A Chinese Worker

A Chinese Worker

Over the months I have come to know a person who works in our area, who is both interesting and in some ways typical of a class or workers that one meets here. She does indoor cleaning as well as yard work and various other duties for which she receives the equivalent of less than $100 USD per month. She's on the job 5 or 6 days per week pretty much from 8 a.m. till about 5 p.m. with the an extended lunch/rest time (休息) that used to be typical but that fewer and fewer workers now get. She and her husband are both from the countryside around the middle of the province, and while all of her siblings have left the farm to work in the city, her husband is the only one of his siblings to do so. He's a construction worker and is now in charge of a small construction team for a bigger company so probably does a little bit better, though construction workers of rural origin are typically not well paid for very hard work and very long hours. They are both probably in their early-mid 40s and have one son, who is 12 years old. She knows a bit of English and uses it with the foreigners she encounters on the job. In short, the folks she works for are lucky to have such a person for so little money. On top of that she is incredibly conscientious and energetic about her cleaning work, reflecting her rural upbringing—fearless in the face of hard work.

There is probably one way in which she is not typical: she finished senior high school and did 2 years of further of study, which could have qualified her to teach primary school. She was not very informative about why she didn't get that kind of job, but I suspect that one of the reasons is that it's much more competitive to get that kind of work in the city as opposed to being back in the village, and for the sake of her son it's better to be a cleaning person in the city than a primary school teacher in the village. There's a lot riding on this 12-year old boy. She has definite plans for college for him and possibly an eventual Ph.D. She asked me if I would spend a little time with him once in preparation for an English langauge speech contest competition. I agreed and was impressed that this 12-year old could function as well as he did in a foreign language. Indeed, he was first in his school but didn't progress to the next level in competition with students from other schools. His mother said it was because his school was less prestigious, suggesting that the students are not as good, though the pecking order might well have influenced the judges' opinions.

Social class is something we have talked about and something that, like most urban workers from the countryside, she is keenly aware of. She has mentioned feeling looked down on for her job and her rural origins even though she is obviously very intelligent and more intellectually alert than lots of professors I know. During several conversations, she has mentioned my treating her as an equal (给我平等), which prompted me to mention my own class background and my political beliefs that this is her due and not a matter of anything I bestow on her out of some manner of kindness.

She is well read and has well-informed opinions on many issues. She doesn't read the mainline newpapers but tries to get information from various sources to triangulate what the truth might be. She opposes the death penalty, a minority view in China, and is very concerned about the environment. Her views about the US are quite positive to the point of being generous perhaps, but she quite correctly sees Americans as more concerned about the environment and more governed by laws than personal relations. During the 17th National Communist Party Congress meeting back in October she was hopeful to hear the "leaders" (领导人) talk about issues like the environment, inflation and rural development, but at the same time blasts them as corrupt and untrustworthy. I told her of my experiences in the countryside sleeping on a kang (炕) with a whole family and shitting in their common hole and such things, and she laughed that one of these people would never do that (not any more than George Bush or Bill Clinton would either). In spite of her mistrust of such people, she seems to be resigned as most are here that these people make the policy decisions and people like her are pretty much left to hoping for the best from them.

Recently we had a really interesting discussion about rural and agricultural issues. This really got her going. She feels that the biggest issue in the country is the plight of farmers. Since she grew up in a rural village and now lives in a city she knows both, but city people don't have a clue about what the countryside is about and most of the political and economic power is now in their hands. She said they wouldn't be able to tell a corn stalk from wheat. Of course, I egged her on and she agreed with me that the national government probably had no real intention of improving the rural economy or rural living conditions and was probably far more interested in getting more and more rural people into urban factories to produce goods for big export profit.

One thing that really set her off was coal mining deaths, which probably number around seven or so per day across the country. Quite recently there was one explosion that killed 180 some miners. As a person of rural origin, she said that she knows that it's the desperately poorest of the poor rural people who go down into the mines. Everyone knows the risk and no one goes unless there are no other choices. The compensation that they receive after getting killed is the biggest insult of all. She doesn't believe at all the stats that come on the TV about the numbers of miners' deaths and believes it's much worse than what gets reported.

She had lots of interesting things to say about local farming. She said that it used to be that the farmers in her area could drill down 3 meters to get ground water to pump for irrigation and now it's 10. (One student told me in her area they have to drill 30 meters now. No wonder I see so many posters in the countryside for well drilling. It must be big business.) Also, there used to be about 2 to 3 feet of snow in winter, but in recent years there has hardly been a few inches. Thus, farmers have to pump and irrigate even more as a result of the lack of snow for winter wheat and the ground water is hardly being replenished at all.

Chemical fertilizer is another issue. Nowadays farmers don't want to raise pigs and cows and use the fertilizer on their fields. It's easier just to use chemical fertilizer. Yields keep going up but the soil is depleted more every year. I told her that one Minnesota farm boy once told me that the soil in his southern family farm didn't do a damn thing except hold up the crop. Everything else comes from Monsanto or whatever.

She decries all the investment in planes and high tech hardware and whatever at the expense of agriculture. If agriculture collapses, what will all these people eat? She feels that no matter what "development" comes about there will still be more workers than engineers so why aren't the lives of workers being attended to? She had all kinds of stats that she was firing at me about how many people per hectare and stats about the loss of agricultural land and how she doesn't believe what the government puts out about these issues. Even if I were a trained stenographer and native speaker I could not have kept up with her. Inflation was another big issue. Her rural-urban experience tells her that both urban consumers and small scale rural producers are taking a hit. What she pays from shopping everyday does not jibe with the inflation numbers she hears on the evening news. It just ain't so.

Our last conversation ended with the usual grimmaces and head shakes accompanied by the very common phrase 没办法, meibanfa, 'no way,' 'no solution,' 'it can't be helped.’ It seems to be descriptive of so many situations, and not just in China. From the price of peanuts in Henan to the Iraq war, it seems that someone is always taking some links out of your chain, cutting down your running room, giving you more comps to corrrect and adding the earnings from your sweat and your sleepless nights to their travel money. 肯定有办法. There has to be a way.