Li Ke loves Robinson Crusoe and confesses with a mischievous smile to watching cartoons on television. He is small and slight for his 13 years and it is perhaps his diminutive build that enabled him to survive when his school crumpled on top of him in the massive earthquake that hit China last year.

He was pulled out of the rubble 48 hours after the tremor. It was a bakingly hot day, but for anxious parents the heat was the least of their worries. Looking for signs of life at the Wudu Hanwang primary school, rescue workers heard Li Ke's cries. They clawed at the debris to give him water and then began the painstaking task of lifting the concrete blocks that had pinned him down in his second-floor classroom.

The three-storey school in the city of Mianzhu, Sichuan province, was a pile of rubble. Onlookers whispered to each other that a survivor had been found. People watched quietly as the rescue progressed. The minutes passed like hours. Suddenly there was a flurry, soldiers cleared a path through the crowd and the little boy, his eyes covered against the bright sunlight, was carried out on a stretcher and into a waiting ambulance. Then the bulldozers roared back to life, digging for more survivors.

It has been a year since I saw Li Ke carried into the ambulance. Now he is back in class, in his first year at secondary school.

He walks with a slight shuffle, his right leg dragging behind him. He doesn't remember much about the earthquake. "I remember that I was buried. I remember that I could hear my classmates crying. I didn't know what had happened." One thing he does remember is the nightmares. "I dreamt that my whole class was going away and I was left alone, I was left behind."

He must have slipped in and out of consciousness as the hours passed. "It didn't seem like a long time and then people came to help me. I just remember the sound of the ambulance sirens when I came out."

His school declared him a "Youth Hero". When the rescue workers began to dig him out he told them to take out his classmates first. "I didn't think I was in much trouble compared with them. I just thought I had a stone on my leg."

Pinned down for hours, he had suffered serious damage to the nerves in his legs. Doctors told his parents that they wanted to amputate both. Li Ke runs his hand across his legs just below the knee to show the spot. "My father refused. He just refused. Whatever the doctors said, he told them that he wanted me to have a future." And so Li Ke kept his legs.

He spent months in hospital. The authorities moved him swiftly from overcrowded wards in the earthquake zone to a hospital in a coastal town in the east of the country. There a doctor created a splint for his right leg to counter the nerve damage that means he can no longer bend his ankle properly to lift his foot.

He throws back his head and giggles to reveal a set of buck teeth. "I have been so lucky. I am a lucky person." It is a word that peppers his conversation. "I am one of the ones who got better the fastest." Of the 60 children in his class, 23 died. He is reluctant to speak much about that. They had been in school together for five years. "I miss them very much."

But he is already looking ahead. The son of a construction worker and an ailing mother, he wants to be a doctor. Suddenly he slips an English word into the conversation. "Or a pharmacologist." He was third in his class at his former school and is already eighth out of 40 after just two weeks at secondary school. "I want to go to university, I want to follow my ideals and I want to see my mother get better."

He sits patiently for photos, says the only thing he knows about Britain is Robinson Crusoe. His face lights up. "I've read it twice." Then he asks politely if he may return to class. It's a history lesson and he is the class representative for history. He shuffles away down the corridor.

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