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.

Liu Mingxiu is 85 Years old. It was the first thing she told me. She was walking along the road between the lines of tents, when she saw me talking with the two Mi sisters, two women 20 years her younger. She was proud of her age, showing me with her fingers. A prestigious age, we all acknowledge. “I’m very lucky.” Then she told me she had six teeth, three on the bottom, three on the top. She spoke thick Sichuanese so though she understood my questions, I could not even pick out words from her answers.

We asked her how she is now, after the earthquake. She is not well, she tells us. Her morale is low, her mood depressed. “I have no hope in life. I just live.” She put her hand over her mouth and her laugh was soft and charming. “Why?” we ask, “Do you have enough food, enough water? Do you have a tent?” Many people in the earthquake zone still don’t, but this camp in Loushui is well supplied. There is running water and young people recruited by Taiwanese organization Tzuchi wear yellow vests and help distribute hot meals. “I cannot eat – nothing tastes anymore.” She thinks, “And there is no place to play. We used to play Majiang.” The Mi sisters both chime in, “We loved playing Majiang.” The memory makes everyone smile.

My translator also found it difficult to communicate with Mingxiu. She understood what the old woman said, but some of it didn’t quite make sense. Sometimes the three old women spoke at once and my translator couldn’t keep up. Later she tells me Mingxiu took her hand and confided, “I have a bad sense of direction. I can’t even call myself a cab. My sense of direction is very bad.”

I ask more questions, do you have children? “I have three sons,” she tells me “Five children. Three sons, two daughters.” “Where do they live?” I ask her, “In Loushui with you?” She shakes her head. “I haven’t heard from them since the earthquake. My youngest daughter lives in Mianzhu, the other three live in Shifang.” Two nearby towns, both heavily damaged in the earthquake. Still, there were towns much harder hit - most of the population of Mianzhu and Shifang survived. “Before the earthquake the visited me ever one or two months.” One of the Mi sisters adds that one of her sons lives with her.

My translator and I are both surprised and dismayed. Haven’t heard from them since the earthquake? “Can’t the government help you to find them? Do they have cell phone numbers?” “I have no phone,” she says, “No TV. Everything gone in the earthquake.”

At the time I thought there must be some mistake in translation. Almost a month and a half later, enough of the chaos had dissipated that this surprised me. But after we finished talking she led me to the tent where she now lived and we met her son. He confirmed that he had no word from his four siblings since the earthquake. He had white hair himself and had been sitting on the bed inside the tent. He looked distraught, much more distressed than the faces I see outside. It made me believe that much of the public suffering photographed in the week following the earthquake must simply have moved inside. The only place privacy still exists in the camp is in the stifling heat inside the tents. Even on the day we visited, when it rained off and on and the temperature was pleasant, no one remained in the tents in the daylight.

I asked her about the first time she ever saw a foreigner. “Not before the earthquake,” she says. “Now there are many here, but before the earthquake I had never met a foreigner.” This too surprises me, for her village was only two hours drive from Chengdu. “In Chengdu I think there are foreigners,” she says, “but I have not been.” She told me she had been once, when she was middle aged - forty something. She last saw Chengdu in the seventies.

As we leave, my translator asks how to write her name but she shook her head. She can recognize the characters of her name “bright beautiful,” but she doesn’t know any other characters. “I never went to school,” she explains. She grew up in Loushui. She farmed in a nearby field until she married. They she moved into her house and lived there for seventy years. “That is why I am not well,” she says. She had great affection for her house, she said, her things. “Now everything is gone.”