An injured woman

In the days following the recent earthquake in south-west China, which is now said to have killed over sixty-eight thousand people and injured five times as many, my Chinese-born students were particularly struck by the plight of the young woman who, when faced with the necessity of having her legs severed from her body by a long and painful operation with a knife - so that she might not die where she lay, pinned down by the collapse of everything around her - expressed the single fear that, as the only child of her parents, she would be unable to care for them in their old age.