(Guiyang, Guizhou, August 1986) After sixty-two hours of dirt, soot, and tears, the train pulled into the station of our destination. A welcome committee of officials from the university stood on the platform to greet us. We followed them out of the station and into the parking lot where we divided into two vans. I could not help but gape out the window at the city. It was a far cry from the modernity of Beijing—decidedly undeveloped, even bordering on Third World conditions, if I may say so inoffensively.
The officials briefed us on the program for the day and escorted us to our new quarters to freshen up for a luncheon reception banquet. The drive took no more than a half-hour. We rolled through the front gate of the institute. There was no university air about it. The school grounds and its neighboring “peasant” hamlet had grown up together—mingling, intertwining academic and agricultural life, and feeding upon one another for decades.
The institute furnished the elementary and middle school facilities for the villagers. The farmers provided the meat, eggs, and produce for the institute. The merger of the two gained momentum in the social upheaval of the mid-60’s known as the Cultural Revolution, when the country bumpkins took advantage of the anarchy and filtered onto campus, a move that interwove college life and country existence into an unyoked marriage. (Photo left campus market)
Students and teachers kicked a soccer ball on the same pasture where the farm animals grazed. Students and teachers alike swam in the same river, in which farmers dipped their pots to irrigate the fields. Students and teachers leaned their bikes on the trees to which water buffaloes were tied for early morn grazing. Students and teachers strutted down common paths where stray chickens and geese scrounged around for scraps. Students and teachers huddled in dorms alongside the villagers’ vegetable plots.
Our dwelling quarters were situated even further out in the fields. (And what a ruinous stench that was released into the air during fertilizing season!)[1] In our neck of the woods, there were no designated garbage collectors. On campus, most throw-aways were burned in incinerators. We were instructed to toss all garbage onto a trash pile right outside our stairwell. We complied by dumping our wastebaskets right out the window of the second floor.
We were under the impression that the rubbish heap would be converted into landfill until, one day, we almost scrapped a binful onto the janitor—a black flop-eared porker. His partner was an old mare that was harnessed to a wagon, donning a scarf and bells that announced: “Animals at Work.” In the natural way of things, the hog was promoted. Several times a week, a pig was butchered in the farmstead across the dirt road from our bedroom window.
To insure freshness, the show opened a few hours before the market came to life, at about three or four o’clock in the morning with the high-pitched oinks of the victim being dragged to the butchery. The squeals intensified to a peak of horror until the blade met the jugular. From that fatal point onward, as the blood was caught in a bucket for an oriental version of what we Italians in the old days called sanguinaccio[2], the roars deepened and piddled down to a low-note gurgle, at which time we could go back to sleep!
At sunrise, the “peasants,” as they were called for better or for worse, trickled onto campus in a caravan of horse carts, pull carts, donkey carts, and shoulder bars to display their prized produce and hardy handicrafts upon roughly hewn wooden tables or on the ground. Animal carcasses from the morning’s slaughter were hooked onto trees; slabs of meat cuttings were flopped across log tables. Dogs licking their chops scavenged the periphery of the market’s bustle, salivating in rabid wait to lick clean the tops of the meat tables after sales. Flies—[1] Deep storage pits were conveniently dug, out of which farmers shovelled human excrement onto the crops. On this account, salads were not featured on most Chinese menus!
[2] Literally ‘ugly blood’, a type of “sweet pudding,” if you will, made by dumping sugar and meats into tubs of fresh pig’s blood, which jelled by the natural process of coagulation. He, he, he...one, two, three...“yuck!”
Photos & slideshow Copyright Men's Fashion by Francesco.
