Before he got the answer, the signal vanished into the rain.
It was 4 a.m. on July 28, when record-breaking downpours struck the mountains in Miyun District, northern Beijing, part of a storm system that swamped valleys overnight. By dawn, the flood had erased his 30-hectare farm.
“Everything disappeared overnight,” Zhen said later.
Five hours after that call, Zhen returned to the farm from his hometown in the northern Shanxi province to find 13 years of labor erased: terraces had collapsed into silt, cornfields and fruit trees lay buried beneath mud, greenhouses were twisted into metal.
