The Long Road Home

The Long Road Home
A 15-year-old girl vanished in the quake.
Her parents crossed China by rail, boat and foot to find her
By MEI FONG
May 17, 2008; Page A1

(See Corrections & Amplifications item below.)

Beijing and Muyu Township, China

When Liu Jishu and Tang Shuxiu learned that an earthquake had struck near their tiny mountainside village, 800 miles away, they knew they had to get home.

Mr. Liu and Ms. Tang are migrant laborers, building luxury homes in Beijing. It's a job that pays better than farming the rocky land the couple left behind -- so much better, in fact, that they were able to afford to send their only daughter, 15-year-old Huimei, to school back home.

See an interactive graphic of the couple's journey, including information on their route and a slideshow of images along the way.

After Monday's quake struck, they knew only this much about conditions in their village: Huimei's school building had collapsed. Their daughter's fate was unknown.

This past Wednesday, the couple set out on a grueling, three-day journey -- by train, boat and on foot -- to reach their village in a distant corner of interior China. They were accompanied by a reporter.

Mr. Liu, a compact man with ruddy cheeks from a life spent outdoors, earns about $250 a month as a construction worker. At 5-foot-4, he is shorter than his wife, Ms. Tang, who makes about $200 assisting him.

The two left their village, Tielu, partly for the money. School fees for Huimei totaled about $570 a year, eating up most of their income from growing wheat and corn on a tiny patch of mountainous land.

But "It wasn't all money," said Ms. Tang, thinking back on their decision last year to look for work on Beijing's construction lots. "We wanted to go out and have a look at things," she said -- to see the world.

They are two of the estimated 140 million or so migrant workers who represent the muscle behind China's economic boom. Like Mr. Liu and Ms. Tang, most laborers hail from poor, remote villages. They spend months or years separated from their children, who are often left behind in the care of grandparents or other relatives.

As soon as the quake struck on Monday, work at their construction site in suburban Beijing came to a standstill. It was China's biggest quake in three decades, killing more than 50,000 people so far.

The work site was full of laborers from Sichuan province, where the earthquake occurred. Phone lines home were jammed. Information trickled in slowly. Some workers got good news: A man learned that his two children, aged 8 and 12, were unharmed.

Construction work in China can be brutal. Bosses often withhold workers' pay or stiff them altogether. But Mr. Liu and Ms. Tang were lucky: Their boss, Tian Deqing, himself hails from Sichuan, so he was sympathetic.

"I told all of them to go home," Mr. Tian said. He paid their salaries out of his own pocket, he said, so they could depart as quickly as possible. His wife gave them packages of instant noodles to eat on the trip.

With money in hand, on Wednesday the couple joined a group of 16 fellow workers from their home village for the long trip home. Everyone knew there was sadness awaiting them. The only question was, how much.

The group arrived at Beijing's immense, bustling West Station on Wednesday afternoon, almost two days after the quake struck. Some of their luggage included plastic buckets filled with thermos flasks (for making tea) and plastic flip-flops (for wearing during visits to the toilet).

Several travelers had put on their best clothes -- women in heeled pumps, men in blazers -- an incongruous reflection of the fact that, in normal conditions, a trip home is a rare event that calls for dressing up. Ms. Tang, 35 years old, wore stylish embroidered jeans and a rose-pink jacket, her best clothes.

She and her husband sat quietly at the station, with reddened eyes. "We all avoided this tragedy," she said, referring to the fact that Beijing was largely unaffected by the quake. But "my baby didn't," she said.

For two days, Ms. Tang had hardly eaten. Her face looked pinched from hunger.

Mr. Liu put on a stoic front. He would much rather have stayed on the farm, he said, but Huimei's school fees were a big financial burden. He casually opened a bottle of beer with his teeth. The couple doesn't possess a photo of their daughter to show.

The train pulled out of West Station at 9 p.m. The carriage where Mr. Liu and Ms. Tang sat was crowded with exhausted passengers stewing in cigarette smoke and angst. One man scoured a day-old newspaper for any whiff of fresh information that may have been missed previously. When another man's cellphone rang, his wife swiftly grabbed off his belt.

Still there was no news.

Though the journey was filled with tension, it was, ironically, the most comfortable train ride Mr. Liu had ever taken. Mostly other trips home happen during China's chaotic annual Lunar New Year holiday -- when pretty much everyone else in the country is traveling, too. As a result, it usually involves standing for the entire 30-plus hour ride home. "And you don't get to go to the toilet, the line's too long." Mr. Liu said. Leaning back on his seat, he said, "this is better."

The train was a slow one, wending its way deeper into China's heartland: Hebei province outside Beijing, and then Henan and Shanxi, proceeding across flat plains, then tunneling through mountains. As the hours passed, the train slowly emptied, giving the group room to stretch out. Tray tables slowly become heaped with Styrofoam instant-noodle bowls.

Mr. Liu and Ms. Tang both grew up in Tielu village. They were married in a wedding that was arranged by their parents. The village is extremely close-knit; families prefer their children not to marry outside the community.

These ties mean that pretty much everyone in the train compartment was related to one another somehow. A loss for one is a loss felt deeply by all.

One of the few outsiders was Ding Wanlong, 39, a garrulous man with a teak-colored tan and green military jacket. He has already experienced loss: He moved to the area in 1995 after his first home was destroyed to make way for construction of a dam. He spent the next 11 years building an immense, new, five-story home for himself there, using money earned by working construction jobs in faraway cities.

He already knew his house had been destroyed. "I'm going to have to rebuild all over again," he said.

He didn't yet know (but would learn in a few hours) that his mother had been killed in the quake. So in the meantime, Mr. Ding was most worried about his son -- who attended the same school as Huimei.

Twenty-four hours into the train ride, Thursday afternoon, Mr. Liu and Ms. Tang received grim news: 183 bodies had been pulled from the rubble of the school.

"She's dead," Ms. Tang sobbed.

"You can't say that yet," insisted Mr. Liu. "You can't say that yet."

At least the uncertainty left room for hope. One man sat nearby with an ashen face. He had just gotten a call telling him his child was, in fact, dead.

Later, Mr. Liu struck up a conversation with a relative of his, Liu Jilin, about the male-female ratio in their home village, which is now nearly three-quarters men. "Women find it easier to get jobs in the city," said Liu Jishu. This is a serious problem all across rural China, and it leaves men of marrying age with very few options.

In a rare moment of levity, Liu Jilin recounted the story of a man in their village who last year took the step of actually buying a bride, something that happens in rural areas due to the shortage of women. He paid almost $3,000 -- a huge sum, representing a half-decade of farm income -- only to have his wife run away with the money soon after.

The two men laughed at the story, then felt guilty about it. "It is a terrible thing," said Liu Jilin, apologetically.

As the train crept toward Xian, the famous tourist city known for its terracotta soldiers, a rare bit of good news arrived. The train would be able to steam further than the travelers had previously thought, eliminating a 10-hour bus trip that they had been expecting to endure.

Friday morning dawned. Thirty-two hours after leaving Beijing, the bedraggled group left the train at Guangyuan city. They were loaded down with supplies bought along the way: Boxes of noodles, bags of rice, bottles of water, rolls of toilet paper, in expectation that everything would be in short supply at home.

One man carried bundles of disposable chopsticks. Ms. Tang had a bottle of cooking oil in her bag, which had leaked.

Essentially, they were carrying all of their worldly belongings, because few had any real intention of returning to Beijing. Whether or not they would find family and home intact, there would be too much work to do. Mr. Liu carried a cloth bag on his back almost half his size.

The next stage of the trip involved a boat ride down the river. Boarding the two-story ferry at the dock, a woman who just learned that her child had died was being carried aboard on a relative's back.

The trip downriver took four hours, past dramatic, craggy mountains. Houses perch on slopes that look like alpine villas. Smoking on board was prohibited, for fear of fire, but most of the men ignored the rule, puffing away by the rails.

"Cigarettes are an anxiety reliever," said Mr. Liu.

Ms. Tang sat by a window in the cabin, thinking about her daughter, Huimei. "She's so obedient, but she loved watching television," she said. She wiped away some tears.

The boat landed, leaving only a steep, 40-minute hike up to the village from the dock. The road was badly cracked, and landslides had blocked portions of the route. They passed caved-in buildings, crushed automobiles. A group of soldiers marched by, shovels instead of weapons slung over their shoulders.

When they finally reached Muyu Township, Mr. Liu and Ms. Tang tossed their luggage by the side of the road. They headed straight for Huimei's school building.

The footpath to the school was littered with scraps of red paper, remnants of fireworks and offerings recently burned for the dead. Ms. Tang, blinded by tears, was supported by Mr. Liu and a relative.

The school buildings came into view. The upper floors had collapsed. There are small reminders of the students -- tin mugs, exercise books. A geography book was lying in the rubble. They wandered the grounds, looking for information.

On a nearby wall, a handwritten notice read: "The government has done a lot to save the children of the school. The government hopes parents can coordinate with them to claim the bodies."

Someone told Ms. Tang and Mr. Liu to go to the school's soccer field. There, at the edge of the playing field, they approached a canvas tent. Beneath it, a man at a school desk sat with a sheaf of papers.

Ms. Tang walked under the tent and said the name of her child. The man checked his list, and announced that Huimei hadn't survived. Ms. Tang collapsed in tears.

Over 270 people had died in the school that day. Many of the students had already been buried on a nearby hill. So Ms. Tang and Mr. Liu walked toward it and began climbing, hoping to find their daughter's grave.

Corrections & Amplifications

The headline accompanying a previous version of this News in Depth article that recounted a Chinese couple's three-day journey home in search of their missing daughter after last week's earthquake erroneously said the journey was two days.

--Gao Sen and Kersten Zhang contributed to this article.

Write to Mei Fong at mei.fong@wsj.com