“My country is calling me,” I thought to myself. “It’s time for us to build a New Great Wall with our flesh and blood.” Our national anthem resonated in my head. The next morning I set off to Beichuan with two friends.

I didn’t know it at the time, but those were my final days as a typical Chinese patriot.

I arrived in the town of Beichuan and was perplexed as I stood in front of the ruins of Beichuan No. 1 High School. I couldn’t understand why the rubble of a brand new five-story building covered half the area of a basketball court while nearby structures built decades ago were still standing. I couldn’t understand why new buildings seemed as fragile as crackers. I couldn’t understand why even the students on the ground floor of the school were apparently unable to make it to safety.

I saw a woman loitering around the pile of debris. Pointing at the rubble, she muttered: “Look, that’s my baby. Her hand is still moving. She is still alive but I can’t pull her out.” I could see the bottom of a little girl’s floral printed shirt, and other children as well. Many of the children were still moving. But the military rescue team forbade us from getting closer to the rubble, fearing further collapse. We stood by helplessly. The children eventually stopped moving.

I was a typical patriot before 2008. I believed that “hostile foreign forces” were responsible for most of my peoples’ misfortunes. As a soccer commentator covering games between Japan and China, I wrote lines like, “Cut off the Japanese devils’ heads.” I saw Japanese soccer players as the descendants of the Japanese soldiers who brutally killed Chinese civilians in the 1937 massacre of Nanjing. I used to curse CNN for its anti-China commentaries. I was one of the protesters who stood in front of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu and raised my fist after the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999.

But my patriotism began to come into question as I stood in front of the ruins of Beichuan High School. It became clear that the “imperialists” did not steal the reinforced-steel bars from the concrete used to make our schools. Our school children were not killed by foreign devils. Instead, they were killed by the filthy hands of my own people.