"When he was buried under all that debris, he told me he kept thinking of his parents. He held on for eight hours so he could see us again," said his mother, tears streaming down her face.
To their shock, a few hours after that brief reunion, their son died about an hour away at a hospital in Chengdu, where he had been rushed for treatment.
Like so many people here, Hao's parents had done everything they could to give him a good education. His father drives a tractor.
In addition to toiling in the family field, his mother works long hours at a factory making bottle caps.
Boarding school costs a bit more than regular school, but for many rural children, schools are too far for daily travel, so they live there.
"Everybody knew him," a villager said of Hao. "He was nearly 6 feet tall. He wanted to go to college and be a pilot."
One of Hao's schoolmates who escaped the falling building said he survived because his teacher told the students to run from the first-floor classroom when the magnitude 7.9 quake rocked the country.
"There were 66 students in our class. All but seven or eight made it out alive," said Ba Cong, 14.
He thinks he probably survived because he was in the second row. "I sat in the front because I am nearsighted. The people who didn't make it sat in the back."
Hao was in a third-floor classroom. Most of the students there were trapped.
"He told me his teacher told them, 'Don't run, duck,' " his mother said.
Parents say the school was built in the early 1990s -- old by Chinese standards -- and that students were to move into a new building next year.
Bitter villagers suspect shoddy construction is partly to blame for the catastrophe.
"Even our humble rural homes built by hand didn't collapse completely," said villager Gong Fuzhong. "How can a big school building collapse? Something is definitely wrong here."
Across an open field filled with makeshift shelters, another mother, Zheng Hongqun, 40, was so paralyzed by grief that she hadn't been able to get out of bed.
The body of her 15-year-old son, Wen Zheng, was pulled from the rubble about 24 hours after the earthquake.
"His father is a migrant worker far away in northeastern China so his son can have money to go to school," said neighbor Wang Xia. "We only told him he is still being rescued. We don't dare tell him the truth."
Outside their temporary shelter, a plastic tarp wrapped over sticks, Zheng's grandparents were surrounded by neighbors trying to distract them from the tragedy. It wasn't working.
"The child is gone. We can never see him again," Wen's silver-haired grandmother sobbed. "It should have been us."
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chingching.ni@latimes.com
