Blog

Meihua lies in the mountains on the border between Guangdong and Hunan provinces. It looks like a small village, but it crawls and winds its way up valleys and around stream beds, so it balloons outward into a much larger city than you would expect. Rice fields and vegetable plots surround it wherever sharply rising hills prevent Meihua’s expansion. While wandering around these fields, Adam and I saw a woman harvesting sweet potatoes. We at Fueledbyrice have always felt a special connection with sweet potatoes, alternately known in the North and South of China as digua and hongshu respectively, and lacking many chances to speak with people other than restaurateurs and innkeepers, we decided to approach her.

The woman, who seeemed to be about 40, wore a concave woven straw hat of the the sort widely associated with Southeast Asian rice farmers, a white, long-sleeved well-worn shirt, black trousers and pink plastic shoes. She didn’t look up as we approached, but continued digging. We said hello, and she shyly smiled and returned our greeting. She slowly stood up, and politely inquired if we were here touring. “Yes,” I said, “we’re doing a bike trip. This area is quite beautiful.” “But, this area isn’t very fun,” she protested, and gesturing to the road, said “it’s dusty and dirty.”

We inquired about the tubers she was harvesting as she pryed the last few out of the ground and threw them into her shoulder-pole baskets. They were indeed hongshu. Then hesitantly, looking at us out of the corner of her eye, she queried “Are you foreigners?” We confessed that yes, we were.

She also gathered up the leaves from the sweet potato plants and threw them into her baskets. In Hunan, farmers feed these greens to their pigs, so I asked her if they did the same in Guangdong, but it didn’t translate very well. “Are you asking me how many children I have? asked the lady, whose name was Qiu. That question was in a much more interesting question, so I said yes. “I have four,” she said. “That’s great,” we rejoined. “No,” she said, laughing “it’s awful.” I couldn’t quite catch her response to my question why.

She finished gathering up the leaves and tossed them into her baskets. “Do you want some sweet potatoes?” she asked us. “Oh no,” we responded, “we’ve just eaten, we’re quite full.” “Ah, but these sweet potatoes are great, they’re very delicious,” she reached into her basket and rummaged around, bringing out 2 huge sweet potatoes. We felt we could do nothing but accept them graciously. “Here,” said Ms. Qiu, reaching again into her basket and grabbing two more huge sweet potatoes from among the many small ones, “give some to your friends too.”

Before she left, I asked if I could get a picture with her. “Eh, why do you want a picture with me?” she resisted, “I’m nothing great to look at. I’m wearing this hat. It looks terrible.” “No,” I tried to reassure her, “it’s a great hat.” “Look,” I continued, pointing at Adam’s baseball cap, “he wears a hat too. No problem.” I cajoled her into taking a picture the same way she cajoled me into taking her hongshu.

Finally it was time to go. She collected her hoe, slipped her shoulder pole underneath the handles on her baskets and hefted them up. They must have weighed about fifty pounds, but she maneuvered through the fields and back to the road easily. We walked with her a ways. She rotated the pole around her shoulders to keep the weight from resting on one spot or to make room for dump trucks full of school children trying to pass. She reached her turnoff, we bade her good-bye, and that was that.

Because of her wide smile and quiet jokes, Ms. Qiu will stand out in my mind when I reflect back on my reactions with Chinese farmers. However, she is also a good example of the huge demographic known as the “Chinese peasant”. Despite their relative lack of means, their position on the lower side of the increasingly huge wealth gap in China, and their very hard lives, Chinese farmers are some of the most friendly and hospitable people I know of.

Around China migrant laborers, who are almost always farmers trying to make more money by coming to the city and working construction, get a bad rap. City dwellers often cautioned me against interacting too much with the supposedly criminally disposed migrant workers. However, I find the people at the lower end of the income scale to be some of the most hospitable in all of China. Perhaps it’s because they don’t have much to do, or perhaps it’s because they don’t have money to worry about spending. Or perhaps it’s just because their lack of possessions leave them better able to see other people as humans. Whatever the reason, my interaction with Ms. Qiu will remind me to slow down and treat people as people with respect and not as obstacles. At least so long as I’m in the country-side.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Jim's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.