Survivors in China sift rubble for the past

YINGXIU, China: There are no more rescues. The survivors say miracles are just that: only miracles.

What the people digging through the rubble here at the center of the earthquake zone are pulling out now is entirely inanimate. There are car parts and real estate deeds and clothing for infants. A woman scours the debris every day for firewood to carry back to a tent where 13 families have taken refuge. Another leafs through her son's wedding album, dust-filled and lifted from the ruins of her home.

They are what the survivors need to carry on with their lives, to piece back together some of what was snatched from them by the earthquake on May 12.

Sang Yuping spreads out a half-dozen photographs on a mattress in the tent that was given to her by the government. Across the road lie the remains of her one-story home. Long wooden planks protrude from the pile at every angle, like whale bones.

There on the mattress is a photo of her daughter, her son and his wife. It is April. They are smiling and dressed in Tibetan robes and dancing at a festival at a primary school here in Yingxiu, weeks before the school is to collapse and kill most of the children inside.

"This is the thing I was happiest to see," said Sang, 54, a corn and soybean farmer. "I lost everything in the earthquake, and when I found these photos, I felt better. Because from these photos, I can see what life was like before the earthquake."

"I look at these photos when I'm sad," she said.

Small objects, some sentimental, some practical, are all that most survivors from Yingxiu have left of their lives. The town lies deep in the mountains of Wenchuan County, at the epicenter of the quake that has killed nearly 70,000 and left 18,000 missing across southwestern China. Most of what is left of Yingxiu is piles of brick and concrete. More than three-quarters of the town's 10,000 residents were killed.

Chinese soldiers here are demolishing building after building and blowing up teetering structures. Soon bulldozers will clear away all the rubble, leaving no chance to salvage the past. Survivors are venturing back to scavenge while they can.

On Wednesday afternoon, for example, soldiers detonated explosives in a building on the far bank of the muddy river that courses through Yingxiu. The blast echoed through the valley and sent a cloud of dust over the town. Then people carrying backpacks, wooden baskets and plastic bags streamed across the bridge to the fields of debris on the far side.

The soldiers and police officers here do not care who takes what. Most of the people who owned these things are dead, they say.

Sang said she and her son came back specifically to look for the family photos. But anything they could find would help. There was, for instance, her 2-year-old grandson to think about. She had been cradling him in her arms outside when the earthquake struck. He and his mother are now living with relatives in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, three hours south.

"I found some of his clothes in the rubble and brought them down to him," she said.

Her tent was littered with other things that had mattered enough for her to dig out. A jar of liquor with a crack in the glass. Two wooden chests that held quilts and blankets. Jackets and sweaters still coated with dust.

"I'm still looking for things," she said. "Today I found a door. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that."

Down the street, a woman in a purple sweater and straw hat stood in the rubble putting handfuls of wood into her basket. She did this five or six times a day: dig in the rubble, gather wood, carry it across the river. She lives in a tent with 40 people from 13 families. They use the wood to make fires to cook.

"We're all refugees, and we don't have anything," said the woman, Zheng Xiaoqiang, 40. "We depend on each other. We all cook together, eat together, live together."

Her son, Zidong, 13, was sifting through the debris looking for more wood.

"He has nothing to do these days," Zheng said. "I want to get him out and send him to school. His teachers took some of his classmates down to Chengdu. But he's afraid to go on his own."

She pointed to a rubble heap at the foot of a mountain that looked like any other rubble heap.

"I want to go back to my house to look for things, but I don't dare because the rocks fall from the mountain at any time," she said. "I ran out without shoes. Someone gave me these shoes I'm wearing. Now, maybe rocks don't fall anymore, but in my head, at night, they're still falling."

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