Barbarian Lost (11 page)

In the new configuration, Li's village, for instance, is not an unknown speck left to its own devices, as it was a century ago, nor is it expected to produce new and improved kinds of humans, as Mao perhaps might have hoped. The different layers of Chinese government have brought electricity and telecommunications wires to Li's village. They broadcast television and mobile phone signals to it. They truck in drinking water for the people in times of need. Eventually, the Chinese will build a proper road to the village, to make it easier to deliver water and simpler to extract the fruits of the land. Increasingly guided by an invisible hand, China reaches into its bosom, both taking and giving, becoming more united than ever before.

Deng also relinquished Mao's obsession with self-sufficiency. Deng reasoned that China does not need to answer every one of its many needs; it can focus on what it does best and trade for the rest. Such a trade economy became plausible when relations were normalized with the West in the early 1970s. With proper management, Deng calculated, China's immense labour pool could form the basis of a manufacturing economy aimed at the export market.

Four decades into Deng's gambit, he has been proven right: those things that China is lacking, like food, raw materials and energy, are largely made up for by the manufactured products it sells on the world market.

Although Deng started liberalizing the economy in the villages by allowing farmers to trade their surplus produce, the massive wealth in the new China stems more from urban industry than agricultural labour. China has perhaps not turned its back on its age-old agricultural sector, but in most places it now almost seems as though farming is an outlet for surplus labour not used
in the factories—like in Li's village, where only the middle-aged and elderly remain to tend to the crops, while the young and able toil in the manufacturing centres.

Yet because much of the manufacturing labour is derived from the villages, wealth is not trapped in the cities but trickles down to the villages. Li and his hundred million brethren send a portion of their income back to their dependents in the villages.

This distribution of wealth is further enforced by the dual residency system. The situation in Chongqing is unique in that, technically, the peasants of Li's village are inhabitants of the municipality of Chongqing and are allowed to work and reside in the city. But in most of China, village dwellers are not allowed to reside in the cities. They cannot legally pay rent or make real estate purchases there and are thus denied a major outlet for their income. If they want to save or invest their earnings, migrant workers are forced to do so in their villages.

That evening, Viv and I are to be Li's guests. He has gone all out for dinner. His tiny table surely hasn't seen a spread like this in a long time: roast duck with scallions, candied pork meat, vegetable broth, mushrooms with ginger, two types of sautéed greens and rice. Wisely, Li has invited the local party secretary and his wife to dine with us.

A more surprising guest also shows up at the feast: the rough chap from the afternoon's dramatic argument, who turns out to be the village butcher and holds a station of some prominence. The heated disagreement with the farmer seems to have had little impact on him. He now cuts a rather merry figure. Li explains that the butcher will be hosting me that night, while Viv will
spend the night with Li's mother in the house next to his. I look to the butcher and he is beaming, enthused by the chance to show hospitality to a stranger from halfway across the planet.

The party secretary is eager to know more about Viv and me. Viv answers most of the questions. She explains that I'm a tourist on vacation and that I've hired her to be my guide and translator. The whole story sounds outlandish to me. But somehow Viv manages to explain it to him in a satisfactory way. Still, the party secretary wants to hear me speak.

“What do you do in your home country?” he asks.

As she translates Viv cautions me to make something up. But she catches me off guard and I draw a blank. I finally just blurt out that I'm a television producer. Not exactly a lie, and not exactly helpful either. I should have seized the opportunity to finally become an architect à la George Costanza. Viv makes sure to add that I produce a show on art and culture in my country, something as remote as possible from news and journalism.

“Is this your first time in China?” the secretary asks.

“Say yes,” Viv urges. I do.

“Where else have you been in the world?” the man then inquires.

“Oh, I have been to many places, in Europe, Asia and Africa,” I tell him, unwilling to continue lying.
“I
've travelled a lot.”

“And what do you think of China?”

“It's simply immense,” I say, quite sincerely. “I could travel in China for the rest of my life and not see the half of it.”

The party secretary seems to appreciate my somewhat empty answer, which combines both awe and humility. Having won his favour, I try my luck at a flattering line of inquiry. “Has this village produced many university students?”

“Oh yes, nearly a dozen. Our own son is currently studying at a university.”

“Congratulations,” I say. “I see a good future for this village.”

The meal ends pleasantly. The party secretary and his wife take their leave, uttering good wishes to Viv and me. The butcher also heads home. We sit around with Li, drinking tea. Out of the blue, Li says, “I know I'm poor and will probably not achieve much in my life, but I look at the things I have, my wife and my daughter, and you know what? I'm happy. I do not want anything else. I already have all that I'll ever need.”

Viv and I look at each other in amazement. This Li Gang really is a unique individual. A free man, perhaps? We are almost envious of him.

My sleepover at the butcher's house turns out to be amusing. The butcher is really a jolly fellow. He's also a better example of village prosperity than Li is. His home serves as a meeting spot for the village, or bar, or mah-jong parlour. The house is relatively big, two storeys high and built out of cement blocks. A large room on the ground floor opens to the street, similar to a garage or mechanic's bay. It's filled with tables and chairs.

When I arrive, the last of the day's mah-jong players are just exiting. A huge television is at the back of the room. The butcher proudly shows me that it's connected to a satellite dish. He flips through the channels, beaming a huge toothless grin at me. Ten channels from India, four from Pakistan, eleven from Arabia, twenty from Europe, and so on. He hands me the remote, and I settle on francophone TV5 and learn of ever more deaths in Iraq.

I notice how incredibly filthy the butcher's parlour is. Impressively filthy, really. Dried earth and spittle are caked on the cement floor, which is littered with cigarette butts and chicken bones,
speckled with bloodstains and tea leaves. As I soak it all up, two immense flying cockroaches dive-bomb into the room and hit the floor near my feet.

The butcher rouses me from this poignant spectacle and urges me to follow him. He takes me to the back of the house, where he keeps the pigs. Although the smell of swine dung permeates the building, the concentration of it in the kitchen and in the swine's room just off the kitchen is a showstopper. Three pigs are rummaging away in the darkness. Through a series of gestures, the butcher manages to explain to me that he will slaughter the pigs at four-thirty in the morning. He invites me to watch him. I have seen the slaughter of pigs before; it's quite a spectacle. The pig is one of those animals that somehow has a sense of its impending death. It squeals bloody murder. With a bow and upstretched palms, I indicate to him that I'll pass. Waking up before dawn to witness the last wretched moments of a few pigs is an experience that I can do without.

The butcher then leads me to my bedroom. The room is not actually connected to the other rooms of the house; we access it from outside. Crowded into the room are a huge roofed bed and and an immense basket of unhusked rice. The basket must be a metre and a half across by a metre high. It's overflowing with grain.

The bed is without mattress or sheets. It is just wood slats covered with a straw mat. In Beijing, Viv and I had decided to leave our sleeping bags behind. “Even in the villages,” she inaccurately predicted, “there'll be bedding for us.” For warmth, I roll myself up in the straw mat like a burrito. The pillow is a cylindrical coil of hard plastic slats to be placed under the crook of the neck.

Sure enough, in the dead of night, I'm woken by the blood-curdling screams of about-to-be murdered swine. Then, through
the wee hours, I drift in and out of consciousness, my struggle to sleep exacerbated by the rambunctious activities of a couple of rats. Not far from my head, somewhere on top of the pile of rice, they're chomping away. They sound like someone noisily eating popcorn at the movies. I don't bother taking a look. I silently enter a pact of mutual non-aggression with them and try to stick to the mantra that, while travelling, any night not spent fearing for one's life or nursing a troubled bowel or an infectious fever is a blessing.

In the morning I drop in on the butcher, who is happily hacking away at the pig carcasses splayed on the tables of the mah-jong parlour. I give him a smile and a bow, then head toward Li's house.

Viv is already awake, drinking tea on the doorstep. She tells me that Li's mother was talkative. “Remember yesterday when the children came back from school and a young boy sat on Li Gang's stoop doing his homework? Well, last night before going to bed, Li's mother explained to me that the boy was her youngest brother's son and Li's cousin. The old woman's brother had abducted a wife from Yunnan Province, to the south. But soon after giving birth, the young woman fled back to her people. The boy's father then went to work in some distant city to make money to support the boy and pay for his education. So Li Gang and his mother's family took responsibility for the care of this home-alone boy.”

“That's pretty amazing!”

“It's actually fairly common in the Chinese countryside. Because the country people want sons to look after them in their old age, they have been getting rid of female babies by abortion or even sometimes after birth. As a result, there are not enough women to go around. So it's not unheard of that women are abducted or purchased from poor places all over the country.”

The night before, Li had proposed that we return to Chongqing
a different way than we had come. It was unclear what he had in mind, but I made out that the journey involved a boat. I enthusiastically agreed.

After a quick breakfast, we set out toward the gorge. We descend deep into it. As we climb down the steep path through the morning mist, I make out what looks like a lake at the bottom. Li tells me that it's a reservoir. The night before he had called the boatman on his cell phone and told him to meet us at our end of the reservoir at 8 a.m. I see neither boat nor boatman on the shore. We skip stones as we wait. Li says that the reservoir was hand-hewn in the 1950s. “It took a thousand men a few years, but they managed,” he says. It's hard to imagine. The vegetation on the banks also indicates that the reservoir hasn't been at its maximum level in years.

Finally, Li phones the boatman. The boatman is still in bed, badly hungover, but his wife is on her way. Sure enough, before long I make out the flutter of her oars in the distance. She rows fast, standing up, facing backwards, making huge sweeping motions with the oars. Soon the woman has reached the shore.

It takes us a good half-hour to cross the reservoir. We emerge from the gorge into a larger basin. Along the shore, I make out fish and duck farms. The boatwoman tells us her story. The central government has a reforestation program. Her farm was designated as an area to be replanted with trees and expropriated. The government pays her a meagre allowance of the equivalent of sixty dollars a year in compensation. To survive she needs to supplement her income with what she and her husband make by running the skiff across the lake.

Our destination is a town built alongside the reservoir's dam. As the boat glides along, I can see that the water is clearly low:
the base is just nine metres down from the surface of the water. It isn't obvious what purpose the man-made lake serves. With all the livestock around its banks, it's hard to imagine it a source of drinking water. Nor can I see any irrigation works drawing water from it for agricultural use. Perched way up above the reservoir, Li's village surely could not depend on it for water. In fact, the surrounding countryside is far too vast and dry to be properly watered by the reservoir. I conclude that it was probably some kind of make-work project and really only serves as an emergency reserve that waters the immediate vegetable gardens around its banks and provides a supply of fish. Perhaps there is a small electrical plant as well, hidden on the other side of the dam.

It's market day in the town. Dozens of pigs are on the banks of the reservoir, waiting to be purchased. We climb up to the main street, which is packed with vendors. Li takes off to charter a local car.

We first travel south toward the mighty Yangtze and then stop to visit an ancient Buddhist temple built into the cliffs high above the great river's banks. Sheltered within the temple's ancient wooden roofs is a gigantic Buddha carved into the stone. We pay our respects, ponder possible ways toward enlightenment, then grab a bus to continue onward.

Back in Chongqing, the bus drops us at a big station along the river. To get to the upper city, Li guides us toward an interesting feature of this immense and bizarre metropolis: the world's longest escalator. The moving staircase proceeds from the lower city right up onto a high ridge running through the upper city. Once at the top of the ridge, it's time for Viv and me to take our leave from our wise friend Li Gang.

I prepare a hundred dollars' worth of local currency to give
to Li for all his troubles. But with a bow, Li swiftly takes his leave without even considering the payment. I have to stop him and make him accept the money, which he does with great reluctance.