China Revisited -- 2013 [#17]

Where Did You Come From? Why Are You Here?

On January 2nd we headed for the Zhang family village, which is to say, the village of Edward's father's family.  Festivities honoring Edward's father were set to begin around noon, and we were invited.

We had been to the Zhang village briefly the day before after our hike into the mountains. Before going to bed we had been told to be ready to go by 9; but at 7 a.m. Edward announced we were leaving in 20 minutes.

As it is also nearby, we drove first to Edward's mother's village, LuoXi. To say that these villages were unexpected to us as western foreigners is almost laughable. In this world all manner of discontinuities exist side by side.

I had had similar impressions on visiting Vladimir, Russia, in 2004. There, Soviet era buildings on the main streets gave way to 19th Century wooden houses on streets of dirt and mud on every side street and back street. The telescoping of time, culture, technologies, and material wealth is almost beyond comprehension for American eyes; the transition from one block to the next is simply astonishing.

In these Chinese villages there is no transition. The telescoping is absolute. For example, there is no mud in the thoroughfares as one might expect -- and as I found often in Russia -- because nearly all walking and driving areas are smoothly and recently paved with concrete.

It is easy to see that a certain kind of village renewal has been going on and that the government has invested in basic kinds of infrastructure (roads, paths, bridges, public areas). This investment was also true in the Zhang village, so it was clear that progress in rural villages has been a priority.

Houses, unlike the road and bridge infrastructure, are structurally varied. New construction sits side by side with old buildings.  All construction, all progress, moves by fits and starts; it continues, I am informed, until the money runs out.

Construction itself is labor intensive, which means virtually everything requires many hands, from digging foundations to mixing cement to hauling materials to laying bricks. Older home are made of an earth colored brick with tiled roofs; many have dirt floors. Newer homes were largely poured concrete slabs with brick walls layed on a two-story, rebar reenforced concrete framework. When they are finished the houses have steel doors and metal grills over the windows; but some houses had open windows and empty door frames, presumably because money had run out before grills and doors could be purchased.

It is one of the astonishing stories of recent Chinese growth and success that these two women, Edward's mother and aunt, spent the first twenty years of their lives in this little blond brick house. It has two rooms. To the right is the room where their father slept. It was his room. To the left is the room where the mother and her children slept. Two thirds of the room is a bed; up a wooden ladder in the loft is another bed.

The window opening is covered with wooden bars and the ceiling is just the underside of the roof tiles, which rest on sapling supports. My guess is that the tiles slid occasionally and let in wind or rain.

 Edward's father grew up under similar circumstances.  Either just before or just after they got married, Edward's mother and father left the village for the town, Lehu, where they lived in town poverty rather than village poverty. For a number of years Edward's father worked various laboring jobs before their fortunes changed and he began to make money.  Edward remembers being poor when he was very young and envying playmates who had new toys.

Poverty remains part of life in the village.  We watched Edward's aunt try to give money to the masons building a house next to their two room childhood home -- the construction pictured above -- so that they could buy supplies to continue working. But giving the money took considerable negotiation and explanation since neither of the masons were used to handling money.

We have this phrase in English, dirt poor, that I have no first hand experience with.  But here we came close to seeing what it might look like. This poverty is as unimaginable to me as the material success and wealth of Edward's parents. Their rags to riches story is the stuff of dreams, American or otherwise.

Despite this recognition, nothing I might conclude from visiting this village is simple or easy. Perhaps it is enough, here, to say that I have been astonished and humbled to see with my own eyes what I could never have imagined.