China in One Village

The Story of One Town and the Changing World

Liang Hong

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781839761775
• eBook ISBN:
  9781839761782
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Hebei province. What she found was an extended family torn apart by the seismic changes in Chinese society, and a village hollowed-out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang's by turns moving and shocking account became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame.

Across China, many saw in Liang's remarkable and vivid interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own families, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed observer, one family, and one village.

1

Where Is Liang Village?

Return to Rang County

Last night I hardly slept. The jolting train kept my son, three years and two months old, from sleeping soundly. The slightest discomfort had him swinging his arms, tossing and turning. To keep him from falling out of the bunk, I lay at his feet and put my legs around him, but he, in his dreams, kept pushing them away. In the end I sat up, turned on the little lamp at the head of the bed, and read the book I had brought with me: The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod by the American naturalist Henry Beston. Beston wrote this collection of essays after spending a season on an isolated stretch of the Cape Cod coast. There he was in direct contact with the majestic ocean, all kinds of seabirds, unpredictable weather, and the omnipresent perils of the sea. You can sense the richness, precision, and deep love with which his gaze took everything in. The natural world and humankind became one:

Whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to Nature. A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual. The ancient values of dignity, beauty, and poetry which sustain it are of Nature’s inspiration; they are born of the mystery and beauty of the world. Do no dishonor to the earth lest you dishonor the spirit of man. Hold your hands out over the earth as over a flame. To all who love her, who open to her the doors of their veins, she gives of her strength, sustaining them with her own measureless tremor of dark life.

Life’s meaning and the true nature of human existence only take form when joined with the natural world. You are insignificant. You are also immense. And you become eternal, for humankind is only one part of the whole.

I lift the curtain. The train is speeding through the night’s hazy glow, and the plains recede rapidly. Between the trees, houses come and go in silence. You can hear the night breathing faintly. On the eve of my trip home, I am filled with yearning. My village, my loved ones, my little stream, and that big tree in the middle of the stream where, when I was young, I carved my name. To me its scenery is both majestic and conducive to the same kinds of solemn reflection.

In the early morning, the train slowly makes its way toward the county seat, and when I see the bridge I know we’ve arrived at Rang County. This is the first stop on my journey. Once, on this bridge, I saw the most beautiful moon in the whole world. It was nearly dark, and the moon had already risen in the sky. Its color was a strange, light yellow, like fine Xuan rice paper, and its round elegance was set off by a wisp of cloud across it. Like youthful melancholy, it had a subtlety that was hard to convey. I was thirteen that year, and it was both my first time at the county seat and my first time seeing a train, yet my first impression of the city, the one that has remained with me, is that moon. I had come to the city to meet my eldest sister, but as I searched for her workplace in the darkness, in the city’s crisscrossing streets, I had started to panic. In fact, I was so terrified that I hadn’t even dared ask directions, for the people walking leisurely by me had an air about them that made me unwilling to approach them. I paced back and forth in front of a building for quite a while, wanting to go in and ask directions. I had a vague sense that I was close to where she worked, or perhaps that this was actually the place, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Now I realize that the city, even just a small county seat, had impressed upon that young country child a distinct difference in social class.

Rang County was once very significant in “deer hunts on the central plains,” that is, historical attempts to overthrow the throne. Time and time again, fierce wars and natural disasters nearly wiped out the people of Rang County. But advantages in geography and climate, as well as ease in transportation, meant that immigrants quickly arrived to fill in any population gaps. According to historical records, in the fifteenth year of King Zhaoxiang of Qin’s reign (281 BCE), “disobedient followers” were relocated to Rang County. During the Tang Dynasty, in the tenth year of Emperor Xuanzong’s reign (722 CE), “Hu barbarians” (non-Han Chinese) from six cities in Hequ County, more than 50,000 people, were moved to Xu, Ru, Tang, Rang, and other areas.

Among migrations, the one involving the largest number of people happened during the second year of the reign of Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang (1369 ce) in the Ming Dynasty. People were moved from Shanxi, Jiangxi, Fujian, and other provinces to Rang County. People in Rang County who claim Hongtong County in Shanxi as their ancestral home arrived at this time. Now Rang County is 2,360 square kilometers or about 900 square miles. It has 28 townships (offices and administrative divisions) and 579 individual administrative villages, with a total of approximately 1,560,000 people and 2,440,000 square mu of arable land (1 mu = 666.5 square meters, so about 627 square miles of farmland).

Rang County is primarily agricultural; it is known as a “grain basket.” Rich in wheat, cotton, tobacco, chili peppers, and peanuts, it’s nationally significant for the production and manufacturing of goods such as grain, cattle, and export tobacco. It is also an important site for cotton and sesame production. Nevertheless, large-scale industry is almost nonexistent, and there has been no development of industrial infrastructure. This means that it has been at a disadvantage throughout the many waves of “reform and opening up.” The government’s general assessment of Rang County is this: an economy that’s undeveloped; customs that are conservative; points of view that are backward.

Finally the train comes to a stop. Outside the window, my relatives make an impressive group: Father, Eldest Sister, Second Sister, Third Sister, and Little Sister’s entire family; more than a dozen people. When the train door opens, my son, who had been waiting anxiously at the door, suddenly starts to cry and doesn’t want to get off. Pointing at the ground he says it’s dirty—too dirty. Everyone bursts out laughing. It rained the night before, and the ground is damp. It’s covered in mud, fruit peels wet from the rain, and bits of paper and trash, and flies are buzzing all around. My son is clearly a bit intimidated.

At noon, we all go to a restaurant to eat together. When I was a child, our family included Father, Mother, and seven of us sisters. Now we’ve expanded to a family of more than twenty. We can’t all fit around a single table, so the kids—big and small—sit at the table next to us and make a racket with their nonstop laughter. To a stranger we must look like a happy family, or at least like a family that has emerged from a long period of poverty; we can now enjoy a proper meal together in a restaurant.

My son, in the midst of this rowdy scene, is skittish and apprehensive. He clings to me, not wanting to be put down. City kids these days aren’t used to these big, noisy family gatherings.

As usual, in the evening, the family goes over to my younger sister’s house. My father, elder sisters, and their husbands don’t play their customary card game, “Fight the Landlord,” a game that’s been a favorite over the past seven or eight years—it’s a common form of entertainment in most small northern towns. Instead, everybody sits together, talking about goings-on around the village. My sisters married early and left home, eventually moving to the city. So for them this is a “homecoming” too, and their curiosity and excitement about village happenings is no less than my own.

There is one more reason that the family is excited: I’m finally able to come home to stay for a spell. Since the age of twenty, when I left to go to school, I’ve never been home for more than a short visit. Now I can finally stay for a while and live with them again.

Lost

The roads leading out of the city were built along the river, and one long section rises more than ten meters above river level. From your car, you can see down along the river, where excavators roar, piles upon piles of sand loom high, and industrial-sized transport trucks rush back and forth. It’s a bustling construction scene. Yet the river itself, which only ten years ago flowed broad and smooth, is gone, and the river birds, which once circled above the water, have left without a trace.

The effects of thirty years of “reform and opening up” are most visible in the roads. New roads, wider roads, extend in all directions and cut the distances between villages, cities, and towns. While I was growing up, riding the bus into the city would take at least two hours, not including time spent waiting for the bus, and the ride was so bumpy you were in danger of banging your head painfully on the ceiling. People rode the bus very rarely; a two-kuai (or about twenty-five cents) one-way ticket represented living expenses for a family of six for a month. Students who went to the county teachers college would usually borrow a bicycle to come home. Two students would take turns carrying each other, as the ride home could take six hours. Your backside would inevitably be rubbed sore, but the students didn’t care. Riding along the river, birds circled overhead, and along the side of the road there were long irrigation canals, filled with deep, green grass and little, multicolored wild flowers that followed the rise and fall of the canals, stretching into the blue depths of the sky. The villages, set off in the trees along the roads, were quiet and modest, seemingly eternal.

But this, I know, is only my memory. Those eternal villages, when brought back to reality, are riddled with ills like this multilane expressway, crossing through the plains, as if proclaiming to all the world: modernization has arrived at the countryside’s doorstep. But, as far as the villages are concerned, modernity is as distant as before, and perhaps even more so. At the beginning of the 2010s, the expressway had just been opened, and the local people still had no sense of road safety.

They walked on the road. They rode bikes and drove three-wheeled carts; they went against traffic; they crossed traffic. Occasionally the sky above the plains would ring with the ear-piercing sounds of horns and brakes. “My fellow villagers” were walking, cool as cucumbers, on the expressway, having cut a giant hole in the wire fence below. But no one walks on the road anymore. I guess they’ve finally learned.

They have learned they must return to their designated track. The cars speeding past have nothing to do with them—on the contrary, the cars only confirm their status as the “other” in this modernizing society. Never mind all the land the roads have occupied: Two villages that were once so close that villagers would drop by for a meal can now reach each other only by taking a detour of several miles. The roads have damaged the village ecology, but the harm done to this living organism has never registered, even remotely, with the policymakers who direct the construction process. No one thinks about the villagers’ experiences, even though not so much as a drain is installed without reference to official data. The expressway, with its strong smell of asphalt and metal, is an immense scar on the plains beneath the sun.

The town of Wu gradually grows closer.

Our landing point is my elder brother’s house, where he does business in Wu town. Wu is situated about forty kilometers northwest of the county seat. It was formerly one of Rang County’s “four famous towns” and home to a bustling market. The main roads run through its center, in the shape of a cross. When I was young, it would become a veritable ocean of people on market days and especially during the temple fair in the spring. We would walk from the north end to the south, being jostled here and there. It seemed our feet couldn’t stick to the ground. Cars could barely move an inch and though they honked to the high heavens, no one seemed to hear them. Certainly no one paid them any mind, immersed as they were in the noisy hustle and bustle.

At the north end is the Muslim Hui district. We passed by their houses every day on the way to school and saw them slaughtering sheep, holding funeral processions, or reading from the Quran. Their lifestyle has always seemed both strange and sacred to me. There are no factories, no businesses. Other than the necessary professions and government functionaries, most of the people work the land for their livelihood or do a little peddling now and then, selling or bartering grain, eggs, and fruit from their homes.

Now Wu has a central market and business district along the new road. Row after row of brand-new buildings line its sides, all built in the same slanted roof, European style, which appears both very modern and very out of place. The former main street, enclosed within the roads and construction rising up on the outskirts of town, is virtually empty and has fallen into disrepair. Even though the buildings and businesses are all still there, though the shopkeepers haven’t changed, the transformation all around them has given the neglected buildings a sense of displacement—as if something’s not quite right. This feeling of displacement is something I haven’t gotten used to; every time I walk down the road, I have the strong sense that I am in some foreign land.

My brother and sister-in-law opened a small clinic in town, but my brother has also followed the times and does some business on the side, contracting land, opening a recreation hall, and, most recently, investing in real estate with some of his classmates. Despite initial setbacks, they seem to be doing well. This time the entrance to his home is piled high with sand, stones, and steel rods, and a cement truck is humming. He’s planning to divide the house he bought into two and then sell one half to pay off the mortgage.

We stop only briefly before we go buy firecrackers and joss paper to take down to the village, where we’ll pay homage at Grandfather and Third Great Uncle’s graves. This is the first thing we do whenever we get home. Twenty years of expansion have almost joined Liang Village and the town of Wu together; my brother’s house is only about 500 meters from the village. When I was young, I would go to the study hall at school in the evenings, and the trip home afterwards was the most terrifying experience of my life. The roads were empty, silent, and tenebrous, surrounded by tall white poplars, blowing wind and rustling leaves. The back of my neck would go ice-cold with fear, and this stretch of road, from the school to the village, seemed the most endless road in the world. Of course, there were better times, too, like when I was a teenager, and especially when the romance and wuxia writers Chiung Yao and Jin Yong were popular. I read everything of theirs I could get my hands on, as if possessed. Afterwards, on the night road, panicked and afraid, I would imagine a young man in white, riding in swiftly from afar, handsome and flushed, reaching for my hand with great tenderness as he offered to take me home.

But today it would be hard to believe that this was the village where I lived for twenty years, if it weren’t for the fact that my family, my former home, and my relatives’ graves are still there.

Grandfather and Third Great Uncle are buried behind our former home. We call this our “back courtyard,” but the wall around it has collapsed, and the weeds reach up to our waists. Sharp and clear, the sound of firecrackers crackle above us. There, in the sky over the village, the explosions startle the silent awake, perhaps connecting us with the souls on the other side. We kowtow and burn joss paper, and then Father rubs his eyes and says, “In 1960 your grandfather entered the communal nursing home. When he went in, he was in good health. He could speak; he could sing. He even carried a small chamber pot. Four days later they sent him back on a mat. He was dead, plumb starved to death.” Every time we pay our respects, father tells this story as a matter of course. Even though I never met Grandfather, I have heard this tale so many times that I can see him in my mind. He is wearing a fitted black cap, and because he sold tofu, which he carried on a shoulder pole through the village all year round, he is bent at the waist. As he totters toward the old folks home, five li (about 1.5 miles) from the village, he’s holding his bedding in one hand and a small chamber pot in the other.

Hearing the sound of the firecrackers, a few people from the village come out and regard me politely. They ask Father, “Guangzheng, which of your daughters is this? Is this your fourth daughter? How’d she get so fat?” I look at their faces, both familiar and unfamiliar, and in their expressions I sense the traces of the years. I realize: I, too, have undergone marked change.

To the right of the back courtyard is a newly built two-story house. Father says it belongs to Zhang Daokuan. Daokuan’s siblings all left the village and went to college; only he remained. He doesn’t speak well and isn’t much good for labor. He married a pretty little devil from Sichuan with a fiery temper. She ran away from home a few times, and each time he dragged her back, but one day she left for good. Daokuan has suffered plenty, and now he’s the village laughingstock.

Pushing back the knee-high weeds and shrubs, we come around to the front of our old home, where I lived for twenty years. The front, too, is filled with weeds and grasses, and one side of the caved-in kitchen has been turned into an ad hoc toilet. There are also signs that animals have been kept there. The front and back roofs of the main house both have large holes in them, and the foundation has started to lean a little. A few years ago my brother tried to fix things up, but because no one lives here, it quickly fell into disrepair again. On the exterior wall a poem my younger sister wrote at school is still faintly visible, complete with the wrong characters. Every year when we go back, we read it again, laughing together. Father forgot the key, so we can’t go inside. Instead, Father and Elder Sister stand in front of the house and take a picture. The contrast between Daokuan’s house and our own is shocking.

Mother’s grave is in the public cemetery on the river slope behind the village. Looking out over it, it seems open and peaceful and filled with mist. It gives a sense of the eternity of life and nature. Every time I come here, my heart expands, not in sorrow, but with peace and solace. Here I feel I am at home. I have returned to life’s beginnings—my mother is here—and my own final resting place will also be here. We burn joss paper, kowtow and set off firecrackers. I have my son kneel on the ground and follow me as I bow three times. I tell him, this is your maternal grandmother. He asks, “Who’s she?” I say, “She’s your Mama’s Mama, the one closest to me.” Then, as always, we sit beside the grave and chat about what’s going on in the family.

Every time we come, my eldest sister repeats over and over, “If only Ma were still here, things would be so much better …”

Yes. “If only Ma were here.” We’ve imagined it untold times; and it’s become our constant dream—and sorrow. Looking at the grass on the grave, and the bits of firecracker, thinking back on Mother’s life and our years of hardship, the idea of home and the significance of kinship always flash into my mind. What would our lives, our struggles, our successes, and our losses mean if it weren’t for this, if it weren’t for our hometown, which keeps us together, reveals our pasts and the traces of our former lives?

The Past

Today’s plan is to “interview” Father. “Interview” sounds a little strange, as Father is always here with us, and his character and temperament could not be more familiar. As for his stories: how he was clever and quick-witted in his youth, how my maternal grandmother personally took a fancy to him, how marriage was proposed, how he went secretly to see Mother, how during the Cultural Revolution he was criticized and denounced and subject to “struggle sessions,” how he constantly escaped, and so on and so forth. These stories I know, “more or less.”

But it’s still only “more or less.” When I think of Father, think of everything about him, everything seems fragmented. Those vague and di...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Where Is Liang Village?
• 2. Where Ruins Flourish
• 3. Save the Children
• 4. The Youth Who’ve Left
• 5. Runtu Grows Up
• 6. Rural Politics Under Attack
• 7. Trials and Tribulations of the “New Morality”
• 8. Where Has My Hometown Gone?
• Afterword