Shen Qin doesn’t sound like a tour guide, not even in her loudspeakers and pink folk costume which she hates to wear.

“Even today, the bodies of 19 students are still buried under these ruins,” she tells a group of tourists, her voice cracks, as though talking about her own children. The emotions take a toll on her.

In 2008, a magnitude-8.0 earthquake rocked much of southwest China’s Sichuan Province. More than 80,000 people were killed. Shen’s hometown of Yingxiu Township, the epicenter of the tremor, was reduced to rubble. In the reconstruction process that followed, the Xuankou Middle School ruins were kept as a memorial site for those who perished. 55 people, including 43 students from this middle school lost their lives in the earthquake. Ten years later, the destroyed school building still shocks many visitors.

“Rescue teams couldn’t come in,” she goes on to explain. The old roads built on mountainsides were completely destroyed in the tremor. It was two days later when rescue teams braved aftershocks and landslides to arrive on foot. By then, many bodies had already begun to decompose. “Some parents begged them not to dig for their children’s bodies,” she continues. “There was no point. They wanted the effort to be used to save someone who still had the hope of surviving,” Shen kept her voice low, so as to not disturb those resting under the ruins.

Shen is one of a few dozen tour guides at the Xuankou School ruins. When they were hired, none of them had the country-issued tour guide certificate. They are all locals of Yingxiu who have experienced the devastating earthquake. Almost all of them lost someone. “So what we tell our tour groups, we tell them from our hearts,” she said. 

Ten years ago, Shen Qin was a 25-year-old mother of a two-year-old baby girl and was running a small internet bar with her husband. “Life was pretty good,” she recalls. When the tremor struck at 2:28 pm on May 12, 2008, the couple had just started the afternoon’s work. Shen’s in-laws were helping with the baby at home.

“I didn’t know it was an earthquake,” Shen recalls. “I just heard a loud rumble, and before I made sense of what’s going on, the room was filled with dust,” she said. She was stuck in a corner and survived.

Her husband’s natural instinct was to flee. He ran out. “That was a very dangerous decision,” Shen commented. But nothing hit him. Shen dug her way out of the rubble and reunited with her husband on the street. 

“Our first reaction was to call home, to make sure my baby and in-laws are okay,” Shen said. But communication was cut off. The couple walked home amidst aftershocks. Years later, Shen recalls seeing the drip hangers for her daughter's small clothes dangling on the balcony. The entire first floor of their house had sunk underground.

“I knew right away I’ve lost them,” she said.

“But humans are stubborn that way. I dug and dug, and I shouted their names. I checked the dead and I checked the living.”

Shen never found them.

Till this day, she doesn’t know if the bodies of her loved ones were ever found. On every anniversary, she mourns them in a mass grave on the mountainside on the township’s edge. She’s not sure if they are buried under here, and only had their names inscribed on the tombstone as evidence of their passing. The more than 6,000 casualties of Yingxiu are collectively buried here. Many were never identified, just like Shen’s child and in-laws.

Three years later, Shen and her husband had another baby boy. “When he was born, and my face touched his face for the first time, I regained hope,” she said. The boy is turning seven soon. Every year on May 12, she takes him to the mountains to remember the older sister and grandparents whom he never met. “They would’ve been so happy to see him,” she said. 

Now, the township of Yingxiu has been rebuilt. The physical scars of the earthquake are long gone, with only the ruins of Xuankou Middle school serving as evidence of what happened ten years ago. 

“Don’t you think you're punishing yourself by working as a tour guide here?” I asked her. The town is moving on, but every tour reminds her of her worst nightmare.

“You’d think I’m used to it by now, repeating the same thing again and again,” she said. “But no. Every time I guide a group, I feel pain.”

But she says the work is meaningful to her. “If the visitors lay down at night and think about the meaning of life, then I did my job.”

“At the end of each tour, I tell my group to leave their grief behind,” she said, “and as soon as we step out of the site, life continues, and we must live it hard.”

“We must not live in the past,” she shrugged off her tears.

(Video by Zhang Youze and Li Yang. Jiang Zhengfeng has also contributed to this report.)