The Unremarkable Village

Guang Ming’s project was, the villagers opted not to renew the contract after the first year. They decided they could save the small fee they paid Yong’s father and manage the fish farm themselves. It did not go well. Yong noted his father’s response to the villagers’ decision: persistently optimistic, he moved on and continued to look for ways to improve the lot of his family and the village. The experience of seeing his father challenge and even breech various norms and expectations, remain undeterred by setbacks, and continually scan his environment in search of ways to make life better for his family had a profound impact on Yong.

Yong’s father is a central character in his story. Without consciously reflecting on his father’s activities, he absorbed lessons that informed his own behavior and attitudes. Watching his father bend and sometimes break the rules for the sake of his family and community, Yong grew up with a healthy skepticism about all rules and regulations. Yong had no compunction about breeching restrictions that seemed to him impediments to where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do. He internalized the entrepreneurial and innovative spirit he saw in his father, who identified needs, envisioned ways to meet them, and enacted his plans to make his family’s life better. He recognized the benefits of taking risks, being willing to try what others would regard as uncertain, even dangerous. Restless in mind and actions, he constantly probed prescribed limits for soft spots where he could push through. This was what Yong experienced as he grew up, a father unlike any other in his village.

Yong’s home village of Xianggong Yuanzi, Yuechi County in Sichuan Province was, and remains, unremarkable. It boasted no historical sites, landmarks, or notable residents. There were no famous rivers or mountains nearby. It sat alongside other small villages in a narrow valley nestled between two hills. Rice fields were terraced into the hillsides, cascading down to the small creek that cut through the valley. Fields behind the village, which lacked sufficient water

to support rice cultivation, grew sweet potatoes, vegetables, wheat, corn, peas, and sorghum. Bamboo grew everywhere in the village, and every family harvested the stalks to make sheets, baskets, and other containers.

When asked where he’s from, Yong jokes that he comes from a village so poor that the inhabitants couldn’t scratch together enough money to bribe government officials to put it on the list of poor villages eligible for special benefits. The funny thing is, it’s not a joke. When Yong was born in 1965, roughly 80 percent of all rural Chinese lived in profound poverty. Because of collectivization and other policies during the Great Leap Forward, Sichuan Province was among the very poorest provinces as well as the most populated and rural of China’s thirty provinces.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

According to the World Bank, China’s per capita annual income in 1965 was $98 in U.S. dollars.32 That works out to about 27 cents a day. This average includes more prosperous urban areas such as Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Tianjin, and so on. A conservative guess is that per capita income in rural areas such as Sichuan was far less, likely less than half the national average. At that time, China’s per capita gross national product (GNP) was $1,070 USD; compare that to the United States, which was $7,890 USD. Rural communities were almost entirely subsistence economies. Though peasants relied on what they could grow, raise, forage, or harvest, they couldn’t keep all the products of their labor—they were at the mercy of a government that prioritized urban areas, CCP officials, and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA; China’s armed forces). Villagers were often left without even the seeds needed for the following year’s crop.

Yong was born a mere three years after the end of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. This failed initiative, along with several natural disasters, was the primary cause of the Great Famine that claimed as many as forty-five million lives.33 The famine hit remote rural communities particularly hard. Sichuan, Yong’s home province, was the twenty-first most severely affected of the twenty-eight administrative units during the Great Famine.34 Peasants such as those in Sichuan had been reduced to eating soil and boiled tree bark. Though the Great Leap Forward was over when Yong was born, peasants were still recovering, both physically and psychologically, from the trauma of the famine years. Childhood malnutrition was rampant, and starvation still occurred. As the prized firstborn male, Yong was as well-cared for as his family’s circumstances allowed. Still, the lack of adequate nutrition in his childhood contributed significantly to his unusually small stature.

Like almost all rural Chinese villages at the time, Yong’s community lacked electricity, sanitation or water systems, telecommunications, and paved roads—all the systems and conveniences that the West took for granted by the 1960s. Villagers used kerosene lamps for light. They relied on grass, straw, and—on rare occasions—coal for cooking. They fetched water from the village well each day. And they collected human and animal waste to fertilize the fields and gardens.

Although some of the other villages in the valley were less than half of a mile away, for Yong, they might as well have been in Switzerland. He regarded residents of other villages as foreign, untrustworthy, and even threatening. Only rarely did residents of different villages interact—the exception being when these foreigners were allowed to visit to draw water from the well in Yong’s village during a severe drought. Only later, when he attended schools outside his village, did his suspicion of anyone not a resident of his village begin to ebb.

As Yong was growing up, the villagers he knew passively accepted their circumstances with the same silent resignation as that of their ancestors. Like peasants elsewhere, they viewed life as a never-ending cycle of seasons interrupted only by catastrophes such as floods, famines, and earthquakes. This view is reflected in the Chinese calendar, which represents a cycle of sixty years.35 They also took in stride man-made disasters such as collectivization and the Great Leap Forward. The idea of defying or revolting against the government didn’t occur to them. When orders came from officials, they did as they were told. They obediently brought their crops to town and handed them over when the government told them to do so, receiving in return paltry compensation at best. If they raised pigs and were told to deliver half of them to government officials for slaughter, they did so. Decades and centuries of unquestioning compliance to authority seemed ingrained in their psyches.

Yong’s village had changed very little over the centuries. There had been no significant innovations or changes of any kind. The crops, farming methods, social customs, and rhythms of daily life— all were as they had been for centuries. The only people to leave the village were women who married into families from other villages. Villagers actively opposed attempts to bring about changes other than those initiated by the authorities, as Yong witnessed with his father’s fish-farming scheme.

Despite the extreme poverty of his surroundings, Yong never thought of himself or his family as poor. Everyone in his village was equally poor. Poverty was the water they swam in, the air they breathed. As most humans do, he accepted his situation as the norm until experiences shifted his perspective. The lack of contact with anything beyond his immediate vicinity meant that, growing up, Yong had no other reality with which to compare his own.

Like most children, Yong played, did chores, spent time with his family and neighbors, and found pleasure in these simple