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.

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