Self Description
This spring, I had the opportunity to visit Meigu County, the heart of the Daliang Mountains, for nearly 20 days. I stayed in the homes of the Yi people to get a closer look at the daily life of the Daliang Mountains. Previously, my understanding of the Daliang Mountains was limited to what the media conveyed about the crisis: drugs, AIDS, and poverty. On the one hand, the field visit confirmed and deepened these contents, but on the other hand, it also changed my understanding: under the crisis and fracture focused on by the outside world, Daliangshan life still has its daily roots, including labor, living, emotions, customs, and even the same rich human content as the outside world, which is often neglected, making Daliangshan a kind of “alien”. “, a “fossil” in the process of history. A more internal perspective is needed to understand the relationship between daily life in the Dalang Mountains and the fractured crises of drugs, AIDS, and extreme poverty, which are often inseparably interdependent. Underneath the crisis lies the vitality of a community and the hope to overcome the predicament. The trust in sunlight and land, the sensitivity and self-respect preserved in the gaps of history, and a certain simplicity of human nature can create the appearance of poverty and desolation, but also contain intrinsic values worth cherishing. In addition, a change of reality is taking place. Although time is running out, I hope to get closer to the people in the Daliang Shan land and convey them more inwardly, rather than just being an outsider gauger. This article is the first part of “Life in the Daliang Mountains: Everyday and Worrying”.
“In Daliang Shan, people are always drying in the sun and hiding in the darkness of their houses. It is hard to distinguish between the everyday and the troubled, like dust and earth.”
Planting beans
In the early morning mist, Gogo and his mother, Kejarali, wielding a hoe, point beans side by side in a field at the top of the slope.
The altitude of more than 2000 meters in the cool mountain area, April morning slightly cool, but mother and daughter are only wearing thin clothes. The white pear blossoms were open at the edge of the slope, and the petals were the same as the slightly red ground, which was a bit damp because of last night’s rain. It is the right weather for ordering beans.
Dig a small hole, beans with the hand to throw down, and then cover up, no need to throw fertilizer. The potatoes that just sprouted on the side also only used farm fertilizer. But the way to throw beans is advanced: beans hidden in the hand holding the handle of the hoe, with the hoe raised, almost invisible hand scattering action, without pause, the hand is always roughly five or six. Only when the hand becomes empty, she grabs a handful from her waist basket and coat pocket.
Mother and daughter speak softly as they work, in a Yi language that no outsider understands, their voices fading into the birdsong and the passing mist.
Twenty-year-old Gogo went out to work with her brother five years ago, initially because she was not old enough, ID cards were bought from vendors on the streets of Dongguan. This year, because the factory is not looking good, did not go out with her brother. Her father died early in life, a sister married, except for her brother who is studying in preschool, the whole family is in the land.
Her brother, Jue Li, who started preschool last year, is already 18 years old. He is the only one in the family to cross the threshold of the classroom, thanks to a newly opened parochial school at the top of the mountain. It’s an hour’s climb to Meigu County’s Firewoo Amu Primary School, and Jue Li is sitting in an overly small seat with a group of children ranging from six to 16 years old, learning to sing the toddler song “The King Sent Me to Patrol the Mountain” along with the paraprofessional teacher.
Compared to Jue Li, who was slightly embarrassed in the class, her fifteen-year-old sister Wu Guo wanted to go to school, but her mother left her to work at home for two years before she could go out to work and earn savings for her future marriage.
When her mother was tired of smoking a cigarette in the field, Wugo climbed up the hill with a hoe. She had more work to do in the morning than her sister, and had just finished feeding the family’s livestock. She worked with the same skillful posture as her mother, with a cheerful expression on her face.
Even if there was a wisp of thought, it was like a wisp of smoke on her mother’s lips, which then dissipated and no one noticed.
Five fruit and older siblings of the year, yearning for the outside world that has only been seen on television, “good-looking. The TV is part-time Gogo bought two years ago, Foxconn assembly line hard work, has let her shed the fantasy, but Gogo still about the partner five cattle, planting crops to go out.
The fog finally retreated to the distant mountains, depressed into a band of green haze, it was time to go home to make up for breakfast. She went down to the woods on the slope and dug up the roots of the folding ears to add some flavor to the cold rice in the unsalted sauerkraut soup. A local prickly pine cut her finger, but it was a minor injury.
Five Niu, Gogo’s cousin, was planting beans in a different field on the mountain beam at noon. The land is also a slightly red sandy soil. Red is the base color of the sandy soil here, and the landslide area is bare of green, yellow, green and blue ground, which, though inhabited for a thousand years, is too late to develop cultivated humus and is only covered with thin turf vegetation.
Five fruit at this time the sheep caught up with the slope, happily sitting in the trees watching five cattle point beans. The morning coolness had passed, and the violent noon sun had not yet arrived, which was a rare leisure time for her.
My mother and sister did not have such time, they ate breakfast and went to help plant beans at my grandmother’s house a few hillsides away with their hoes. Because of the lack of male labor in her grandmother’s house, my mother often had to go back to her mother’s house to help with the farming, bringing along a plastic bag with her to carry the cold rice she ate in the afternoon.
It was late in the evening when my mother and sister returned. The next morning, the mother still went to her mother’s house to help, five cattle and bring their own sister down to help Gogo and five fruit work, four people a day to make a large piece of land below the residence. The four people live a lot more lively, thinking about their sisters soon to go out to work, two sisters throwing beans in their hands, constantly asking about things outside, many things have been asked roughly many times, but always said not clear. For example, the subway, the two sisters have never dared to ride, because the subway in Guangzhou does not announce the station, and they do not know too many Chinese characters.
In the second group of Kamatou Village, Ear River Township, which is at a higher altitude, the bale seedlings are still just emerging from the soil, although film has been used in recent years. Some of the nascent embryos are not capable of opening the film. Qupenshibu’s mother squatted between the monopolies, tearing open the film one by one to expose the seedlings, and then surrounding them with soil, which needed to be broken up in large pieces, all with her fingers and no agricultural tools. A belt on the mother’s back wrapped around the youngest, who is more than a year old like a kitten, next to the laying of a Charwar, two children playing, four sisters learn from their mother’s look to pick the soil to protect the seedlings. Last year, the fourth sister is still in the oldest Qupen Shi Bu back, this year Shi Bu finally and the second brother Asa went to school together. Dad went up to the mountains early in the morning to cut wood and let the horses go.
By the afternoon in the field, the seedlings did not come out well, A-ma had an extra bale stick in her hand, and when she met a blank nest, she broke off two to press them in. The sun is strong, the child is still on her back, a while crying, a while laughing, and finally fell asleep again. When she was tired, she unbuckled her belt and put the child down, sitting on the ground between the monopolies on the tile to rest for a while. In the slopes far and near, there are people doing similar work. The sun is too strong, in June, July and August, the ground can not work.
Yesterday evening there was a sudden hailstorm, and some of the sprouts were broken, as if they had been trampled by chickens burrowing into the hedge of a thorn tree. Here the soil is barren, cold and hot, the crop of grain is not good, each family down to more than a thousand pounds a year, must be combined with buckwheat, potatoes together as a staple food, seedlings earlier and more durable potatoes are the bulk.
There is no road, film and fertilizer back to the mountain through the canyon to climb two sides of the mountain, spend a whole day, too expensive to use more. The family’s back basket is so huge that it looks disproportionate to the back of a person’s load. Unlike the Gogo family’s low mountain area, no pig pens have been built here, and there is no habit of accumulating stable manure, so the fertility of the soil is even lower. A wooden plow was set up at the entrance, but the dirt in the field was still very large, and the lack of a process to break up the dirt before spring sowing was the reason why many bale seedlings were crushed.
The posture of the people working in the field on their bellies looks elaborate and primitive, like a picture preserved from the distant past, only to add one or two foreign strokes.
Fire pit
During the evening meal, Lao Si fell asleep on the floor by the fire.
The house is dark, and only the fire of the wood flickers with a faint red light. The eldest sister is carrying the oldest to the restaurant to add wood to the fire, and the leaves used to start the fire make a beeping sound, and the fire rises at once, casting her and her siblings’ figures writhing on the ground. Everything behind her was black: the black purlins, the objects, the walls, the pig’s urine bubbles hanging above the fireplace. There was an electric lamp, but the light was absorbed by the darkness and did not reflect at all. In the alpine area of Asa’s house is a solar lamp installed a few months ago to help the poor, a simple hydro generator is still thrown in the stream under the village can, a short weir covered with bamboo leaves, preserving the memory of the bright and dark fifteen-watt tungsten light bulbs of the past.
Under the roof is the darkness smoked out by the long years of fire, only the human face is reflected red. In addition to my father, who had gone to Leibo County for a short period of time to work on peeling bamboo shoots, all my family members were by the fire, my mother, Sobu and my six younger siblings, and my grandmother, who had followed Sobu’s family. The children sitting crouched on the ground like potatoes sprouting in winter at home, clustered in a circle around the fire.
The fire pit is an ash pit, installed with three grinding fan, grinding fan on a large pot, everything to eat in the pot, can be set up on several levels, the last a deep tube of steamer cover.
Today’s pot is steamed with the skin of the potatoes, buckled on the lid of the pot attached to four large yellow buckwheat cakes, topped with a pot of leftover dried vegetable soup. Slightly bitter buckwheat cakes are a fine grain in the Daliang Mountains, not often available, and for too many children, corn and buckwheat is not enough to eat the Sobu family is even more so. Lao Si, however, missed out.
Yams and cakes steamed, and vegetable soup were beaten into three large pots, the whole family and two neighbors squatting on the ground, or sitting on a low bench, around the basin to pick up and eat, with a long-handled large spoon to scoop soup to drink. On occasions when there are dishes, the long-handled spoon is also the only eating utensil that fits the fingers, and chopsticks and bowls are not used. When the salt was finished, it was taken from the aunt’s house down the slope. Compared to Sobu’s family, which had too many children, the aunt and uncle were recently married and had no children, and the uncle was a high-risk but well-paid electric wireman, so the economic situation was much better.
After eating, Sobu went to the tank to scoop a ladle of cold water to drink, while the guests grabbed a handful of dried bean shells on the ground to wipe their hands. While people are out, the dogs sneak over to the fire to clean up the mess, licking their tongues over the used pots and spoons. Earlier, they had already licked over the scraps the pigs had finished eating in the pig food bowl in front of the door.
“Under the roof is the darkness smoked by the long years of hearth fire, and only the human face is reflected red.” (Photo by the author) “Under the roof is the darkness smoked out by the long years of hearth fires, and only the faces of people are reflected red.” (Photo by the author)
No one woke up Lao Si on the ground. The family’s yellow cat came to the fire at some point and was snoring the same as he was. The yellow cat’s fur was bright, nourished by the many mice on the dark floorboards, and it was the richest creature of its size by the fire, as if it didn’t belong here.
Perhaps the oldest had just been hungry too long. From darkness onward, when her mother is busy with the household chores, the second sister takes the place of her smaller sister, repeating “I’m hungry, I want to eat” in Chinese, as the oldest, Sobhu, has taught her. Sobu is 12 years old. But the second sister also does not have much appetite, she has the same cold as the fifth and seventh, hanging nasal snot.
The oldest five was having nosebleeds from time to time. He sits naked on the floor, a bit down. Mom and her sister’s energy was focused on the youngest, the sixth and seventh, and from time to time they needed to wrap them around their backs to soothe their sobs. Their crying was always short-lived and forgotten after a while, and their sister and mother, who took care of them, also forgot about them from time to time, leaving them at will on the floor, on a low bench or on the bed. Mom’s dry tobacco wafted away and the house had a long, bitter smell. After her father’s death, Jue Li’s mother became addicted to cigarettes and alcohol, and “if I don’t smoke, I’ll die,” she said with a smile as she held a small cigarette stick, the flames reflecting the layers of wrinkles on her face, each wrinkle like the folds of a hillside, hiding a hint of age.
Low stools are far from enough, even with the two iron stools issued by the government in recent years, the words “bench project” have been worn out. Sitting on the ground is a more appropriate position. If you stand up rashly, your head will hit the pig urine bubble hung at New Year’s Eve, accumulated thick oil stains, it is difficult to say why it is hanging here.
My aunt came up to visit, and she took an egg, broke it in a small bowl, poured white wine over it, and lit it by the fire. The fire flickered up and the aunt turned the egg over until the white wine had burned out and the egg was cooked.
The aunt ate two bites of the eggs herself and passed them to her grandmother, who then passed them to her fourth and second sisters, making a total of five people who tasted the wine boiled eggs. It was a recipe for a cold. In the Shibu family, the benefit for the cold was a bowl of sweetened buckwheat paste, which was given to the three children.
In the morning, when the rooster in the cage by the door crows for the third time, the darkness under the roof is like the bottom of a pot before the first hint of gray comes through, and A-ma is already up, holding firewood to light the fire. A shrub with dense, rustling leaves is the most convenient firewood to start the fire. In the old days when there were no gas lighters, preserving fire was a painstaking task, and older people used the county’s onyx as a flint, but fortunately the leaves were available locally, which were particularly easy to light.
The fire pulsed in the ash pit, a layer of smoke floated under the bamboo roof, and the earthen house felt warm as the family got up one after another and gathered by the fire in their thin clothes.
Jue Li’s family, located in the low mountains, has a much larger mill fan than the Sobu family’s, carved with decorative patterns, by the hand of Jue Li’s grandfather. Jue Li’s bed is also better than Sobu’s, with a carved partition, like a cupboard against the earthen wall. Behind the partition is another space where overwintered potatoes sprout, as deep as a forest.
Jue Li’s roof also had more storage than Sobu’s: a few pieces of bacon hanging from a beam, a few bags of fertilizer, a large pile of dried turnip tassels, and a bed on top of the tassels where Jue Li climbed a ladder to sleep when he had guests. The roof of Sobu’s house was sparsely boarded, so there was nowhere to put a bed, and there was only a pile of turnip tassels and a bit of sprouted potatoes on the floor, and only a small part of the meat skin was hanging under the roof beam. The main thing is that the roof of Sobu’s house is wooden slats, even in this village located in the high mountains, it is only one or two, other people have replaced the tiles.
Daytime noon, the sun through the gaps in the wooden slats, throwing a few pillars of light onto the dark ground, as if in the exploration of the place. At night it rained, and after a thunderstorm rolled over the roof, the rain leaked over the bed where Sobhu usually slept with his father, and the rain dripped unevenly onto Sobhu’s forehead, waking him up from sleep, and he had to put the chalwa he used as a pillow over his head. The rest of the house, also sounded from time to time the sound of rain dripping poof, but was quickly absorbed by the silence, several beds were sleeping mother and grandmother and several siblings, did not wake up, but issued a series of coughing, from violent slowly become moderate. The rain above Sobhu’s head later stopped, as if the old wooden roof could adapt itself to survive the stormy night, and the coughing disappeared.
As Sobhu removed the damp chalwa from his head, the dogs in the village barked so violently that the barking of Sobhu’s house and the entire village became one. There were times when they barked fiercely and concentratedly, as if there was imminent danger approaching the Yi village, and even an outsider had reached the door of the house and was about to break in. But the people in the house were unmoved. They slept until dawn, escorted by the fierce barking of the dogs. It was only in the clear cold of the early morning that the coughs of a few younger siblings with colds rang out again in their mother and grandmother’s bed.
The village was as safe as yesterday. The fire pit is still warm, and Grandma lights it so that the earthen house will be warm.
The Ranch
Sobhu’s family and his aunt’s family have a horse together, which was passed down from his grandfather.
On weekends when school is out, Sobhu is the one who shepherds the horses, together with the two families’ cattle and sheep, two sheep and one cow belonging to Sobhu’s family.
The ranch was at home behind the jagged, rocky mountain tops. Sobhu jumped on the horse on the trail, needing to dismount only on the bumpiest and most treacherous jagged sections. The brown horse looks big for Sobhu, with a neat mane, “cut by Dad before he went out,” just as Sobhu and his brothers’ hair came from their father’s hand. Riding horses is a common talent for boys in these mountains, even standing on them. Niu, his nine-year-old sister, can also skillfully drive the cows with a branch, and the cows and sheep walk ahead of them, all the way up to the top of the rocky hill.
The strip of land at the top of the hill was divided into two halves: one half was a potato field surrounded by two wires, potatoes just sprouting in the heavy fog, with many rag-tied straw men stuck in it; the other side was a meadow reserved for cattle and sheep, pasture for the whole village. Compared to the dozens of goats and sheep whose neighbor’s children caught up with the mountains earlier, the number of Sobu’s livestock was less than a fraction of others.
The cattle and sheep spread out to graze, and because of the large number of livestock, the turf was relatively shallow and the livestock had to walk far away and disappear into the fog. Sobu and his sister went down the slope to pick a kind of wild flower. A woman talked to Sobu in the fog, and her sheep gradually appeared in the fog, but the people did not look at each other.
Qupen Asa’s family’s cattle and sheep are taken care of by grandpa, who lives on the top of the mountain for years and comes home every week to get some grain. Two uncles, two aunts and grandpa’s own sheep are together, there are forty-three pairs of sheep and eight cows and four horses.
Today grandpa came home and told dad and uncle that three sheep had gone missing. Dad and uncle went up the mountain to look for the sheep, crossed the border with Leibo County, and by the afternoon they were all found and returned to grandpa’s flock.
Grandpa ate a few potatoes and left with two long bamboo poles and a roll of plastic sheeting to cover the shed that had leaked last night. The shed was built in a gentle place, covered with green branches and dried thatch, and covered with a plastic sheet, half of which seemed new and half of which seemed to have weathered for many years. In the shed was a thatched bed, a small fire pit, and an iron pot with leftover food: cold rice and yam strips with a few pieces of meat. The sheep’s overnight stay was right next to the shack.
Grandpa had the right to eat better, because he not only worked hard, but was also a master of the Bimo, and could earn money for the family. The price of sheep this year is not high, the ram a thousand dollars or so, ewes seven or eight hundred yuan. When the market, will get up early in the morning, drive down the cattle dam to sell a few.
Poverty in Daliang Mountain: Even if you are hungry, it’s not long before you cry
The Yi people’s farming business is always disturbed by annual festivals and red and white events. For example, when my young uncle got married, his in-laws came with 100 people and killed three sheep and two pigs at the wedding banquet. When friends and guests come, there is no shortage of sheep to be killed. Once an elderly member of the family passed away, the number of cattle killed could reach fifty to hundreds, cut into simple lumps of meat to eat, and those that could not be eaten had to be thrown away. The animals are distributed from each close family, such as the death of the biological mother, the daughter needs to drive three cows back to her mother’s house to be slaughtered.
This can cause a family’s livestock herd to suffer greatly. A village clerk near Zhaoge County said that after the introduction of the eight rules, the government banned the killing of cattle feasts, and only let funerals kill up to five cows, happy events kill two heads or less, only kill pigs and sheep, and the culture of eating lump meat alone also added to the drinking of lamb soup and fried vegetables.
The fog on the mountain is very big, grandpa walked to the depression, there are two people at the top of the mountain and greet him, but can not see people. When he got closer, he was shadowed by two young men from the village below. They did not work this year, and they were herding dozens of sheep.
Grandpa’s sheep were on the top of the hill, and if he didn’t go too far down the cliff slope and cross the boundary between the villages, all he had to do was spread out his charwa and sit on the grass and smoke a few puffs of dry tobacco. The sheep went far away, grandpa stood up and walked to the cliffside, whistled a few times, and the sheep obediently ran back.
The two young men’s sheep were just below the hillside. The red soil of the hillside collapsed in layers, with a shallow turf, looking like a tableland that had been fallow in recent years, making one wonder where the ancestors had planted the land to such a high place.
Ada’s flock, a neighboring boy, climbed from the slope of the hillside to the top of a cliff higher up on the opposite side, making it almost impossible to see.
Ada, who leaves early and returns late every day, drives his flock along a different route: over the hill to the left of the village, down a horizontal slope to the bottom of the hill where his grandfather is, then through a large ravine and up the opposite beam to the top of the hill.
Thirteen-year-old Ada did not go to school like Shibu and Asa, because there was no one else in the family except him and his mother, Jin Gu Jiha.
Ada’s father died of an illness many years ago, while his brother died at the age of eighteen in an accident: he had not been working outside the home, and was hanging around in Niu Niu Dam, where he became addicted to drugs and jumped into the river and drowned during a police arrest.
The mother kept repeating, “There is no more son, there is no way out”. One of his two sisters is married, and the other is 15 years old and working, so his mother has to do the work in the field and at home, and the task of herding sheep and cattle naturally falls to Ada. Ada rarely speaks, it seems that he knows more about the silence of the sheep than the language of people. Unlike Sobu in the village of Firewoo, his father did not leave a horse back for him to gallop.
Ada went out with a small bag containing and skin yams, which had been cooked for several days and were a bit greasy, and were dipped in chili noodles for lunch. The other two sheep herding girls on the cross slope, carrying the same small bag on their backs, one containing the same potatoes and chili noodles as Ada, the other is a small pile of cold rice. Ada and they seldom talk, the three are not school children, a moment can not go out to work.
In the evening, Ada’s flock had not yet returned, and Jin Gujiha was a little worried.
She walked across the cross-slope road, in a pass overlooking, only in the highest faintly see the family’s sheep, can not see Ada. Called across the canyon, no answer, only the long echo of “A – Da -“, stretched between the canyon disappeared, tinged with twilight and the bleakness of age. The slopes quieted down, the two young girls and an old shepherd went home, and the sun set on the opposite summit, after the usual time. Kingoogiha decided to cross the Grand Canyon to find her son.
She walked down the meadow where twilight had fallen and climbed up the mountain beam across the Grand Canyon, like a tiny insect, climbing up the beam. After a long time, she drove her flock down from the beam. There was no Ada.
Jingujiha returned home, put the sheep in the pen, and burned the fire. The fire did not fully illuminate her face, and some shadows remained in the folds of her skin for years.
Near bedtime, the family dog barked violently, which turned into a welcome whimper again, and Ada walked in the door. He had been searching the hills for sheep, for he hadn’t found them, and returned with trepidation to see them in the pen.
Ada flicked on the fire, and the shadow on her face disappeared for the moment. She put the basin with the steamed buckwheat cakes on the ground and another basin with two lumps of meat. It seemed to be an advance celebration of her son’s safe return.
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