Another highlight of our visit to Changyucheng was going inside one of the village's houses. They naturally showcased the nicest dwelling in the village. The exterior can be seen in the photo above, and this shot appears in an earlier post about the village. We spent over an hour here, making dumplings and then eating them, along with lots of other food, for lunch. I'll have more to say about that in the next post.We spent most of our time in a large that functioned as a sitting room (客厅), bedroom (卧室) and dining room. I also popped inside a small bedroom off to its side to take some pictures (they're below). The house may have had another room, but I'm not sure. That other room, if it did exist, was certainly very small.
One part of large, multipurpose room off to the right of the doorway in the photo above had two or three old style brick beds (火抗)—the ones that are heated up at night with firewood. As I noted in an earlier post, that's why stacks of firewood are scattered all over the village.
I didn't see a stove inside this place, nor any sign of some other means of heating the place up. So the beds seemed to be the only way to keep the dwelling warm and cozy during this area’s bitterly cold winters. The beds were not very wide; they were certainly no larger than a twin bed back in the states. They thus functioned not only as beds (床), but also as sofas (沙发). After our walk through the village was finished, we all sat down on them and had some Nescafe before boarding the bus to return home.
A low table, much like an American style coffee table, was placed in front of one these sofa-type beds. According to my good friend, Lu Hong Yan (路红艳), the Chinese term for such tables doesn't use the character for table, 桌子. They are instead called 茶几, which can be literally translated as “tea device.” That's because the teapots used for brewing tea leaves are typically placed on these tables.
Finally, as one can see from the photo below, the walls of this room were adorned with Chinese Communist Party poster art (画).
The dining area was toward the back of the large room. This part of the house was away from the window, so it was fairly dark. Lighting was provided by several bare bulbs sticking down from the ceiling and through the thick, white-colored wallpaper-like (壁纸) material covering both the ceiling and the walls. Interestingly enough, these light bulbs (灯泡) were not the older round types, but newer energy saving ones.In addition to these state of the art light bulbs, the sitting room also boasted a relatively new TV set (电视) and DVD player (DVD机). So while this house was lacked any kind of modern heating (暖气) system, it did have what passed for a state of the art home entertainment center.
You observe these contradictions all the time while living in China. For me, as well as many other expats, this blend of backwardness and modernity is a big reason why the Middle Kingdom such a fascinating place. At least fascinating enough for us to want to continue living here and put up with the occasional “bad China day”.
The small bedroom was on the left side of the doorway entrance to the large room in the house. You can see that room's windows (窗) on the left side of the photo at the top of this blog post. The photo below is a picture of those same windows, along with bed in front of them, shot from within the room.
The bedroom also had a small writing desk (书桌) wedged between the foot of the bed and one of the room's walls. There was a mirror (镜子) on the table resting against the wall (墙). And in this room, the poster art consisted of a landscape painting, rather than portraits of revolutionary leaders.
The dwelling didn't have an indoor bathroom. There were instead two outhouses (厕所) in the courtyard area to the left of the dwelling's entrance; a small chicken coop (鸡笼) stood in the center of courtyard. As one might suspect, the toilets in the outhouses were not western-style toilets, but “squatty potties” (蹲便).While I have never gotten used to using these little bowls of heaven, many Chinese people actually prefer them over Western-style toilets (马桶). They believe that they are more sanitary, and I'd have to say that they have point (有道理) here. Not sitting on a toilet seat rim used by lots of other people reduces the chance of picking up whatever infections or other bad things they might pass on. And I read somewhere that when Mao visited the Soviet Union to meet with Stalin (斯大林) shortly after founding New China, he could not get used to the pedestal toilets in his villa. He also didn’t care much for the soft bed either.
In many Chinese farming villages, particularly the poorer ones, the excrement (分辨) deposited in such latrines is still collected at night and put into the soil as fertilizer (I'm not sure about Changyucheng Village and didn't bother to ask). Poor farmers, of course, lack access to and can not afford to buy chemical fertilizer. They thus have little choice but recycle human and animal waster in this manner. And this process can also be seen as turning the food growing and consumption process into a closed circle: human beings, as well as animals, consume what's grown in the soil and then discharge their wastes back into the soil so that it more food can be grown in it.
Because this material was put into the fields at night, it's referred to as “night soil” in books written about China by Western authors. However, one of my Chinese friends informed me that the Mandarin word for “night soil”, 肥料, which literally means “rich material.” Jasper Becker notes in his book, CITY OF HEAVENLY TRANQUILITY, that as late as the 1920s and 1930s—at that time, the ancient city of Beijing was still almost entirely intact—this “rich material” was carted out of the capital to be used in the nearby farms.
The courtyard area outside the dwelling also blended the new in with the old. For example, one of the outhouses had a washing machine (洗衣机). I also saw a pair of what appeared to be solar (太阳) heated water tanks (水箱) on their roofs. However, this outside area also had the dwelling's only sink/washbasin (洗手池; 洗碗池) and water faucet (水龙头). For some reason, I didn't bother to take any photos here.
There was an electric water dispenser inside the house, so one could get a hot cup of tea without having to go outside. But washing one's hands necessitated a short trip to the outside washbasin. And since it was the middle of winter, the water in the basin was frozen (冰) solid.
The lifestyles of most of Chinese urban dwellers (城里人), particularly those in country's rapidly growing middle (中产阶级) and upper middle classes, not to mention the rising number of those who are rich (有钱), at least somewhat approximate those of their counterparts in highly developed economies. But the same can't be said for rural China's rural residents. My visit to Changyucheng Village made it clear to this laowai that China still has a long way to go before its overall living standards catch up to those in Europe, North America, Japan, and South Korea.
The good news, however, is that immense progress has been made here since the reform and opening up policy. Following 1979, over 200 hundred million people have been lifted out of absolute poverty. Nothing quite like this has happened in recent global history. And as I noted in several previous posts, the current government is making a genuine and serious effort to improve the lives of China's farmers. I am therefore confident that in the future, things can only get better in places like Changyucheng Village.
The Chinese characters used in this post, along with their Romanized spelling (Pinyin) and tones are listed below. A number 1 indicates that the character has a flat tone, a number 2, a rising tone, a number 3, a falling rising tone, a number 4, a falling tone, and a number 5, a neutral tone.
在一个房子的里边 (zai4yi1ge4fang2zi5li3bian1): “房子” is the Chinese word for “house” or “dwelling,” while “里边” means “inside (of a place or space)”.
客厅 (ke3ting1). “Outer room for guests” is a more literal translation of this character combination.
卧室 (wo4shi4). 室 is a suffix that appears in many Mandarin words for different types of a room. “Office,” for example, is 办公室 (ban4gong1shi4).
床 (chuang2).
火炕 (huo3kang4).
沙发 (sha1fa1). This is an excellent example of a foreign word transliteration. Translated word for word, these characters mean “sand” (沙) “to happen” (发). As I think I noted in a much earlier post, anytime you run across a nonsensical character combination, it's almost certainly some foreign word transliterated into Mandarin. Then you have to figure what foreign word the characters sound like when said together. Not so hard to do with 沙发, but many other times, that's easier said than done!
桌子 (zhuo1zi5).
茶几 (cha2ji1).
画 (hua4). This word usually means picture, and the character pretty much looks like a framed picture. The verb to “draw” is simply 画画. Mandarin does have a word for poster, 海报 (hai3bao4), but after looking at my photo, 路红艳 told me that 画, not 海报, is the word Chinese people for such art.
壁纸 (bi4zhi3). “壁” means “screen”, while 纸 means paper. The left side of the character 纸 contains the silk “radical”, which provides a clue as to the meaning, namely something made out of woven material (at least that was the case for ancient paper).
灯泡 (deng1pao4). “灯” is the word for “light,” so if want someone to turn of the lights, tell them, “清关灯” (qin2guan1deng1). The first two characters are the words for “please” and “turn off.” Interestingly enough, 灯泡 is also a slang Chinese term for “chaperone.”
电视 (dian4shi4). This character combination, which means “electric vision”, is yet another example of how Mandarin vocabulary is usually much more logical than English vocabulary.
DVD机 (DVDji1). As noted in a previous blog post, 机 is a suffix that appears in many words having to do with mechanical devices, as is the case for another character combination that appears later on in the post, 洗衣机 (xi3yi1ji1). “洗” means “wash”, 衣is a shortened form of the word for clothes (衣服; yi1fu5), so when combined with “机”, they all mean “washing machine”. And yes, Mandarin is starting to incorporate some foreign words without transliterating them into characters. Many of these words are computer program names, like Excel. If you want to tell someone to open up Excel, just say “开Excel;” 开 (kai1) is the Chinese word for start or open.
暖气 (nuan3qi4).
窗 (chuang1). Since “窗” and “床” differ only in their tones, it's easy to be misunderstood—one might get the tone wrong and say, “I'm sitting on the window”, when you really mean to say, “I'm sitting on the bed.”
书桌 (shu1zhuo1). “书” is the Chinese word for book, so this combination literally means “book table.”
镜子 (jing4zi5).
墙 (qiang2).
厕所 (ce4suo3).
鸡笼 (ji1long2). “鸡” is the Chinese word for a live chicken. Chicken meat, on the other hand, is 鸡肉 (ji1rou4). So chicken soup is said as “chicken meat soup”, or 鸡肉汤; the last character, a rising tone “tang,” means “soup”.
蹲便 (dun1bian4).
马桶 (ma3tong1).
有道理 (you3dao4li3). “有” means “have”, while 道理 is the word for “point.”
斯大林 (si1da4lin2). At least this transliteration sounds somewhat like Stalin's name; the same can’t be said for the one for that of his arch geopolitical rival, Adolf Hitler. The Nazi dictator's Chinese name, 希特勒 (xi1te4le4) is said like “she t-eh l-eh.”
粪便 (fen4bian4).
肥料 (fei2liao4).
太阳 (tai4yang2). For those who are interested, “solar power” is 太阳能 (能 is a rising tone “neng”).
水箱 (shui3xiang1). “水” means “water”, while 箱 appears in the Chinese word for refrigerator, or 冰箱, which literally means “ice (冰) box/container (箱)”. “冰” is also one way of saying that water is frozen solid, so ice cubes are 冰块 (bing1kuai4; 块 is the Mandarin word for “piece”).
洗碗池 (xi3wan3chi2). English speakers would call this the “kitchen sink”; in Chinese it means “dishes (碗) washing (洗) basin (池)”.
洗手池 (xi3shou3chi2). And this means “hands (手) washing (洗) basin (池)”.
水龙头 (shui3long2tou2). For some reason, the Chinese decided to combine the characters for “dragon” (龙) and “head” (头) with “water” (水) to form the word for water faucet or spigot. Perhaps they thought that such devices really do look like a dragon's head!
城里人 (cheng2li3ren2). “城” is the shortened form of the word for city (城市; cheng2shi4), “里” means “inside,” and “人” stands for “person.” So the combination literally means “city inside person.”
中产阶级 (zhong1chan3jie2ji2). “中” is the word for “middle” and also appears in the Mandarin name for China, “中国,” which literally means “Middle Kingdom.” “产” means “produce”, while 阶级 is the word for “social class.” Thus the working class is called the 工人 (gong1ren2; or worker) 阶级, while the capitalist bourgeoisie is the 资产阶级. Readers might remember from the previous post that the first character is in the character combination, 资本 (zi1ben3), for “capital.”
有钱 (you3qian2). This literally means “have” (有) money (钱)”.
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