Jonathan Xavier Weinert 2008

"My Spring Festival in the Sticks"

Feb 15, 2006: Recently I had an eye-opening experience in learning about Chinese society. Spring Festival began Jan 29th, so I visited two of my classmates’ homes in some of the lesser-known parts of China. I’ve been here for 6 months now, but this was the first time I’ve actually been able to experience how average Chinese families LIVE day to day. These observations will show you a slice of life in China that’s much more prevalent than what I’ve been accustomed to seeing in the more affluent Shanghai. These are the people who are rising to the middle-class and who are going to make the biggest difference in China’s energy use over the next 30 years. The two most surprising discoveries I made were 1) how much energy they DON’T use, and 2) how much the environment is neglected.

First, let me describe to you how an average rural Chinese family lives.

The Lu Family, Shanghai Countryside:
The Lu's live in a small village about 50 km from downtown Shanghai. This area 10 years ago was completely rural, but small and large factories are starting to dot the scenery. While years ago, they farmed the gov’t owned fields in front of their home, the fields are now barren and the father is a general laborer in a 30-person plant that makes air conditioners. He makes $0.75/hr; much better than in the old days. The mother is a house-wife. Both have only primary school education. Their daughter lives a comfortable life in the city, and their son attends graduate school at Tongji. He is the only one of all his classmates from this town to go on to college.

The House
It’s surprisingly large (about the size of an average home in America) but very basic: on the first floor, there is very little furniture besides the kitchen table with four benches and a cabinet for storing food; upstairs, each room has a bed and a chair or two. My classmate’s room is barren, except for a bed, desk, a bookshelf (full of books), and some magazine cut-outs taped to the wall of…naturally… cars! The house is not heated at all, and there is no hot water heater for showers. At night, the temperature can fall below freezing but generally during the winter it in the 40-50’s. The floors downstairs are cement and there’s a handy well in one room to gather water to hand-wash clothes. Oh, and they have a live-in pet rooster which I only learned about AFTER it scared the bejesus out of me late one night when I went to take a wiz.

Dinner
As dinner time approached on my first night, they fired up the stove, literally! They brought in a big bundle of straw and wood and got a nice fire going to heat the woks directly above. We gathered around the dinner table in our winter jackets to prepare for the feast, (which was wonderful!). Afterwards, we stored the left-overs in the cupboard to sit…until breakfast the next day when we would re-eat what we didn’t finish the night before (along with some new additions). The leftovers were recycled like this for all three days at each meal, even the fish!

We sat around the table, drank tea, and chatted the rest of the night. At one point, the family started laughing. Not understanding a lick of their local dialect, I inquired. “My parents were just reminiscing on how tough life used to be before, and how during Spring Festival, they didn’t have nearly this many dishes to eat when we were growing up.” During those times, there was very little to eat. Way back during the father’s childhood, the kids often went hungry.

A Riddle: What’s long, wet, and you throw your trash in it?
My classmate collected the rubbish from dinner and the day, stuffed it in a plastic bag and went outside. “Where do you put your trash?”, I asked, since I didn’t see any rubbish bins outside. “We just toss it in the river (behind the house),” he replied, to my shock. “When the chemical companies came into town, they totally polluted the river. The river’s completely useless now, so we just throw our trash there.” This is the river he used to swim in as a child only 10 years ago. While he is deeply aware of the chemical pollution problem in his town, he also sees no problem dumping his trash in the river (and he is among the top <0.1% most-educated citizens).

I delved a little deeper into the whole factory pollution mess with my classmate. Basically, the people around town have no idea that this pollution is harmful to their health; they just think it smells bad. As I strolled past a number of houses in these villages, I saw more of the same trash piling up in front and behind houses. It’s not at all surprising that the factory spews their pollution into the river considering that everyone has the same habit of dispersing their waste directly outside their property line. I’m sure back in the father’s days when they didn’t have plastic bags and instant-noodle wrappers it was not such a problem, but while waste content has changed, behavior has not.

It seems that for a lot of people here, “wastebasket” is defined as: “(n): any ground-area outside your immediate space”. This idea is everywhere: On the train, where the man in front of me tossed his empty can into the aisleway; on the bus, where the girl next to me BARFED in the aisleway and nobody even flinched; the salon owner who sweeps the freshly cut hair of his customer out into the sidewalk in front.

Bedtime
They then informed me that it was time to get ready for bed. “I hope you don’t mind, but since we don’t have hot water, we just wash our face and feet each night,” the sister told me. During winter, they go into town to shower at the public facility…once per week. We all got our own little plastic basin, a towel, and a very small amount of hot water, just enough to do the trick. (by the way, this is exactly the same procedure I followed at my other friend’s home in the city.) The steamy hot water was surprisingly refreshing, actually! I climbed into bed that night fully decked in two layers of thermals, giggling a bit as I saw my breath fog up, trying to think back on how long it’s been since I could see my own breath before falling asleep.