When the New Number Two Primary School fell, parents, relatives and friends of pupils rushed to the site. Sang Jun arrived about 20 minutes after the earthquake to look for his son. “There were already five people digging,” said Sang. He jumped in to help. His arms and legs, like Bi’s and other parents here, are now scarred with scrapes and bruises from the frantic efforts to pull apart the rubble and get to their kids below. Holding a pair of dirty blue jeans and a blue work shirt stained with blood, Sang said: “I was wearing these. I pulled out more than 20 children … Only five were alive.”

Zhang Chao was recovering from surgery in a hospital nearby. When he heard the school was demolished, he got up and went to help, pulling several bodies from the wreckage.

Down the road, a hefty farmer with a buzz cut named Zuo Jun hobbles with a crutch along a dirt path beside a golden field of wheat. Zuo injured his left foot prying through the rubble in search of his 11-year-old son, Zuo Hao, who appears pudgy with a crew cut and a jovial smile in family photos. At the end of the raised path in the corner of the field is a mound of fresh dirt where Hao is buried. “If the teachers had been there, he would be alive,” said Zuo with a pained look. “During the lunch break, the teachers put two classes together, locked them in and then went to play mahjong. This is what students said.”

“Did quake really kill my little girl?”, The Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 16th May, 2008

Jiang, who comes from distant Kaili city in Guizhou province, was working in the highway administration department in Yingxiu, the town in Wenchuan County at the epicentre of last Monday’s quake. Jiang was working the night shift, so was asleep at the Yingdian Hotel when China’s worst natural disaster in a generation struck at 2.28pm. “I was buried in complete darkness, but my quilt was covering my body; that must have protected me,” he said. “I knew that I wanted to live. I didn’t want my parents to grieve for me. Their voices, telling me to work well before I left home for Sichuan, echoed from time to time in my ears in that darkness.

Jiang’s mother, Long Jinyu, a 52-year-old administrative worker at a vocational school, flew into Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, at 4am on Saturday, then took a taxi out to Dujiangyan city… Police and soldiers were preventing civilians from going any further… They would not let her continue, but when they were distracted, she began to climb the mountain. “I kept scrambling up, sometimes on my feet, sometimes on my hands and knees. I don’t know where my strength came from. I caught up with a team of soldiers heading the same way. I was the only civilian there.” Running over in her mind as she kept travelling on were the words, “Son, hold on, Mum is coming to help you.” When she arrived at the ruins of the town, a firefighter told her a quite stable signal had been found where the Yingdian Hotel had been, indicating there was still one person alive, buried under the pile of tiles and bricks. “I ran up to the ruins, and shouted into them, ‘Erge, Erge!’ - my son’s special pet name from when he was little. “And I heard him answer ‘Mum’. It was like a voice from heaven. I can’t tell you how I felt.

“Mother’s voice saves son”, The Australian, Monday 19th May, 2008