MIANYANG (China): Before she set off on the mountain path for school on Monday, Wang Xiaorong’s nine-year-old daughter gave her mum a farewell that was even more affectionate than usual.

“She kissed me again and again,” recalls the Sichuanese mother. “She said she had a secret to tell me. She ran back and hugged me and then she left.”

It was an unusual show of warmth even for Liu Xinqi, who was as popular among her teachers as her classmates in Beichuan elementary school.

But she had a special relationship with her mum. Even though Mother’s Day is not a Chinese tradition, Xinqi had celebrated the occasion the previous morning by giving Wang a handmade pink star.

That gift is now buried, along with the secret that the young girl did not live long enough to reveal. Xinqi was swallowed by the mountain when north-west Sichuan province was hit by the earthquake. She is one of an estimated 50,000 fatalities from the 7.9 magnitude quake, which Prime Minister Wen Jiabao called the most destructive in the history of the People’s Republic of China.

Slopes were sliced off mountains, slipping down on to villages, towns and factories in the valleys. Four million homes were buried or shaken to the ground, along with hospitals and schools especially schools.

Bodies are still being pulled from the rubble. Astonishingly, a handful are still alive, but the main job this week for emergency workers, the army and morticians has been to bury the dead.

Supporting the living will be the long-term challenge for China. Many of the survivors have lost everything: families, homes and businesses. Others, like Wang, are so traumatised that they are unable to eat, drink or sleep.

Wang takes me around. We pass countless people in visible pain. Some sob quietly by themselves, one or two howl. The injured hobble or grimace with aching wounds. Some show them off. Others turn aside because they do not want their puffy, purple, bruised faces to be photographed.

Like many people in China, the big question for many refugees was why so many children died. More than a third of the 20,069 confirmed dead perished in classrooms and playgrounds that proved weaker than other buildings in withstanding the seismic force. Amid a public outcry, the government has said it would investigate why more than 6,900 classrooms were destroyed.

Wang takes a more fatalistic view of the natural disaster. The earthquake, she says, collapsed the mountains on either side of Beichuan, wrapping the town up like the meat in a dumpling. She was out at the time, doing business higher up in the hills.“When the quake hit, the mountains started shaking and collapsing, but we immediately tried to get down to check on our homes,” she says, sitting outside a tent she shares with a dozen other former neighbours. The paths were destroyed. After 10 hours, she was still not home. People’s Liberation Army troops took her to the Miangyang gymnasium, where she found the teacher of her daughter’s class.

“When he saw me he held my hands and cried, saying he felt guilty because he had not taken care of my daughter.”—Dawn/ The Guardian News Service