HUAYUAN COUNTY, HUNAN — The public face that China shows the world is of a vigorous, prosperous world economic power. The other face of this complex nation is the remaining poverty in rural areas.

Several weeks ago, I saw a famous Chinese movie, the English title of which is Not One Less. Made in 1999, it depicted the poor living conditions of a small village in Hebei province, whose one-room schoolhouse looked as if it could fall in on itself at any minute. My friends here (and the star of the movie, Wei Minzhi, herself) told me that conditions for many villages have not appreciably changed in the last decade.

On Monday, one of my seniors — newly freed from the rigors of studying for a critical national English examination — took me to visit her father’s village in this county in the mountains west of Jishou. “You will see the real China, the way farmers live every day,” she said.

Quite honestly, Jishou is not a thriving metropolis. This part of Hunan is quite poor, so I was already accustomed somewhat to the simpler lifestyle here. But, truth be told, she was right to expect the visit would open my eyes.

The trip by car took about two and a half hours. The two-laner leading west into the mountains winds its way (I am talking mega-switchbacks here!) up the foothills of the Wuling Range into the highlands bordering the neighboring provinces of Chongqing and Guizhou. We passed through a busy town center teeming with ethnic Miao going about their daily business.

[Tourist advisory: There are several Miao villages around Jishou and Fenghuang, which cater to tourists. There are performances of Miao singing, drumming and dancing, displays of Miao clothing, and models who wear the elaborate silver jewelry intended for special occasions. Folks, it's just a show. They don't live like that every day.]

This part of Hunan has two principle businesses: agriculture and mining. There were plenty of dump trucks carrying limestone, coal and perhaps shale (I couldn’t really tell) on the two-laner, which of course suffers like all busy roads from the pounding of these overloaded trucks. (Folks in eastern Kentucky can relate, I am sure.) The roadside scenery alternated between neatly organized, terraced farms and huge quarries cutting into the mountainsides.

We also saw the foundations of yet another Chinese superhighway, which snakes through Hunan on its way into Guizhou. While the two-laner follows the rugged contours of the land here, the new highway will soar across broad valleys on ridiculously tall pillars and dive headlong through the limestone mountains, destined to carry the vehicles newly prosperous Chinese are buying in droves.

Finally, we turned off the main road onto a newly made concrete roadway leading to the village. My student told me that it used to be a dirt road not long ago, but that her father, a banker in Jishou, had arranged for a modern road to be laid.

Our first stop was the village primary school, from which her father graduated some four decades previously. It has changed little. The sturdy-looking, but rundown school consists of three classrooms side by side, a large courtyard, and some storage rooms and toilets, surrounded by a dry stacked limestone wall. The classrooms have no decorations on the walls, though the sun streams through their large windows. The furniture consists of simple desks and benches facing a chalkboard.

It was a scene from Not One Less, but in real time, in 2009.

My student’s aunt is one of the teachers. The children, who are largely Miao, come from several neighboring villages on foot every day. When we visited, they each had a textbook open to a page of Chinese characters with the corresponding pinyin next to them. (It looked familiar; I have one just like it, a children’s book to learn chengyu — Chinese proverbs.) The books looked well worn, but in better condition that the single text Teacher Wei had in the movie. Likewise, the children were dressed fairly well, not as neat and tidy as their city cousins might be, but certainly presentable.

I said a few words to the aunt’s class of primary students, in English, which my student translated not into putonghua (Mandarin) but into the local dialect here. Her aunt followed up with a few words of Miao to clarify matters. Mostly I told them to study hard, and to go to university, so they could become successful like their “elder sister,” my student.

My student’s grandparents (aged 86 and 90), uncles, aunts and several cousins still live here in this village. Only her father left permanently to pursue his career, a feat that his pluck and good fortune enabled.

When he was a middle school student, representatives of the revolutionary government came to recruit villagers to attend Peking University. Unlike his peers, who like wallflowers avoided direct contact with the important guests, her father saw it as his duty to ensure the guests had something to eat and drink. Impressed by the boy’s courage, the guests nominated him to attend the prestigious national university.

[Incidentally, the same kind of pluck enabled Wei Minzhi to be the lead actress in Not One Less. She was not afraid to perform in front of strangers.]

After university, he went into banking, marrying a Han woman and settling in Jishou, which in comparison to his hometown is a thriving metropolis. Their two daughters are both university educated; one works for a Beijing newspaper, the other is in her last few months of uni, contemplating either work in China or study abroad. They are the only two of the several cousins to go to university; the rest work or are trying to find work with their high school educations.

Grandfather and grandmother are still spry, though with hearing losses, walking about their farmstead to care for the pigs, the chickens and their garden. They rent the fields out for someone else to plant and harvest. Both were visibly very proud of their banker son, and of his second daughter who could translate for their American guest.

While not prosperous in the material sense, their village is not impoverished in the same way as a remote village might be in, say, southern Africa. They have electricity, potable water, satellite TV, and decent road access to the outside world. The children can attend school, though paying for boarding children at middle and high school, and paying university tuition is a real stretch for most farm families. Financial aid in China may be available only for one student in each academic college at a university; and it might not go to the poorest student.

The grandparents’ home is not palatial, but roomy and comfortable in a very rustic way. To get to the pit toilet, you have to pass an enormous sow in her pen; she was fortunately sound asleep when I entered her domain. Two of her probable offspring roamed outside the house, competing with the cats, the dogs and the chickens for leftovers from lunch. The walls are made in the traditional way, with interwoven stalks of bamboo slathered with (now dry) ox dung. [Newer homes are built of China's ubiquitous concrete blocks.] The floor was stone, and the roof tiled.

Back in the days of the Cultural Revolution, this village was divided into three work units. Each unit was expected to till the fields and produce enough food to feed the nation, but not necessarily themselves. Villagers were so hungry then that they ate the bark off the trees, effectively deforesting the woods around them.

Those days are gone. Now, there is plenty to eat. We had enough food at lunch to feed a small army — I hope the leftovers went to people, not farm animals.

The two Chinas, one modern and prosperous, the other rustic and poor, co-exist so close to each other that in one short day trip I could see both. They intersect in the relatively few village residents who left the countryside to jump on China’s prosperity wagon, and who are raising their children to be city folk. Bringing the villages into the 21st century remains as a task for the government and for the devoted children and grandchildren of the Chinese farmer. It will happen, eventually.

March 11th, 2009 | Category: China, Commentary | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL