Word: townes
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...point of the room is a pencil drawing of the family he lost on May 12. An art student drew it from the ID cards of his wife, Wu Shanshan, 33, and their daughter Zhang Duo, 6. All other photos were lost in the rubble of Beichuan, a mountain town where 15,000 perished. An 8-ft.-tall (2.4 m) fence topped with barbed wire now surrounds the town to keep people out, lest they be harmed by still frequent landslides. Former residents gather on the hills overlooking their destroyed homes, lighting incense and firecrackers for their kin entombed...
...Father While Zhang works to rebuild Beichuan, Lu Shihua toils to figure out why the 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...
...with a similar determination that Lu fights for an answer to why the Beichuan No. 1 Middle School caved in, crushing his daughter. Lu had just had lunch with her in town an hour before the quake struck. He felt the earth move as he waited for a bus back to their mountain village. Rocks tumbled down from a nearby peak, but as soon as the tremors eased he ran to the school. "The five-story building was completely flattened and young, broken bodies were everywhere," he says. "There were parents here and there, crying and digging for their children...
...Shopkeeper A short walk from where Lu's daughter died, a temporary town has sprouted. Nearly 4,000 residents from the mountainside village of Tangjiashan, which was destroyed in a landslide, now live in makeshift houses with gray, Styrofoam-lined aluminum walls and concrete floors. A school, bank, police station and local government headquarters are all packed into these oversized gray boxes...
...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...