Hope begins afresh for May 12 quake survivors

Bleak business

Yingxiu town was one of the towns devastated in the quake. Today, local residents have started picking up the threads again by doing small business or planting crops after subsisting on government subsidy for over six months.

Zeng Xiaohong is one such person. The 27-year old Zeng hails from a Tibetan minority and opened a tiny restaurant in the temporary shelter community three months ago. It is called the "Reunion Restaurant" as three of her five family members reunited with her after being seriously injured in the quake.

During the daytime Zeng lays three tables in a 9-sq-m room in the lines of temporary shelters while the kitchen is between two lines of shelters. And at night, she puts tables together, sparing room for a mattress on which her husband, four-year-old son and she can sleep.

In the restaurant, her husband is the cook while the mother-in-law doubles up as the waitress. Her father-in-law is the baby-sitter.

"Business is bleak and sometimes we can earn 200 yuan a day but sometimes, no one comes at all," said Zeng, whose husband used to be a truck driver in a local factory but became jobless after the medicine factory was reduced to a rubble in the quake.

As Zeng's town is the epicenter of the quake, visitors come in hordes often driving their own cars. Before fallen school buildings, scarred mountains and long broken or dangerous one-way road sections, they take pictures, sigh and offer condolences.