Yang Jinmao and his pregnant wife He Jianxi take an afterdinner walk in reconstructed Hongxing village, Lushan county, Sichuan province, on April 18. After being injured in the magnitude7 earthquake in 2013, they have struggled to rebuild their lives, but now have a new home and have started their own furniture factory. Jiang Hongjing / Xinhua

In 2013, a small county in China's mountainous west was the epicenter of an earthquake that left more than 200 people dead and destroyed the local economy. Three years later, renovation projects are healing the devastated community. Li Yang reports from Ya'an, Sichuan province.

"Saving my sister wasn't a heroic act, something to show off about. Anyone would have done it," said Zhou Zigeng, with a casual shrug that belied his bravery.

The chubby 11-year-old was recalling the morning of April 20, 2013, when he used his bare hands to dig his 2-year-old sister out of the rubble after a magnitude-7 earthquake had destroyed their home in Lushan county, Ya'an city, in the southwestern province of Sichuan.

Zhou, a student at Luyang School in Lushan, said he didn't notice the pain from his bleeding fingers and ripped nails until his sister was being treated by local first-aiders.

He was just happy that none of his family had been killed in the quake, which claimed 217 lives, and injured 11,470 people. More than 1.5 million residents of Lushan, the epicenter of the quake, were affected, with many thousands left homeless.

Zhang Yichuan, a 24-year-old nurse at the Baosheng township clinic in Lushan, was less fortunate than Zhou. She lost her mother in the disaster.

"The memory is still fresh. Immediately after the earthquake, I received a call from my father asking me to come home. I saw my mother lying at the roadside near our collapsed home, watched over by my grieving father. She looked as though she were asleep," said Zhang, who was a nursing intern at the time of the quake.

She forced herself to control her emotions and, after bidding farewell to her father and dead mother, returned to the clinic in Baosheng, where hundreds of injured people were waiting for emergency treatment.

"Every wounded person I helped had his or her own family. My father had urged me to return to my work," she said, adding that next three sleepless days were the hardest of her career.

With the help of a government subsidy, Zhang's family built a new house. "But the new home hasn't helped my father to recover," she said.

Reluctant heroes

Although the local government bestowed many honorary titles on her, such as "The most-beautiful nurse" and "A model woman", Zhang doesn't feel that her actions made her special: "I just did my duty. Those honors make me feel pressured; it's quite stressful to live as a 'heroine'."

Like Zhang, Gao Yuhua, an English teacher at Mingshan high school in Lushan, doesn't think she deserved the media accolade, "The most beautiful teacher in China".

When the quake hit, Gao evacuated all the students in her class, and was the last person to leave the room. "All teachers in the school did this. It was just our duty. It was almost instinctive - we just did what we had practiced in our daily earthquake exercises," she said.

None of the 3,800 students and teachers was killed or injured, but the quake flattened the school. Since then, the students have been taught in makeshift classrooms, but things will change soon when the new school buildings are finished.

Gao likes to read The Beginning of Death, a poem by the Syrian writer Ali Ahmad Said Esber, to her students .

"Death rises in steps - his shoulders:

a woman and a swan.

Death descends in steps - his feet

sparks and the remains

of extinguished cities.

And the sky that was all wings, expands

and expands."

Two days after the disaster, when her students were assembled in a tent that served as a classroom, one of the children embraced Gao, prompting a round of applause from her peers.

"It was a moving scene, definitely the most memorable of my life," Gao said.

She hopes people won't forget the efforts of others in the community who provided first-aid and oversaw the arrival of rescue teams in the devastated area, especially government servants such as Yuan Chao.