Word: mother
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...town collapsed. The single father lost his only child, daughter Lu Fang, when the Beichuan No. 1 Middle School crumbled. His wife had died 16 years earlier giving birth to her and Lu had resolved to raise the girl on his own. Friends and relatives, including his mother-in-law, offered to help the farmer find a new bride. "I turned them all down," he says. "I could not risk any possibility of my daughter being mistreated by a stepmother...
...Deng Zhuyuan sat with his family outside a foot-massage parlor in the devastated town of Hanwang, resigned to the fact that he would soon find his mother's corpse. As rescuers moved debris with a crane, Deng, 18, told me in nearly flawless English about life in his mountain town, about how he was preparing for his college-entrance exams before the quake struck. Eventually, I left to walk through the wreckage of Hanwang. Unclaimed bodies lay under bloody sheets. A 20-ft.-tall (6 m) statue of a rider on horseback had been decapitated by the violent shaking...
...speech commemorating the new school year. "If you're still alive, then there is no reason to despair," he told his classmates and teachers. "I am living, and my life is hopeful." But in private, there are moments of doubt. "To get used to [the fact] that my mother is gone, it's very hard," he says. "But I am not the only one to suffer." Among the 36 students from his junior high school class, four died in the earthquake. "When we get together, we talk about those four," he says. "But we look to the future...
...someone who thinks success is within anyone's reach? Well, I'd like to think more the former than the latter. But you have to go back and ask, how was that change possible in my life? And the answer is that I was blessed to have a mother who understood that education was a liberator and that you get out of life what you put into it. And so one of the things that really concern me is the long tale of underachievement in New Zealand's education system, and I know that unless we can deliver credible change...
...think being raised by a single mother in a home with your two sisters has shaped your character? I've got a softer side to me. Look, you don't miss what you don't have. I like people. My strongest point on the campaign trail was that I was relaxed, and I think I can get on pretty easily with New Zealanders from all walks of life. The biggest challenge, I think, for any Prime Minister is to stay connected with the people who elect you. Once you lose sight of that, then the end is probably not that...