Rising from The Rubble

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At the time, grieving parents seemed like an immovable political force. They agitated for answers and, having lost what meant most to them, appeared unwilling to compromise. But local authorities began blocking access to the sites of demolished schools where parents and journalists would gather. The government offered compensation to parents, hush money that reportedly ran as high as $14,000 in exchange for a promise to keep quiet. Those that didn't acquiesce faced official intimidation. Lu says police frequently questioned him and demanded that he cease his calls for justice. The only shop with a fax in his village has been told to not let him send documents. Nevertheless, Lu continues. In late October he received a statement from Beichuan officials denying any flaws in the building. Lu's not satisfied. "As long as I am breathing, I will seek an answer to my question: Why did the classroom building of Beichuan No. 1 Middle School completely collapse?" he says. "I just want to have a answer so all those who passed away in Beichuan can rest in peace."

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China's Sichuan Quake: Six Months Later

The Shopkeeper
A short walk from where Lu's daughter died, a temporary town has sprouted. Nearly 4,000 residents from the mountainside village of Tangjiashan, which was destroyed in a landslide, now live in makeshift houses with gray, Styrofoam-lined aluminum walls and concrete floors. A school, bank, police station and local government headquarters are all packed into these oversized gray boxes.

Luo Xiqun, 22, runs a tiny shop selling soft drinks, beer, toothpaste, hot sauce, instant noodles, cooking oil and toothpaste. She and her 28-year-old fiancé had planned to marry this year. Then the earthquake struck, flattening their house and burying their wedding nest egg, which they had just withdrawn from the bank. At the time, money was the last thing on Luo's mind. "I wanted to live," she says, as she stands inside her store wearing a puffy orange jacket to ward off the chill. "No one else in the same building made it out, but somehow I survived." Luo walked five days with an injured foot and no shoes, braving runaway boulders and mudslides to make it to safety.

That survival instinct remains. Luo and her family put aside nearly every cent they earn. Her fiancé, Yang Yong, leaves early each morning to find work on reconstruction projects. "Even when he's sick he works," she says. "It will be even harder in the winter, but we have to live, so he goes." Although unemployment is as high as 80% in some areas of the Sichuan disaster zone, Yang says he doesn't have much difficultly finding work. Indeed, the extent of rebuilding still required means he can expect construction jobs for years to come. His 50-year-old father works with him, but the family worries about how long he can handle manual labor. So Luo runs her small shop to save money for a life beyond a gray box. "We don't have plans," she says. "We don't know where we will go. Right now the most important thing is money."

The Son On May 14, Deng Zhuyuan sat with his family outside a foot-massage parlor in the devastated town of Hanwang, resigned to the fact that he would soon find his mother's corpse. As rescuers moved debris with a crane, Deng, 18, told me in nearly flawless English about life in his mountain town, about how he was preparing for his college-entrance exams before the quake struck. Eventually, I left to walk through the wreckage of Hanwang. Unclaimed bodies lay under bloody sheets. A 20-ft.-tall (6 m) statue of a rider on horseback had been decapitated by the violent shaking. The hands of a clock in a tower in the town square were stuck at 2:28 p.m. When I returned to where Deng was waiting, two covered corpses were lying outside the massage parlor. A family member identified Deng's mother. A soldier yelled at a dog that sniffed at the bodies. Deng called me over. In a voice cracked with emotion, he offered me a final few words. "You must cherish life," he said. "You must cherish every moment you are alive."

Deng has done just that. When we met six months later, it was at the new campus of top-ranked Sichuan University, where he now studies electrical engineering. In July, Deng took the college-entrance exam and passed with the highest score among his schoolmates. The head of the university asked him to give a speech commemorating the new school year. "If you're still alive, then there is no reason to despair," he told his classmates and teachers. "I am living, and my life is hopeful." But in private, there are moments of doubt. "To get used to [the fact] that my mother is gone, it's very hard," he says. "But I am not the only one to suffer." Among the 36 students from his junior high school class, four died in the earthquake. "When we get together, we talk about those four," he says. "But we look to the future, not to the past."

— with reporting by Lin Yang / Beichuan