I’m a chinese from a rural village in Southern China. I stumbled upon this Sub and found that lot of people here never actual been to China, less likely they have been to rural China, which still take up most part of china. so I want to share what I’ve seen and heard over the last thirty years to show you a slice of the rural China—in real life. Not very good in English, please excuse the grammar mistakes.
I grew up in a small village in Southern China. a bit isolated. The population merely past 1,000. Everyone in the village have the same surname. As a kid, I thought the whole world had the same surname until like 7 or 8 years old, when a girl with a different surname move to our village, this thing reshaped my worldview, like, “there is actual other people outside our village?”
Beside being isolated, the village was dirt-Poor.
How poor? We had no Flush Toilet, no, no Flush Toilet, no underground pipe system. Every household had two big buckets. one for the liquid human waste, one for the solid waste, Aka fecal. when the liquid waste bucket was full, we took it out to the fields to water the crops. When the poop bucket was full, well, some with morality will carry it to a public pit. some would just dump it onto the street. one thing I learn about poverty, if you can’t afford food, you can’t afford morality. so, most go to the street.
so as a school child, commuting to school took extreme caution, you never knew what you may step on. the worse thing is, when it rain, the alley would became a small river of fecal and piss, you had to walk like a ballet dancer to avoid them.
The hygiene was bad, the education was worse. We had one class, one teacher. The teacher was short, we nickname him Mr shorttie, Mr shorttie only finished middle school, that already crown him the most educated person in the village. He taught writing, Math, and sport, basically everything. Mr shorttie had like six daughters, he beated his wife a lot because she can’t gave him a son to carry his blood line.
When I was in 6th grade, the government said we had to learn English. But Mr shorttie only knew the 26 letters of the alphabet. So, He only teach the alphabet.
Mr shorttie had three teaching skills: the Belt whip, the Face slap, and the knee Kick. personally, I think the last one hurt the most.
Our school was just a brick house with a tile roof. When it rained, it leaked. Once, a typhoon took down a tree onto the roof, tiles rained down and smashed two kids. the school had no money to hire cleaners, so they hire us intead, zero pay, of course. We spent like a week to clean up the rubble.
Then, a few HongKonger donated some money and built us a new school. 3 stories concrete building, freshly painted. to show the HongKongers how grateful we were, the school arrange a show, let us kids dance and sing out our gratitude. In a rehearsal, I fell from stage, broke my left arm, and missed the performance. but anyway, I’m still grateful to them, finally a solid rooftop above our heads.
Infrastructure was bad. Most roads were covered by dust and muds, when the wind blow, the dust flow. When I get older, a fresh concrete paved road was built, but seldom any car come by. I once dropped a basket of fruits in the middle of the road, after I pick up all the fruits, not one car came by.
the only busy time of the road is the double sun festival, a lot of HongKongers would drive back to the village and pay respect to our ancestors. sometimes, their kids came back too.
We mainland kids were mostly barefeet, HongKong kids wears white Nike shoes, white as snow, holding toys like gameboys, like creatures from another dimension.
About HongKongs, a lot of them used to be mainlander, in hard times like the culture revolution (60s) or the great leap forward(50s). Some escaped to HongKong for better life. HongKong belonged to England back then. there was a well guarded border between the the mainland and HongKong. for the trespassors, the guards’ attitude was “shot first, ask questions later”, crossing the border was life risking. but a lot of our villagers risked it, including my great uncle, he escape to HongKong way before I was born. my father wanted to follow. he scolded my father: “you stayed! If I died at the border, you have to live to continue the family line!”. He made it through the border, but things didn’t work out for him in HongKong, he fell into gambling, never saved any money, never married. years later, he died alone in his coffin sized “apartment” in HongKong. when we buried him, a man showed up claiming to be his son, but when he found out there were nothing to inherit, he disappear, not leaving a “good bye”.
for some other villagers made it to HongKong, things work out fine, some made it big, some made it small, but still a lot richer than lives in the mainland. And when they have money, they want women. lot of them would come back to the village to seek mistress. lot of mainland young women would like to be their mistress, no shame, because when you can’t afford food, you can’t afford morality. those women were even proud to be their mistress, with the allowance given by the HongKongers, they can support the family. and because the wealth gap was so huge, even you were a construction worker or a truck driver in HongKong, you can easily afford a few mistress back in mainland. this had been a fashion, an advanced modern HongKong life style.
Another fashion from HongKong was drugs. heroin or ketamine, we called it the “white powder”. back in the 90s these “white powder” were popular in the village, lot of people tried it. you can found used needles on the street, or even in the toilet of my school. my cousin got hooked, he used to be a muscular man, but drugs ate him to the bone, we can’t afford rehabilitation center, so his father built him one, a small wooden cabin in the middle of the crop field, they chained him there, fed him, changed his diapers, until he didn’t wanted drugs. in the night, my cousin would scream and cursed like an animal, woke me up, my father told me that’s the drug demon in him howling.
And then the government decided to destroy drug business. in the middle school, a public trial was held in the play ground of the town, all the students were there. we saw a few prisoners were handcuffed and forced on the knee, there was a judge declaring their crime, “XXX, XX years old, drug seller, XX kilograms sold, according to law XX, death!!”, “XXX, XX years old, human trafficker, XX boys sold, death!!” people cheers. after declaring all the crimes, the police took them in a van and sent them to execution. and then there were chalk slogan on the street walls like “Death for drug sellers and human traffickers”. seem like it work, I didn’t meet too much drug abuser ever since.
later I finish high school, got admitted to college, the tuition fee were 5760 rmb per year, around 800 dollars. I worried about it. but the village government awarded me 10000 RMB, which cover the first year.
and then later, China joined WTO, my father got better off, and I don’t have to worried about the tuition fee ever since.
the infrastructure in the village also improve, concrete roads everywhere, there is even a traffic light in gateway of the village. we didn’t ever have road, and now we have one traffic light. not much, but thing definitely got better.
Less women were willing to be mistress of HongKongers now, because they would ask for more payment.
I wrote a lot. what I am trying to say is, a lot of anti-china people don’t seem to really know China, they don’t know what happened these years.
When I was poor, I saw no freedom fighters desending from helicopters to lift us out of poverty. When we run on the street bare feeted, I saw no human rights fighters coming to give us shoes and foods. When the village were flooded by drugs, I saw no super heroes flying here to save us. And when some, I mean some HongKonger say they missed the “good old days”, I know what they were talking about, it’s “a taxi driver can afford 3 mistress” good old days.
and what they told me? When I was a teenage, I saw some books telling me we were poor, because we deserve it, it’s something in our blood, something in our bone that make us inferior. that made me hate myself as a chinese.
now, seeing things got better, I became proud of being a chinese. but some people, which, lots of them are chinese, are yelling “NOOO! stop being proud, you are still inferior, keep hating yourself, keep being ashamed of your slit eyes.”
And I say NO, I not ashamed of who I am, you should be.
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The comments at the link above are also interesting and provide other perspectives. I hope Westerners will take note of the pride Chinese feel in their country and their willingness to work for its benefit. ABN
American Buddhist Net 