Bicycle Wanderings

Bicycle Wanderings Saturday 9/22/07

Well, I've had the bicycle for a week now and I've been able to do what I most love doing here (which by the way is not reading essays!): wandering around the city and countryside observing the daily life of real people and stopping to have a chat with them when the opportunity presents itself. I've gotten out three times this past week and I spent a good three hours out this morning because it was Saturday and I'm off for the weekend. This time I just went out the university gate and headed straight west on the main drag out of the city. This direction is definitely more of a working class neighborhood of the city. The housing was older and there was little new housing or evidence of air conditioners in the windows, etc. and after a certain distance the streets were not so well maintained. (Kind of reminded me of coming to my neighborhood in Duluth from the East End when it comes to the quality of the streets.)

After I got out to the edge of town I started to see lots of corn drying in the sun out in front of smaller, single storey buildings about 10 yards from the curb. Most of the corn was still on the cob, some was already shelled and some cobs were still in the husks. I was pretty much out of town, and it was a bit hard to tell because I was on the main drag, but not far behind the small factories and shops and houses that lined the street were fields, mostly of corn, the harvest of which was pretty much done.

I stopped to ask whose corn it was because I thought maybe the farmers were renting the open space by the road but actually it was the farmers themselves who lived in the older housing adjacent to the main road sometimes behind shops or small factories. I kind of lucked out because I got to chatting with these two older fellows and we had a good long talk over the customary cigarettes that always come out at such times. (I was also lucky because their local accent wasn't too heavy though I think I'm also catching on a bit to the pronunciation differences.) The one fellow was born in 1942 and the other fellow was probably in his 50s. The second one had his ankle in a cast because he had twisted it and temporarily couldn't do farm work. The older fellow had a small roadside stand selling cigarettes. In spite his being old enough to get some kind of retirement he left whatever job he'd had before the customary retirement age so didn't get anything and so sells cigarettes to help make ends meet. (The conversation moved on and unfortunately we didn't get into details about that. We talked about lots of stuff and I don't know how much of it I can remember now affected as I am with chronic CRS syndrome (Can't Remember Shit).

One reason I also wanted to stop at that place was because there were two very large factories there that made various kinds of 3-wheeled vehicles, some powered by batteries and some that have gas-burning motorcycle engines. They were big enough that each could employ hundreds of workers if not a thousand for the larger one. I asked these guys how much workers in them made per month and they said about 1300 or 1400 yuan (rmb), that is, not a little under $200 US per month. They said that this was a more or less average salary for such work. I told them that I have seen some nice new housing going up around town and wondered if these families could afford such housing. They said that if a husband and wife both worked in such a place—and both virtually always do work—they could probably afford to buy something at least. In such situations, couples would typically hand their kids off to grandparents or put them in day care that would cost them a couple 100 rmb per month, not really so bad. They said that some work places had day care centers and some didn't though certainly none are free. They also mentioned that there was a lot of corruption in such enterprises and managers were always running off with a big slice of the pie. I nodded and translated the US saying that the best way to rob a bank was to own one. They got a kick out of that.

Of course they asked me about the US too, and I am always surprised to find that the attitude toward the US is almost always quite positive. The only exception to this I have ever experienced in China is when I happened to be here soon after both the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, which resulted in 3 Chinese deaths, and then the forced landing of the US spy plane off the south China coast, which resulted in the death of the Chinese fighter pilot. Even at those times people weren't hostile, but did sometimes say things like “What's with this bullying, anyway? Why does your country do things like this?” Genuine wonder more than anger and never personalized. These two fellows asked about what people in the US thought about the Iraq war and they had puzzled looks on their faces when I said that it was widely opposed but continues nevertheless. My explanation was that the war benefits the corporate elite who want Iraqi oil, and since both US parties feed at the same trough the war continues--not so complicated really.

At this the old guy smiled and shook his head and said something like yeah, it's the same everywhere, the people at the top get theirs first and the common people (the 老百姓) deal with it. That said, when I asked them outright, both of them were on balance pretty satisfied with the direction China was going in since Deng Xiaoping opened China to massive foreign investment in 1978: China needs the foreign investment to modernize and create jobs and it's a good thing. This is an almost universal viewpoint here. As long as the vast majority are “warm and have full stomachs” (温饱) things are acceptable. The situation in Henan, traditionally a very poor hinterland agricultural province, has improved greatly just in the 6 years since I was last here and this was noted by these fellows so they didn't express any negative feelings when I asked them straightforwardly if they were jealous of or angry about the extreme wealth in Beijing and Shanghai though the younger fellow shook his head and frowned a bit when he added, “We're 20 years behind them.” When I asked about pollution, the older fellow—rightly I think—said that it was a world problem and one that countries had to cooperate on. I wondered what they thought about the “6-4” (the Tiananmen shooting) because I suggested that it was Deng who was responsible for that too. Well, it was all 不清楚, “not clear” about who was really responsible for what. They might well have been dodging the question, but I think they were telling their true feelings when they said that Deng and Mao like all leaders all over the world had their shortcomings but on the whole the plusses of these two—Mao for unifying the country in the face of imperialism and Deng for changing the course of the economy—in their view far outweighed the mistakes they certainly did make. By the way, I was told by the younger that the older fellow did have more education (though I was not able to ask exactly how much, maybe senior high school), so I asked him if he had had problems during the Cultural Revolution and he said no, though undoubtedly the shutting down of schools adversely affected him as he was just coming of age at that time. They said that they were pretty satisfied with current leader Hu Jintao as well. They seemed to be willing to cut him and the government slack when it comes to development of the city vs. the countryside. Twenty years ago city people complained that country people had the economic advantage and now it's the opposite but even as country folk they were willing to accept it. Once again, like it or dislike it, I have found these views to be a very, very commonly held here among people like these two gentlemen for the last 20 years that I have been coming to China, views that are very likely in sharp contrast to those of the well educated, upper class, professional Chinese that one meets in the US or those who get to write their memoirs in English. These people have far more in common with their elite American counterparts that they now lilve among than any common person in China, which should come to no surprise to anyone. Knowing these people is a very truncated window into China. (By the way, this group of upper class émigrés also has nothing in common with the working class overseas Chinese who do endless hours of restaurant and sweatshop work in the US and, if I may add, are never, never, never there to help translate for these English deficient largely economic immigrants or morally support them in emergency rooms or police stations or workplaces or their children's schools as my wife and I have done again and again in Duluth for all the 20+ years we have lived there. The reason? Social class. Like the upper class here in China they are just too damn worried about and busy with their careers, their status, and their bourgeois comforts and I share no common interests with them.)

In short, for better or for worse, like it or not in America, some modicum of economic security and hope for a better material life is what moves people like these two I talked to today. For the sake of those ends, they are willing to accept some lumps, some of them pretty serious. But inasmuch as they seem to see concrete economic improvement in today's China they are contented enoug...for now. Something on local agriculture next time maybe.

P.S. For whatever reason, I have not been able to access comments posted on this website. Feel free to post them because you can probably get them outside here, but if you want to communicate with me it's best to send email. I would be interested in hearing your reactions.