After China's quake, parents grope for hope and answers

By Chris Buckley

DUJIANGYAN (Reuters) - The air around the Dujiangyan crematorium is acrid with smoke and disinfectant as families bid farewell to victims of southwest China's calamitous earthquake, all too many of them children.

One was Yang Li, a stocky 16-year-old boy at Juyuan Middle School on the rural fringe of this city in Sichuan province, where he was crushed to death with perhaps 400 or more students under a six-storey school.

Yang's farming parents have since kept vigil besides a mourning display in front of their quake-damaged home, with incense, a black-and-white picture of their only child, and paper flowers in white, the traditional Chinese color of grief.

"This has taken away all that we had," Yang's mother, Li Qun, said hoarsely, sitting near the display. "As soon as the earthquake came, I ran as fast as I could to the school. But I was too late. Now I can't sleep or eat or think."

She said he was a mischievous boy starting to get serious about the competitive exam to enter a good high school. Like many of his classmates, he yearned to use education to escape the countryside for a city life of business and wealth.

With so many school buildings in Sichuan crumpling under the blow of the quake on Monday, such scenes of parents mourning their sons or daughters are being repeated.

China put the quake's total death toll at around 22,000 on Friday, but has said the number could well exceed 50,000. Many were children in scores of schools that collapsed, killing, maiming or burying hundreds at a time.

With many villagers and townspeople around here abiding by the government's "one-child" population control policy, that loss cuts all the more deeply, snatching away only children who carried their parents hopes and future security.