Job hunting

My first port of call after leaving Guilin was Ping’an, a small village situated on the Longji rice terraces. The terraces are a mile from top to bottom on a steep mountain side and are aptly named the dragon backbone terraces. I’ve never seen a dragon’s back bone but presume that the vertebrae of a dragon look just like the silhouette of the terraces. The contours are pretty spectacular even if it’s not the best time of year to visit. They remind me of maps showing the elevation levels of land. I liked looking at a person working in the distance then looking at the vast terraces and reminding myself that those little specs in the distance, armed with only buckets and spades sculpted these mountainsides, mind boggling. I camped out above the village and got morning views all to myself before the drove of bus tours of day-trippers from Guilin arrived. By the time the masses swarmed the scene I had unsuccessfully been to two villages looking for ‘dagong’ (casual labour). Despite being surrounded by wooden houses I failed, possibly because the note specifies dong houses and not the wooden houses of the numerous other ethnic minorities that live in the area. At least I got a free breakfast of rice, garlic omelette, extremely chewy, lukewarm beef and fried grasshoppers from some guys. I had knocked on their door because they appeared to have a half constructed house next door, never mind. My note quite clearly said I didn’t want money for work and the guys said several times that they didn’t want money for the meal they gave me. It’s quite refreshing to be amongst Chinese who do not try and make every situation into a business opportunity. The grasshoppers were very well cooked. If all Chinese meats were as thoroughly cooked as those grasshoppers, I’d probably have visited the bathroom one third of what I have done in the past 2 months and those occasional visits to the lavatories would have been far less traumatic.

 Hmmm...... Difficult decision

I’ve noticed myself getting a bit hacked off lately, I don’t think I was getting a cultural superiority complex like so many of the expats I’ve met (despite coming from a culture that has an infinitely better alphabet than them), I was just getting a bit disenfranchised with the Chinese and preferring to hang about with westerners than make the effort to learn about the locals. Being properly in Rural China (Yangshuo doesn’t count) has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for Chinese culture. Stories such as Auras aforementioned shield spear one has also reignited my sense of curiosity in what is the oldest continual civilisation in the world.

I went from Ping’an to Sanjiang which I heard was near many Dong villages. Sanjiang’s a dive, I only walked 10 metres out the bus station then jumped into a mini bus and escaped to a cluster of Dong villages. I really like the villages. Some locals dress in traditional clothing even when they aren’t trying to sell things to tourists. The women wear brightly coloured towels on their head. The bridges here are really nice. They call them wind and rain bridges, presumably because they protect from the wind and rain.

I bumped into Aura for the third time (we bumped into each other briefly for the second time in Guilin) then went looking for Dong construction sites. I found a house being erected in the village of Pingpu. There were about 30 people working on it and about another 30 (mainly old men) watching. The whole community gets involved. The women cook meals for the workers and there is a big rice basket in the middle of where they cut the wood full of cigarettes for anyone to help themselves whenever they please. The whole framework of a 4 story building was completed in about 6 hours. I would have loved to have helped but with so many people moving around all knowing exactly what was going on I would have just got in the way. The different components are slotted in place in synchrony so by the time I’d have worked out what I was being told to do I’d have held up everyone else. I learned a lot from watching and there are definitely elements of Dong houses that I’d like to incorporate into my own future home. I won’t bore you with pictures of mortises and roof trusses or 29 minutes of construction videos but here is a picture or 2 of the construction site.

I spent the evenings making a 3D model of a dong house. If I choose to build my own one I can adjust the size of the model then I’ll have all the measurements for the various bits of timber. I could have done a bit of labouring in houses that are nearing completion but the aesthetics of Dong houses are not what appeals to me, it’s there frames constructed entirely of wood with no nails used that intrigues me. From watching them to do it, I reckon I have a fairly good idea of how it’s done. I could always build a hut in this style before building anything that’s a major investment just to get a bit of practice. This is China, labour is plentiful and I guess I was a bit naïve in hoping that they would love the help from an outsider even if communication would be painfully slow and the outsider didn’t have a clue how to build anything. 

I continued on my journey west to the town of Congjiang in Guizhou Province. It looks close on the map but with the winding path, innumerable potholes, the amount of construction vehicles and piles of cement and various other minerals placed precariously on the roadside meant that the journey was long but as always, not dull. I had mixed feelings about this area. While the mountainous scenery with its forests, rivers and terraced fields are very striking, the amount of forestry and mining is staggering. Whole hillsides are disappearing to feed the greatest mass migration in human history, the migration of hundreds of millions of Chinese from rural to urban life. If they were building utopian cities I wouldn’t mind. They’re not. I hope the ducks found the trip as interesting as I did. They were in potato sacks strapped on the roof with holes cut in the sacks for them to enjoy the view. The Chinese are very conscientious in that way, every duck deserves a good view.

I passed one small town that I’d guess had a population of only a few thousand. The biggest building in the town was a Family Planning Clinic. It was a big concrete building that stood out like a sore thumb amongst the surrounding wooden ones. I started counting the amount of girls in comparison to boys as the children walked home from school. When I passed a crowd of kids in Congjiang I reckon it was close to two boys for every girl. Maybe the girls were just hiding from the scary ‘waiguoren’ with the big afro. I had tried to guess how many young boys there were in comparison to girls when I first arrived in China but lost interest when I could not see any comparable difference. The Chinese love kids, they are revered as much as old people and I have got the impression that they have just as much adoration for girls as they do for boys. I guess that my analogy is right but it only applies to the families who chose not to abort their females. It’s surprised me that there would be a significant difference in male to female ratio in Congjiang. The one child policy only applies to Han Chinese. Ethnic minorities can still have multiple children and Han Chinese in rural China can have a second child if their first one is a girl so that they’ll have help on the farm (not that many kids male or female stay in the villages once they are old enough to leave) (and not that the females on the farms don’t put in their fair share of hard labour). Maybe my observations were coincidental, but it got me wondering.

I’ve been told that there are 25 million boys in China who will never get married. This has resulted in boys becoming very vain and slightly effeminate in their quest to being attractive to the young ladies who can afford to be choosy regardless of their own luck in the gene pool. The guys take as much care with their hair and skin as even the most superficial of Hollywood girls. It is a paradox that there are more boys than girls because boys are seen as more valuable. As a result girls in many ways have more power than males, they can behave however they want and their boyfriends will still grovel with their heads bowed and their tails between their legs because they need to take whatever opportunity they can get. There is no government pension scheme in China therefore bearing children and having grandchildren is hugely important. The chances of a Chinese couple yielding grandchildren are significantly higher if they have a girl. Surely girls are now more valuable than boys. Although some of the consequences of the one child policy disgust me, I believe that at some point in our future, humanity as a whole will either be faced with the choice of having a population at high risk of famine or living in a society that places control over birth rates. Even in the most chauvinistic of countries, equilibrium would eventually sort itself out. Even in Saudi Arabia families would eventually groan in despair at the sight of yet another boy who has little to no chance of sowing his seeds. The higher the percentage of parents aborting girls in favour of boys will result in the decrease of value in boys.  If I was Chinese I’d abort a boy just to save money on hairspray and facial cleanser alone. Many young Chinese guys remind me of Paris Hilton, no cleavage, and not much interest in any non-trivial subject either.