the scene received training in handling chemical fires?

The head of the Tianjin Fire Department replied: “I’m not too sure.”

I remember a family member sobbing upon hearing that: “They didn’t even have names—how could they have had training?”

Later, we learned that most of these firefighters were contract workers hired by Tianjin Port Group, not formally enlisted under the public security system. Their pay was low, their training brief. Some had only been with the team for three months. Some were still trainees.

One of them was Dong Zepeng. He was 19, from Yu County in Hebei Province. He had joined just three months earlier. That night, he wasn’t even wearing proper firefighting gear—just standard camo fatigues. His uncle later said, “With a blast like that, it wouldn’t have mattered what he was wearing.”

Then there was Li Changxing. If not for that deployment, he would have completed his internship and returned home three days later to receive his technical school diploma. His sister wept as she told me, “He was so young. He didn’t even know how to smoke… and now he’s gone.”

Writing all this felt like watching a slow-motion reel on loop. One by one, these young men in oversized gear stood before the flames, some still wearing traces of excitement on their faces. They didn’t know what would happen next. No one had told them what kind of fire it was.

They weren’t called heroes. Back then, they didn’t even have names.

Only their phones remained, still glowing and blinking on their dorm room nightstands. Call after call came in—but no one would ever answer them again.

Chapter Two: The Firefighters Without Names

They said they were “outside the system”—but they never imagined that even in death, they would still be outside of it.

That winter, I first heard a mother speak of how “his name wasn’t on the list.” There was no crying in her voice, only a quiet, piercing pain—as if daily life had been silently shattered.

“They went on a mission, died in the fire, but weren’t on the list. So what are we? Whose family are we?”

In the first three days following the explosion, the official list of the dead and missing did not include the majority of firefighters from the Tianjin Port Public Security Fire Brigade’s First, Fourth, and Fifth Squads. These were the earliest responders—the first to enter the blaze, the first to go missing.

Their status? Contract firefighters.

China’s system divides firefighters into two categories: those formally affiliated with the public security system—fully recognized, regularly paid, eligible for martyrdom status—and those hired directly by enterprises as “full-time firefighters” or “contract workers,” whose legal standing is vague, whose training varies, and whose insurance is often outsourced.

Tianjin Port’s firefighting units belonged to the latter group.

One insider from the port’s public security system put it bluntly: “They say they’re firefighters, but in truth they’re just temp workers. If there’s a shortage, they hire a batch, train them for a few months, then send them out. They’re young, cheap, obedient. If they can’t handle it, they quit. If they stay, they stay.”

I asked, who is responsible for their safety?

He was silent for a few seconds, then said softly: “No one asked that question before the explosion.”

I’ve seen photos of their training. Over twenty young men doing push-ups shirtless in the pouring rain, mud on their faces, still smiling. Their training was rigorous: 3,000-meter runs, rappelling, operating German MAN water tankers, climbing four-story ladders, changing gear, rescue drills… none of it was skipped.

But that was just training. They had received no systematic instruction on hazardous chemical fires, no manuals for identifying dangerous goods, and no one told them that sodium cyanide reacts with water to create explosive gases.

At the scene, all they knew was how to turn on the water and aim it at the flames.

A journalist once asked Zhou Tian, head of the Tianjin Public Security Fire Department, whether those firefighters responded appropriately that night—was there a misjudgment?

He replied, “I’m not clear on their situation.”

Not clear—because those firefighters didn’t belong to the Tianjin Municipal Fire Department. They weren’t part of the system. Even on the night of the emergency, they had no right to report, no command authority, not even access to the unified communication network.

They wore the same uniforms as system-affiliated firefighters. They responded, fought fires, charged into the blaze. But when they fell, their families had to prove: he was a firefighter too.

On August 15, three days after the explosion, many families gathered outside the Tianjin government’s press conference with banners reading: “Give me back my son!” Some held lists of names. Others clutched photos of their sons.

They weren’t asking for compensation, nor for the title of martyr. All they wanted to know was: why wasn’t his name even listed?

Only later did the media reveal that the Tianjin Port Fire Brigade was actually under Tianjin Port Group Co., Ltd., with no connection to the public security system. Wages were paid through outsourcing firms. Most employment contracts were incomplete—some families said, “We never saw any contract. We just knew they got paid every month.”

One firefighter’s sister recalled, “I asked my brother how he got paid. He said, ‘In cash.’ I said, ‘Still? You’re paid in cash?’ He said, ‘That’s just how it is.’”

There was an absurdity at the heart of the public discourse: the children were dead, but their deaths could not be classified within the system.

“He wasn’t a formal firefighter, so he can’t be on the list of the fallen.”

“But he was the first one to charge into the fire.”

“Yes, but he wasn’t officially recognized.”

One family member told me she went from hospital to hospital, only to be turned away. No one had heard of the “Tianjin Port Public Security Fire Brigade.”

“I saw other families—those of the official firefighters—getting liaisons, designated contacts, even psychological counseling. We had nothing. We had to ask around ourselves. And still people stopped us: ‘Whose family are you? Do you have proof?’”

Eventually, these names were added to the official list of fallen heroes—but only months later. No official document could repair the shame and helplessness of those weeks.

The title “martyr” came too late. And to the families, it felt too distant.

“We don’t want any title,” one mother said. “I just want to know how he died.”

I remember, at the end of one interview, the wife of a fallen firefighter said something to me:

“They weren’t lacking in courage. They were lacking in legality.”

It was an irrefutable absurdity—like a cruel joke written by fate.

They had fought to become real firefighters—even if just as temps, even if unofficial. They wanted to stand at the front lines, make their mothers proud, hear their girlfriends say, “You look just like a soldier.”

But when they fell, they didn’t even have a shared gravestone.

Their stories are fading now, in a city that has already been “restored.” But to the mothers who once held up name lists, who ran between hospitals, who handed notes to reporters—they were never nameless.

They lived in a system that simply refused to give them names.

Chapter Three: The Disappearance of the Fifth Squad

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with the image still vivid in my mind: a row of neatly made beds—on each bed, a phone flashing, still plugged in, its screen lighting up and fading again. Those phones were waiting for someone to answer. But no one came back.

The Fifth Squad of the Tianjin Port Fire Brigade was the name I heard most during my interviews. Not because they were well-known, but because they were—an entire team—completely gone.

Twenty-five were dispatched. Two confirmed dead. Twenty-three never returned.

In disaster reports, they were just a string of numbers. In official press conferences, they were “unverified missing personnel.” But to the parents who rushed to Tianjin after the explosion, they were:

“My son, my husband, my brother.”

When I entered the hotel that had once been packed with family members in the winter of 2017, only a few remained—still waiting in Tianjin for updates. Some were still fighting to have their sons recognized as martyrs. Others had quietly returned home, placing their sons’ portraits on ancestral tablets carved into the wooden walls of family shrines.

That was when a question struck me: How can an entire fire squad just “disappear”?

Only after poring through documents and speaking with families did I understand—this disappearance wasn’t caused by the explosion. It was the system that let them slowly vanish from the record.

Hu Le, 21, was the squad leader of the Fifth Squad. He shouldn’t have been there.

At the end of July, he had injured his hand during a drill and was sent home to recover. Three days before the explosion, he insisted on returning. “Mom, I have to go back. The team is short on people,” he said. No one could talk him out of it.

On the night of August 12, he appeared in a friend’s social media post—wearing firefighting gear, holding up a hose, with flames raging behind him. “If he could still post, it means he didn’t know what kind of fire it was,” his mother later told me.

At 22:50, they received the dispatch. By 23:20, the explosion occurred. Less than an hour.
He never came back.

Qi Jixu, 18, was the youngest member of the squad. Right before the blast, he was chatting with his father on QQ voice call, casually asking why his nephew wasn’t asleep yet. Just before hanging up, he said, “We’ve got a mission—just a small fire.”

A family member told me later that when they went to the dorms to collect belongings, the beds were still neatly made, phones still charging, screens lighting up one by one—yet no one would ever answer them again.

That image etched itself into my mind. It wasn’t a scene of death—it was a scene of interrupted life: a missed call, an unopened lunchbox, a toothbrush set gently by the sink.

Zhao Fei and Qiao Peng were the only two whose bodies were recovered from the Fifth Squad. Their remains were burned beyond recognition.

Qiao Peng’s sister stood outside the morgue, holding her ID card, family certificate, and a vial of her blood. “I just want to confirm if he’s my brother,” she said. “I won’t make a scene. I just want to know.”

At the time, her brother’s name still hadn’t been released on the official list.

I used to ask myself why I insisted on writing down such painful details. Was it too heavy? Too cruel?

But if I didn’t write them down, they would be forgotten too quickly.

I know this society excels at quick recovery: damaged buildings are repaired, new slogans go up, the blast site becomes a man-made lake, and banners in the neighborhood read “Welcome Home.”
Only the families are still stuck on that night.

Some called this “the deadliest disaster for firefighters in Chinese history.” But to me, it felt more like a silent erasure—with no warning.

Their deaths weren’t quiet—on the night of the explosion, a mushroom cloud rose and flames lit up half of Tianjin—but their identities were.

“Our son wasn’t a deserter. He was the first one to charge in. But now, no one even says his name,” one mother said.

She waited outside the press conference with her son’s photo—until police asked her to leave.

The families of the Fifth Squad say they’ve never received a clear investigation report. No one explained why their sons were the first ones in without protective gear. No one explained why the chemicals weren’t labeled, why the fire command didn’t warn of danger.

So they kept their own records in little notebooks:
“August 12, 2015, 22:50—dispatched.”
“23:20—explosion.”
“After that—no one came back.”

After that round of interviews, I found it hard to keep writing.

Because the disappearance of the Fifth Squad wasn’t just the vanishing of a team. It was the silence—and complicity—of an entire system.

These young men were supposed to be getting their diplomas two years later, falling in love, saving for a home. But their lives ended in the misjudgment of a “routine fire.”
They didn’t die on a battlefield. They were trapped in positions where they had no information, no power to ask questions, and not even a name.

I once tried to describe their deaths as a “sacrifice.” But the more I wrote, the less right that felt—sacrifice implies choice, implies respect.

But they were simply people who were never told the truth.

I remember, as I was leaving Tianjin one time, a father walked me to the station. Calmly, he said:
“These kids… they were like a message you hit ‘send’ on. It went out—but no one ever replied.”

I looked out the train window, toward the gray seaside. I thought of those phones. Those blankets. Those names.

Not a single person from the Fifth Squad came back alive.
But we must speak their names, one by one.

They must not be omitted again.

Chapter Four: Echoes That Came Too Late

When I arrived in Tianjin in 2017, two years and three months had passed since the explosion. There were no barricades left on the streets, and the news had long stopped reporting on the disaster. A taxi driver casually turned the wheel and said, “Oh, that? It’s all over.”

But I quickly realized—for some people, that night had never truly ended.

In a rented apartment in the Binhai New Area, I met the mother of Liu Zhiqiang. She had come all the way from Yu County, Hebei, carrying her son’s ID card, a photo of him wearing his police helmet, and a wrinkled vocational school diploma.

“You tell me—he studied wind power. Why did he die in a cyanide fire?”

Her voice wasn’t loud, but each word hit with weight. I had no answer. I could only sit there and write down everything she said.

“He wanted to come here. He said he wanted a proper job. Like being a soldier.”

When she said that, she neither cried nor smiled—as if reciting a fate already sealed. But I knew this wasn’t fate. It was disappearance sanctioned by a system.

Yuan Xuxu, born in 1996, made his last phone call to his mother three days before the explosion.

“He didn’t say much—just kept telling me to take care of my health, to look after his younger siblings. He even warned me about news of child kidnappings, told me to be careful.”

His final photo was posted on QQ Space at 7:33 PM on August 12, with the caption: “Life and death are fate; wealth and honor are in the heavens.”

His mother later set that sentence as her phone’s lock screen. “I’m afraid I’ll forget,” she said.

I once overheard families arguing in the hotel hallway. Someone said, “We need a lawyer.” Another replied, “What good is a lawyer? They’re already dead. What can we do?”

Then came a long silence. Not the usual kind, but the kind forged from delay, evasion, and bureaucratic coldness.

One mother came to Tianjin looking for her son, not knowing the explosion had happened three days prior. No call, no notice. She learned about it from a neighbor who had watched the CCTV news on a village satellite dish.

She took a thirteen-hour bus ride, asked three people at Tianjin Station before finally finding her way to the port. She brought only a photo of her son and a box of glucose meters—hoping he would remember to eat on time.

She said she refused to believe he had died.

“He was so young, and hated the heat. He wouldn’t have gone somewhere so hot.”

There was also a married couple—both from the Fourth Squad. The husband was a firefighter. The wife was a nurse. On the night of the explosion, he was at the scene. She was in the dormitory, just two hundred meters away. He had no time to call. She had no time to escape. Both perished. The five-month-old baby in her womb didn’t make it either.

I remember the family saying, “We just want them to go with dignity.”

They used the word “dignity” as if to say: Please let them remain human, even after death.

The more I wrote, the quieter I became. Because you begin to see how, in the eyes of the system, a life’s worth can be so easily disassembled: employment status, contract type, formal registration, martyr application procedures, insurance classifications, whether or not they counted as “civil servants”…

One father asked me, “My son went to the front line, right? He died, right? He saved people, didn’t he? Then why can’t he be called a martyr?”

I had no answer.

Some mothers said, “We’re not asking for much compensation. We just want them to admit—our sons were firefighters.”

Such a small request. And yet it took them two years—filing papers, making calls, contacting journalists, writing petitions—just to hear one sentence: Your son was a firefighter.

That made me angry.

Not because these families didn’t get enough—but because they were so precisely categorized as “exceptions,” so efficiently erased from the public memory.

This wasn’t accidental omission. It was structural, deliberate exclusion. From the very start, they had been placed in positions meant to be disposable.

At the end of one interview, a mother handed me a piece of paper with her son’s name written on it. “Don’t change his name. Don’t use a pseudonym,” she said. “We’re afraid even if you finish writing, it won’t be published. But if by chance it is—please let him appear just once under his real name.”

I nodded.

It was a silent permission. And the most humble, most dignified request.

On the train ride back, I repeated their names to myself like a prayer:
Dong Zepeng, Liu Zhiqiang, Yuan Xuxu, Zhang Sumei, Xue Ning, Hu Le, Li Changxing, Yang Weiguang…

Most of them were born between 1995 and 1997—my own generation. When they joined the fire brigade, they carried with them dreams of the city, reverence for the uniform, the hope of becoming “useful people.” They couldn’t afford college. They had no connections to get into the system. So they chose fire. They chose to charge forward. They chose a path that sounded respectable.

But what they didn’t know was that this path ended in silence, in evasion, in refusal.

I wrote all this not to comfort them—but to warn this society:

When a person dies, and even their name cannot be written—
They haven’t just died.
They have been erased.

Chapter Five: The Cost of the Blast—And Who Buried It

The first time I tried to understand the structure of Ruihai Logistics, I found nothing in the official reports.

Not because the news coverage was insufficient—
But because the news had vanished.

Three days after the explosion in August 2015, journalists scrambled to look up Ruihai’s corporate registration. It was a brief moment—like a vent had opened. Tianjin’s government-maintained business database came back online, showing that the company was owned by two young men: Li Liang and Shu Zheng. Neither had any notable business history.

“They don’t look like the real owners,” a friend of mine, an investigative journalist, told me.

Sure enough, when we reached out to Shu Zheng, his response was: “I was just holding the shares for a friend.”

Such people are known as white gloves—front men used by powerful figures who can’t appear publicly, appointed to make a company’s background appear clean.
The real question was: Who was the man that couldn’t show his face?

The deeper journalists dug, the greater the resistance became.

From speaking with several reporters involved in the investigation, I learned that:

• Some were summoned by superiors and told to “change the reporting angle.”
• Some were stopped at airports by plainclothes officers, their notebooks and recorders confiscated.
• Some had their photos of the blast site deleted by their editors.
• Some saw their published reports erased from the entire internet within three days—and even lost their jobs.

And the most common phrase they heard?

“You have to understand—this isn’t our fault. It’s just not something that can be fully investigated.”

I once tried to reconstruct Ruihai’s power network from another angle. When I attempted to speak with someone inside the port’s public security system, he responded with a series of questions:

“Do you know who approved that warehouse?”

“Do you know it was only 600 meters from a residential area?”

“Do you know who first let those goods through customs?”

I answered: “No.”

He gave a cold laugh.
“You’ll find out. But you can’t write any of it.”

Many of the answers were already there—
But we were forbidden to ask, forbidden to speak, forbidden to remember.

Later, Caijing magazine reported that a man named Dong Mengmeng was one of Ruihai’s true “controllers.”
His identity? The son of the former director of the Tianjin Port Public Security Bureau.

That made the story even more absurd—and more impossible:

The company responsible for the explosion was controlled by the son of the port’s police chief,
And the firefighters who died in the fire were under the command of that same port police system.

This wasn’t a tragedy—it was a black comedy.
It wasn’t coincidence—it was a structure of collusion.

In 2017, when I asked several government staff members about the progress of the investigation, one said:

“Several executives have already been arrested and punished. What more do you want?”

But according to public records, this so-called “accountability” included:

• Ruihai’s deputy general manager sentenced to six years.
• A warehouse supervisor sentenced to five years.
• A low-level safety officer sentenced to three years.

The actual decision-makers and political backers?
Not a single one stood trial.
Not a single one ever spoke to the families.

This was not justice. It was theater.
A staged performance for the system to report back to itself.

One parent I interviewed told me he had gone to local courts, petition offices, and the civil affairs bureau. All he received was a single letter stating:

“This matter has been properly resolved. Please refrain from unnecessary petitioning.”

He shook his head. “This is what they call resolved?”

I asked him: “What is it you really want?”

He replied:
“I want to know who made my son die.”

I once saw a photograph—from an article that has since been scrubbed.

In the photo, a firefighter sits on the charred ground, holding a scorched fire hose. Dust and tears streak his face.
He didn’t look like a hero.
He looked like a child about to collapse.

That photo disappeared from mainstream media.
Just like all the truth.

I began to question whether the word truth was even worth chasing anymore.

I know that’s a dangerous thought.
But when a society closes off all paths to inquiry, then truth is nothing more than the portion of facts that power allows you to know.

Even worse—when journalists are silenced, families isolated, and records taken offline, people begin to doubt themselves:

“Maybe it really isn’t worth asking anymore.”
“Maybe I’m just being too sensitive.”
“Maybe, after all this time, I should just let it go.”

No. We must not let it go.
We must not stop asking.

I wrote this chapter not to reconstruct the corporate background,
Not to assign technical blame—
But to ask one fundamental question:

Who made them die?

Not the chemicals.
Not a single misstep.
But the entire structure that allowed a warehouse like this to operate illegally,
That sent untrained firefighters into the flames,
And then erased every trace of them from the record.

That is the true cause of the deaths.

Five years after the explosion, media revisited the site.
The promised memorial was still nowhere to be found.

The former blast site had become a “Harbor Eco Park.”
Neatly trimmed lawns. A man-made lake. Rows of flowerbeds.
No plaques. No stones.
Not a single word about that night.

It is a land where memory has been deliberately cleansed.

As I wrote this into my notebook, I remembered what one grieving father once said:

“My son is dead. I’ve cried enough. Now I just want to ask—can his death help others live more clearly?”

But this society has never been good at remembering.
It is good at deletion and renaming.

Ruihai’s warehouse is gone.
The address has changed.
The development renamed.
The residents have returned.
The disaster has “passed.”

Everything has returned to normal.

Only the names—and the answers—
Still have not been spoken.

Chapter Six: Between Memory and Forgetting

On the fifth anniversary, I returned to Tianjin Port.

It was late summer. The wind from the Bohai Sea was damp and heavy. I removed my mask and inhaled deeply. I stood on the very ground where the explosion had occurred. Under my feet was freshly laid turf, surrounded by gleaming new steel fences. A few sprinkler trucks circled the edge of the artificial lake. There was no scent of smoke, no echoes of the screams from that night. Everything felt as though it had never happened.

I asked a nearby security guard, “Was this where the explosion happened?”

He paused, then shook his head. “I don’t know. I came here later.”

He looked to be in his twenties, likely started the job in 2018. It wasn’t surprising that he didn’t know. What was truly shocking was that nowhere in the entire park was there a plaque, a word, or even a single photograph to remind people that 165 lives were lost here.

I walked toward the artificial lake—reportedly built right over the blast crater.

The government had once promised to erect a “Harbor Heroes Memorial” here, to inscribe the names of the firefighters and civilians who died that day. But five years had passed, and the promise—like so many others—had disappeared from the reconstruction plans.

I couldn’t help but wonder: why is this city, this country, so adept at building towers—but so incapable of building memorials?

The families were not invited to any official commemoration—because no public ceremony was ever held. They could only mark the date alone, in their own homes, in their own cities.

I contacted one family member and asked, “Do you plan to visit the site?”

She replied, “We asked, but they said we’re not allowed near that area anymore. Called it a danger zone, still under cleanup.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. The area had already been redeveloped into an eco-park. The housing complexes were reoccupied. Malls were operating. And yet, to the families, they say:
“You can’t come. It’s not safe.”

What the families wanted was a chance to reach the truth.
What the city gave them was a string of excuses and a wall of fences.

I walked a full circle and saw, on the southern side of the park, a massive propaganda sign that read:
“United in rebuilding our homeland.”

I’d seen this phrase in dozens of press releases—the government’s repeated refrain: this disaster can be overcome, can be rebuilt, even serves as proof of the city’s resilience.

But what I kept thinking was—if we can’t remember the dead, what exactly are we rebuilding?

This is the most heartbreaking part of China’s post-disaster politics: it encourages “looking forward,” but forbids “looking back.”

“Stop asking questions. Life must go on.”
“It’s been so long—why bring it up again?”
“Think of the bigger picture. Don’t tarnish the government’s image.”

But the real stain on the government’s image—is silence.

The real insult is erasing someone’s name, reducing their death to a statistic, turning remembrance into a private act that must not be spoken aloud.

I remembered one mother, whose only action after the explosion in 2015 was to print her son’s name onto a white T-shirt. She said, “I’m afraid people will forget him. If I wear this, he can still walk down the street.”

Five years later, when I saw her again, she was still wearing it. The letters had faded. The fabric was pilled and frayed. She said, “This is the only thing I can still do.”

As a documentarian, I began to ask myself:
If we can’t build monuments, can we leave memory through words?

I don’t know if writing has any power.
But I do know—I no longer want to be a “listener who never speaks.”

That day, as I left the park, I passed the nearby residential buildings.
Five years ago, every window had shattered. Now, new glass was installed. Walls repainted.
Children played on scooters below. The air smelled of sesame buns and cold noodles.

I admit—this return to life was comforting.
But I also know: this comfort does not justify the cost.

People always say, “Life must go on.”
But no one ever says, “Memory must continue too.”

What have we lost?
Not just lives, homes, data records.
We lost a way of remembering tragedy—together.

There are no statues. No name lists.
No reflective textbooks. No annual media retrospectives.
Only a park. A patch of water.
And names that can never return.

I think, maybe this era isn’t afraid of explosions.
Not afraid of journalists.
Not afraid of mothers’ grief.
Not afraid of a sleepless city—

It’s afraid of one thing:
Memory that refuses to go silent.

This report is not to soothe the dead.
It is to question the living.

Do we still remember how they died?
Are we willing to admit it was not simply an accident?
Do we dare to say: Someone got away with it?

These questions cannot be carved into stone.
So let us carve them into our sentences.

Because some names should not be buried by grass.
Should not be muffled by public parks.
Should not go voiceless in the nation’s memory.

They deserve to be remembered—
Even if remembering them is, in itself, an act of resistance.

Epilogue: We Want More Than Martyrs

In the winter of 2017, on my last day in Tianjin, a mother walked me to the door of her rented room.
It was a sparse, almost barren space. A calendar hung on the wall—stuck on August 12, 2015.

She said, “I know my son is gone. But could you write down his name—his real name, not a pseudonym?”

I nodded.

That night, I wrote in my diary:

“What we remember is not the death, but the name.
Not the disaster, but the person.”

That sentence became the reason I kept picking up my pen.

In this disaster, the system wrongfully took lives, the bureaucracy silenced voices, and then offered the living an empty title: “Martyr.”

But are those two characters enough?

“Martyr” is a kind of shrine—it wraps loss in glory, but it cannot answer the most basic questions:

• Why did they die?
• Why didn’t they have proper equipment?
• Why weren’t they officially recognized?
• Why did their mothers never even see a complete body?
• Why, two years later, was there still no gravestone?

These questions cannot be swept away by the word martyr.
What we want is not just martyrdom.
We want respect, accountability, and a system that makes death less cheap.

I used to ask myself: Ten years from now, will anyone still remember this?

But maybe that’s the wrong question.
The real question is whether this era has left us space to remember at all.

Chinese society has never lacked disasters, nor poetic words for heroes.
What it lacks is the courage to honestly remember the wounds.

Not to feed hatred,
Not to remain in mourning forever,
But to help us understand:

A truly responsible country does not end with canonizing the dead—
It ensures that the living never walk into the same fire, the same fate.

Over the years, I’ve come to believe that writing down names is a gentle form of resistance.

A resistance against institutional coldness.
A resistance against how public narratives evaporate individual lives.
A resistance against hollow phrases like “properly handled”, “legally processed”, and “emotions stabilized”—which, in truth, shrink the space for human rights.

I’ve seen too many families not destroyed by death itself,
But by concealment and denial.

In a society where you cannot mourn without knowing the truth,
Human rights mean not just freedom from being killed—
They mean the right to know why.

At this moment, I think of a line from Voices from Chernobyl:

“It wasn’t the nuclear power that destroyed us. It was the lies.”

This is true in China too.
It wasn’t the explosion that destroyed these young firefighters—
It was ignorance, it was command,
It was an entire system built to blame fate instead of itself.

You ask me: Is documentation useful?

I used to doubt it.
But today, I want to say—
Even if these words never change a single policy,
They at least preserve names and voices that would otherwise vanish.

They remind us:
This was not a natural disaster.
It was a man-made catastrophe.
Not an accident, but a result.

We don’t write only for the dead.
We are leaving testimony for the living.

When truth sinks again, these sentences will resurface.
And when the next explosion comes, maybe someone will remember—
That once, someone gave their life to remind this nation:

The cost of not asking… is repetition.

They are not numbers.
Not mere casualties lined up in state ceremony.

They are Yuan Xuxu, Dong Zepeng, Liu Zhiqiang, Zhang Sumei, Li Changxing, Hu Le, Yang Weiguang…

They had faces, voices, unfinished loves, journals left half-written, and texts they never got to send.

They are not just martyrs.
They are us—
Only born into the wrong system,
Trusting the wrong kind of fate.

What we want is human rights with names,
Responsibility backed by evidence,
And remembrance with sincerity.

What we want is more than martyrdom.