A collection of medicines from south China caught on camera

Selling snake oil in central Sichuan

Deer horn, sea horse and used for Viagra pills ginseng in south Sichuan, with names like “Africa rigid rod” on the boxes. The hawker explained that “The pills are Chinese medicine but the models are all French”. oh boy.  

Herbs in Yunnan

Curing tumors in Guangxi

And last for now from Guangdong.  Can always count on the Cantonese to outdo everyone else in strangeness and creative animal abuse.

Yes, that is a living crocodile in the cage. Croc oil it apparently good for the skin (of people, evidently not so much for the skin of the crocodile). Sorry for the quality.

Administrative Note:  In the last few days, couple of donations were recieved in the one billion fund. These help me to keep visiting more villages and report more stories from the other billion. I wish to thank the donors. Your contribution is much appreciated.

But only because it’s a different Shenzhen, also located in Guangdong province. This is Shenzhen village, only differs from the mushrooming megalopolis ofthe south by maybe one million GDP points. It’s a collection of mud houses and brick houses among rice paddies by a side road leading to pretty much no where. Every house has a mushroom shaped shade – three boulders supporting a straw roof. These are made to provide shelter for the cows.

Kong  Beifen, who drives a motorcycle in the nearby township of Nanfen is from that village, and enjoys telling people he lives in a mud house in Shenzhen, which he consider a terrific joke (with the advantage of also being true). His wife works in Foshan city of Guangdong, at a light-bulb factory, and his four brothers all work in different parts of the province except for one who went as far as Liaoning to open a tea-house there. “He is the best of us all”, says Kong, who remained in the village to take care of his aged parents and his three children.

“People here are very poor” Kong says, then takes me to see the house of a rich man, allegedly the main tourist attraction in the area. it’s early afternoon and the road is swarmed with kids on bikes, cycling back to school from their lunch break. Kong’s three children go to school in the village. The one in town is too expensive for the family to afford. He points at another village, farther from the road and at the foot of the hills. “This”, he says, “Is a village with very good Fengshui. Many people there went to university”.

Teacher Ren lies down on the sofa in his home at Yangmai village. He sits up then lies down again, unable to find a comfortable position. “This is how it is when a person is old. All pain and never any rest” he tries to smile, a trial that ends with an agonized fit of coughing. Teacher Ren is in his seventies. He retired from the local elementary school ten years ago. His wife, Wang Shuyin, says he’s been like that for three years. “He was in the hospital for almost a year, but now he’s just resting at home, taking medicine”. She goes on to explain the peculiarities of the local health system. She is classified a farmer which grants her subsidized health-care. “I paid only 40% of the hospital bill when I had an operation to remove a tumor. But he is a teacher. For him, we have to pay 80 percent of the total”.  

Their village is a tiny one, only ten houses hidden in the mountains off the main road, some ten kilometers away from the town of Lingyun (凌云 a town in Baise prefecture of West Guangxi). There is no sign pointing to the village, and Wang explains the rough dirt road that leads to it was built by the villages themselves. “No help from the state. The house too, we built it ourselves. The state doesn’t build houses for us, not like in other places”. Their house is the biggest of the ten, a two story building with a porch extended into their fields. They live alone in the house they built after Ren’s retirement. Their three sons all left for Guangdong province, where they work and study.

Ren started working as a teacher in a nearby village in 1963, the first of his village to have finished High-School. “We needed to walk everywhere back then, there were no roads. As a teacher, I would get 30 Yuan a month and five more for food”. The Cultural Revolution came here in 1968 he says, but then quickly changes the subject, chatting away about religions and traditions. There is a bible near his bed but he is not a Christian. “I just bought it out of curiosity”.

Very few religious signs are evident around this area: no temples or churches anywhere but the tradition of ancestor worship reigns supreme. The hall of every house is decorated with ancestors’ photos (Sometimes joined by a photo of Chairman Mao) and red inscriptions. In towns and villages, many shops sell funeral decorations unique to the area: fluttered paper mobiles of many colors for Han funerals, paper shoes to be buried with the dead for the funerals of the Zhuang ethnic minority. The shoes are made out of China Mobile advertisement leaflets, hand-painted by the shop owners.

On hillsides, many graves show new and elaborate tombstones. A villager explains this is one of the first things a family would spend money on when they start doing well, as appeasing the spirits brings good luck and more money.

Ren picks up the conversation again with an effort. There is something on his mind but he seems hesitant to blurt it out, and then asks it all the same.

“You come from Beijing, such a big city. Is it true that same sex marriages are now allowed there”?

It is now my turn to hesitate. The question caught me by surprise and I try to read in his face whether he is scandalized by the idea, or encouraged, or maybe just curious. Wang is quick to intervene, throwing light on where the question came from.

“There was one here, you know. Teacher Lou. He wanted to live with a man. Later we heard in big cities it’s quite normal, but not here. Here, he was scolded to death”.

. “Teacher Lou joined the school when I was still working. Such a bright young man and a very devoted teacher. He would come to visit me often after I retired”. Teacher Ren tells of his friend.

Wang adds that some time ago, teacher Ren wanted to leave his wife, who was also from the village, to live with a former student. “The family, the school, other villagers, they would criticize him every day, saying he was shameful. Then, I didn’t see it myself, two other neighbors found him in the field, dead after he swallowed rat poison.

他被人骂死了 – tongue-lashed to death by people. Somehow, I assumed she had just used that as a figure of speech. Turned out she meant it quite literally.

Guiangxi is a strange province, a buffer zone of sorts between the impoverished minority areas of the South-West and the prosperous province of Guangdong in the east. crossing it is almost going to a different country. Food-wise also, Guangxi offers neither of the spicy delicacies of Sichuan and Yunnan, nor the sophistication of a Cantonese cuisine, which makes travelling here a dull experience for the taste-buds.

Nothing dull about the scenery though: natural or man-made.

As the case was in Sichuan and Yunnan, a trip through the highways and country roads of Guangxi is an exhausting experience. Trying to take in all the changes and development soon turns into one big blur of dusty construction and endless movement. I sometimes imagine a big sign hung over China saying: This country is under construction,please visit us again in the future.

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Housing Bubble?

In Baise (百色), a city in the far west corner of Guangxi, dosens of new neighborhoods are being built. At the same time the city center, near a memorial to  the 1929 Baise Uprising, the event that brought Deng Xiaoping to prominence within the communist party, is deserted. Old buildings abandoned and crumbling, broken windows reflect signs with some missing characters in empty office buildings.

In Lingyun (凌云), a small county town, thousands of new apartments were built, and more are under construction. Evening reveals occupation levels, when here and there the light is turned on in a window.  In many cases, it’s a single widow out of an entire block. The town of Fengshan (凤山) presents similar feature, with dozens of budget hotels and no tourists. In the villages on the road everywhere mud houses are giving way to brick and block buildings. In the city of Jinchengjiang (金城江), new construction surrounds the old city center. On the river bank before noon, hundreds play cards, including many young man of working age (but never any young women). Some watch DVD’s on the sidewalk - street stalls rent movies to watch nearby. Others check out the  stalls of traditional medicines that cure all, from mosquito bites to cancer. Movies are hard to follow because of the noise from a nearby construction site.

The right for broad-band

Hillary Clinton sometime talks about the right to surf the Internet as a fundamental human right, so perhaps it’s not so surprising Internet access isn’t guaranteed in China. Wan Zhongming, a driver and occasional  construction worker from the village of chayuan (茶园), near Lingyun, bought a computer for his seven years old son. The telecom companies refuse to set up ADSL connection in the village because this would require expensive infrastructure that doesn’t exist in villages. Just ten minutes by car from a town, but still years behind. permanent wireless connection is too expensive for them.

Beiya village: Rice fields and a gold mine

(Originally posted on China Digital Times)

The two ancient cities of Dali and Lijiang are probably as famous as a tourist site in China can be. Picturesque and enchanting, they are swarmed with tourists from both China and abroad who come here to admire the magnificent mountain scenery and rich minority culture at this gateway to the Himalayas. The clear streams, lush mountain flora and snow-capped peaks of North-West Yunnan aren’t what one would associate with pollution and contamination but it was right here, few kilometers off the main road connecting Dali to Lijiang and about half way between the two, that over a hundred children were hospitalized after dangerous levels of lead were found in their blood.

It all started… actually no one knows exactly when it started. In the village of Beiya (北衙) tells differ: some say signs of ailment in Children started about three months ago, and were spotted by teachers in the local school who alarmed health authorities. However, one mother, whose daughter is still in the hospital, says the child, now 12, has been feeling bad since the beginning of this year. “But I gave her some herbal medicine and thought she’ll be all-right” she says with remorse. “I can’t afford the cost of a medical check in the hospital, and it has been a drought year…” Some experts in the ministry of health suggested that drought conditions worsened already existing pollution, therefore causing the number of affected children to peak.

Beiya's main street

Another mother, who only gave her surname, Yao, said there have been similar cases as early as 2008. “But then we thought those kids have just had bad luck”. Her daughter, who is seven, was released from the hospital few days ago and is recovering at home. Her son, 3, also tested with high levels of lead but was released earlier and is now happily, if somewhat slowly, wanders around the yard, chasing a dog. His arm is in an improvised sling made of a scarf: he hurt it when he slipped in the yard the day before. “He falls a lot” Yao explains. Another couple hurriedly sent their two years old daughter to her grandmother’s in a nearby county. “She is supposed to drink a lot of milk to get well, but she can’t drink any, or eat any fruits. She gets weaker because she doesn’t eat but she gets sick when she does, so what can you do”? 

The government of Heqing county, where Beiya is located, publicly announced the case at the end of July, and took upon itself all the medical costs. According to the official report (that was quoted in Chinese and international media), the air contamination was caused by small illegal gold mines operating in back yards by peasants trying to make some quick cash. Those were allegedly all closed down in an aggressive campaign following the poisoning.

Heavy load: A woman in Beiya

The official report failed to mention the odors that would hit you as soon as you enter the valley of Beiya, the air is murky and it smells: not the usual smell of dung, sewage or untreated household waste, but something that feels like it belongs in a more industrialized area. Then again, maybe it was merely my imagination, and the cough that refused to let go during my two days in Beiya might have been psychosomatic. The report, however, completely ignored the most noticeable feature in this valley – the mining operation of Yunnan gold mine company. This is no backyard illegal mine but a big factory, complete with machinery and workers dormitory. It started operating here more than ten years ago, locals say. According to the company’s website, Yunnan resources and minerals corp adheres to safety regulations and strictly enforces environmental protection measures throughout its mines.

 Some residents of Beiya are convinced it was this mine that caused the lead poisoning. Others have a theory that links the incident to the newly laid railway that passes nearby. “The kids used to play there” One farmer explains why she thinks that. They don’t know anything about the results of an investigation and have received no compensation, but the hospital costs, as well as parents travel costs, were covered by the local government. Their grievances with the mining company are of a different nature.

“They wouldn’t hire us to work” Yao says. “They don’t want us because they say we have no education and no qualification so they bring workers from other places. I know the people who work there get medical insurance. That could have been helpful to me”. Her neighbor, Ms. Sun, doesn’t believe the latest poisoning or the investigation will change anything, or make the place safer. “Mei Banfa” (nothing to do, no solution), she says. “We have no guanxi and no influence. The bosses of the company probably have many friends. My only hope is that my husband will earn enough money (He works in Fujian province) then we would move to a safer place”.

If you’d have a chance to talk to the manager of the gold-mine, what would you say to him?

 Yao: “I would tell him my daughter is sick and that I need money. I’d ask him why he wouldn’t hire us. We are good people. We want to work and earn our living”.

Then there are those who are not around. The husband of one, best friend of another. Their names often come up in conversation, that always turn back to some amusing experiences from jail terms or brief detentions. The stories are amusing when told by drunk men, even though reality behind them isn’t all that funny.  

But it’s nice to see some people having a good time, even when I know they’re mainly just creating an echochamber for themselves, convincing each other everybody want the same things as them. A glance at other tourists around in their purchase spree will assure not all Chinese people want these things  (The tourists want scarves, mainly). Still, it’s nice to see those people having a good time. They don’t get much of it in their ungrateful homeland.

This came from a former student of mine in Lijiang. He Works in town now, cleaning tables at a restaurant and taking driving lessons in his spare time. Most of his classmates also work in town, doing similar jobs. Few went to university. None stayed in the village. “There is nothing to do there” he says, and his friends all nod.

“The village” is the same village I wrote about few times before, Baoshan in north-west Yunnan province. I was a volunteer there for a year in 2005, and have been trying to go back for a visit at least once a year ever since.

The youths of Baoshan might think of it as a dull place where nothing ever changes, but from one visit to the next, I do see changes. For the worse.

More and more fields look abandoned, with no one wanting to stay in the village and cultivate them. Those who stay are the elderly, who got older since my last visit, but still work the remaining fields, having no one else to do this for them.

Construction of the road to Baoshan area has finally been completed (I wrote about that painful process here). The asphalt goes almost all the way, leaving only about 20 Km of rough dirt road that only takes an hour. The rest is a smooth, dreamy  ride that only takes slightly longer than it used to before. You see, in the process of paving, the width of the road somehow shrank, leaving barely enough space for one vehicle to pass. If they drive very slowly and take dangerous curves carefully, they are almost guaranteedto get to Lijiang town safely in no more than 5 hours. This is the best villagers can hope for nowadays, and the best that could be managed with a meager budget, that no doubt got even scantier due to other necessities such as banquets and cigarettes and the new dwelling of a party secretary.

Rough Roads and ageing people is bad news for the local education system. Some devoted teachers, with the help of some donors, have done wonders to students test results in recent years: The number of Junior-high kids who passed High-School exams soared from 25% in 2004 to more than 50% in 2009 – not bad for a school where classrooms are always freezing or leaking, or for students who often can’t afford to buy a separate notebook for each class, or for teachers who normally get only about half their salary every month.

But not impressive enough, apparently. The coming school-year, few of the smaller elementary schools in the villages will not open, and the only middle school was shut down. Not enough teachers could be recruited (I wonder why). So first graders will have to walk for half an hour or more on mountain paths to attend classes. Middle-school students could either move to Lijiang or to a smaller town, about two hours drive away when the road is passable: That means a boarding school, which many families can’t afford. In turn, it means more kids with less education and less prospects.  

So that’s the situation. Not the best you can find in China. Most definitely not the worst. Just another Nong Cun where nothing ever changes.

The Chinese call their enormous railway system “The iron rooster” – a name that hints to the shape of China itself that some say resembles a chicken, with it’s head in Dongbei and tail in Tibet (I’m guessing, don’t really see the resemblance myself). Actually, the railway can more acuurately be likened to a big migrating bird, covering great distances, bringing travelers from one climate zone to another and totally different one within days.

 But there is another transportation system in China: much more fragmented and somewhat more floppy, but one that gets to nearly every corner of the empire, carrying goods and people from the countryside to the cities and back. The public busses of China are much more reminiscent of a chicken, picking here and there in a backyard. In a way, the tin chicken is the true lifeline of the Chinese countryside.

A bus from a town to a smaller town would always leave on time, but would then stop for an hour at the edge of town, for reasons that are never fully explained. It usually turns out the driver was waiting for some delivery that he is supposed to pass on to someone in the smaller town, something like a sack if rice, or two desktop computers, a tractor engine or some bolts or a salted pig’s leg or a DVD. Passengers don’t complain – they can always find somewhere to have a quick noodle dish and a smoke.

From a smaller town and into the villages there are often only open trucks, but some of the older models of buses go there too: then the luggage will contain of much more bolts and sacks of rice as well as empty jars and water containers, later to be sent back to town filled with home-made Baijiu. Some of these buses aren’t in fact part of the state’s system but private initiatives by some guys who just bought old buses and started offering this much needed service where the government does not.

Rural bus drivers are curious and splendid creatures with many skills and inexhaustible patience who usually speak several dialects and are true masters of multi-tasking. They act as middle-man in the trade between towns and villages: keeping accurate account of every sack of rice. They would deliver children to schools, X-ray photos to rural clinics, drugs to patients and chickens to restaurant, all with the same reliability and resourcefulness, never shying away from a conversation, as they are also responsible of delivering the latest gossip. If they sometime neglect the maintenance of their own vehicles, they can be excused as they have so much in their hands: passengers are patient and always will be, tolerating road bumps and broken coils with the same stoic mood they accept flat-tire induced delays. One bus driver in Yunnan told me that once, among all the deliveries he has made, he even delivered a baby when still on the road and far from a hospital. Three days later, he was also the one taking the baby, the new mother and several chickens home in his bus. The tin chicken may not be a cutting-edge transportation solution, but it is a solution of sorts. country folks have long learned to make do with what they get…

Bus station in Yunnan

In the Liangshan (亮山 meaning cool mountains) prefecture of south Sichuan, the mountains are high and the emperor is far away, therefore the children are many. “Most families here have four or five kids” a woman says in very broken mandarin. She herself has three so far, all under the age of five. Her friend, sitting on the concrete paved path next to her, has four. The friend, like many women, doesn’t speak a word of Chinese. They are both members of the Yi, (or Nusuo) ethnic minority, a tribe that has once cast its fear over much of South-West China. In this county, Butuo, they are over 90% of the population, and make for a very picturesque spectacle with their traditional colorful clothes on the backdrop of green hills and swift streams – Picture-perfect rural life, regarding one can ignore the poverty. Or the dirt.  .

These two women live in a village called “Ethnic village” (民族村), a strange creation of a semi-modern era, Located just outside a ring road that surrounds the small town of Butuo (布拖). the village consists of about a hundred families that were moved here, few hundred meters from their former homes, when their land was seized for urban development. They were given courtyard houses built after the traditional Yi fashion, where they continue to raise cattle and poultry. “The houses are better than the ones we have had before, but the village is too crowded, we don’t have the space that we used to have” explains A-tsai, 61, who sits, huddled in her sheepskin cape, with her back to a low wall that separates the village from the main road.

Butuo town is trying to push into the 21^st century, while the countryside around it still lies deep in ancient times. a pedestrian street opened here two years ago that looks almost elegant, or would have looked so, if it hasn’t been for so many empty and locked-up shops, and even more empty apartments, built on A-tsai and her people’s former homes. “Business is weak” is a common complaint from those shop owners who are still open for business. La-Lo, age 40, is one of them. Her tiny restaurant is the only one still open in the block, but there are no costumers, and the entrance is half blocked with a cage holding the family’s chickens. La-lo worked in Chengdu for a while, married a man from another county and brought him back to her native place. This is not how it usually goes for women here, she says, and that is evident in the villages around Butuo.

In one village, just about two kilometers into the mountains, several young women put on heavy silver jewelry. They are getting ready for a wake of sorts – visiting the house of an old relative who has just passed away. The procession goes through muddy fields, with older women helping the girls with their big silver head-dresses and complicated hair-styles. Many young children tag along or are carried on mother’s backs, but no man is to be seen.

The men are all busy in the deceased backyard since morning. They slaughtered many cows as offering to the departed spirit and are now smoking the meat. Young women here speak even less Chinese than the older ones, and are averted to speak to an outsider at all, though they are happy to have their pictures taken and are encouraged to do that by the men – obviously proud of their women elaborated costume. Young men, on the other hand, are chatty on the verge of flirtatious, with the confidence of well traveled people: Many have gone to work in places as far as Shenzhen and Dongguan, only coming back home for the summer’s traditional festivals. After paying respects to the departed and having feasted on the rare meat dish, most women and children go back home, leaving the men alone for a long session of Baijiu drinking, outside on the street in the rain.

La-lo confirms that many women in the villages can’t speak or read Chinese. “They are often being pulled out of school to help in the fields or to take care of younger siblings” she explains. Officially, most Minority groups are allowed to have two or sometimes three children, but here family planning rules are widely ignored and children are considered a blessing, even when dressed in rags or with faces and bodies so dirty that most suffer from skin-rash – it has to be said though that despite all that, small children here look quite happy, even when their only toy is an old basketball gone flat. La-lo only has two children and seems to be somehow negotiating their pass into China’s middle-class. Her older daughter works hard on her English homework and prefers to go by the English name Suzan.

“I have always been curious” La-lo laughs when asked how come her lot is different from that of other women. “My mom encouraged me to study and go out to see other places that she never saw. I try to do the same with my daughter. It is good for a girl to study”.

*Had trouble uploading more photos onto this post. Some more photos from Butuo here.

fortune teller in Xichang old town

sourcery is alive and well at the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture in south Sichuan. The Yi people who, I’ve been told, prefer to be referred to as Nusuo, were traditionally animists and used shamans to communicate with the spirits. This they still do today: In each one of the Liangshan towns, men or women can be seen in markets and street corners, crouching under a big parasol, giving advice to the sick or the troubled, based on reading of ancient scripts and egg yolk.

The center of that Bimu culture – Bimu are the shamans or medicine men, using the ancient Nusuo script to tell fortunes – is in the old town of Xichang: few streets of crumbling shacks, filthy and smelling of urine, in the middle of a city that is quickly upgrading itself and that only last week got the ultimate validation of being a new middle class center – it’s very own walmart super-store .

A bimu awaiting for costumers

On the bank of an almost dry river, more than twenty fortune tellers sit all day, and none of them needs to wait much. The costumers are all Nusuo and the sessions are done in their own language. The people mainly come to consult regarding ailments or infertility, but sometimes an exorcism ceremony is performed.  Some Bimu – usually the men- are literate in the ancient scripts while others just use ceremonial drum or look at the egg yolk for answers. “Many of them are fake fortune tellers, only few are real” says a man in traditional dress, but he can’t explain how he knows the real ones from the fake.

Bimu and a Nusuo script

The payment for a session seems to be somewhere between ten and forty Yuan, sometimes with an added bottle of beer or a chicken. Some of the witches wear full traditional dress

Medicine woman and a mother of six

Others bother less with appearance and dress casually,

evoking the spirits

Or almost not at all – like this man, a Bimu and a proud father of six,originally from the town of Meigu. His sons already learn to be Bimu as well, but the oldest currently holds the somewhat more prosaic position of a bus driver.

reading fortunes in raw eggs