"When I set off to cover the Sichuan earthquake last May, I did not know my life and the lives of the families of quake victims would acquire a strange symmetry: of lost hopes, and the struggle to find a space to mourn. Three days after the quake struck, I found a group of migrant workers in the Beijing West railway station. They carried all they had -- bedrolls, thermos flasks, plastic basins, cooking oil -- to travel a distance equivalent to that between California and Minnesota, on badly damaged roads and rails."
