ShareThisWhen the earth shook last May, Jiang Lucheng's wife of 25 years and their infant grandson were buried in the rubble of their home. At 55 years old, and no longer able to work because of a leg injury he suffered during the quake, Jiang felt his life was over.
In another corner of the village of Shaba, close to the epicenter of the massive earthquake that left about 88,000 people dead or missing, Li Chengxiang was desperately looking for her husband. Though she heard stories he had survived and was seen helping the wounded, she never saw him again. A widow at 53, her heart was as shattered as the land around her.
Despite living their entire lives in tiny Shaba, Jiang and Li had never met, even though Li and Jiang's wife were friends. Then last summer, a mutual acquaintance who knew how lonely they both were introduced the chatty and earthy Jiang to the shy and attentive Li.
By September, they were married and now share a metal-walled room in a temporary community erected for earthquake survivors. They're both still in mourning, but they're going through it together.
Neither uses the word "love" to describe their relationship, and a sense of sadness and loss hangs over their tiny new home. He needed someone to cook and clean for him, tasks he never had to do until his first wife died; she wanted companionship as she grew older.
But they both see themselves as lucky. "The other men who lost their wives all want to get married too," Jiang says with the smile of a lottery winner.
"Everyone wants a happy marriage, but it's hard to find someone suitable," Li adds.
Jiang and Li are just one story among many here of people trying to build something new out of the ruins of last year's massive disaster.
Like the nearby city of Beichuan, and dozens of other smaller centers in the region, Shaba was devastated by the earthquake last May in Sichuan province, a tremor that registered a magnitude of 8.0. Of Shaba's original 718 residents, 109 were killed, and the village remains little more than a pile of rubble.
Deepening the sense of loss, many of the dead were children, killed when their schools collapsed.
Nine months later, ground is being cleared at another site for the construction of a new village for Shaba's former residents that the government promises will be ready in less than three years. And the sound of crying infants fills the narrow streets of the temporary community on the outskirts of the nearby town of Mianyang.
Three babies have recently been born to the more than 600 survivors gathered in the long rows of prefabricated homes here, and eight more women are pregnant.
Some of the mothers and mothers-to-be lost children last spring, and in some cases have been given a special exemption from China's one-child policy.
Now four months' pregnant with her second child, Xu Chunmei can't stop thinking and talking about the little girl she lost.
Yang Jiaxin, 4, was going to be a dancer, Xu says wistfully, until the little girl's kindergarten school collapsed on top of her.
A kindergarten teacher herself, Xu believes that she and her class survived solely because their school was better constructed than the one her daughter attended.
She and her husband didn't plan to have another child, and she was stunned to find out last fall she was pregnant. But now, she's starting to get excited, and hoping for another girl.
"I was happy as well as worried, because I'm still not over the earthquake and losing my child. Life has not settled down yet," she says. "Now, I'm not so conflicted, because after all, time heals ... I still miss my daughter. But hopefully this one will have a better life."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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