Yang and Xue are feeling their way forward. One evening when I visited their house, smoke billowed out of the kitchen, filling the room with an acrid blast of chili paste. Yang, in a blue chef’s apron, stuck his head out of the kitchen. Tears streamed from his hangdog eyes, but he had a grin on his face. “Huiguo rou!” he said — he was making the “twice-cooked pork” that is a Sichuanese specialty. Xue smiled up from her chair, holding a box of insoles she had embroidered to make Yang’s shoes more durable and comfortable on his long days driving. Her mother and brother were visiting, and Yang relished the chance to cook for a family again. A few minutes later, he emerged from the kitchen with a parade of dishes: chicken feet, cold sesame noodles, beef and potato stew and twice-cooked pork, all to be washed down with rice liquor. Yang called his new family to the table and, with a flash of yellow teeth, declared, “Let’s eat!”

Hey, you just sneaked off, where are you now?”

The last text message from Luo Xuemei, Yang’s first wife, sent hours before the earthquake, stared back at him from his cellphone. Yang left their home in Beichuan early that morning not wanting to disturb his sleeping wife and son. He was headed for Piankou, his home village, to buy mushrooms and honey for his trading business.

Now, four days after the quake, the text message was all he had left. It had taken him two days to hike the 40 miles across mountains gashed by landslides to get back to Beichuan. He searched hospitals, stadiums and refugee camps, hoping to find his wife and son alive. He lifted the covers off dozens of swollen corpses pulled out of his son’s collapsed school. “It was too much to take,” Yang told me. He threw himself down on the rubble and wailed, “God, you are too cruel!”

More than a thousand people were crawling across the wreckage the day Yang arrived, all sobbing and shouting out the names of loved ones. Xue was there, too. An acquaintance of Yang’s wife — she sold clothing downtown, too, after a stint in a tile factory — Xue was looking for her 35-year-old fiancé in the rubble. Now she wondered if the dead weren’t better off than the living. It was her fourth day wandering through the wasteland, clawing at the debris with bare hands. Her parents and brother were nowhere to be found (they turned up alive on the fifth day), and she knew, deep down, that her fiancé could not have survived the landslide that buried his home under a hundred feet of earth and cement. Xue stopped digging. Her lover was dead, and so, too, were their dreams of starting a family together.

Beichuan was declared a mass grave, leaving thousands of unrecovered bodies under the ruins. For the next few months, Xue lived alone in a government-issue tent outside a local stadium, eating crackers and instant noodles, unable to sleep without seeing images of corpses appearing with her fiancé’s face. Yang returned to his parents’ home in Piankou and retreated into a suicidal stupor. He lost more than 30 pounds. He slept very little. As soon as he closed his eyes, he would see his wife and son staggering among the ruins, waiting for him to come save them. Yang spoke to nobody about the tragedy. “I couldn’t dump all this on my parents or in-laws,” he said. “They had suffered great losses, too. So I kept it all inside, wondering why life should be lived anymore.”

Image REBUILDING LIVES Liu Yinhu says he spent a month persuading a grief-stricken Zhao Yonglan to marry him. Credit... Wang Gang for The New York Times

The only way to pull Yang back from the brink, his family decided, was for him to remarry as quickly as possible. “My parents, my older sister, my younger sister: they all pressured me to move on,” Yang recalled. “My wife’s older brother recruited my friends to look for a new wife for me. Even my mother-in-law, one month after the earthquake, urged me to get married again.” Yang also got a call from the Communist Party’s local propaganda department. The deputy director of the department, a 33-year-old man named Feng Xiang, lost his young son in the same Qushan Primary School collapse in which Yang’s son died, and subsequently committed suicide. Feng’s colleagues encouraged Yang to start a new life — and offered to do anything they could to help.