Rising from The Rubble

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The Official
Zhang Kangqi lives in his office. Five feet from his desk sits a single bed, a small table and a television. The focal point of the room is a pencil drawing of the family he lost on May 12. An art student drew it from the ID cards of his wife, Wu Shanshan, 33, and their daughter Zhang Duo, 6. All other photos were lost in the rubble of Beichuan, a mountain town where 15,000 perished. An 8-ft.-tall (2.4 m) fence topped with barbed wire now surrounds the town to keep people out, lest they be harmed by still frequent landslides. Former residents gather on the hills overlooking their destroyed homes, lighting incense and firecrackers for their kin entombed in the collapsed buildings and mud below.

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Zhang, 36, has little time for such expressions of grief. As a Communist Party cadre from Beichuan, he was working in a village in nearby Xuanping prefecture when the tremors hit. The hamlet's 2,000 survivors were cut off from the outside world. For days there was no news from Beichuan. Finally, Zhang learned that his hometown had been flattened. "Everybody cried, but I couldn't cry," he says. "What would people think?" The next day Zhang trekked six hours to a rescue command center to get help for the villagers. People's Liberation Army helicopters arrived on May 18, bringing supplies and evacuating the injured. It would be more than a month until Zhang was able to visit the remains of his home back in Beichuan. His wife's and daughter's bodies were never found. "Now I put all of myself into my work," he says. "The dead, there's nothing you can do for them. All we can do is make Beichuan better."

The local government tentatively plans to turn the remains of the city into a memorial park and build a new downtown 12 miles (20 km) to the south. Zhang now heads the Beichuan Department of Commerce, working to attract new businesses and industrial development. He hopes to bring in building-material companies that will develop earthquake-resistant products. Once Beichuan is rebuilt, a process that is estimated to take three years, Zhang hopes that the firms can then produce materials for seismic hazard zones elsewhere in China and abroad. The strain on Zhang and other local bureaucrats is severe. A quarter of government officials died in the quake, and the disaster continues to take victims. On Oct. 3, a Beichuan official who lost his only son to the quake killed himself. Zhang says his job keeps him from remembering what happened to his wife and daughter. "When I'm buried in my work, I think they are still alive," he says. "But when I look up from my desk and see that drawing, I remember they are not."

The Father
While Zhang works to rebuild Beichuan, Lu Shihua toils to figure out why the town collapsed. The single father lost his only child, daughter Lu Fang, when the Beichuan No. 1 Middle School crumbled. His wife had died 16 years earlier giving birth to her and Lu had resolved to raise the girl on his own. Friends and relatives, including his mother-in-law, offered to help the farmer find a new bride. "I turned them all down," he says. "I could not risk any possibility of my daughter being mistreated by a stepmother."

It is with a similar determination that Lu fights for an answer to why the Beichuan No. 1 Middle School caved in, crushing his daughter. Lu had just had lunch with her in town an hour before the quake struck. He felt the earth move as he waited for a bus back to their mountain village. Rocks tumbled down from a nearby peak, but as soon as the tremors eased he ran to the school. "The five-story building was completely flattened and young, broken bodies were everywhere," he says. "There were parents here and there, crying and digging for their children, and I did just the same. I cried and cried, dug and dug, until the police stopped us."

Four days later Lu found his daughter's body in the rubble of the school. He identified her by a pair of cloth shoes, which had been handmade by her grandmother. "Just what evil have I done to deserve this?" he asks. "I already feel very guilty for my wife's death — she died giving birth to my daughter. For my daughter, I had not gotten close to any woman for 10 years, and now she is taken away from me, too." A few days after identifying his child's corpse, Lu posted petitions at earthquake shelters calling for an investigation into the school deaths.