Zoo Escapee--Roaming the Countryside

Zoo Escapee—Roaming the Countryside

It's pretty interesting to get out into the countryside on my bicycle. People often notice me when I'm on the street in the city, but in the countryside I always get long stares. Of course, it's understandable enough in that few foreigners have any reason to venture out there. So whenever I roam around there I feel pretty much like an escapee from the zoo. Most just give a long surprised look, but some will give you a cheery “hello” and you can also overhear others just say 老外 (laowai) ‘foreigner’ as they point you out to other bystanders. It's something like canoeing in the north woods with your buddy, and suddenly: “Look, a moose!”

People in the countryside are busy. They are working hard and it's a bit difficult to get into conversations for that reason. Most of the people you see in the villages during the day are oldsters looking after grandchildren. The elders are challenging for me to talk to because they invariably have really heavy Henan accents. Everyone else is out in the fields hard at it.

Northern Henan is mostly corn at this time of year and most of that goes to pigs and and some to cows. (The other biggest crop is winter wheat, which is often double cropped with corn because summers here are fairly long, but this necessitates the pumping of ground water.) I've heard that some people still make a kind of gruel out of this rough corn and others make kind of layered cake, which I think is steamed. This kind of food used to be eaten by really poor people, but I've been told it's making a kind of comeback in a sweetened version now that that people don't have to survive off it. Farmers can be seen husking corn and putting it out to dry in the sun on the sides of the roads. I saw corn standing stalks being chopped up in the field by mechanical choppers on small tractors to be turned over in the earth for the next crop, but I've seen some of them being stacked up and trucked around as well. I asked some people by the side of the road what they do with the corn husks and they said they just throw them away rather than composting them. Corn cobs seem to be saved but I was not able to ask what for. In all my forays into the countryside so far I have seen only one mule pulling a cart, a very, very commonplace sight on roads and in fields when I first came to China 20 years ago.

The important thing about farming here is that everything is done so intensively. Every little patch of 黄土 (huangtu) or ‘yellow earth,’ the stuff that blows in from the northwest, is cultivated for something. Near town there are also lots of hothouses whose sides are made of earth with clear heavy plastic sheeting coming down at an angle. As anywhere this gives a few weeks or more on either side of winter. 黄土is very fertile but the north China plain is very dry and has been getting drier over the millennia. In the month that we have been here it has rained just once, yesterday, about a quarter of an inch. Water for these vegetable plots comes from wells and you can see where small irrigation ditches carry it to the plants from central locations. Some water is still carried in buckets so each plant gets a drink. Interestingly, raised beds don't seem to be used universally here but I hope to have a chance at some time to talk about such things if I find someone with time to talk!

Recently not far out of the city I saw people crating up tomatoes that were still only about half ripe. I asked where they were shipping them off to, and they said Loyang, a city somewhat larger than Xinxiang about 3 hours away. I would say that looking down the street there was the equivalent of about 2 or 3 semi-tractor trailers full of tomatoes still on small carts. This location was literally blocks from a new superhighway to Loyang, but I was still mystified as to why they were shipping them to Loyang, when this city of nearly 600,000 was only 10 minutes away. Of course, they are probably selling here too, but then why doesn't Loyang have tomato truck farms of its own? The climate and soil conditions are virtually identical. I wanted to ask more but everyone was busy, busy, busy getting those tomatoes into the crates. Anyway, it seems that these highways have opened up some markets for these producers that the train to Loyang, also just 3 hours, didn't deal with. (Trains seem to carry mostly passenger traffic and coal and other heavy bulk freight.) So the covering of what was once farmland with 6 lanes of highway has produced this market “benefit.”

Another interesting thing I found was a kind of industrial park about 30 minutes by bike out of town. This reminded me exactly of something similar near the Duluth airport. The one here had a huge new 6-lane concrete highway heading for about a mile to a row of 3 or 4 factories with corn fields all around, fields that presumably will gradually grow more factories than corn. The workers are undoubtedly from the local villages because many of my students from farm families say that their fathers—and usually it's the fathers—will take on additional part or full time work off the farm. Needless to say that this is a common phenomenon in the US too as small farmers try to keep struggling to make ends meet until they too are gobbled up by agribusiness.

Everywhere I've gone outside of town a bit there are many small patches of cotton plants. Cotton seems to grow well here, but I'm surprised to see it grown on such small plots. The first time I saw it, I wasn't at first sure what it was when I saw one older woman picking it but I couldn’t get much info because she had a really heavy local accent. Later I asked another younger guy and he said that people grow it like this and just sell it to the government at a set price by weight, so it seems to be a way to make a little spare cash maybe particularly for older people or retirees like the fellow selling cigarettes that I met last week. Small vegetable plots are everywhere too, for personal use but also for sale of vegetables in the towns and villages for non-agriculture workers. It's mostly middle aged and older people peddling bicycle carts into town to sell small amounts at the vegetable markets. Again, as in the US maybe, hard times in the countryside can be mitigated by supplementing one's income in such ways—growing some vegetables, raising some chickens or some fish in a farm pond, sharing a slaughtered pig, etc.

The local stores in the villages are all well stocked with big bags of chemical fertilizer, which farmers must buy directly for local use. Even 20 years ago I recall asking farmers if there was anyone equivalent to a county agricultural agent to oversee or consult with on the issues of fertilizer use and soil conservation, etc. and they said no. Everyone just does their own thing to maximize yield and profit with predictable results. The “river” that runs through the city is pretty much black but when it gets to the countryside it's more greenish with the overflow of chemical fertilizers as one can still see in some farm ponds in the US in late summer. Incredibly, I saw some people fishing in this “water,” which might not be fit for putting out fires, to quote a Native American friend from back in Minnesota. This river flows south to the Yellow River, which I recently read has lost a third of its fish species to extinction due to pollution.

There's lots of good fruit here, more than I remember being the case. The local peaches and Asian pears are very nice as well as the apples. I paid a heavy Confucius’ revenge tax for not being able to stop eating them once. Wandering the countryside I have seen people liberally spraying rows of vegetables with hand pumped sprayers and tanks on their shoulders. Few wear face masks or rubber gloves. I'm sure the fruit gets the same treatment, so I peel everything I eat just as the locals do.

Perhaps the most interesting thing I have seen in the local countryside so far was a very tiny old lady probably in her late 70s or early 80s walking with a cane next to where corn had been laid out in the sun on the concrete pavement. She had smaller than normal feet, probably someone whose feet had been bound for a time as a young girl but then unbound after the Liberation. The most interesting thing was that she was laboriously walking on the edge of the piles of corn painstakingly moving each single wandering kernel with her cane back into the bigger pile lest even one be lost, hardly a concern to her great-grandchildren, who might well have been downtown shopping for some new clothes at that very moment. She could indeed be seen as a symbol of just how much things have changed in her lifetime.

Tomorrow we leave for Inner Mongolia.