A Thwarted Search for Information

Traditions have lasted longer in Juyuan than in many urban centers. Younger generations still respect their elders, residents said, and parents -- especially farmers who need help in the fields -- value their children as insurance policies against old age.

Those values sometimes conflict with the one-child policy, which has helped raise millions out of poverty by preventing more than 400 million births over the last 30 years, according to family planning officials.

Because of exceptions for rural farmers, ethnic minorities and parents who are only children, the policy applies only to about 36 percent of China 's families -- those who live in cities and some rural areas like Li's.

"The people in the mountains can have two children, but people living here in the Chengdu plateau like us can only have one," Li said. "She's my only child, and if we become old and cannot work anymore, she can support us."

In 1987, Li and his wife had twin boys, but they died just after birth. Two years later, they had another boy, but when he was 8 months old, he had stomach surgery and contracted a fatal infection.

"We entrust our lives to our children. . .the most important thing right now is to find my daughter at any cost," Li said after lunch next to the makeshift tent he and his wife have been sleeping under since the quake. Their modest house is leaning, and a tree has pierced its roof.

Yi was in middle school and preparing to take the high school entrance exam this summer. When she asked whether to apply to a high school or a technical school, her father said he had replied, "I'm not educated; it's up to you."

He wanted to tell her to choose high school and then college, he said. "She is our only hope to help her family lead a better life," Li said.

On most days, Yi rose early and walked down a dirt road and across a canal to the middle school. She returned home at 6 p.m. and immediately launched into homework, before watching 10 minutes of TV and then cooking dinner for the family and doing the laundry.

Li's wife works the family's wheat and rice fields while he is often away working on a construction site. "In the past, I worked in Lanzhou and other faraway places. My daughter said I should work closer to home so I could see her every day," he said.

With each day that Li waits, tensions grow between the government's need to keep order and the will of parents to protect and defend their most precious assets.

At Juyuan Middle School, surrounded by buildings that did not collapse, mothers and fathers recently debated whether the builder of the school should be sentenced to death. State broadcasters set up chairs and backdrops for a televised fundraiser from the scene. Members of the Chinese news media told members of the foreign media not to "get too emotional."