Two months after the earthquake that took the lives of so many schoolchildren, Clifford Coonanreturns to Juyuan to hear how their families are coping.
SITTING ON A SOFA in her sister's house in Juyuan village and looking at the small green ID card which is all she has left of her daughter Zhou Yating's belongings, Wang Kanghua shakes her head in disbelief.
While she has agreed to tell stories about Yating, about what a lovely girl she was before she died in her school during the Sichuan earthquake, she is reluctant to be photographed in another person's house.
"It's bad luck to cry in someone else's house. She's so beautiful. My daughter is just like a flower," she says, carefully arranging photos on her lap.
Wang ran down the street to Juyuan Middle School as soon as her house stopped shaking from the earthquake, and dug with her fingers to find her daughter.
The Juyuan Middle School is now the most famous school in China.The quake struck at 2.28pm on May 12th - fatal timing for the children of Sichuan, as so many were at school. Of the 90,000 dead or missing, 10,000 were schoolchildren and students who died in collapsed schools during the 7.9-magnitude tremor.
The day after the quake, heavy rain turned the ground to mud and every time the body of one of the hundreds of teenagers buried in the ruins of the school was dragged out and identified, a barrage of firecrackers exploded and a chorus of keening and wailing arose from the families gathered around.
The basketball court in what used to be the playground was turned into a mortuary. Parents and rescue workers were frantic; whole sides of the school had slipped away as the ground shook. Support walls were left standing with blackboards with the day's lessons written on them. It was an unbearable sight that will be with me forever.
Today, the school remains a pile of rubble, the blackboards are still visible, but the area has been fenced off and the People's Armed Police in black combat fatigues guard it. When I come to look again at the school, they are physically threatening, saying "No photos" in English.
Towards the end of May, grief turned to anger for the parents of the children who died in Juyuan Middle School, as well as other schools in the region where official corruption was blamed for poor building standards.
People are full of praise for Premier Wen Jiabao whose hands-on approach and long visits to the quake zone earned him the nickname "Grandpa Wen".
But there are bitter denunciations of local officials cutting corners when building schools and pocketing the cash saved from not putting enough steel into the structures. Parents held protests to denounce corruption and called for investigations into the collapses. Why did their schools collapse like paper houses and so many surrounding buildings survive?
Within hours, the protests were transformed into a major political headache for the government.
Public displays of dissent are not tolerated in China, but here you had scores of bereft, grieving parents openly protesting in front of the courthouse in Dujiangyan. How to respond to parents wailing and carrying pictures of their dead children? The response was tough - some parents were arrested, a number of foreign and Chinese journalists detained, and the weeks of remarkable press freedom following the quake were at an end.
THE PARENTS ARE under pressure not to talk to foreign journalists, to be quiet, and their phones are being monitored. They are eager to talk to me as they want justice for their children. And having lost their children in the quake, they feel they have nothing else to lose.
The first time I met Wang Kanghua was a few days after the quake when she was burying Yating. She was too grief-stricken to talk, but when I came back, she was more open, pleased that people in Ireland had read her story in The Irish Times. But now, talking to the parents has become a game of cat and mouse with the police and we have to do interviews behind tents and in backrooms.
Cai Mingrong and her husband Liu Qiang are living in a tent, but we return to their quake-damaged house, the stairwell marked by huge cracks and debris on the steps. The floor of their modern apartment is still littered with their belongings as they fell when the quake struck - money is strewn from a broken piggy bank, and DVDs are scattered on the tiles. From the window of the fifth floor apartment you can look across the river - flowing fast because of heavy rains and filled by the draining of quake lakes - and see a field of blue tents, which is where many of Juyuan's residents currently reside.
The couple's 15-year-old son Liu Jun's basketball boots are still on the window ledge to air, just where he left them before he went to school on the day of the quake.
"Ah, he was a very handsome boy. He always listened to us, although he wasn't a great student. We ran to the school after the quake and we dug him out at seven o'clock in the evening and he was dead. He loves sports, he's great at basketball," says Cai.
The parents switch between the present and the past tense when talking about their children, and it is unsettling to hear "my son loves basketball" or "my daughter loves to dance".
"The government says we should stay calm and they will resolve things. We're in a tent and we have food and clothes, we get 300 yuan (€28) a month," she says.
Li Dechang is wearing a T-shirt that you see everywhere in the quake zone. It says "I Love China" on the front and "Beijing 2008 Olympics" on the back.
He met Premier Wen when he came to Juyuan Middle School.
"He was sitting where you are now. I told him 'thank you', that the central government has been great, very nice to us," Li says.
His little girl Yunlu was 15 when she died. He reached the school at 3pm and, at 8.30pm that day, the soldiers dug out her body. People in rural China can be casual about times and figures, but all of the parents remember exactly what time they arrived at the school and precisely what time the body of their child was taken out of the ruins.
Probably more than 90 per cent of the children who died in Juyuan school were their parents' only child. There is little open criticism of the one-child policy, which limits the number of children couples can have to one in most cases. There is no question that the loss of any child can devastate a family, no matter how many children there are, and proponents of the policy say it has stopped China's population, already 1.3 billion, spiralling out of control and putting too much demand on fragile resources.
But because of the policy, many people wait to have children until they are older and better able to care for the child. This means that some of the parents of the children in Juyuan are at an age where having more children gets more difficult, for some impossible. It's the end of the family line for them.
We go to the courthouse in the nearby city of Dujiangyan to deliver a petition from the parents, suing the government. The quake devastated the city and the roads are lined with tent villages and signs saying "Dangerous building - do not enter".
The sight of piles of rubble and soldiers in camouflage digging at sites and disinfecting wrecked houses becomes monotonous after a while.
This is the third time the parents have tried to file a petition, though they are careful to go in a small group to the modern, airy courthouse this time, wary of being arrested or causing a riot.
They are given a hearing, but told by a court official: "The government will deal with this."
A father bangs on the pillars of the courthouse to show how fragile the pillars in Juyuan Middle School were.
The court officer tells us to get out as we don't have permission to be there, despite the earthquake zone access pass I wear around my neck.
After we leave, two policemen yank open the doors of our cars and demand that the photographer wipe the memory card of his camera clear. They are very aggressive.
At a restaurant on the city outskirts, the parents meet to discuss their next step. Around 30 mothers and fathers sit around eating fruit and exchanging stories about their lost children. There are tears, some fond smiles and a lot of determination as they plan their quest for justice.
"Some of us have been arrested when we tried to petition before. They've no right to arrest us. We haven't done anything wrong." says one parent.
Yang Jiang scrolls through photographs on the wide screen of his mobile phone. They show images of his daughter, Yang Yin, at various tourist spots, pulling faces and posing for the camera. Then the images shockingly turn to photographs of her body as it was pulled from the rubble of the quake. Yang shows me a video of Yin being laid out at the school. Sometimes modern technology is incredibly brutal, almost too objective in the way it allows the depictions of a happy teenage girl on a Chinese hillside to give way to frightening images of the same child dead in the wreckage of her school.
WANG JINGHUI IS AN ELEGANT woman, dressed in black with the poise of a society matron, and she arrives up to the meeting in her own car. She is the aunt of He Xue, and because she had a bit of money and lived in the city, she brought up the little girl for her sister, a poor farmer who lives in a remote rural area. This is common practice in China.
"Xue was the only child in the family. I got there at 3pm but they didn't find her until the 14th of May, two days after the quake. Her classroom was on the second floor. When my sister got the news, she fainted, she couldn't deal with it. And look at this photo," she says, pointing to an elderly man in a blue Mao suit.
His name is He Shicai and he was the grandfather of He Xue. When he heard his granddaughter was dead, he died of grief, says Wang Jinghui. She turns away and puts her head in the crook of her arm and cries for a long time.
Liu Li approaches to show me a small photograph of her daughter, Hu Huishan, which depicts her as the cover star on a mock-up of a teen magazine called Sophisticated.
"She was a sunshine girl, very cute and everybody who saw her said she was an angel. When the earthquake happened we were at our house about 15 kilometres away. It didn't feel like much. Anyway, we chose the school because we thought it was solid and safe and we presumed it would be okay. Then my brother-in-law told me that the quake had hit the school really badly, I got on the phone, but the lines were down. He has a taxi and he drove us, then we ran from where the road was blocked. Our daughter was the first to be dug out of the wreckage," says Liu. She holds her daughter's cremation card as she speaks.
Lunch is a fiery Sichuan broth of red peppers, chilis, peanuts and coriander with a big fish, served with local beer and sprite. It's delicious and parents go out of their way to heap choice morsels of fish into my dish. Just like banquets everywhere in China, there are constant toasts and animated discussions about food and repeated questioning to see if your neighbour has eaten enough, especially the foreign journalist.
The quake is banished for a few minutes but it hangs over the room like a shadow, and by the time people are lighting cigarettes, talk again turns to how the families are going to get justice. There are tears again, and there is anger.
The government has sent payments and support messages to the parents, in an effort to show support and to reduce political fallout over shabby building standards and poor supervision of school construction.
"All we want is a response from the government. We gave our children to the school to study, and they all died. Those responsible for that should pay for it but they are ignoring us. We gave our children because we trusted the government," says one father.
"A natural disaster we could understand. We would grieve, we could move on. But this was negligence. This was corruption by local officials. We just want to know the truth about our children. That's enough," he says.
