Yao Yang, "Three Days Back in the Village"

Yao Yang, “Three Days Back in the Village”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
　　
Introduction

Yao Yang (b. 1964) is a well known economist at Peking University, Director of the China Center for Economic Research and the Dean of the National School of Development.  In the context of my Reading the China Dream project, I first became interested in Yao because of his engagement with Confucianism and his argument that reembracing Confucianism would be the best way for China to “sinicize Marxism” (see here and here).    

When the organizers of the project “The Exterior of Philosophy—On the Practice of New Confucianism” kindly invited me to present a paper at a conference they are holding in Switzerland in late August, 2022, I decided to focus on Yao and his “Confucian pragmatism.”  I find it intriguing that a senior professor at a prestigious university in China would “change course” in a way that, at least at first glance, appears to be bold and even radical.  Consequently, I have been reading a lot of Yao Yang for the past few weeks, which means that, for better or worse, I will be sharing my Yao Yang translations with you for the month of August.

Most of Yao’s dozens—if not hundreds—of books and articles focus on economic topics, and I rarely read academic work in economics in English, to say nothing of Chinese.  Luckily for me, throughout his career, Yao has produced both technical, granular studies of whatever he was interested in at the time, as well as “big picture” essays where he conveys the results of his and others’ research in broader, more accessible terms, as a way of contributing to public debate and solving important problems. 

​These big picture essays are often both interesting and enjoyable, and a worthwhile research project might be to look at Yao’s writings as a public intellectual over time; the arc of his concerns might shed considerable light on the interaction between formal economic research and public policy debate between the late 1990s, when Yao began his academic career, and today.  Ultimately, I think that Yao’s advocacy of Confucianism is a problem-solving exercise as well, and thus perhaps not quite as bold or radical a move as I initially thought, but I will have more to say about this when I update the blog in mid-August with more of Yao’s writings about Confucianism and liberalism.

In the course of my recent research, I also discovered four essays by Yao that treat neither economics nor Confucianism, but instead are quite personal statements based on his experiences in his father’s home village in Jiangxi.  I translated all four, and include them in this update.  In addition to this one, the other three are “Before My Grandfather’s Portrait,” “The Vanishing Town,” and “My View of Revolutionary History.”

Yao was born in Xi’an, but spent most of the first eight years of his life in the small, single-surname village of Hujiangbei, where he was raised by his uncle and aunt.  The emotional ties forged by this experience led Yao to return when he could, even as an adult, and his visits prompted the reflections that led to these essays, three of which appear to have been written in the 2000s, and one in 2019, a further reflection based on the three texts already composed.   All four essays are well-written and interesting in their own right, not the least for their autobiographical nature, which, while not unheard of among public intellectuals in China (see here for one example) is not something I run across on a regular basis. 

In terms of the themes explored in these texts, two stand out.  One addresses the effects of reform and opening on village life after 25 or 30 years.  Yao applauds the material success that reform and opening have brought to many Chinese villages, but at the same time notes with sadness and frustration the diminishing sense of community and public spirit—even in single-surname villages like his, where kinship should help, but hardly seems to.  Villagers encroach on public land and goods to build homes that respect neither aesthetics nor tradition, and often leave old homes to decay (in part as a de facto claim on the land, should they ever need to build another house).  They build pigsties in ways that pollute public space, and village “authorities” are incapable either of penalizing those responsible or mobilizing the village to dig sewers to solve the problem.  Part of the problem is that village elites were largely eliminated during the Cultural Revolution, and village government largely abandoned during reform and opening.  It is surely significant that Yao Yang says not a word about village elections. 

The other theme is Yao’s reflection on the meaning of China’s revolution.  Yao’s grandfather was a revolutionary martyr, having joined the Chinese Communist Party (as well as the Kuomintang) in the 1920s, to be executed by the Kuomintang after participating in the Nanchang Uprising in 1927.  The grandfather’s portrait still hands in the family home where Yao grew up, which prompts Yao to wonder about what his grandfather would have thought about the twists and turns of China’s long revolutionary journey, and what the revolution has ultimately come to mean in his village.  What struck me was less Yao’s conclusion—“the revolution was indeed necessary, but now it is time to move on”—and more his willingness to think out loud about the revolution, something I find to be surprisingly rare in the writings of most Chinese public intellectuals.

The text translated here is the longest and most detailed of the four, and is clearly a labor of love, as it is well-written and moving.  It recounts Yao’s return visit to Hujiangbei in 2003 or 2004, and is focused on his family’s efforts to move his beloved aunt, now 76 years old and widowed, into a retirement home, but many aspects of the decline of village community are addressed in detail as well.  Yao notes that many readers have compared the text to Lu Xun’s “My Old Home,” which also recounts a returning villager’s struggle with nostalgia in the face of the bleakness of village life.
 
Translation

It was an early winter morning in the south, and the air felt good.  Our driver, a young man named Wang, drove me and my uncle, who lives in Nanchang,[2] out of Nanchang city, heading toward my hometown in Xin’gan. We passed Xiangtang, where we should have been able to take the expressway, but the driver missed the sign directing us there. Thinking that Nanchang is only 120 kilometers away from Xin’gan, we suggested that Mr. Wang stay on the slower National Highway 105. Because of the Beijing-Kowloon rail line and the expressway, there were very few cars on the national route, but the quality of the road was very poor, and the car was a new Citroën Elysée, still in the break-in period, so it was slow going, and it took us nearly three hours to get to the Xin’gan county town.

Like the last time I went back to my hometown, my Nanchang uncle insisted on buying good vegetables and meat, saying that there would be no good food in the village.  Just then, my cell phone rang, and I saw from the number that the incoming call was from another cell phone, but the person on the other end was my aunt from the village: "Yang, where are you?" she asked.  I answered, "We’re in Xin’gan, buying some food.” My aunt said, "There’s no need! Juxiu brought a chicken and she’s cooking it. Just come on over for lunch." So I told my uncle not to buy any food.  He muttered, "if we don’t bring food, God knows what they’ll feed us," but then said “we’ll just buy something for the kids."  So we each bought a bunch of oranges and snacks. The oranges were surprisingly cheap, only 30 or 40 cents a catty. I told the old lady at the stall to give me ten RMB’s worth [about $1.50 USD], but a big plastic bag full only came to five.　　
 
Continuing 15 kilometers south of the county town, we arrived at the place where the car was meant to drop us off. From a distance, I saw two of my second cousins, Xiaobing and Xiaoping, sitting at the side of the road waiting for us. When the car stopped, they came to fetch our luggage and the food. We told the driver to head back to Nanchang, and followed my second cousins down the road towards the village. They told us that there was a big drought in the village this year, and the water level in the Yi river was very low, so the crops were in bad shape. Sure enough, the river was very shallow, with part of the riverbed visible.   The rapeseed planted along the roadside was stunted and colorless due to lack of water, and it looked like the spring harvest was in for trouble.　　
 
Hujiangbei village is actually not far from National Highway 105.   When you get off the highway and follow the Yi river for a bit you can see it.  I still remember one year when the river flooded when I was a child, and a big chunk of the river bank directly opposite our house washed away.  Our village and several villages around us were flooded for three days and nights, and people lived and ate in their attics. I was only four or five years old at the time, and I remember it being fun, not scary. One of the things I remember seeing from the attic was one of my cousins paddling around on a little raft, rescuing fruits and vegetables floating in the water.  I pestered my aunt let me try it too. The winter following the flood, a bunch of people came to rebuild the dike, some of whom stayed in our house, so we set up a huge wok in the hall to feed them. They reinforced the old dike and added new dikes in some sections.  Since then, although the river has flooded, the dike has never broken again.　　
 
Perhaps because it’s been many years since I’ve been back, the impression I carry in my mind of my hometown is that of the towering camphor trees on distant dikes and smoke curling up from the kitchen chimneys.  This time, what I saw was different.  There were no camphor trees, and no smoke curling up from the kitchen chimneys, and in their place what caught my eye were several white or green buildings sticking out like a sore thumb at the head of the village. Nor is what you see on the opposite side of the Yi river exactly a green mountain.  The Beijing-Kowloon Rail Line passes at the foot of the mountain, and on one of the hills stands a China Telecom wireless communication relay tower.

As I approached the village, I saw that the little lake in front of the village was almost dry from the drought, revealing the dirty bottom of the pond. In the remaining murky water, the fish with which the pond had been stocked were struggling to break the surface of the water to get some fresh air. The lake in the name of our village—Hujiangbei, the “lake at the back the river”--refers to this lake, and the river is the Yi River.  I never really understood what “back” meant.  Maybe because of my vaguely romantic feelings, for me, our village had always been different from the villages around us, all of which were called this or that “family” village.  But this time, my village left my dream world behind, becoming a messy reality.　　
 
Our house faces the small lake and occupies the best location in the village. When my aunt saw us coming from afar, she went back in the house to get a string of firecrackers, which she then set off.  It was a long string of firecrackers, and when they ignited, tears came to my eyes.  
　　
There were three brothers in my grandfather’s family.   The oldest was a farmer, the second brother was a doctor, and the youngest joined the revolution and was captured and beheaded by the Kuomintang after the Nanchang Uprising in 1927. The oldest brother was my biological grandfather, who had three sons as well. My Nanchang uncle was the only son of the middle great-uncle. My father was the youngest among his cousins.[3]  The oldest son of my grandfather had three sons and three daughters, but the second son had no children.

When I was ten months old, my parents sent me back to the village, where I was raised by this childless aunt and uncle.  They treated me better they could have treated their own children; in fact, I called my aunt "Iya," which means “mother” in the local dialect. When I was eight years old, they had to send me back to the city to live with my parents for the sake of my education, which broke my aunt’s heart.  My great-uncle died some years ago, and my great aunt died shortly after I left. On her deathbed, she entrusted my aunt with the three children she had been raising. My uncle and aunt were known far and wide as good people, and they quietly took on the responsibility of raising the children and seeing to their marriages. 

A few years later I went back to my village to live for another year. A year may be short, but by now I was old enough to understand things, and for this reason, the village made a deep impression on me.  After starting university, I went back to my hometown roughly once every four years, but it had been more than ten years before the visit I am describing here.   The first few times I went back, my uncle was still alive, and every time I went back he would take me around the village to greet all my relatives. More than half of the 30-odd families in the village were close relatives.[4] I remember that in 1983, when I returned to my hometown for the first time after finishing university, my uncle took me to see the newly divided land that he had received under the responsibility system.  He carefully explained to me the boundaries between our land and that of other people, just like a farmer does when talking about his own land.

When I returned to the village in 1994, my uncle was already showing his age, but I didn't expect him to die a year later. At the time, I was studying in the United States, so I couldn't go back to for the funeral!  In the past, it was my uncle who came out to set off firecrackers for me, but this time, only my aunt was left. My aunt is old too. She was always short, but now, at 76, she is a shriveled up old woman.  I had not expected that I would be involved in a major change in her life as an elderly person on the occasion of this visit.  But I’ll get to that later.　　
 
When I went in the house, the children of my two cousins gathered around me. I wasn’t yet 40, but I was already a grandpa![5]  My Nanchang uncle and I gave them some oranges and cookies, and the three children, big and small, started eating. The one child policy seems to have won people over. The eldest cousin had no more children because his first child was a boy; the youngest cousin, whose first child was a girl, gave birth to a boy five years later. Most families are the same. People say that that after the implementation of the "Population and Family Planning Law," you could pay 15,000 RMB [approx. $2,225 USD] in “social support fees” and continue to have children,  but this has not happened in our village.

When I asked why, my older cousin said that no one could afford to pay the fine. The younger cousin added they "People don’t want to have children now.  It’s hard to bring them up."  I also wonder whether the slowdown in rural population growth is due to effective family planning measures or to the increase in the opportunity cost of raising children due to rising income levels. This is not a question that can be answered by a few cases, but it is an indisputable fact that the opportunity cost of raising children has increased significantly.　　
 
When others in the village heard that uncle Nanchang and I were back, they gathered in twos and threes in the courtyard in front of our house and grabbed a chair or a bench to sit on. The southern sun at noon was just right, the warmth spreading across your  body, perfect conditions for catching up. Among the visitors were both the old brigade head He Sheng and the new brigade head. The new brigade head’s nickname is "Torn Eyebrow" because he has a scar on his eyebrow.

I remember returning to my hometown twice in the 1980s, and He Sheng talked to me about a piece of mountain land in my village that had been forcibly occupied by the township.  This land had been handed down from my ancestors and was deep in the mountains, dozens of kilometers from the village. The old people said that the reason why the village could own mountain so far away was entirely because our ancestors were capable and we were a prominent family in the southern part of Xin’gan County (later in the county town I learned that my great-grandfather had been the first magistrate of Xin’gan country in Republican times).

However, in the collective era, the mountain was developed as a forest area by the commune and the village temporarily lost its ownership. After the rural reforms, the township forestry enterprise closed down for awhile, and people from the village went to plant trees, and they also obtained a land use right certificate from the county forestry bureau. But for some reason, the township decided to take the mountain back, and the village sued the township for nearly ten years. I remember one time when I returned to the village, I went to the county forestry bureau with a few people who were literate and willing to get involved, and the person who received us was very sympathetic, saying "The mountain is yours, but there is nothing we can do about it at the forestry bureau. To solve the problem, the county government would need to intervene."

At the time I was just student, and didn’t know anything, and the others were honest but timid farmers, so who was going to pester the county government? So we came back empty handed. I heard that later the village hired a lawyer who filed suit against the township, but despite the facts of the matter, the suit made it to the Ji'an District Court without success, and the mountain still belongs to the township. No one brought up the mountain when I came home this time.　　
 
The situation in the village seemed to be much improved. Almost every house has a TV and a telephone, almost all the young people use cell phones, and now and then motorcycles whizzed by, sometimes with a fashionable young woman sitting behind the driver. I asked Torn Eyebrow how much the per capita income in the village was. The brigade head answered, "what we report to the authorities in 2,400 RMB [approx. $355 USD], but it’s actually a lot lower.”  He Sheng added, "Our family made less than 1,500 RMB [approx. $222 USD]."  Xibao, who was standing next to him, said, "Your family doesn’t have enough labor. Our family can earn 10,000 [approx. $1480 USD] a year!"

His family built a three-story "foreign house" in the front of the village facing the main road, a flat-roofed house with green bricks up to the roof.  There are no traditional tiles, but the roof has a circle of decorative glazed tiles. This is the standard "foreign house" in this area, and is completely different from traditional houses. The traditional houses have slanted roofs, without glazed tiles (which seem to be rare in the south), but eaves are added to the gables, the front is made of green bricks, the gables are painted white, and the frame of the house is made of wood. The standard layout inside the house is a hall in front, two side rooms, and a kitchen in the back. The front wall of the hall is dedicated to portraits of the ancestors, and there is a shrine in the corner, where incense is burned for the gods. Against the front wall there is a traditional square table 八仙桌, two chairs with backrests, and two benches.

Sitting on the benches requires a certain artfulness, because is the person at one end suddenly stands up, one end of the bench may rise up and the person at the other end could fall on the floor.  So whenever anyone gets up they have to remind their fellow benchmate to pay attention.  The layout of the house and the way the dining table is designed reflects the traditional hierarchy of elders and children. Although the new houses preserve some of the traditional practices, such as the ancestral pictures, the layout of the house is exactly like that of a townhouse in the city, which no longer reflects the status order but is more practical. One of the problems of the traditional houses is a lack of light, first because the windows are small and second because the attic blocks the light. The frame of the new houses is made of reinforced concrete, and the structure of the house lets in more light.　
　　
There are two or three new houses like this in the village, which stick out against the backdrop of dilapidated old houses. Uncle Nanchang asked Xibao how many people were in his family, and he answered that there were three. Uncle asked why three people needed such a big house.  Xibao laughed and said “that’s just how we live!! ”  It takes 50,000 to 60,000 RMB [approx. $7,410 to $8,900 USD] to build a house like this, which represents ten or more years of savings for a middle-class family. As in rural areas throughout the country, when people in my village have money, they build a house, even if the old house is still liveable. Our village is not that bad, and there are not that many new houses, but in my mother's village, which is the same kind of village from an administrative perspective, the problem is much worse.　　　
 
While we were chatting in the sun, my aunt and Juxiu got lunch ready. My uncle and I invited a few of the people chatting in the yard to join us. The rule in our village is that when someone invites you to eat, you can’t accept straight away, but instead have to wait for the host to insist. He Sheng, Torn Eyebrow, and Xibao were not much of a problem, and let themselves be talked into it pretty readily, but the old accountant kept refusing despite my efforts. I tried several times, and he kept backing away, to the point that I almost gave up, but seeing that he finally was not leaving, I made one more huge effort and finally got him to come in.  Everyone else had already eaten, so they just drank.

My uncle started complaining about the rapid growth of the population in the village. When he left home more than 50 years ago, there were only seven families in the village, but now there are 35 or 36 families and more than 100 people. The old accountant said that there are now 107 people participating in the land distribution, meaning an average of about one mu[6] of land per person. There are readjustments every five years, which messes up the previous arrangement and redistributes everything. This practice is obviously not in line with the spirit of the central government, and also contradicts the newly promulgated "Rural Land Contract Law."

Most of the people in the village do not rely on the village's land for income, except for side businesses such as raising pigs.  Most people rent land in nearby Xiajiang County to grow cash crops. As a result, the village land is more of a source of welfare than a major source of income. This is probably the reason why land is periodically redistributed. Not many people go to work in the coastal areas, but more than thirty young people have left the village over the years through further education, and two families have had all of their sons go to college. For a small village, this is a remarkable achievement. For villages like mine, a rural village in the middle of the country, going to school is still the best way for young people to leave the village.　　
 
After lunch I went for a walk around the village by myself. In the past, the village was clearly divided into two parts. On the east side was our branch of the family, which my uncle said had only four families in the early days; on the west side was another branch, which originally had only three families. In the middle of the east side of the village there is an assembly hall 议事厅 and an ancestral hall at the village edge. In front of the assembly hall is a wide alley, and on either side of the alley is where our families’ homes are. When I was living in the village, while there were more houses than when my uncle left 50 years ago, the basic pattern remained nonetheless the same.  This was toward the last gasp of the Cultural Revolution, when the ancestral hall had been taken over by the production team and used to keep cattle and pigs, and the assembly hall functioned as a warehouse.

Later, both the ancestral hall and the assembly hall were rebuilt, with money contributed by all of the families; although I was studying abroad at the time, my family donated 100 RMB [approx. $15 USD] on my behalf. So I wanted to see the assembly hall. But before I could even get to the hall, the appearance of the alley already disappointed me. In what used to be a clean and tidy alley there is now a sewage ditch, into which drips the foul water from the pig pens, and the water snakes across the open space and flows into the small lake in front of the village. It turns out that my cousin had turned a room next to our main house into a pigsty, which is the source of the sewage, and this room is right next to the alley. This sewage ditch is like a scar, which has changed the village beyond recognition, but the villagers turn a blind eye to it, and let it be. 

On the front wall of the assembly hall are three stone tablets with the names of the donors and the amount of their contributions engraved on them, including my name.   There are several banners hanging from the side walls, which were sent from other villages when the building was rebuild. The images on the banners are not only crude, but also completely off-topic, showing either sailboats or foreign landscapes, and one of the banners had a hole in it where a child had thrown a stone. It looks as if even the assembly hall has been restored, it has lost its past function. When I exited through the back door of the assembly, I saw the well that had always been there, but the same sewage was flowing around it. My cousin's wife who had come with me told me that the well water was no longer drinkable because of the sewage. The entire village smelled like a pig sty.  The smell made strolling around unpleasant, so I took a quick look at the ancestral hall and returned to our front courtyard.　　
 
There were still a few people there enjoying the sun, so I joined them and sat down on a bench. I asked why they couldn't build some underground drainage ditches to divert the dirty water from the pig pens outside the village. Cousin Jinbao replied, "That costs money! Who can afford it?" "But how much would it cost?” I asked.  “Five or six thousand RMB [approx. $740 to $890 USD] would be enough, right?" "That would cover the materials" was the answer. There are more than thirty families in the village, and each family would only need to contribute 150 or 160 RMB [approx. $23 USD] to get the money together. Given the income level of the village families, coming up with this small amount of money should not be difficult.

I figured there were two reasons for not doing it. One is that not many people care about the living environment; in the words of environmental economists, people are not very willing to pay for a good environment. If that's the case, it's truly a sad thing—the kind of sadness that comes from human nature being debased by economic interests. I prefer not to believe that this is a valid reason. As far as I can remember, the folks back home could put up with a lot, but they still acknowledged a basic need for cleanliness.  At least back then, the sewers flowed, the courtyard where they threshed the grain was smooth and level, and you could wash your clothes or your feet in the water from the pond.  Now, the sewage ditch snakes its way across the threshing ground and flows into the pond right by the dock, so who is going to wash their clothes there?

Perhaps another reason that makes more sense is the disorganization of the village. In the past, public affairs in the countryside were managed by the clans, and for a small village like ours, this type of organization was enough. During the People's Commune period, clan relationships completely disappeared, but the well-oiled production team system served as a substitute. In those days, the village was orderly, although no one particularly liked following the commands of the team leader, He Sheng. The team raised a few pigs each year, and although each pig weighed no more than a hundred catties,[7] there was still an annual get-together, and relations between neighbors seemed to be much better for it.

In the past twenty years, I have been back four times, and each time I felt that the villagers cared less about one another. Maybe this is because my childhood friends have all left the village, but I never truly accepted these changes, and always felt a vague sadness for the disintegration of the village social network. The village's public spirit was lost because of the loss of the local organization to which it was attached. This is the main reason why the village could not repair the sewers. Not only would such repairs require raising money, but each family would also have to contribute to the labor (in fact, labor was more important than getting the money together).

If we were living under the commune system, there would be no problem, because the village would have savings to cover the costs, and labor would be allocated from above, and hence would have been even less of a problem.  But now it is a big deal. If the new brigade head Torn Eyebrows were to attempt such a thing, he would have to convince all of the more than thirty families in the village, among whom there would certainly be some who would not be willing to contribute money or labor.  For example, people who don’t raise pigs would say “let the people who raise pigs contribute more.”　　
 
The consequence of the disorganization of the village is not merely that public works are not carried out, but also that the obvious encroachment on the public interest cannot be stopped. One family has not only built a three-story house in the open space by the lake, but also built a methane tank next to the house, the foundation of which sticks out into the lake.  The lake is the public property of the village, so how can individuals be allowed to privately encroach on it? I asked the person next to me if the methane tank had been approved by the village. He Sheng answered, “What permit?  They wanted to build it so they built it!”  Torn Eyebrows, the new brigade head, laughed along with him. 

This is very different from my memory of He Sheng. I remember in the spring of 1977, one of the packets of seed grain the team was soaking in the lake went missing, and He Sheng led some cadres to do a house-to-house search, and finally found what he was looking for in the pig trough of the only family in the village not surnamed Yao. This family had been vagrants prior to liberation and wandered into our village, and at first only lived in a side room in the ancestral hall. Because they had a politically correct family background, the husband of the family served for a time as team leader. Later on, they saved up their money, and built a decent house in the western end of the village. The wife of the family was stronger than other women in the village and could compete with the men, which earned her the nickname "strong woman 壮婆."  

Who would have believed that “strong woman’s” original vagrant character had not changed and she finally stole the team’s seed grain, an incident that occurred not long after they had built their new home. Her husband saw this as a great loss of face and cursed her up one side and down the other, and the team also fined her work points. But today, someone is blatantly encroaching on the village pond, and surprisingly, they are getting away with it. The family doing this is probably the richest in the village, because their son owns a feed mill. There are two more brothers in the family. The three brothers are very close, so they have a lot of power in the village. I could see this when I was a child. But at that time, because there was a production team, the family was too powerful to challenge the team.

Now it's different, and they can do whatever they want. And once there is a precedent, someone will follow suit. One family has already piled rocks on the open space between our house and the lake, and an old honey locust tree by the lake dock has been cut down; clearly they are going to build a house. My aunt said to me privately: "When my uncle was alive, he said that if anyone dared to build a house in front of our house, it would be over his dead body." Maybe this is why the people planning to build the house gave up on the idea. But the stones are still piled up there, and my uncle has died, so maybe they will build the house after all. The layout of the village has already changed because of the two buildings in front of the village, and if they build something else beside the dock, the village will look awful. When human desire breaks free from the constraints  of organization, it becomes the enemy of anything we can call civilization.
 
I decided to go see my uncle who lives in Liao Family village, very close to Hujiangbei.  I don’t know why, but in my memories of my hometown, everything is taller and wider than it appears to be now.  For example, I remember the houses as being tall and spacious, and the lake in front of our house as very big.  Now I see that the houses are quite squat, and the lake is just a pond.  The same is true for the road to Liao Family village.  When I was a child, I went to school in this village, and I felt like it was a long walk to and from the school every morning and afternoon.  This time, it took about five minutes. 

I knew that my uncle's family had built a new house by the road outside the village, so I went straight there. Arriving at the village, I found it much busier than before. The area was originally farmland between several natural villages, and there were no buildings except for the primary school by the road. Now the farmland is full of buildings and the natural villages have bled together, with an intersection with a few small stores at the center. I went into one of the stores and bought a bottle of liquor, and was about to buy some pork when my uncle appeared.  Probably someone had told him I was there.  My uncle is only ten years older than I am, but his hair is already gray. I felt a pang of sadness. My uncle used to be a handsome, happy-go-lucky kind of guy 风流潇洒. When I was in elementary school, my grandfather and grandmother were still alive, and my uncle was not yet married. He was good at playing the flute.

Once, I pestered to take me with him to the mountains to gather firewood. We hit the road after lunch, crossed the river on the ferry, and then headed for the mountains. I was so excited that I didn’t notice how far it was. After about two hours, my uncle said we were at the right place. I’ve been talking about “cutting” firewood, but in fact, it did not take much effort, because there were a lot of dead trees on the mountain, so we just we picked up the dry branches already on the ground, and in no time had collected two dan[8] of firewood.  My load was of course much smaller, less than a third of what my uncle had on his shoulder pole. I happily shouldered my load, but after a few steps it was too much for me. My uncle transferred some of my load to his, but the same thing happened again. By the time we got home, I was carrying just a small bundle of dried sticks.

Although this experience stunted my appetite for work, when I think of the scenery we saw along the way I still have a happy feeling.  I remember we stopped to rest on a hilltop and looked out over the farmland and houses spread out before us, with the Gan River further in the distance, floating by like a piece of white silk. Even then I got caught up in the beauty of the scene and temporarily forgot the hard work of collecting firewood. Later on my uncle got married. My aunt was very beautiful and treated me very well. When I saw her again this time, I found that she too had gray hair.

My uncle’s new house is behind several other houses and also has three stories, but they are only using the first floor at the moment. My cousin is renovating the second floor, and nothing is going on with the third floor. A while later, two of my cousins joined us. They are both quite beautiful, like their parents. I remember when I returned home in the early 1980s, they were five or six years old, and I took them down to the river to play. Now they are married and have children.　　
　
I was planning to have dinner at my uncle's house but I got a call on my cell, and it turned out that my aunt Genting's son, Jianhui, had gotten a car to take me and my Nanchang uncle to Shuibian town. Shuibian is the new county seat of Xiajiang, which is about ten kilometers away from where we live. Because the road to Shuibian passed through Liao Family village, Jianhui's car was waiting at the intersection.  So I promised my uncle to come for dinner the following night, and then I went to find the car. Both my aunt and my Nanchang uncle were in the car. The road to the national highway is a gravel road with lots of potholes, so it was slow going, but happily it was a short ride, and before long we were on the national highway.

My aunt pointed at something on the side of the road and said, “that’s your uncle’s grave.” Nowadays it is not easy to find burial land. My aunt told me that the land for my uncle's tomb was given by Nantou Village, which is also a village of people surnamed Yao, so they take care of other small family villages.  

There were basically no cars on the national highway, and in ten minutes we arrived at Shuibian town. Aunt Genting's husband works at the Shuibian Hospital, and the family used to live in the hospital courtyard, but now they have moved into a house next to the national highway. The house is part of complex built by several families, where they rent out the first floor, and live on the upper floors. You see this a lot in the south. My aunt's family also built two single-story structures behind the building.  One serves as a kitchen and dining room, and the other as a storage space. In fact, their house has ample space, so there was no good reason to build an extra, inconvenient kitchen, and they built the two structures just to occupy the space, so it will be available when they want to build a house later on.  Although Shuibian is a county town, the people who live there think just like the farmers in the surrounding villages.
 
After dinner, we went upstairs to my aunt Genting’s house to chat.  Her son Jianhui works for the county electricity board, so the family pays little for electricity, and at my aunt's house they use electricity for everything from cooking to heating. We sat around a powerful electric heater. The aunt that raised me was in a bad mood, and the first thing she said was "I've lived too long and have been a burden on the younger generations." She is seventy-six years old this year, which is not old, even in the countryside. I didn't know what was going on, but my Nanchang uncle interjected, saying "It's not you, it's the younger generations who treat you badly." It turned out that while I was visiting my other uncle's house in Liao Family village, my uncle's mother was bending my Nanchang uncle’s ear about family matters.

After her husband died, my aunt was left alone, and cousin Xiao San took over her kitchen and made it into a pigsty, so my aunt had to rig up a hot plate and cook in the hall.  My aunt let Xiao San plant her mu of land, and also gave him 150 RMB [approx. $22 USD] a year to buy grain to eat, but Xiao San still thought that he was the one taking care of her, and asked her to go up on the roof to dry his grain for him. Xiao San’s older brother had no real interactions with my aunt, but his wife still went out of her way to speak ill of her.  My aunt had been looking forward to me coming home to take care of this, and was constantly calling me her “little boy.” My Nanchang uncle tried to reason with her, saying: "Yang is back here just for a few days. You will have to get along with them even after he goes" Auntie sighed, saying: "How am I going to get along with them?"　　
 
I have always believed that the elderly in China are overly dependent on their children. This dependence is not necessarily material, but more likely to be psychological, such as wanting their children to come home often, or to come and take care of them when they are sick, etc. This is a sign of a lack of rationality. Maybe because of the era in which we live, this generation of elderly people overall lacks emotional support, so they always project their emotions onto their children and expect them to reciprocate. In many cases, their emotional outbursts only add to their children’s burdens, and often turn out to be harmful to the old people as well, as their children's responses may not meet their expectations.　　
 
However, I wasn’t going to tell this to my aunt when she told me her story.  For the most part, all I could do was to send her some money every year for living expenses, but she still had to rely on those cousins to take care of her day-to-day life. In rural areas, it is still unrealistic to talk about retirement homes, and I had not at all expected that one of the major things I would do when I returned to my village would be to send my aunt there!　　
 
This started on the morning of the second day of my visit.  Bright and early, my Nanchang uncle told me that aunt Genting told him last night that several of my aunt's nephews were thinking about sending my aunt to a retirement home. My aunt had three younger sisters, all of whom had passed away. But their sons were all very good to my aunt and knew that she was not happy at home, so they talked about paying to send my aunt there, but they did not dare to bring it up because they were afraid that my cousins would not agree.

Aunt Genting knew about it because she was in touch with them. But she thought it couldn't be done because people would say bad things about our family. When my Nanchang uncle heard this, he shot back, "What do you mean it can’t be done? I think this is a good idea. I came back with Yang this time in the hopes of resolving this problem." My Nanchang uncle is himself seventy-one years old. He said: "I can’t stop worrying about my sister-in-law. She and my brother lived their entire lives for other people. Now that my brother is gone, I want her to live out her remaining years in peace." I choked up when I heard this, and all my arguments about old people flew out the window.  All I wanted to do was to do right by my aunt.  Nanchang uncle then said to me: "Yang, you should take care of this. Can you afford it? It's nearly 5,000 RMB [approx. $740 USD] a year!"

I told him there was no problem, and knew my wife would agree with my decision. Setting my aunt up in a retirement home was also in line with my thoughts about the elderly and what is “rational.”  My fears were that my aunt would not agree, or that the cousins would be against it. At the breakfast table, I told my aunt about the idea and to my surprise she readily agreed. It turned out that her nephews had already asked her and she had already thought about it. The only thing left to do was to convince the cousins, and to find a suitable retirement home.　　
 
The plan was for the entire family to have lunch together that day. Before going back to Hujiangbei, we went to a farmer's market in Shuibian to do some shopping. Nanchang uncle insisted that we both pay 100 RMB [approx. $15 USD] each. Prices at the farmers' market were not cheap, and some items were even more expensive than in Nanchang or Beijing. When we asked, we learned that most of the goods here are brought in from Nanchang early in the morning. My aunt knew the place well and led us to the stalls of her acquaintances to make our purchases. Looking at the pleasure she took from this, I began to worry she might feel lonely at the retirement home.

Jianhui got another minivan from his work unit to take us and Aunt Genting’s family to Hujiangbei. Past the intersection in Liao Family village, the road was really bad, and I worried that the mini-van, with six or seven people in it, might flip over, so I offered to get out and go on foot. Juxiu and some of the other women were already there, and they got the things out of the van and started lunch preparations.  One of them instead decided to play with her niece, saying “thank you, thank you” to her in Mandarin.  This niece was born in the county town and is a city person, and older woman maybe thought that if she was taking care of this city person then she wouldn’t have to cook.　
 
I sat down with my uncle outside the door and talked to a few relatives who gathered around us. One of the young men is a professional pig farmer who has rented a site in a forest in the mountains where he raises more than 100 pigs. He slaughters his pigs at the age of four months, which means that he can produce more than 200 pigs a year. Business has been very good the last couple of years, with each pig bringing in about 100 RMB [approx. $15 USD]. He does not raise sows, but rents a truck three times a year to go to Henan or Anhui to buy piglets, because they are cheaper there, even with the shipping costs, so it is more cost-effective than buying local piglets.

Jiangxi is a big pig breeding province, and the price of local piglets is surprisingly high. The main place to sell pigs is Guangdong. The pig farmers do not sell the pigs directly, but first sell them to middlemen who then ship them to Guangdong to sell. The young man complained that the middlemen were making all the money. I asked him why he didn't become a middleman. He said, "Those guys have connections everywhere.  I don’t." It looks as if rural markets have matured well, with everyone playing fully to his comparative advantage.

What amazes me even more is that the supply chain for pork—from piglets to final consumption—spans half of China!   China's rural economy does not exist in isolated pockets like people often think, but is instead like the industrial economy, with links all over the place, so that everyone propers or fails together.  The booming pig industry in Jiangxi brings benefits to farmers in far-away Anhui and Henan, and if Jiangxi pigs don't sell, the income of farmers in Anhui and Henan will suffer as well.　　
 
Lunch was soon ready. In addition to our own family, we invited two elderly people from our clan, and there were three tables in all. Because we had made no decision on which retirement home she would go to, my uncle did not announce that my was going. He toasted everyone at all three tables. Uncle is of the older generation, and it is not proper that he toast the younger generations. His intention, which only I understood, was shut the cousins up before they had a chance to talk, so that they would not stand in the way when the announcement was made about my aunt.　　
 
After eating, I rushed over to my uncle's house in Liao Family village. I deliberately went through the old village. The old village was quiet, and except for the sound of old people talking behind closed doors, there was no sign of human life. Abandoning an old house to build a new house at the edge of the village is a common phenomenon in rural areas that are starting to develop. In more developed areas, old houses are usually rented to outside workers; in our village, the old houses are left empty. I walked quickly through the old village and saw that the small two-story building we used to use as a school was now lost amidst many new and old houses, although at the time the school was at the edge of the village.

The new village is right next to the old one. A pond that used to be at the edge of the village had been mostly filled in to build houses, and the water in what was left of the pond was filthy, with garbage everywhere along the shore and white plastic bags fluttering in the wind. In the past, household refuse did not contain chemicals, so it could be returned to the fields and used as fertilizer, but things are different now, and the chemical waste cannot be absorbed by the soil, so it has become a major hazard in rural areas. This is another aspect of the disorganization of the countryside. If public institutions were healthy, there would surely not be the scourge of garbage everywhere.　　
 
My cousin took care of the renovation of my uncle's new house in Liao Family village by himself. He had worked outside of the village for a long time and has seen the world, so his designs are quite good. We went upstairs together to the roof terrace and the whole village was in full view. Due to unbridled expansion, Liao Family village is now of a piece with the three small villages around it. I asked my cousin how they got the approval for the land on which the house was build, and my cousin said: "There’s no need for a permit.  Any family can build a house on their land, and if their land is too far from the village, they can swap with someone whose land is closer.”  

The land close to the village is good land, but it is used to build houses. Some people believe that this is an undesirable consequence of the current rural land system. Since farmers do not own the land and the land has to be redistributed every three or five years, no one cares about land use. There is some truth in this argument, as suggested by the quote “those who lack a constancy of goods lack a constancy of mind!”[9]  However, on second thought, if land were privatized, would we not see the same incidence of land occupation to build houses?  It seems to be that the urge to build houses is so great that private ownership of land might not necessarily serve as a deterrent. In Hujiangbei, my two cousins built their houses on their own land. These plots were originally planted with vegetables and were basically owned by the family, but the urge to build houses still swallowed them up.

If we say that the houses in Hujiangbei were built due to population pressure, then the new houses in Liao family village are the pure products of rising incomes. In urban areas, renovating the old parts of the cities requires a lot of moving people out and back in, a huge project that only the government can accomplish. Does the problem of renovating the old villages also exist in rural areas? From what I have seen, the answer is yes. However, in villages like my hometown, this problem cannot be solved because there is no organization with enough authority.　　　　　　　
 
After dinner at my uncle's house in Liao Family village, as planned, one of my aunt’s nephews, Wugeng, drove me and my uncle to my aunt Gengting’s house in Shuibian to discuss which retirement home my aunt would go to. Wugeng owns a rattan factory near the Xin’gan county town, and his business is pretty good. There is a retirement home right across the street from his factory, and he promised to go check it out. Aunt Genting said that there is a retirement home in Shuibian, run by Xiajiang County, which seemed to be well equipped, it might be worth a try.

I remembered that another of my aunt's nephews, Niangeng, had been part of the county leadership in Xiagang and might be able to help, so I gave him a call. Niangeng said that the Shuibian retirement home was for residents of Xiajiang County and only accepted seniors from there. But he promised to go to the County Civil Affairs Bureau the next morning and ask. Early the next morning, Niangeng called and said that the retirement home would now accept seniors from outside the county because the demand in the county had not been as great as expected. So after breakfast, Niangeng sent a car to pick up me and my Nanchang uncle so we could go check out the retirement home. The Xiagang county town was originally on the west side of the Gan River across from Shuibian, but because most of Xiagang is on the east side of the river and there are no bridges, the county town began to migrate to Shuibian in the early 1990s. More than a decade later, the new county town has become quite large.
 
The retirement home is nestled against a hill in the new county town.  There is a large courtyard and several European-style buildings painted pink, a color that is quite rare in our region. The courtyard is planted with grass, and there is a pond in the center with a veranda and a pavilion next to the pond. After two days in the filth of the countryside, I felt like I was in another world when I first entered the courtyard. We were greeted by a man and a woman, both young professionals, he the manager and she the accountant. They showed us the rooms upstairs and down, while at the same time pointing out that the mother of one of the county leaders was in this room, and a retired leader in that one.  Although the idea of retirement homes is not greatly accepted in our county, there are still some enlightened old people who have made their own choices to live there.

We finally chose a single room on the first floor. This room has a lot of natural light and is close to the dining room, which is only two doors down. The room was furnished like a hotel, with a TV and bathing facilities. The manager said, "Let the your aunt stay in a single room at first, and later once she gets to know people maybe she can share a room.”  We thought this was a good idea and were ready to sign the contract. The contract stated that there were three levels of care. Level 1 is when the elderly can basically take care of themselves and the nursing home provides some daily services; level 2 is when the elderly need some care but can get out of bed and engage in basic activities on their own; and level 3 is when the elderly are bedridden and need special care. Because my aunt is still in good health, we chose level 1. It was almost New Years, so we decided she would move in on the 19th, after the holiday.  The manager and accountant were very happy and politely escorted us off at the entrance of the home and did not go back inside until we started our car and drove away.　　
 
In the car, Niangeng talked about the past. His mother was the eldest of my aunt's four sisters. When he was a child, his family was poor and could not afford to pay for his education, so uncle and aunt took him to live in Hujiangbei and put him through high school. Uncle also taught him to use an abacus.  Uncle was illiterate, but he was very good with the abacus, and could even use both hands at once, which Niangeng learned as well.  Without the kindness of these two people Niangeng would not be what he is today.  Niangeng said: "I have every intention of repaying their kindness, so if you can’t take care of our aunt, then I will.”  Our Nanchang uncle added, "My brother [i.e., Auntie’s deceased husband] was Runtu in Lu Xun’s story.[10] When I was a child, I had to walk a long way to go to elementary school, and he was the one who always toted my bedroll for me." He also said to me, "Without your uncle, your father would never have been able to afford to go to school. In order to earn tuition for your father, your uncle walked to Suichuan to buy oil to resell. That's was more than 100 li!"[11] 　　
 
Having read Fei Xiaotong’s[12] 费孝通 (1910-2005) books, I understand that China is a kinship society. When Fei talked about kinship relations, it was more or less pejorative. According to his metaphor, each person's kinship relationship is like a circle of ripples in a pond, spreading out from the center where each individual is located, and the farther away you are, the lighter the trace you leave. When I lived in the countryside as a child, I only knew that there were many relatives and regarded visiting relatives as a joy; when I grew up and accepted Fei Xiaotong’s ideas, I developed a resistance to kinship.

This time when I returned to my hometown and saw all sort of relatives making arrangements for my aunt, I began to rethink the meaning of Chinese kinship. I believe in liberalism, but am by no means a Hayekian rights supremacist. My understanding of liberalism is positive liberalism, which is the pursuit of human freedom based on the preservation of society. The "preservation of society" means not only the maintenance of its structure, but also the humane protection of each component of society. In my past writings, I have vaguely felt that liberalism in this sense is linked to traditional Chinese humanistic concepts and social structures, but after returning to my hometown this time I came to a new understanding of this on a practical level.

Every society has its own unique traditions, but not every tradition is necessarily perfect. The British empiricist tradition makes the British pragmatic, but it also prevents them from thinking in a metaphysical manner, like the Germans; the German rational tradition has produced great philosophers, but it also makes the Germans dull; French romanticism can produce wild thinkers like Foucault who despise the world, but it often also makes France ineffectual; the Americans advocate individual freedom, which has created all kinds of social divisions.

In China, perhaps because the repression had continued for too long, once the Qing dynasty fell, the slogan of the May Fourth Movement was “down with Confucius,” and Lu Xun used a madman of his own creation to accuse China of being a “cannibalistic” society.[13]  Recognizing the danger of such radical slogans, Hu Shih 胡适 (1891-1962) and Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896-1950) began to "reorganize the national heritage."[14] Unfortunately, their “reorganization” stopped at the level of the classics, and they said little about China’s social structure.  

Liang Shuming[15] 梁漱溟 (1893-1988) went one step further than Hu Shih and company, not only defending Chinese traditions in terms of doctrine, but also understanding the importance of the social structure of the lower classes in preserving traditions, and therefore actively engaged in experiments in village governance, thus pioneering the combination of Chinese intellectuals and grassroots society. It is regrettable that these experiments were cut short because of the Japanese invasion.

However, the experiments themselves had their own limitations, most important among which was their effort to isolate the villages from society in order to realize a traditional agrarian order free from external damages. They did not realize that the villages had to be integrated into the outside commercial order, and that the rules of behavior of this outside world were often in conflict with the notions of the local society they promote. To put it more accurately, they failed to find something that would link traditional cultural values and modern commercial cultural values, to say nothing of the social structure that would support this linkage. In the 1930s, this may have been unimportant, but today this problem is unavoidable.　　
 
What I saw and heard during my three days back in the village reflects this. On the one hand, at the formal level, rural society is disintegrating due to disorganization; on the other hand, the disintegration of formal structures has highlighted the role of informal structures, and blood and kinship have once again become important ties that sustain the existence of society. If traditional values are still embodied in rural grassroots society, the sole vehicle of these values is kinship. The task facing village governance today, as I see it, is to find a new form of organization that will link traditional values and modern democratic concepts. 
　　
Epilogue
  
The afternoon we signed the contract for my aunt, my Nanchang uncle and I went back to Hujiangbei and announced the decision to the whole family. My uncle said, "This is a good thing, and she can enjoy a happy life." However, he started crying and got all choked up, so he left the house to go down to the lake by himself.   That an old person who has taken care of their lot of descendants cannot get old and die at home is nothing to celebrate for Chinese people.  In the countryside, it is an even greater loss of face for the descendants.  That said, the cousins did not object. I was relieved, but like my uncle, I was choked up and I couldn't speak. Looking around the old house, I understood that once my aunt was in the retirement home, I would never come back here again. Maybe in a few years, my cousins will knock the house down and build something new, and my connection with my hometown will be broken.　　
 
When I returned to the city, my village became a memory yet again.  But I knew that there was one old person back there constantly thinking of me. Her thoughts became the thread linking my dreams to her reality. I urgently remitted the annual fees for my aunt's year-long stay in the retirement home, and urgently waited for news that she had moved in, but all I got was a phone call from my aunt saying she wasn't going. She said that the cousins and Juxiu had advised her not to go, because she shouldn’t be spending my money. I understood that this is their fear of what other people will say, and I tried to reason with my aunt on the phone for a long time, and then called Niangeng and asked him to do the same. Finally, on the day she was meant to move in, I called Niangeng again and learned that he had already taken her over there.

​However, after less than two months, my aunt called and said that she could not get used to it, first because the food was not good, and second because she developed a rash on her skin.  The old house did not have a concrete floor and was rather humid, which is what she was used to, and she was uncomfortable in the drier environment. She said she wanted to go home. I knew that besides not being used to things, the bigger problem for my aunt was loneliness, so I had to agree and let Niangeng take her back home. It would seem that for retirement homes to work in rural China, we need not only a social effort, but the old people have to make an emotional effort as well.

Notes

[1]姚洋, “回乡三日,” original draft finished on March 19, 2004, revised version (with pictures) published on Sohu on April 4, 2019 and on Aisixiang on April 6, 2019.

[2]Translator’s note:  What Yao Yang actually says is “Uncle Nanchang/南昌伯父,” but I assume this is not his name, and instead a way of saying “my uncle who lives in Nanchang” or “my Nanchang uncle.”   

[3]Translator’s note:  In another essay, we learn that after the execution of the great-uncle who had joined the Chinese Communist Party, his young widow fled the village to avoid retaliation, and her young son died as she was escaping.  Yao Yang’s father was the biological son of the oldest great-uncle, but was adopted by the widow of the younger so as to continue the family line.

[4]Translator’s note:  The expression Yao uses is 未出五服的亲戚, which means “relatives within the five degrees of kinship distance that regulate mourning customs.”

[5]Translator’s note:  The term Yao uses is gongong/公公, which is what children call any “older” relative.  In other parts of China, he might have been called shushu/叔叔, which means “uncle.”

[6]Translator’s note:  One mu/亩 is approximately 1/6 of an acre.

[7]Translator’s note:  One hundred catties is the rough equivalent of 60 kilograms or 130 pounds.

[8]Translator’s note:  A dan/担 can mean either a unit of weight equivalent to 100 jin (roughly 50 kilos), or the proper amount of something to be attached to a shoulder pole.  Clearly the two meanings overlap.

[9]Translator’s note:  This is a quote from Mencius, see Robert Eno, Mencius, an Online Teaching Translation, p. 56.  The longer quote is:  “The dao that pertains to the common people is that those who have a constant sufficiency of goods will have a constancy of mind, while those who lack a constancy of goods lack a constancy of mind. Without any constancy of mind, they will abandon themselves to strange behavior and excesses; there will be nothing they are unwilling to do.”  My impression is that this is sometimes taken as a Confucian endorsement of private property.

[10]Translator’s note:  The reference is to Lu Xun’s story, “My Old Home,” in which the narrator returns to his native village from his job in the cities, and encounters his childhood friend Runtu.  The narrator was from a wealthier family and eventually left the village, while Runtu was from a poor peasant family, but through their friendship, the narrator learned about the pleasures of country life.

[11]Translator’s note:  One hundred li/里 is roughly 50 kilometers or 30 miles.

[12]Translator’s note:  Fei Xiaotong is widely seen as the founder of Chinese sociology, and wrote many influential books about rural society.

[13]Translator’s note:  The reference here is to Lu Xun’s famous story “Diary of a Madman,” where the narrator, something of an iconoclast who has been away from the village, has a crisis on returning home and imagines that his fellow villagers are planning to eat him.

[14]Translator’s note:  Hu Shi and Fu Sinian were major figures in the May Fourth/New Culture Movement, and among other things sought to reread Chinese history is such a way as to reduce the impact centuries of Confucian ideology.

[15]Translator’s note:  Liang Shuming was a prominent philosopher and public intellectual in the Republic period, and was also involved in efforts to reconstruct rural Chinese society, which is what Yao Yang is referring to here.