Yang Dalan died in the fight and Pan Xinglan, who was 19 at the time, lost one of her ears and retained some serious cuts and bruises to her body. However, the object of the robbery, 10,000 yuan (US$1,205) in cash, remained intact in the safe.

Eleven years have passed since then and Pan, 30, looks no different from any other woman of her age. Living with her husband and 4-year-old daughter in their crowded one-room apartment in Beijing, Pan enjoys her work with the Beijing branch of the Agricultural Bank of China and her family life.

Pan says she is satisfied with a peaceful and happy life. On returning home from work, Pan is a good wife and a loving mother. She proudly shows off her family albums, mostly photos of her daughter, to visitors.

It is hard to relate this joyful and light-hearted Pan with the one who looked death in the face all those years ago. This is no coincidence, just as she hides her artificial ear behind her hair and her scars under her clothes, Pan has buried her past deep in her memory.

Whenever people talk to her and call her a heroine, Pan feels embarrassed and becomes very shy.

She prefers to be seen as a normal person who overcame physical suffering and never ceased in her pursuit of education and happiness. Pan refuses to live in the past.

However, memories are hard to get rid of. She remembers when she regained consciousness, following the fight, she saw the tearful faces of her family.

“I thought I was going to die and my only wish was to have a last look at my loved ones,” she said.

Pan survived. However, she has endured more physical suffering than most people can imagine. She underwent seven major operations and had plastic surgery on her ears four times.

In the months following the incident, Pan was the center of public attention. She received hundreds of interviews and made dozens of reports.

“What were you thinking at that moment?” “Are you really not afraid of dying?” These were the two most frequently asked questions.

“I did what I had to,” she always replied. However Pan’s answer seemed too simple to explain her heroic actions.

Pan’s father used to work in a bank. “In the bank, the money is your responsibility” was his work ethic. Pan was so familiar with her father’s teachings that when she took a job in a bank his words were already embedded deep in her mind.

Pan was 18 when she got the job at the same credit co-operative as her father. ”The only thing I could think of were my father’s words: ‘In the bank, the money is your responsibility’," Pan said.

Fame and honor piled up on the 19-year-old Pan who received more than 30 rewards following the incident. Yet Pan stayed levelheaded.

For the past 11 years, Pan has been trying to hide from public attention and live a normal life.

She was discharged from hospital in September 1990 and returned to her job. In the same year, she applied to the Wuhan Agriculture Administrative Institute. It was a hard experience for Pan.

After leaving the hospital she had a busy schedule. She was invited by various units, schools and factories to give speeches and meet visitors who came to see her. She had to work around the clock to make up for the time she missed at her job and prepare for her college entrance examination.

In 1991, Pan’s efforts bore fruit as she passed the examination and was enrolled by the institute, her score was 16 marks higher than the admission requirement. “Everybody was surprised when I told them my score since they took it for granted that I’d received preferential treatment,” Pan said.

Pan still studies in her spare time, this time for her master’s degree in economics and management. “I was determined to go on studying even if the incident hadn’t happened,” she said.

Her peaceful life was disrupted again this year after another bank robbery occurred in Dalian, a port city in Northeast China’s Liaoning Province.

A woman bank employee was put in a similar situation to Pan, the difference was that she did not resist the robbers. Instead, she used her wisdom to scare them away and then reported the case to police.

This woman was not recognized as a heroine. Instead, she was fired. She then sued the bank and won the lawsuit. The case has become a hot topic of discussion in the media.

When asked what she thought about it, Pan paused for a while and said: “I think she had her reasons for what she did.”

“But I still hold to my principle: In the bank, the money is your responsibility.”

(China Daily 10/31/2000)