Under the rubble, couple clung to each other, to life

Breathing had become harder as day turned to night. The chunks of brick and concrete that had buried him and his wife were pressing tighter by the hour, crushing them. Their bodies had gone numb.

Then there was the rain, sharp and cold, lashing at them through the cracks.

“I don’t think I can make it,” he told his wife, Li Wanzhi, his face just inches from hers, their arms wrapped around each other.

And they lived. They were pulled from the rubble of their collapsed six-story workers’ dormitory 28 hours after last Monday’s earthquake, spared the end met by at least 32,000 others.

Their tale of survival is also one of a rekindled love, of two people who might have died had they been trapped alone.

They whispered to each other. They talked of their 14-year-old daughter— who would take care of her? They recalled their life together, the shape of it before and the shape of it to come, all the changes they would make if they ever got out alive.

Days after their rescue, they lay in separate beds in Shifang People’s Hospital, a loud place with too many patients and too few doctors. Their daughter stood by their side. Wang’s stout body was covered in cuts scabbed over with blood and pus, and he drifted in and out of sleep while talking to a reporter.

Li, 38, her petite frame dressed in a pink nightgown, had had her arm had just been amputated.

Yet they were both thankful. “My colleagues said, ‘You’re the lucky one. You don’t know how many people died,’ “ Li said.

Wang, 40, had just returned home two days earlier, after traveling around the country for half a year and trying his hand at small businesses. He had lost a lot of money. He and his wife rarely spoke. He spent the Chinese New Year by himself, skipping China’s most important holiday.

Li was raising their daughter, Xinyi, on her own while working at a chemical factory in the town of Luoshui. “My husband doesn’t have a stable life,” Li said. “He goes wherever he can...