Chinese-Americans open wallets for quake relief

After the magnitude-7.9 quake struck Monday, U.S. residents with ties to the region anxiously sought news about China's worst earthquake in three decades and tried to contact friends and relatives through jammed phone lines and e-mail.

It took Tong Zhu, an international relations director for the Port of Tacoma in Washington state, more than three hours to contact her family in Chengdu, about 50 miles from the quake's epicenter.

"When I got a busy signal for three hours, I knew something was definitely not right," Zhu said. "We were all in panic mode."

All family members are now camping outside their home because of the fear of aftershocks, she said.

David Lee, whose wife's family lives in the same city as Zhu's, finally reached family members by cell phone after many attempts. He described relatives sleeping in their cars, with no access to electricity or running water.

"They're worried about the aftershocks. They're worried that something might happen to cause the house to collapse," said Lee, who heads the Chinese American Voter Education Committee in San Francisco.

China's official Xinhua News Agency said Tuesday that the death toll had exceeded 12,000 in Sichuan province alone.

Soon after news of the earthquake broke, Chinese organizations nationwide began setting up ways for people to donate money for disaster relief efforts.

Sing Tao Daily, one of the largest Chinese-language newspapers in the U.S., published eight pages of quake coverage Tuesday and set up a disaster relief fund that will collect donations from its readers around the world, said Tim Lau, CEO of the paper's West Coast operations.