With the spectacle over, Anne's and Tariqa's heads disappeared from view above, leaving me alone and in another world. I gazed around at the peaceful fields, each apportioned to this family or that, crisscrossed with drainage ditches, and connected by the curving footpaths that wind along the edges of the terraces. The faces of the terraces are made from the firm red clay of the area and are typically 2-to-4-feet high. At the upper and lower ends, roads cut across the little valley; toward the lower end is a good-sized pond that collects the irrigation water and delivers it on command to the next set of fields below. I followed a few paths; they don't connect very well, so it's sometimes necessary to backtrack.
I wandered down to a freshly plowed area where two men were planting rice in seedling beds. The beds were about 5 feet wide and 30 feet or so long, and had been freshly plowed and leveled. The beds had been flooded with water, so the mud was soft and liquid enough to move around with a broom. One man was laying out what looked like greenhouse flats, made of plastic, about 1-by-2 feet, with a grid of 1-inch deep dimples. The other man was brooming the mud over the flats, filling the dimples and smoothing the surface. Both men were barefoot, with legs bare from about the knee on down. Worried about getting your shoes muddy? Not a problem for farmers. They had a bag of rice, and I presumed they would be putting a seed or more into each dimple. Beside them were other beds they had finished. They had covered them over with light plastic to shield the seedlings from the weather. I was mildly surprised that they used modern techniques and paid for plastic; but I suppose it's economical to do it that way. Later on they will transfer the rice from the seedbeds into all the fields. This requires days on end of bent-over, muddy work for men and women alike.
A couple of terraces below, two more men were plowing a small field. It too was flooded with standing water. Instead of an ox, as we had seen last year, they were grappling with a motorized plow. It was about the size of a roto-tiller, with a plow point in the back and small ski-like skids on each side to keep the engine from sinking into the mud. The man couldn't plow a straight line and needed help turning the corners; it may have been the first day he had ever used such a plow.
Another man was preparing a vegetable bed nearby with a long-handled, wide-bladed, heavy-duty mattock. It is an all-purpose tool, especially good for digging into the hard earth. I have also seen it used to take up sod. I continued walking down the little valley, toward some humps on a low hill near the children's school ground. They are graves. Cremation is the regular practice in the city, but if you live in the country you can still find a patch of earth for your final resting place. A month or so ago there was a funeral across the valley; they played very loud traditional music over loudspeakers for days, but that's another subject. They mound up earth over you; sometimes you are dug slightly into the hill and they build small wingwalls around your mound. If you're lucky, they will make it all out of brick and concrete, and they will burn incense for you. Do you become overgrown with weeds? No problem, your descendants will burn off the hillside once or twice a year.
I crashed through some underbrush and walked past a few farmhouses. An old man was standing outside with a girl about 10 years old. In outlandishly imperfect Chinese, I told the man may age and asked him how old he was. He said he was 86; he wouldn't let me take his picture, though. Many Chinese don't want their pictures taken; others will go into the house and bring out their kids and all the kinfolk. There were some small gardens in front of the farmhouses, with loose, low walls of mud- mortared brick around them. I don't know what why they need the walls; there are no deer or sheep or goats. Maybe it's neatness; maybe it's a territory thing; maybe it's wild children.
I found a path and followed it; it came out just below the children's school. I wandered onto the school grounds. It was late afternoon and many children and parents were there, playing or walking. Kids were playing basketball, soccer (football), and of course ping pong. Kids were running around, jumping rope, and playing on the monkey bars. I found Taalan at the ping-pong tables. There had been a grade-against-grade tournament earlier in the afternoon. For some reason he had been excluded from his grade's team, though he could beat the others. He had been upset about it earlier, but was happily playing away now for fun. In the center of the playground some workers were building the brick foundation and steps for a new flagpole. The flag ceremony is taken seriously at school. Also, every day the entire school does exercises outside. Everyone in China who is less than 50 or so years old has done the same exercises in school to the same music.
Just up the lane from the school is a croquet court. It has a low boundary and a few benches, and is made from leveled, packed, and smoothed clay (i.e. local dirt). Retired ladies and a few of the men play croquet every day. They play by the strict rules; each one plays two balls simultaneously. They play slowly, seriously, and well.
Farther up the lane I came across Anne and Tariqa again. They had had their own walkabout. We joined hands and walked home to make supper, making a good ending to a good day.
I looked down. We were on a narrow lane that sloped downhill. On the right was an apartment building, partially dug into the earth, meaning that we were 10 feet or more above the ground floor of the building. A solid retaining wall, with an extra 3-foot wall at our level, separated us from the drop. Taalan explained how he would go over the wall, climb down a bit to the top of the ground-floor gate (covered at one time with pieces of broken glass), work his way across, swing down until he could get his feet on the gate, then climb the rest of the way to the ground, which was solid concrete. I wondered to myself how much he had been influenced by all those times he had watched The Three Musketeers, with Gene Kelly. He said that he realized it was dangerous and didn't do it anymore -- what more could I add?
We walked a little farther, then turned off the lane onto a faint path, still leading downward. The path passed up against the side of a building. In several places, small pipes from the building were discharging some kind of vile, blue-black liquid across the path. We came out into a little hollow with a small pond at the outlet. Around the sides and upper end were the retaining walls that separated the farmland from the university. We walked past some kind of open sewage pool; it was square and about 4-feet wide. Taalan said he would rather die than fall into that, and I heartily agreed. He added that one time he and some other boys had been there and were setting off firecrackers; Yue Wenjie had thrown one into the pool and had been thoroughly splattered. We both laughed and involuntarily wriggled our shoulders convulsively at the thought.
Yue Wenjie is the local Huckleberry Finn. His parents are workers, and he doesn't care much about school. He is a good boy, but always getting into trouble. The teachers mostly ignore him and refuse to call on him in class. He knows everyone, everything, and every place. He plays and eats fairly regularly at our place, and is basically part of the family.
Taalan showed me the pond. It was only about 20 yards across, but he swore there were lots of fish in it. He told me that his fishing buddy, some man who lived in our village, had showed him all the best places to fish. He said that once when they were playing the flying-card game there, his card had gotten washed into the pond, and a big fish had come to the surface and eaten the card. I supposed fish stories were told everywhere; Taalan insisted it was true. He confided that he had never told us before, but once he and some other boys had gotten into trouble there. The other boys were throwing big rocks down from the wall onto some cabbage plants -- Taalan was whittling innocently on a piece of bamboo, he said -- and the farmer had caught them and taken them all to the principal of their school. The principal had threatened the boys with suspension if it happened again.
We passed a farmhouse, with two boys in the front yard. Taalan said they were nice boys, but too poor to go to school. In theory, education is both free and compulsory, but the practice is somewhat different. Parents must pay about 100 yuan per semester for books, and for poor farming peasants this can present an effective barrier. Other factors come into play, as well. There is a pervasive bias in school toward children whose parents are teachers or officials. Despite its hundreds of large cities, about 90 percent of China's population are still farmers -- peasants. The government praises the peasantry and the value of their work, but is doing little to improve their conditions. For most of them, a more comfortable life is impossible, and many put their hopes on one child. They train him/her to study hard and pass the exams, then put all of their savings (or borrowed money) into paying the cost of sending him to college. Usually the money runs out after a year or so; what then? The youth feels burdened with the sadness of his parents' sacrifice and the necessity of becoming successful and making enough money to support the rest of his family. At every stage, peasant children have harder conditions and less opportunity in school. One egregious example, in my opinion, is that the minimum passing scores on the entrance exams are higher for peasant students than for city students. Combined with the much lower quality of education in the countryside, this makes it very difficult for a peasant student to succeed in college.
Thoughts such as these crowded my mind as we continued our walkabout. We came in sight of the south road. Taalan said this marked the end of the protection of the university, and that he did not want to cross it. I asked why. He said that, once before, he had gone there and the peasant boys had ganged up on him, broken his backpack, chased him, and would have beaten him up if he hadn't gotten away. He was sure it would happen again; who was I to argue. I asked him why they were like that. He said they were too poor to go to school and had almost nothing of their own. The only was to get something was to get it from other people, and if they had to steal it or hit them and take it from them, they would. When they weren't helping with farm work, they had nothing better to do than stick together and act tough. They resented boys who had money and went to school, and they had little to look forward to when they grew up.
I remembered some of the problems he was having at his own school. Last year he had blacked the eye of a bully who was picking on smaller kids. This year the bully problem is common in every class. There is a bully in his class who breaks Taalan's things. For example, he had broken one of Taalan's art projects, and one day had thrown down Taalan's ink bottle to the floor, breaking the bottle and splattering Taalan's legs all over with black ink. Taalan's teacher never took any action to restrain the bully. Whenever Taalan complained to the teacher, the bully would complain louder about something that Taalan had allegedly done. Taalan said that every class had its bullies, and that nothing was done by the teachers or the principal to curb them. Taalan is trying hard to remain peaceful, but it's very frustrating. We have started to raise the issue with the authorities, but it's a slow process. From what I have seen, this coincides with other aspects of the Chinese social system, but that's a topic for another day.
We didn't cross the road, but walked up it a ways until we came to the entrance of the south campus. Until last year, it had been a separate college (a taxation college, I was told), but was bought by our university as part of an expansion drive. This year it is mainly used as dormitory and recreational space for freshman students. We wandered past students playing basketball, ping pong, and badminton. I waved to some of the freshmen I had taught last semester. We headed for the opposite gate, but kept finding dead ends instead. Taalan said he remembered that he had been here once before, that there was a round place that was great for the flying-card game, and that it had some ping-pong tables next to it. Sure enough, in another minute we came across a nicely paved, fenced round area with some benches. That's it, he said; he described all the details of that one day, months before. We eventually managed to find the outlet, crossed over a small footbridge across a large drainage ditch, and passed into the main campus.
Taalan started talking about a special shortcut that he and his friends had made. They had moved some surplus construction debris to camouflage it. I went over to inspect his infrastructure. The shortcut was to climb over a broken place in the low wall, then to hold onto the top of the wall as you edged gingerly along a very narrow ledge to the safety of the other side. As usual, it was ten feet down or so. Taalan pointed out the weak spots in the ledge, commenting that he knew it so well he could do it with his eyes closed. He said if you hurried, it would save time from going around the long way. He mentioned that he used the shortcut at night when they played hide-and- seek.
As we tightroped along the ledge, I recalled my previous knowledge of his hide-and- seek games. Sometimes on weekend nights he had asked if he join his buddies who were playing it. I had presumed that they played something like the common backyard variety of the game, exuberant but safe, and never wandering far from base. We could hear them shouting in the distance; he would come in at the appointed curfew hour, flushed and happy. We had no idea that they were ranging so far, practicing ledgewalking, or anything of that sort. I asked how they played the game. He said they would choose two sides; one side would hide and the other would hunt. The object was not to return safely to base, but to remain uncaught. I asked hopefully if the hunters merely had to see you to catch you. No, he replied, they have to chase us and catch us. I imagined Taalan hustling along the ledge in the dark, in his carefree youthfulness, confident in his skill and invincibility, with someone close behind and relentlessly in pursuit. Yes, he said, I know it can be dangerous, but all the boys my age play it together.
We came back up the hill to our local neighborhood and stopped to play marbles on some bare dirt near our apartment. It's spring and Taalan now has some marbles in his pocket at all times. He showed me his favorite, a small steel marble, and explained how it couldn't be knocked very far by other marbles. The boys set up a course and play their marbles in turn, similar to a game of croquet. He beat me in two games; then we walked up the steps to our second-floor apartment, and I was once more in my familiar world.
The essence of boyhood is universal. When I was Taalan's age, I lived two miles outside a small town. It was a different time, and definitely a different place. My domain was composed of the fields, woods, creeks, ponds, and backyards within a mile radius of my house. I knew where to find "gold" nuggets in the sand, where the footholds were in the best climbing trees, where to dig sassafras roots out of the bank, and how to climb all around the old dam at the end of "our" pond. Some of Taalan's experiences are familiar to me, but others are totally beyond my reach.
Taalan's own feet straddle different worlds -- east and west, urban and rural, privileged and peasant, supervised and unsupervised, freedom and discipline, childhood and youth. Though he is fully accepted into his schoolmates' circles, he will always, in some ways, remain a foreigner here. In America there is no shortage of bullies, poverty, inequality, or prejudice; however, those problems seem more noticeable here in China. Perhaps the difference is real; perhaps we were more sheltered by our safe, middle-class lifestyle in America; or perhaps we simply notice more here because we are "outside" observers. In either case, in China Taalan has been exposed to an intense short-course in social relations. Our own behavior is more-or-less on public display here, and this has helped Taalan to become more aware of the choices that he makes daily. Sometimes I wonder about the unique life he is experiencing. I wonder what he is being prepared for. I can only shake my head in wonder at his exuberance, his adaptability, and his ability to immerse himself in the moment. Marbles, anyone?
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