Going to the countryside

I built a close relationship with one of the migrant families living in Old Nanjing this semester. The Li family has been incredibly welcoming and friendly to me—sometimes overly so—since I moved to Old Nanjing. Every time I walk by her kabob cart, Auntie Li tries to give me food. I’ve long since given up on trying to give her money for the food she gives me. This has actually caused a major headache for me (I know, poor me, right?) because the neighbors told me I should not accept any food from her because she’s just being polite. The best excuse is to say I’ve already eaten and I’m so full that I can’t eat another bit (chi bu xia) or to say that I’m on a diet. The reason this is a problem is because I like to sit with Auntie Li by her cart to chat with her and collect some observations. But if I do this, she inevitably will fry up some food and give it to me, saying, “Well, I’ve already fried it, now you have to take it!” which I feel really bad about.

The Li family is one of the poorest families in the neighborhood. Auntie Li and her 16-year old daughter, Li Jun, live there permanently, and various cousins, aunts, and uncles on the mother’s side (the father is out of the picture), cycle through the home to help out with the kabobs at various parts of the year, according to how much agricultural work needs to be done back in the countryside at home. Auntie Li sells kabobs during the school year, from September to June, and then takes a break during the summer holiday.

Ever since January, they have been telling me that I should go back to their hometown in the countryside with Li Jun during the summer break. I thought that they were just being polite, but they were really excited and insistent about it, telling me how beautiful their hometown is and how good the air is. Li Jun ended up enrolling in a summer study abroad program to Korea through her school (the fact that this is a waste of money is talked about frequently in the family), and she is leaving right after her final exams in June, so we decided to go this past weekend. This was a very special trip for me for many reasons, one being that I'd never visited a friend in the countryside before. All of my other Chinese friends from the countryside are too embarrassed to take me back home, insisting that I would not be able to handle the "poor" conditions, so I was thrilled that the Li family was more than welcoming. I've been to the countryside in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Gansu before, but each time was with a group of other American students and staying in hotels, so the experiences weren't nearly as authentic as the one I had this weekend (I love the fact that after two years in China, I still continue to have new and exciting experiences).

On Friday we took a bus to Northern Jiangsu Province (苏北), to the city of Sihong 泗洪, an agricultural town located in what is the poorest county of Jiangsu. I thought I was dressing appropriately by wearing my old tennis shoes with shorts and a T-shirt. 16-year old Little Sister Li Jun showed up in leopard print leggings, black high heels, blue contact lenses, fake eyelashes, and fake eyelids. Being that she is currently in beauty school, she applied the eyelids expertly and you can hardly tell that they are fake ones.

Side note: Chinese women (and, as I’ve heard, other East Asian women) think that having eyelids is the most beautiful thing ever. When I first heard of this phenomenon, I was confused. “Um, Chinese women have eyelids!” I thought. I never noticed a difference before in the eyelids. But they actually don’t have the same crease that most other races have around the world, the crease where you usually apply eye shadow. Chinese women call the creased eyelids "double eyelids" and the eyelids without a crease "monolids." They often get plastic surgery that reconstructs their eye such that they get the crease, but until then, they wear fake eyelids, a hard piece of adhesive that forces their eye to crease right above the eyelashes. I just did a quick Google search on "double eyelids" and came up with an Asian girl's blog on how to apply fake eyelids. Here are some images too, in case you're like me and having trouble imagining this.

This is what single eyelids look like

This is a double eyelid on an Asian woman

This is what an advertisement for fake eyelids looks like

This is an advertisement for fake eyelid surgery

 Common compliment: "AH, your double eyelids are so pretty." My response: "Uh, thanks, I grow them myself?" 

Li Jun’s face looked unusually red and I can see her veins. I asked her about it and she said that she’s slightly allergic to the blue contact lenses and it causes her to break out a little bit on her face. “These contact lenses actually aren’t very good for me, so I try not to wear them too much.”

Luckily for me, I already have eyelids and blue eyes and I applied a bit of mascara, so I didn't feel too out of place, though Li Jun scolded me for wearing too little and said I was going to catch a cold. It was 80 degrees that day. I’m not kidding. I looked around. No one else was wearing shorts. I wondered how they weren't dying of heat stroke. 

Anyway, we took the public bus to the long distance bus station, chatting about Li Jun’s 2-day old relationship the entire way (she’s already practically planning the wedding). When we got off the public bus, we decided to take the cheaper route by taking an illegal bus. As we walked down the street, people selling the tickets for the illegal busses asked us where we were going and Li Jun bargained down the price for two seats on a bus. The woman selling us the tickets ensured us she didn’t cheat us because she’s also a native of Sihong (because if Li Jun wasn’t from Sihong it would have been okay to cheat us?), which can be easily proven on both sides by speaking in the dialect. She took us to where a group of about 10 people were waiting, and from there we walked a couple blocks to the side of the road, where we waited for about 30 minutes for the bus.

While we were waiting, a man asked us what country we’re from (Li Jun has unusually large eyes, even bigger than mine, and with her blue contacts, fake eyelashes and fake eyelids, she can easily pass for a foreigner). We laughed and I say I’m from America and Li Jun says she’s a Nanjinger. Later I asked her why she didn’t say she was from Sihong. “Oh, I consider myself a Nanjinger because I have a Nanjing hukou [household registration]. I lived here since I was five, so I basically am a Nanjinger. I don’t consider myself from the countryside.” Many Chinese people define their place-based identity on their hukou, which gives the government the power of defining your hometown origins. Li Jun related that she is often mistaken for a Korean.

By the time the bus arrived, our group had grown to about twenty people. There was a mad rush to the front, during which about 10 or so men pushed and shoved to get on the bus first, while the 10 or so women struggled to get to the front. I asked Li Jun what the rush was, and she said they were fighting to get a seat. The bus ticket handler screamed at them to settle down, but they pushed and shoved until everyone got on the bus. We all soon realized that there were never any seats to begin with, that the bus was already full. We were all cheated, but it should have been expected.

We realized we would be sitting in the aisle on mini plastic stools all the way to Sihong. Li Jun apologized and looked embarrassed, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize it was going to be like this.” I told her it was fine. I sat down and got comfortable reading a magazine. The stool wasn’t too bad and Li Jun and I are happy that we can sit together.

A few minutes later, the bus attendant pointed to me. Out of twenty other Chinese people, they picked the foreigner for the one empty seat in the front of the bus. I was confused and everyone was staring and Li Jun was telling me to go up there so I did. The bus attendant gave me her seat at the front of the bus next to the bus driver. I have no doubt it was because I’m a foreigner but I still don’t understand why. It must be a mix of embarrassment and shame and concern that I’ll call the police or otherwise report to the authorities that I didn’t have a seat on the bus. Regardless, I was thoroughly embarrassed for the special treatment, but the bus attendant insisted. Li Jun was left on a stool in the aisle.

When we arrived in Sihong, Li Jun’s uncle picked us up in his car to take us to his hometown in Sixian in the neighboring Anhui province, about a 30-minute drive away from Sihong. To make the drive worth it, he picked up 5 other girls on the way, all of who were waiting on the side of the road waiting for someone to help them make the trip from Sihong to Sixian. They piled in the car and paid a small fee for the ride.

It was here that I realized Li Jun was dressed to fit in perfectly with the girls in her hometown. Each girl was skin and bones, with super high heels, dyed hair, and fake eyelids. On the way, they swapped pictures of their 3-year old kids on their touch-screen phones and chat loudly in the dialect. The girls experimented with a new type of messaging software on their fake iPhones. You say and record your message, then send it like a text message. Seriously, at this point, why don’t you just call them? I was originally thinking that it might be easier for them to do this because this way they could speak the dialect instead of using Mandarin to type the characters. It’s easier for a person who doesn’t speak standard Mandarin, and therefore has trouble with the pinyin system based on Mandarin that allows you to type in characters, if they can use voice messaging in the dialect instead of typing using Mandarin.

Finally we arrive, and go to Li Jun’s uncle’s house, which reminds me of Old Nanjing in many ways. The houses are in a somewhat similar structure in the sense that they are in a courtyard style and are one-story individual homes that are connected in a long row-home formation. About 4 or 5 kids caught a glimpse of me as I was walking past and I heard them running behind us, they exclaimed, “A foreigner. Oh my god, a foreigner! Is it really a foreigner? I can’t believe it! This is my first time seeing a foreigner!” and the like. It was pretty cute.

After dinner that night, Li Jun’s uncle takes us to the downtown area, where there is street food and shopping. “There’s so much trash on the street here! In Anhui we don’t have clean streets like you do in Jiangsu! We are not as developed as Jiangsu.” What is it with Chinese people always downplaying themselves, saying their not as good as this place or that place, always comparing? Li Jun says it’s just typical Chinese modesty. I have my own theory that they’re saving face and/or giving me face? I don’t have it all figured out, but I think it’s about face.

In the morning, the uncle took us out to breakfast, practically shoving food down my throat. He just didn’t want to be the one to take the last piece of fried onion bread, but when I successfully convinced him that I was actually full, he finally ate it. Li Jun and I waited in the car while he picked up a few people on the street who would pay him to go back to Sihong, and we were on our way.

He drove us to Li Jun’s family’s home in the countryside of Sihong.  We got out of the car when the asphalt ended and the road turned to dirt. We could walk the rest of the way. Everyone greeted Li Jun as she walked by, saying how much she’d grown up since the last time they’d seen her. Again the women were all dressed to impress and it was incredible to me. I’m used to hanging out with either the “intelligentsia” of Nanjing University or the people in Old Nanjing, both groups usually don’t dress in a way that so obviously is trying to show off wealth. These girls were so much poorer than the young college girls I’m used to hanging out with—girls who by nature of their university status come from wealthy families—who dress much more conservatively. Yet these girls were dressed with all the Chinese bling you could imagine, namely high heels, brightly colored fashion blouses, and fake eyelids. They were young, no older than 24-years old, and they all had young children, sometimes even two kids (allowed in the countryside, unheard of and unwanted in the cities). It was clear that displaying what little wealth they had was important in their society. 

I liked listening to her family speak in the dialect. In Nanjing, it’s always difficult to communicate with Li Jun’s family (Li Jun speaks perfect Mandarin, though, and so she translates for me). Their dialect sounds a little rough around the edges to my untrained ears when you compare it to Mandarin, and the other Chinese look down on it, they look down on people that can’t speak Mandarin (and the Old Nanjingers look down on people that can’t speak the Nanjing dialect). Sometimes I get caught up in that mindset too. But then put me, a Mandarin speaker, in the countryside, and now suddenly I’m the weird one that can’t communicate with anyone. I realized that their dialect sounded beautiful once I was immersed in it. Their dialect became the norm and Mandarin became the weird, outside language that only Li Jun and I spoke with each other. Then it’s me that’s out of place, and they’re the ones that can fit in to the social situations. Now I can imagine how Li Jun’s mother, who doesn’t speak Mandarin, must feel as an outcast in Nanjing.

All the homes only had outhouses. But every family had a computer and high speed Internet. The younger generation, the ones under 30-years old, had 3G phones where they constantly were Instant Messaging with their friends.

Li Jun’s family raises silkworms. They grow a special plant, called sangye, which have unique leaves, the only leaves that silkworms will eat. They raise the silkworms until they are big enough to make silk and then sell them to the factories. The silkworms eat like crazy! In the morning when I got there, they had a fresh patch of leaves and you could hear them munching away. By evening, the leaves were completely gone and the family brought in more leaves from the fields to give the silkworms. 

Silkworms eating the leaves. The leaves were completely gone that evening!

A little silkworm farm they'd set up in the living room of their house. They had tents set up outside too, but had converted one of the rooms into a silkworm farm too.

I knew their family was poor, and when I had a chance to sit down and talk with a friendly neighbor who had married into her family, she told me that this place saw extreme hardship during the Mao era because they didn’t have access to wheat or rice, so all they could eat were the wild vegetables and fruit they could gather. That might explain why when we sat down for dinner, each family member periodically would turn to me and scream, “EAT MORE! Why are you being so polite! EAT MORE! Stop eating so much rice, eat the food. EAT MORE!” I mean, every 5 seconds. It was more than overwhelming, even though I’m pretty used to this routine as most Chinese families will do this, but I’d never been bombarded to that extent before. I just tried to show how much I was eating and left it at that. I knew they were just being polite, but it felt like I was being scolded just the same. The next morning it was the same. Literally every time they put their chopstick into the food, they would scream at me, “EAT MORE!” I knew it must be an instinct for them that every time they ate, they wanted me to make sure I was eating too, but I felt anxious anyway, as though I really wasn’t eating enough! It’s hard to remember to just eat until you’re full and then stop eating, no matter how much they push you.

In the afternoon on Saturday, one of Li Jun’s neighbors, Liu Cong, took us shopping. She was the same age and height as me and probably at least 50 lbs lighter. The three of us rode on her motorbike to the bus station and hopped in a pedicab for 3 yuan each the rest of the way. It was windy, and as the ride continued on, I noticed Liu Cong’s weave was coming undone. I couldn’t stop staring. I was super jealous when I first saw her long, beautiful hair, and there I was, watching it slowly come undone from her head with the force of the wind. I have to admit I judged her then, with her high heels and fake hair and fake eyelids and anorexic body frame.

Liu Cong took us to the shopping mall, and it was incredible. It was somewhat similar to other markets I’ve seen around China, but I still had to pick my jaw up off the floor.  Countless rows of vendors in stalls next to one another selling the exact same inventory. The sections were separated into shoes, clothes, electronics, and more. In each category the vendors carried the exact same inventory.

We went to the shoe section to buy another pair of high heels for Li Jun, and we passed shop after shop stuffed full of inventory selling the exact same merchandise. When we got to the clothing section, I noticed that many of the shops tried to make themselves look more like little boutiques, trying to sell a few, high quality items and mark themselves as unique, but we could tell the actual quality of the clothing was relatively poor. Heavily made-up girls managed the shops and urged us to buy the things we tried on. I bought a skirt and Li Jun and her neighbor each bought a dress.

As the day wore on, Liu Cong warmed up to me, and I concluded that she was the sweetest girl ever. She bought us hot dogs and helped me pick out my skirt and genuinely told me I looked good in it. As I got to know her personality, I saw through all the fakeness and saw that she was just as genuine and beautiful as all the other Chinese girls I’ve become friends with and I wanted to stay in Sihong and be best friends with her. She also had incredibly low self-esteem, asking my opinion on how she looked. It was interesting, as I was sitting there thinking about how much effort we put into what we look like, and in the end, once you get to know someone, you kind of don’t notice what his or her outward appearance is like anymore. Note to self: Stop being so pretentious, you fool! Don’t judge other people! If you came from that experience, you’d act that way too. We are all products of our environments. Lesson learned.

On our way home from the shopping center, we got on the bus and people were harassing me (okay, okay I know they were just being friendly) about where I was from and Li Jun decided to be Korean. I wanted to smack her, but it was already too late, so she had to put on this fake accent. But it worked well and everyone believed us. A girl turned around and started telling us that we shouldn’t travel here, that it’s backward and poor and there’s nothing fun to do or interesting to see or pretty to look at. “It’s the poorest county in Jiangsu, don’t we know, and we should go to Shanghai if we want to see the real China.” Awkward. Because Li Jun wasn’t actually an outsider.

If she had known Li Jun was from Sihong, she wouldn’t have said those things about it. But she did say those things, and I asked Li Jun about it afterwards, and she said, “Oh you know it’s just Chinese people being modest.” She didn’t seem fazed by it, and she said, “Well it is the poorest county and there isn’t anything fun to do here. She wasn’t lying. But I have been meaning to ask you, what has your impression of this place been? I mean, do you think it’s like what the girl said, that it’s nothing compared to Shanghai?” I told I’d had a lot of fun and I like the fresh air and the relaxed lifestyle. I told her that Chinese people say stuff like that to me all the time, whether it’s saying that Nanjing isn’t as good as Shanghai, or that China isn’t as good as America. I asked her if they were giving me face and she said she didn’t think so. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. 

The next day on our way home, we got on another illegal bus and once again, there weren’t any seats. But once again, there somehow was one empty seat a few minutes after we boarded. I don’t know how that happened, maybe someone willingly gave up their seat. And once again, they wanted to give the empty seat to the foreigner. I was humiliated. There were grandpas (no grandmas) and girls in high heels that could use that seat more than I could. 

I told Li Jun to sit in the open seat, as she’d told me earlier that she definitely wanted to get a bus with seats this time. She refused. I insisted. I made a scene. I yelled. I told her I was embarrassed that they were obviously picking me out as the lone foreigner to sit in the empty seat and I insisted that I would be sitting on a stool like everyone else and that I had a seat on the way from Nanjing to Sihong and so it was her turn to have the seat. 

She replied, “But when I visit you in America, you would give me the empty seat, wouldn’t you?” I responded, and I regret this now, by saying, “But in America you’ll always have a seat.” I was angry. She was angrier. In the end, I sat down in the empty seat and buried my head in shame. I hissed to her, “你太不给面子了!” which means, “You can’t give me any face!” Essentially I was saying, “Way to make me look bad!” 

When I sat down, I realized that my comment, “But in America you’ll always have a seat” was the entire reason that the bus attendant and Li Jun and everyone else was so insistent on me sitting in a seat. They knew this, and they knew that in America we don't sit in the aisle, and they wanted to make themselves look better (and perhaps wanted to avoid a report to the authorities), but in turn they made me look bad. Or at least made me feel bad. Looking back on it, I made a big deal out of nothing. Maybe I am slowly becoming a Chinese person, but I felt like I didn’t have one piece of face left that day.   

 

 Chinese word of the day: 

免费- mian3 fei4- literally, "to avoid the consumer fee" aka FREE