Barbarian Lost (9 page)

Li Gang, his injury, his family life and his village are a window deep into China. Sensing my curiosity, Li offers to take us to his village. Viv and I immediately realize that this is our opening.

Li suggests that we rent a four-by-four, to make the journey there and back in a single day. Too expensive and not interesting, I decide. I ask Viv to find out if we can sleep in the village and use local transportation to get there and back.

Li feels the need to explain the obvious: we would be welcome to spend the night, but his village and his family are extremely poor. We cannot expect to find the comforts of the city there.
Once more, Viv cautions me about the nature of country living, but I'm grinning from cheek to cheek and Li himself cuts her off. “This one,” he says to Viv, referring to me, “seems like the type of guy who seeks out hardships and enjoys them.”

With the lawyer's assistance, Li makes the arrangements to take two days off work. A taxi brings us to a suburb of Chongqing. From there, we need to find a bus that will take us deep into the countryside. At the station, Li goes off to look for the right bus. He comes back and reports that one is leaving right away, but it's not a new bus and he again wonders whether we are up to a rough journey. This time both Viv and I laugh off his doubts as we head to the ticket booth. Li nods to us amiably, as if to say, “I know, I know, country living is no problem for you, but don't blame me for the formality of being considerate.”

The bus has seen long years of action. Inside it has been stripped down to the barest necessities of service and is packed with the largest possible number of rough metal seats. When we climb onto it, it's already half-filled with a colourful assortment of peasants: the old and toothless are amused by the sight of me; the young and hardy, too self-absorbed to bother caring. I grab a seat near the back and am charmed to see that, although I'm by no means a tall man, the space between the backrest of my seat and the seat in front of me will not fit my thighs from hip to knee. To accommodate them, I have to swivel my legs diagonally toward the seat beside me.

Just after we leave the station, the bus stops to pick up a middle-aged woman with big baskets filled with groceries. Immediately after that, the bus is waved to a halt by some cops. A bizarre scene ensues. A policeman climbs onto the bus, armed with a video camera. Listing off their faults, he films the bus driver
and the woman passenger. He then proceeds to record their personal details and recites the offence of boarding the bus at an unregistered stop.

Viv tells me that this is a common occurrence in China. By boarding outside the station, the middle-aged woman could ride without a ticket, for a lesser fee. By the driver accepting this unofficial passenger, the operator can avoid giving the state its robust portion of the ticket price. Li adds that the bus actually belongs to his second cousin, but he'll soon be selling it.

The costs to operate the buses have been increasing, and police crackdowns are making it more difficult for bus operators to collect under-the-table fees. One company is purchasing all the licences in this area. This might mean new buses but higher ticket prices, Li muses.

“You can bet that someone bribed some official to be able to take control of all the routes,” Viv says. “With traps like this, the police are helping pressure the independents out of business.”

As we wait for the police to finish with the formalities, a minivan drives by making a huge racket. It's one of those old-school “town crier” vehicles, with huge multidirectional loudspeakers mounted on its roof.

“Someone wants to get elected?” I wonder aloud.

“No,” Viv says, giggling, “they're announcing that strippers are now putting on a show at some venue on the outskirts of town.”

The bus leaves town and proceeds deeper and deeper into the countryside. After an hour or so, we get off at a crossroads in a newly built part of a little town. Although it's in the middle of nowhere, the place hardly even feels like it's still in the countryside. It's strangely built up. The street has not even been properly paved yet, yet it's lined with more than a dozen three- and
four-storey concrete-block apartment buildings, freshly erected, mostly uninhabited.

“Buildings for people displaced by the flooded Yangtze River,” Li explains.

As we walk toward the centre of the village, Li conceals his missing forearm by putting the end of the stump in his jacket pocket. He leads us to eat at the village's finest restaurant. Viv and I raise our eyebrows when we see that the only other diners for lunch are the town's police chief and some town officials.

“Make sure that the foreigner registers with us as soon as possible,” one of them barks at us as he leaves the restaurant.

“He's just visiting and won't be staying,” Li responds politely. Before he finishes his sentence, the official is already walking out the door.

Li takes us to find another bus that will take us closer to his home village. Another dishevelled vehicle packed with locals stops to pick us up. It embarks into the hilly countryside on an ancient, unpaved road.

“Look how dry the countryside is,” Viv points out. “I even heard about it in the news: this region is experiencing the worst drought in living memory.”

In the afternoon sun, the colours of the blighted landscape are enchanting. The exposed and parched earth is a beautiful chocolate brown. The fields are pockmarked with well-defined cracks and crevices. The dried stalks of rice and corn remain, golden and shiny. Here and there, bamboo groves bring a fresh green tint to the vista.

The road is rough and rugged. We pass innumerable farms. Their red-brick walls and dark grey roofs add yet more hues to the portrait. Viv notices that we drive past someone walking his bicycle, two baskets hanging off either side. In each basket is a pig.
“Pig baskets!” she exclaims. “Until now, I didn't quite know what one was. We are told that in old times, adulterous women were put in them and then thrown in a pond. Not a nice thing!”

Finally, we arrive in yet another village. It's not our final destination, I'm told, but we're close. We cross the street toward some shops. An elderly farmer passing by looks at me with complete surprise and happily pipes up, “Aieee!
Yang Da Ren
.”

Viv can hardly hide her amusement. “I have never heard a more antiquated title: Your Highness Foreigner!”

Viv and I are left to wait in a shop that sells pig feed. We take a seat on the big bags of it. Li goes to arrange transportation to his village. He returns with three men on mopeds.

“Sorry for the wait,” he says, “but I wanted to find really good moped drivers. They're more expensive, perhaps, but are less likely to wipe out on the trail.”

The trail is indeed a little treacherous. Making its way through the hilly terrain, it climbs along the sides of steep banks. With patches of exposed stones, the trail is at times extremely bumpy. We clench our moped seats as the two-wheeled vehicles toss about on the rugged trail. Finally, after six or seven kilometres, we come to a halt amid a dozen or so brick and stone huts: Li's village.

Li's home is a hovel. It's an ancient one-room, thatched-roof habitation built of stone. It seems the poorest hut in the village and is packed with stuff. The family's bed takes up the back third of the room. To one side, a wooden couch makes for a sitting area. At the front of the hut, beside its only window—which is glassless—is Li's tiny grocery store. He sells dried noodles, a few canned goods, batteries and a limited selection of sweets. Li's wife is very young and sweet-faced. In the tiny dark room, she quietly tends to the couple's one-year-old daughter.

The people in the village can hardly be deemed friendly; they make no effort to come say hello to us. For the briefest of moments they study us from a distance without expression, then go back to their business.

Within minutes of arriving, I notice two mah-jong games going on nearby. These villagers play the game seriously, quickly and energetically. They don't speak a lot while playing. They play immediately when it's their turn. And they slap their tiles down on the table with force. It would seem that the goal is to make a crisp, snapping sound with the tiles as they hit the surface.

I can see why they play mah-jong: What else is there to do in the village, when there is nothing to plant or harvest? Amused by the lack of activity, I turn to Viv with a smile. “What do you think?”

“Actually, not a whole lot different from my grandparents' village. I was there for months as a child. Sure, the landscape's not the same. They plant different things. They build differently. But the village feels very similar.”

Suddenly and without warning, right in front of us in the middle of the village, a boisterous argument breaks out between a middle-aged farmer and a slightly younger, rough-looking man with a bicycle. They shout and shout, sputtering a daunting successions of syllables at each other. It's like machine-gun fire, and totally incomprehensible to me. Sometimes they shoot their invective in bursts, sometimes in long sequences; sometimes they take turns shouting at each other. But most often, they simultaneously let it rip at each other at high volume. Amazingly, they argue for over half an hour. This boggles my mind. I have never seen this before, two people just standing there, furiously yelling at each other for such a long time.

The farmer wears ragged cut-off pyjamas and sandals. He carries a three-metre-long paddy hoe. He's short and wiry. The other man is heavier-set and looks tough in his black pants and black shirt. Yet neither of them looks like he will resort to physical violence. The farmer eventually begins to walk out to the dried-up rice paddies, yet doesn't relent in his verbal attacks. The other man continues down the road. For the last ten minutes of the argument, the two men are yelling at each other over quite a distance. Stranger still, I seem to be the only person in the village paying attention to them.

Worn out by our rough journey, Viv is dozing on Li's couch. At the first sign of consciousness, I rouse her so that she can explain to me what is happening. She has trouble making out the dialect but determines that they keep repeating “one hundred and thirty-five yuan.” It seems they're arguing over twenty dollars.

Perhaps they are just putting their feud on public record. Now, whether they like it or not, everyone in the village knows their respective grievances. Perhaps so begins a slow process of justice by which people will be held responsible for their wrongs and subtly sanctioned. Or most likely, they are just in a grumpy mood like everyone else because of the drought that ended the season early and is eating into already meagre incomes.

Li takes us out into the fields. He shows us his mother's dried-up paddies. The ground is really parched.

“Where do you get your drinking water?” I ask him.

“The county government brings it in with a water truck.”

Beyond the paddies, the plateau unexpectedly recedes and a big gorge opens up in the landscape. We descend into it, and Li shows us a small temple built into the cliff.

“The village shrine,” he explains.

A man is working in the shrine, sculpting statuettes out of clay.

“Some of the old figures were damaged, so the village has hired this artist to make new ones,” Li says.

No clear faith is represented in the shrine. Distant ancestors. Buddhism mixed with local lore, with some Taoism for good measure, a modicum of protection and benevolence from beyond in a time of need.

When we return to the village, I realize that the village is completely devoid of young people. It's inhabited by toddlers, babies, the middle-aged and the elderly. Apart from Li Gang and his wife, I cannot spot a single soul older than five years or younger than forty.

In the late afternoon, one missing demographic group finally makes an appearance. The school-age children return, having walked the seven kilometres back from their elementary school, and are greeted with joy by their grandparents.

I learn that the teenagers are either boarding in the closest town or are out in the wide world, working odd jobs as Li once did. The parents of the children, people in their twenties and thirties, are mostly in the cities, working in the factories. The children are often raised by grandparents.

As the magic hour approaches when the shadows are long and for a few precious minutes the sunrays run almost parallel to the land, I decide to take a walk out of the village. To get a good look at the surrounding countryside, I climb a nearby hill. From the top, I can see up to several kilometres away.

Across the rolling hills, as far as I can see, are farms and fields. I count a dozen groupings of houses like Li's village. Each one only a few hundred metres apart. Not a centimetre of this vast land left to its own devices. Every parcel of soil put to use. Every
contour of the terrain terraced and planted. Each plot of land a tiny parcel only a few hundred square metres in area.

I focus on the sounds of the landscape: the barking of dogs, the clucking of chickens, the crying of children, the banging, the brushing. As each sound becomes distinct, the land comes alive with activity. I get an eerie sense of just how many people inhabit this countryside and conclude that I'm looking upon the most densely populated farmland I have ever seen, and that this territory has been full of people for several millennia.

I then picture the countryside unfolding for tens of kilometres in all directions, all of it densely filled with little farms and vil-lages. Then I stretch my mind out further to include a few small cities like the ones we passed through on our way here, each inhabited by tens of thousands of people, each surrounded by dense countryside. Then I envision a city like Chongqing: a cluster of people living one on top of the other, by the millions. I think of the territory I flew over to get to Chongqing from Qingdao, the thousand or so kilometres of terrain, the central heartland of China, filled for the near entirety of the distance with countryside much like this one: village upon village, clustered around big and small towns and around immense cities. I smile as I realize that, after so many years, I finally have a good image of the measure of more than a billion people.