Lydia Wallace was interning at Danwei when the Sichuan earthquake struck. She is now working for a disaster relief organization in Sichuan and will be publishing stories and photographs about the people she meets. She is also blogging at www.fiferis.com.

Gao Caohui is 65 years old. She lives in the tiny village of BandaoCun, between Miangzhu and the now utterly destroyed Hanwang. When the earthquake struck, she and her daughter were working in the fields together. From their rice paddy, they turned to watch the houses in their village crack, crumble, and collapse. Two minutes later when the ground stilled, only rubble remained. She wishes to show me where she lives, so I follow her down a path through the rice fields. On the way, she continues her story.


Gao Caohui says on May 12th, looking around at totally destruction in the wake of the earthquake, her first thought was for Jiang Linfeng, her nine-year-old grandson, her daughter’s boy. Together, she and her daughter walked an hour down the road to the boy’s primary school. Brilliant green rice paddies lined the road, the rice plants still evenly spaced in meticulous straight rows. All the houses they pass are rubble; the road is riddled with cracks and debris from falling buildings.


When they reached the primary school, they found a mountain of bricks, cement, metal beams, chairs, broken chalkboards, and torn schoolbooks. The two women searched everywhere, calling his name, climbing thought the rubble, ducking though collapsed window frames. Finally, miraculously, they found him. The third story stairway had collapsed on his back. It took them an hour clawing and digging through the rubble to free him. They carried him to the road and waved at passing cars until one stopped and agreed to take them to the hospital.


She tells me he is ok now, that her grandson had only fractured a shoulder. He is still in the hospital in another town, his mother at his bedside, but they plan to return home the next day. Of the twenty students in her grandson’s third grade class only four survived. Zhou Kehui, her neighbor, had a nine-year-old grandson named Xi Chunyi in the same third grade class who did not survive. She repeats the numbers to be sure I have understood: “Sixteen students and their teacher all died, sixteen of twenty.”


When we reach her house, we step over the crumbling remains of a wall into what was once the courtyard of her home. She shows me the tiny tent they have set up in the corner, big enough for a single bed and a pile of supplies. She opens the flaps, making sure I see inside. “Three people live her now,” she says, “but tomorrow my daughter and my grandson come home from the hospital and there will be five of us.” She has told her story insistently but with great composure. Now though, at the thought that her daughter and injured grandson will have nowhere to sleep when they return, she begins to cry. She wipes away her tears as they come.


Though she has seemed eager to tell her story, I worry I am intruding. When I begin once again to thank her for telling her story, she interrupts me. She is so grateful that we have come, she says. She thanks us for caring about her country, her town, her family, for coming from so far away to see her and in such hot weather. “The weather is nothing,” I say helplessly. She wishes she could invite me to stay in her home. “Before,” she says, “when we had a house, I would have invited you to stay for a few days with us.” I tell her I will try to come back when things are better.


She tries to give us water bottles and boxes of milk. We protest, “We already have water. We have eaten. Really, we don’t need anything.” My Mandarin skills are confounded by her insistence. It takes my translator a whole minute to argue with her, to convince her we want her to keep her food and water. She will not let us leave without at taking at least one box of milk.