"I may have a hope in wheelchair racing," he said. "You can't move on if you don't accept reality."

"There are a lot of people who love me and want to see me happy I can't let them down."

Zhang Hua and Yang Mingyu, mothers to two teenage boys whose bodies have still not been dug out of the debris, were among the many parents who came to the site to mourn their lost children.

"Our children are dead. There's nothing we can do about that," Zhang said.

Yang hoped the authorities would build a monument at the site of the school, with the names of all the deceased students and teachers etched on it.

"My son went to school in the morning, but never came back. He's still down there somewhere," she said.

Students who survived the deadly quake now attend classes at the nearby Changhong Vocational College in Mianyang.

Work to reconstruct the Beichuan Middle School will start on May 12, the first anniversary of the earthquake.

More than 90,000 people were killed or missing and millions were left homeless, the government statistics have shown.

Chinese from both home and abroad have donated nearly 200 million yuan (US$29 million) for the reconstruction project.

(China Daily April 24, 2009)