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I must begin this article with some thoughts on early marriage. This is the thing that shocks and upsets me the most. You may blame the ignorance of country people, or the backwardness of village life. Whatever the justification, the fact is, it happens.
According to the Marriage Law, the statutory minimum age for marriage is 22 years for men and 20 years for women. This is what actually happens in our village. When I came home, a 17-year-old boy was preparing to get married to a local girl that he had met online. I don’t know the girl’s age, and when I saw her during this trip, wrapped up with a scarf against the cold, I couldn’t guess. But I don’t think she could have been that old, because where we live, it's very rare for women to be older than their husbands. When I heard this news, I was shocked, and still more so to learn that she had had an abortion during the winter (such is the level of awareness of contraception among young country people).
I asked around a bit and was told people generally get married before they are 20, unless they move away from the area to go to college. If you do not marry by the age of 20, your options become increasingly limited.
One day, I met this young man, who was just a boy when I was a student, and to me still is. I asked him, has your marriage been registered yet? He said it hadn't. I said, you’re marrying without registering? He said it was not a problem. I asked, so what will you do when the first child comes? He replied, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Cross that bridge when we come to it ... That would mean arranging for a bribe to be sent to some official to falsify the ages and post-register the marriage certificate. If they didn’t do this, how could the couple register the birth?
Another day, when I was drinking with our village brigade leader, I asked him about the early marriage issue. His answer was typical: it has always been like this, not only in our village and county, but even in neighbouring counties. There was nothing he could do about it.
“I'd like to act, but I cannot. After tying the knot, these young people leave the village to work in the cities year in year out. If they are single, you just cannot keep tabs on them,” he said.
In our area, early marriage has become a kind of fad, a model that others copy, as villagers always keep an eye on what neighbours are up to. If A gets married at 20, then B will wed at 19, and C will get married at 18. Basically nobody bothers with the marriage certificate. As far as the parents are concerned, if the nuptials are completed early, that means their responsibilities also end early, and it also stops the young ones from going astray when they leave to work in the cities.
Here’s another case. A girl in our village, about 19, came back to the village at the end of the year to get married. But she already had a child several months old. She met the father while away, working as a migrant. Unable to certify the marriage, they could only “marry” by organising a banquet for the village, thereby earning informal community recognition for the union. It was enough.
This issue has affected me personally. After I came back, my parents pressured me every day to get married. They felt that because I was already in my twenties but still single, other villagers would look down on me, I would not be able to hold my head up, I would be laughed at.
Let me say something about the background to all this. Our village - a very typical village in a county of northeastern Anhui, is no different from countless other places in the area. Over 1,000 people locally have the same surname, and four families predominate. Villagers usually have around four mu (two-thirds of an acre) of land. We are not really poverty-stricken. Apart from income from farming, people in their twenties and thirties can work in the cities year after year. In our village, a number of two-storey buildings have been erected in recent years (typically at a cost of around 150,000 yuan) and some people have been able to buy small Daihatsu cars (60,000 yuan). Of course, a lot do remain poor.
The reasons for early childbearing are easy to understand, given the above remarks on early marriage. In rural areas, a child will generally be born within the first year of marriage, and if this does not happen, the couple can suffer mockery and discrimination. One couple in our village did not have a child for more than four years, so the husband began to beat his wife, even though people said medical checks at the hospital showed the problem was nothing to do with her. However, the husband adamantly refused to get himself checked.
To be a woman in the countryside means forgoing one’s youth. After marriage and childbirth, she ages very quickly. A girl in her early twenties looks the same as a worn-out woman of 40. I heard that a girl in the village, just turned 20, got married in the spring of 2008. That winter she gave birth to a child. In rural areas, the tendency is always to want children very soon after marriage. Waiting is considered strange.
Under China’s birth-control laws, if the firstborn is a boy, the parents are not allowed to have a second child. In the tightening of birth-control regulations in the 1990s, rural women in China had to undergo compulsory tubal ligation. I always found this an act of profound inhumanity. But, on close reflection, perhaps there is no other way. How else can the birth rate be controlled? It is hard to persuade country people to use condoms, count the days or take contraceptives.
In recent years, however, many women approaching 40, who have undergone forced tubal ligation, have had surgery to reopen their fallopian tubes and have a second child. A woman in a neighbouring village, 40 this year and with a son born in 1994, now in his third year of elementary school, had another boy last year. I saw the infant during this stay. My father blames social pressures, saying “everyone is having children nowadays.”
Early one morning, a woman came hobbling along the road to the west of our village, her stomach thrust out. I didn’t know her, and asked my mother who she was. “Just somebody,” she replied. Originally, it transpired, this woman had had two children, a girl and a boy, but the daughter had died three years earlier (when I was back home this time, I went past the grave; she had been only 15 or 16 years old). Only the son was left, and so she had another operation and was now pregnant again.
I didn't ask, but I would guess she was over 45 years old.
This is what happens in the country, the real country. Women aged 45 and 18 go through the travails of pregnancy and birth. The arrival of the internet in the countryside has made it even easier to get pregnant. A boy and girl hook up through an internet dating site, a child will be born out of wedlock, and an elderly midwife will be called in - it’s much the same in the country now as it is in the cities.
On a wall of a house at the entrance of the village, you can see a large-character AIDS-prevention poster; I cannot remember exactly what it said.
Whenever I go back to my village for the New Year, I always ask my father who died over the past 12 months. All of the people in the village are getting on, and of the ones I know well and have fond memories of, any could die some day without my knowing. Of course, my time will come too. I have already chosen my parents’ and my own grave plot. All of us will be buried in a field that is now green with young wheat.
I have never worried much about how many babies were born over the year, since I have nothing to do with them. At least, they are not part of my memories. In 2008, three people died in our village, a woman and two men. The woman died in an accident. She fell off the top of a newly roofed two-storey house, and failed to recover from untreated head injuries.
I want now to say a bit more about these two men. At their deaths, one was 59 and the other just past 60. They both succumbed to cancer, having only been diagnosed in the late stages of the disease. Less than six months later, both were gone. Before their deaths, they had been great stalwarts of local farming. Of course, lacking medical insurance, they did not think of getting their health checked. They were like animals in the wild, quietly passing their lives, calmly waiting for the sudden onslaught of disease to carry them off.
In the country, people often say that happiness is “having enough to eat and drink, and escaping illness and disaster.” But if one day they do fall ill, it can mean death. A minor illness, untreated, will deteriorate into a serious one. Then it is just a matter of time.
Of these two men who died in 2008, I didn’t know the elder, and won’t say anything about him just now. But I do want to say a few things about the 59-year-old, who was an acquaintance of my father.
He was the eldest of two brothers. The family had a well-known sesame oil workshop (they fried the sesame seeds and stone-ground the oil out, getting one catty of oil from every three catties of seed).
When he was young, he was too poor to find a wife, but later, in the 1980s, he bought a girl from Yunnan. Later, she bore him a daughter, but then ran away. After that, he devoted himself to care of the daughter, remaining single. His younger brother married and fathered two sons. However, when I was at middle school, one summer afternoon, the younger brother hanged himself from a roof beam in his house. It was said he was wearing white hand-made clothes at the time of his death.
After his death, the people of the village wanted to bring the older brother and the widow together to form a new household, but the girl did not agree because of the age difference. Later, she set up home with another man.
Now, the older brother too has died, of stomach cancer. He was diagnosed in summer, and passed away at the New Year.
I remember when I was in my second year of elementary school, three village girls committed suicide by drinking pesticide. The strange thing was that their graves were dotted around three sides of the village. This created much unease among the villagers, who feared that somebody else might be carried off to occupy the fourth side.
One afternoon before New Year, I went for a stroll in the fields, and in the distance saw a new grave. On top of it there were still a few wreaths. As soon as I got back home I asked my father who it was. He didn’t know. After the New Year I went back and saw that more new graves had appeared amid the fields outside the village.
Still on this morbid subject, I’d like to say a little bit about cremation. Some time ago, the government began forcing people to cremate their deceased. This was good news for crematoriums in our county, which had suffered a string of closures. Now they were unexpectedly brought back into operation, and reportedly made good money. During the summer holidays in my third year of elementary school, I went to the funeral of one of my relatives on my mother’s side.
Village custom required use of a coffin, even after cremation, so the bones and ashes were placed in a cinerary casket inside the coffin. Afterwards, they held a funeral ceremony and lowered the coffin.
Later, there was talk of backhanders. By offering a bit of cash to the crematorium (several thousand yuan – the exact amount was determined by the strings you could pull) it would have been possible to avoid burning the corpse; instead, in return for the money, the crematorium would simply issue the death certificate. Of course, if it had been somebody with influence, a dignified, direct burial without cremation could be arranged without greasing palms.
Some years ago, things got so busy in the funeral trade that the village had to consider building a single public cemetery for cinerary caskets. But these plans later fizzled out. As a rule, the deceased are now always buried in the fields of their family. They become a kind of embellishment dotting the fields. The only difference is the new grave mounds are smaller than the old ones.
Cremation was proposed as a way of keeping valuable farmland in cultivation. Now, in our county at least, it has become another official routine, and sometimes a hotbed for shady deals. In the Chinese countryside, even the dead have their price.
According to official sources, the proportion of university students from rural areas is now in steady decline.
At year-end, I went to a wedding banquet, and sat among a group of village elementary school teachers, roughly aged from 40 to 50. I did not know them very well. We drank and began to chat.
At the table, somebody took out a mobile phone. I glanced at it, and saw it was a LG model, worth, I guess, several hundred yuan. Somebody asked: Director Liu, where did you get hold of that new phone? The man said someone gave it to him. The school principal had one, he had one, and later the school supplies manager had got one too.
The person who asked the question laughed and said: “So, it’s graft. You guys will be the ruin of the Party! I’m going to hand in my membership if you go on like that!”
Afterwards, the people continued to drink and brag. I listened quietly at their side.
A middle-aged teacher, who had just had an operation (apparently some kind of haemorrhoids problem) said he could only drink standing up now. “I am now just like Kong Yiji, I only ever drink on my feet.” Everybody laughed.
Mention of Kong Yiji gave me a start. How sad! Today, the countryside is full of Kong Yijis, but where is Lu Xun?
Although in theory the countryside has a nine-year compulsory education system, this is basically just empty talk. Most village children either drop out early or leave after middle school to become migrant workers.
A 15-year-old neighbourhood girl dropped out during elementary school. Before she was physically mature, she spent a year away from the village working. In the spring she went to pick tea, and then to work at a family business in Nantong in the neighbouring province of Jiangsu. She was earning 500 yuan a month to pack food. She never had Saturday or Sunday off, every day she had to start work just past seven o’clock. I asked her when she finished in the evenings, and she said it varied. Sometimes they went on past ten o’clock. There were two other girls of her age. After the wheat harvest, she went home with 2,900 yuan for over half a year’s work.
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