Xiaoling Hong

ITS, Occidental College
April 3, 2003

Introduction
Ever since I left West Luo Village in the spring of 1972, I have always dreamed of it and wanted to see changes there over the years with my own eyes. I am grateful that with the support from the Avery China Program, my life-long dream has finally come true.

Background: My Experience in West Luo Village, 1969-1972
I’d like to say a few words first about the background of my “connections” with West Luo Village. I was born and grew up in Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province and a large city in Southeast China. In the winter of 1968, when I was still at a junior high school in Nanjing, there was a call from the government. It asked urban youth to go to rural areas to receive “re-education” from peasants, that is, to work and live with villagers in China’s vastly underdeveloped countryside to understand life in the real world. Like millions of youth of my generation, I heeded the call and went to the countryside.

The place I went to was called West Luo Village in Xuyi County. (It used to be Si Hong County until 1988). It is a small village in a remote and poor region in North Jiangsu, about 800 kilometers away from Nanjing. I had never been to any rural areas in my life until that day. Naturally, my parents were worried and concerned when they heard my decision because that region was notorious for poverty and famine. Our neighbors also warned me that North Jiangsu was not only poor, but also a very “uncivilized” world. People there were rude and lack of manners. But I was not affected by the concerns of my parents or warnings from my neighbors. If they had any effect on me, they made me even more curious to explore the new life that appeared exciting and adventurous to my young mind. I guess this is typically what Americans would call “teenager’s rebellious mentality.”

I stayed with a villager’s family for the first few weeks. After that, the village committee built a small house made of mud and reed for me and three other girls from Nanjing and put us together to form a unit -- called Jitihu, meaning “a collective family.”

Unfortunately, like other girls in my group, I soon found what my parents and neighbors had warned about was not baseless. There was neither electricity nor tap water. Life in the village was not as inspiring and exotic as I had expected. Work in the fields was tough and tedious. The hardships in daily life were beyond my imagination. For instance, in our “family,” I was responsible for grinding corn and dried sweet potatoes, and other grains. Once a week, I had to walk with a donkey around a stone mill to grind grains for our daily meals. I used a piece of cloth to block the donkey’s eyes so that she would keep walking around the stone mill. I remember the donkey was very stubborn and naughty. She would take a break whenever I stopped walking with her. She sometimes would stand there motionless. I had to set a good and hardworking example for her by walking fast and urged her to follow me. Only in this way, could we have enough corn and sweet potato flour for our weekly supply. It is no exaggeration to say that I had to fight an exhausting battle every week.

Despite the hardships, however, on the whole, I considered my experiences at West Luo rich and meaningful. Villagers taught me a great deal about values of life, and I made my unique contributions to the local development that even today I feel proud of. In this sense, my experience in the village is a valuable part of my life and it has left a lasting impression on me.

In the early spring of 1972, China began to restore its higher education system, which had been disrupted by the Cultural Revolution since 1966. I was nominated by West Luo Village, and was chosen by a joint committee of local representatives and admission officers from Nanjing University in early spring of 1972.
After graduation, I stayed on in Nanjing, got married, came to the United States in 1983. Although I had not had any opportunities to visit West Lou again, I frequently dreamed about the village. I dreamed many times that the villagers had built up new houses with bricks and I was happily chatting with them. In those dreams, strangely, I always ended up getting lost in crowded cities.

Thanks to the Avery China Program, my life-long dream has finally come true, and I have had a wonderful visit to West Luo Village. The journey is just like a go-back to a dreamland. Everything there is so familiar yet also strange. There are so many stories that I would like to share with you, but as my time is limited, I can only report to you a few things that impressed me most during my trip there.

Change and Continuity in Chinese Village: My Re-visit to West Luo
Village School
The education level of the region was extremely low in those years. When I settled down in the village, I found that among the forty-four households in the village, only two men had some schooling while most villagers were illiterate. So I volunteered to serve as an instructor in the village school shortly after I got there to teach children how to read and write. I taught them how to read and write their own names as well as their parents’ names, and characters of everyday use such as dogs, cats, and crops in the fields. Our small house was always full of laughter.

During my visit this time, I was really impressed by the great progress made in education in the area. The village now has a formal primary school established by the local government. This is a 6-grade public school. It currently has 8 teachers and about 200 kids. By American standards, the school is small and simple, but villagers all regard it as extraordinary progress, because their children can get formal education in the village now. The campus looks nice and neat. There is even a big playground. Students look well dressed, and teachers are young. Unfortunately, among the eight teachers, only two are women. On the other hand, however, I am very pleased to find 50% of all the students are girls!

The classrooms are bright and inspiring, with lots of pictures of great historical figures hanging on the walls, especially scientists such as Newton and Einstein. I learned that the graduation rate of the school is 100%, but only 5% of students could afford further education in a high school in town. Among them, only a handful of students from this primary school eventually get into college.

Village Clinic
When I lived in West Luo Village, I also served as a member of the bare-foot doctor team for our and several surrounding villages for a short time. The system was set up and developed by the government in the 1960s and ‘70s to solve health care problems in rural China. Chinese government in those years tried to encourage villagers to establish their own clinics and trained local people who had some education to serve as primary care providers. Because I was considered a “highly educated” youth, I was chosen by the village committee to be a bare-foot doctor.

We attended training classes in a small hospital in town to learn how to treat patients with traditional Chinese medicine. I also learned to practice some simple acupuncture therapy. When villagers heard about my newly acquired skills, they came and asked me for help whenever they got problems. If I succeeded in curing them of some minor diseases, such as headache or back pain, they would thank me again and again and have their kids delivered to me fresh eggs or home made dumplings. But they never complained if I failed to solve their problems. I was deeply moved by their simple but pure feelings, encouragement, and trust.

I know health care is still a big problem in China today, so I paid a special attention to see if there was progress in this aspect since I left the village.

I visited a clinic in a neighboring village. It had a fairly large blue cross on the door. When I walked up to the house, a woman came out to greet me warmly. She told me that the local government funded the clinic, and her husband was the only doctor as well as administer of the clinic. While we were talking, the doctor walked out to see me because he had heard my conversation with his wife. To my great surprise, the doctor was no other than a member on my old bare-foot doctor team thirty years ago! I could hardly recognize him because he was a young boy when we met on the team. I was also stunned to learn that he alone handled everything in the clinic. In his daily duty, he serves as a family physician, internal doctor, surgeon, and pharmacist. He treats patients with both traditional Chinese herbs and Western medicine, whichever works better. He seems very conscientious, visits patients in their homes, and collects and grows herbs during his spare time.

He told me peasants usually didn’t come to see him unless they got seriously sick. Unfortunately, it is sometimes too late to receive any medical treatments. After I talked with the doctor and saw everything in the small clinic, I had quite mixed feelings about the health care system in the village today. Although the situation seems better than the past, I feel painful that the progress is not great. In fact, before my trip to the village, I had expected to meet several senior friends who would have been in their seventies, but I was sad to learn after my arrival, that they all had died. They would have been still alive if there had been better health care system in China today. Therefore, I wish the Chinese government would pay more attentions and give more funds to rural areas for health care in the near future.

Irrigation Project
The most proud contribution I ever made to West Luo Village during my three-year stay there was my involvements in helping the village get a pumping machine in a severe drought in the summer of 1971. We had not got any rain for four consecutive months in that year. Crops in the fields were almost burned. I joined the villagers to dig a long ditch all the way from the nearby Hongze Lake to lead water to our fields. We worked day and night. Finally, the ditch was completed. All the villagers took turn to use large buckets to pour water from the lake into the ditch, hoping the water would flow into our fields. Unfortunately, the land was so dry that the water was all gone before it could reach our village. My friends and I volunteered to go to the local government and asked officials there to loan us a machine to pump water from the lake to our dried fields. After much effort, we got it the next day. We started the machine immediately. It was already small hours in the morning when the water was slowly flowing into the fields along the ditch. We were too tired to enjoy the sight, and simply fell asleep on the narrow ridges of padded fields.

In the following winter, local government organized villages in the area to start an irrigation project so that we no longer had to rely on nature for water. I joined the villagers in building the irrigation project. I still remember many of the challenging moments that I experienced. Living in small sheds on the construction site, we got up early every morning and worked two hours before sunrise. Food was simple and poor while work was tough and hard. I often fell to the ground while carrying mud with a pole and climbing the steep banks.

Because my personal attachments to the irrigation project, it always stays in my mind. So I looked forward to visiting the site during my trip this time. The irrigation project is still there, and it remains in fairly good shape. I felt a little sentimental when I arrived at the site and climbed onto the banks of the canal. I literarily walked all the way, about two or three miles, along the canal against bone cutting wind in sub-zero temperature. I was very pleased to see the irrigation project with my eyes again. I shed my sweat there, experienced the most tough and harsh winter in my life, and made my own contributions to the lifeline of the local farming. Villagers there still remember my participation in the construction, which made me very pleased.

Reunion with Old Friends
Perhaps the most enjoyable and exciting moments during my visit was meeting with many old friends at West Luo and other villages in the area. I visited their houses, and was delighted to invite them as my guests for lunch or dinner in restaurant in town. We were happy to share our stories and exchange our views on numerous topics.

Changes in West Luo Village
Villagers are certainly much better off than I stayed with them thirty years ago. As I mentioned, the main food at that time was sweet potatoes.

The situation is very different today. Every family now has lots of grains--rice, wheat, and corn—at home in the storage room. Villagers no longer worry if they would be short of food before the arrival of harvest season. When they showed me how much grain they had stored at home, I took for granted and commented, “You must have a large cellar of sweet potatoes, right?” Villagers all busted into laughter and teased me: “Xiaoling, you still live in the 1970s, but we are now in the 21st century! You are so left behind.” It turns out sweet potatoes and corn is no longer the main food of villagers. In fact, sweet potatoes now are considered curiosity because they are no longer produced in the area.

I also find out that villagers are no longer sleeping on bared reed mattress as they used to be. They have nice and colorful beddings such as cotton sheets and silk quilts. They are well dressed, too. I don’t see any kids or adults wear patched clothes. That was a common sight in the village thirty years ago. I remember at that time, my friends and I always ran a used clothes drive whenever we visited our parents at Nanjing. We would ask our family friends and relatives in city to donate used clothes to villagers. Each time we returned to West Luo from Nanjing, we would drag ourselves with big bags of used clothes for villagers.

Another surprising and exciting progress is that almost every family now has a well-designed drinking well in the backyard or in front of the house. Villagers no long have to carry water home from a village pond. They now also have electricity and TV, and most families have telephones. There are even two Internet bars in the nearby town. I also saw quite a few men had cell phones.

Moreover, I am impressed that villagers no longer lock themselves in the fields or live in an isolated world. They seem to know well what is going on in the outside world, and are anxious to discuss with me many international issues, from the globalization of economy, to American politics! For example, on several occasions, they asked me what I thought of the tension in the Middle East, terrorist activities in Central Asia, and where I was on Sept 11 in 2001.

While I am pleased to see progress at West Luo Village and in the area, however, I have also noticed there are still lots of problems and challenges facing the villagers. One of the urgent problems is how to improve sanitary conditions at their homes and how to protect the overall environment.

For example, to my dismay, I’ve discovered that there are not any in-house restrooms in the new houses built by villagers. Toilets are typically attached to pigsties outside the house just like in the old days. Of course, it makes a perfect sense for villagers to keep toilets this way because it is convenient for them to collect fertilizer for farming—farmers in most regions in China still use manual fertilizer, but such a toilet becomes a big challenge to my husband and me. Whenever we went to toilet, we found pigs next door would “greet” us happily and grunt or move around excitingly. Because I had some bad experiences with pigs when I lived in the village thirty years ago, I am still afraid of the animal. I actually joked to the villagers that I wouldn’t come back again unless they had modern in-house toilets and improve sanitary conditions in the village.

Another most urgent problem is that there has emerged a huge labor surplus. This is caused by mechanization of farming, which has reduced greatly need of labor. For example, machines now have replaced people to do plowing and harvesting jobs. The labor surplus is also an outcome of rapid decrease of available farmland in the area. In recent years, the government has turned large amounts of farmland in the area into building highways, railroads, and power plants. Villagers have received some money for their loss of farmland, but not employment offers because most jobs in these plants require education and skills. Unfortunately, the villagers have used the money quickly while lost their farmland forever.

Further, villagers now are freed from the old collective farming system, which liked to keep people busy in off-farming seasons. For example, when I was in the village, we used to spend wintertime building irrigation projects, planting trees, or attending numerous political study meetings. Now being freed from these obligations, many villagers in winter like to kill time by playing Ma Jian or simply chatting under the sun. This is a sight I never saw thirty years ago--a sort of “luxury” that villagers could not afford in the past.

Conclusion
I have had a wonderful and memorable visit to West Luo Village. Before my trip, I had thought that after going there to see the place again, I would close happily a significant chapter in my life. I am surprised to find, however, that my connections with West Luo Village will continue as a result of my recent visit