Greater Wuzhou

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With the students gone and my job finished Wuzhou still had one more suprise in store for me. The principal called it "propaganda", it seems Chinese people still use this word without any negative connotations. I called it "false advertising". I was taken around to all the neighbouring villages where I gave little "speeches" about the benefits of learning English to awestuck country bumpkins. Since they didnt understand a world I said the principal was free to translate my speeches however he wanted. His entrepreneurialism bordered on deviousness and I suspect he embellished my speeches to fit his own designs and make his school irresistable to the poor ignorant kids. All I know is that LOTS of them signed their names on the enrollment sheets.

Travelling to the countryside was an unforgettable experience. It was worth having to "promote" New Cambridge to get the oppertunity to see what I probably otherwise wouldnt have seen. It was beautiful, strange and a bit disturbing.

There are no suburbs in most chinese cities. One minute you are on a congested city road surrounded by appartment buildings, then in a blink you are on a bumpy, narrow, dirt road surrounded by tiny fields and confusing jumbles of shacks and cottages. The thing that struck me first was the general set up of the fields. My impression of agriculture was always vast rolling fields as far as the eye can see. Chinese farms dont have tractors or irrigation, so our way doesnt work for them. Instead the have tiny little patches of crops, mostly about 2m by 10m, with little paths inbetween that they wobble along with two large buckets of water on a pole across their shoulders, so they can water all the vegetables in the stinking heat. And they use EVERY square inch. There were little alleys of rice growing between houses and on roofs.

The houses were all mostly shacks. The general structure of them was a closed room with a wooden roof for sleeping, and large veranda area for cooking and socialising. They are all jumbled together in a pile, next to and ontop of each other. Thrown together from an assortment of materials, tyres, bricks, tree trunks and old street signs, they look like they are cubby houses made by children.

The schools I saw in the villages were amazing. It seems all middle schools are boarding schools, but I suppose it saves walking several kilometres in the dirt. Chinese people dont seem to believe in building maintenance. All the buildings I have seen are either delapidated or brand new. The schools fell into the dilapidated collumn. The barren little classrooms didnt have windows or doors and hadnt been painted for decades. The set up was the same, little wooden desks in rows infront of the black board, but the difference was that not all the students had desks, and none of the students had books. These were REALLY poor kids.

As soon as I got out of the car they all flocked over to gawk at me. It was wierd at first, but the principal explained that they had never seen a foreigner before. So I just smiled and waved and shook their shyly proffered hands. I even signed some scaps of paper for them. It was the closest I will ever be to a celebrity.

The teachers at the schools were hilarious. It was difficult not to laugh when I was introduced, they just looked like characatures of rediculous old me. They all had buzz cuts, the flat on top hair cuts you can set your watch to. They all wore tired looking polo shirts tucked into stupidly baggy slacks fastened with a belt above their beer guts, about 5cm below their armpits. They they kept hitching these pants up higher as they talked. Its making me laugh remembering 😊

I was treated to lunch in a village restaurant. It was duck, the whole duck and nothing but the duck. The Chinese way of serving duck (and chicken) is to cut up the whole bird and put it on a plate, beak, feet, neck and all. The most favoured part is the head which is sucked loud and lovingly until every juicy drop is drained. Im not a huge fan of othel, but they kept trying to pile duck parts onto my plate. I had my first revolting taste of kidney and I nibbled an unappatising piece of liver but I couldnt make myself eat the intestines. And I found out too late the soup was made from ducks blood. Isnt it strange what makes us squimish.

I left the villages with an overwhelming sense of the enormous gap between the haves and the have nots in China. In Australia it is obvious but debilitiating. In China it is a crippling and unsurmountable handicap. The people in the villages live thier lives oblivious to the things that govern ours. They are the silent majority, the hunched shoulders of whom the counties economy sits heavily upon.

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