SHIFANG, China -- At the moment of greatest despair, Wang Zhijun tried to kill himself by twisting his neck against the debris.
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.
She sensed he was giving up. "If God wants to kill us, he would have killed us right away," she said. "But since we're still alive, we must be fated to live."
And they lived. They were pulled from the rubble of their collapsed six-story workers' dormitory 28 hours after last Monday's 7.9-magnitude earthquake, spared the end met by at least 32,000 others. China has declared a three-day mourning period, starting with three minutes of silence exactly a week after the quake.
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 got out alive.
Days after their rescue, they lay in separate beds in Shifang People's Hospital. 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, spoke softly and stared at the ceiling with tears in her eyes. A white blanket covered her left side, where her arm had just been amputated. She had pleaded with a doctor not to cut it off, but there had been no choice: It had turned gangrenous after being trapped beneath Wang in the collapse.
Yet they were both thankful.
Wang, 40, had 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.
Li was raising their daughter, Xinyi, on her own while working at a chemical factory in the town of Luoshui.
Last Monday, she and her husband had just sat down in her fourth-floor apartment to watch a police soap opera on DVD when the dormitory, which houses dozens of factory workers, began shaking violently.
