The Village beside the Castle 09/09

I went for a walk in the village adjacent to school.  Clearly this encampment has not yet been cleared away to make room for “Modern China”.  These villages, I am learning, are much the same everywhere throughout the country.  First of all they are single storied and the roofs are low, often made of a rough scalloped terracotta. The streets are cement worn by time and the earth is showing through.  People are doing their simple washing in basins in the narrow street.  A woman picks out one crude pot and rubs her hand over it.  The dark water falls away and the misshapen container is set on the brick wall beside her.  An old man with a bundle of sticks is clearing (sweeping?) the street.  Moving dirt and debris from one place to another

I wanted to look in, to see inside the houses and imagine the life which took place there.   I wanted to take pictures of what I saw, but of course then it dawned on me that these were peoples’ homes- how would I feel if someone walking by my house took a picture of its interior?   But it was unreal, like a park for a time gone by.  I had to keep reminding myself that these were not characters in an ancient novel, but people trying to live their lives.

The rooms were very small and the windows had no screens.  Everything looked put together from something else, makeshift.  Mattresses on the floor in a room almost the same size and ceilings so low I could lift my arm to touch them.  I saw a room I would have had to bend my head to get into.  Tiny tables that looked like the kind in a forgotten preschool program and miniature chairs were lined up.  What was this? Attached was what I believe was a kitchen because there was something that looked like a stove and many of those ill-begotten pans I had seen earlier. I surmised it was a place people came to eat.  Perhaps a restaurant or was there an arrangement between families?  Would people be coming back from work tonight and relaxing and enjoying themselves in this tiny room?  I couldn’t imagine more than three people in the place that had diminutive chairs for twenty-four.

Some of the walls and brick had once been painted white, yellow, red but they had not retained the color.  Age mingled with the hues in a dingy claim that left all the walls a shade of grey.  Ragged time had grown on these walls and had infected its people.  They were propping the old village up enough to get through another lifetime.  One room through an open door stood out as it had a clean white coat of paint over a rough wood. There was one chair in the room reminiscent of a barber’s.  A mirror faced the chair, nothing else was in the room.  Such effort was made to make it clean and nice; I surmised that it was the beauty parlor. This was a business where someone was trying to make enough money to pay for that paint.

Nothing seemed real here and I turned around and looked back on our school that loomed above the village like a feudal castle of the 21^st century, monolithic and huge.  It was the place children with opportunities would go everyday, but the people of this village would only go there to clean.  And still they greeted us with a smile and a wave “bye-bye”.  It was the edge of town that stayed with me through the night though.  It was the smell of the other side of China—human excrement is not to be confused with any other smell.  Human excrement, it must have been some kind of public toilet.  Human excrement, not just a waft, but an enduring, relentless reality that went on for 100 yards.  The dank stench made me want to gag.  And people walked on this end of town, coming and going to work every day.

I had to go home and take a bath.  That night it haunted me.  The smell never left me.  And that night it dawned on me why my foot massages are so cheap.  China has a huge underclass that will work for nothing, which sustain themselves in these rudimentary ways and somehow accept it and have enough energy to go on and serve me and rub my feet.  I could not separate the smell from the vision of the skinny gentle-faced girl who kindly washed my feet and applied pressure to points in my furthest most appendages. And because I was told this is not a tipping culture, I hadn’t even left a tip.