Laughter and Song in the Fields
I seem still to live before the age of ten; my ears often ring with the bursts of cheerful song and laughter I heard as a child laboring in the fields with my parents in our rural village. Epigenetics tells us that early-life experience is decisive, and most people merely repeat the lifestyle they absorbed in childhood. Modern psychiatry confirms this: children who are morose, or whose interest in toys and play is forcibly suppressed by their parents, grow up to be tormented by depression, mania, emptiness, and anxiety.
Those who have never known true rural life may mistake endless golden rapeseed, white clouds over the hills, fresh air under blue skies, and pastoral idyll for what is most attractive about the countryside. But that is only a very superficial view. The real core of rural life is the close, warm emotional bonds between people and the kind, positive atmosphere a group maintains together. Without these, the village is an empty shell; we would grow tired of it within days. After all, the so-called pastoral scenery of the countryside palls after a month.
The busy farming seasons were hard, but when I lived in the village I rarely heard villagers complaining about heaven and earth—quite unlike the grumbling I constantly hear in the city. From age six or seven we would roll up our trousers and wade into the paddy like the adults, chased by swarms of leeches while transplanting rice seedlings. We knew rural hardship deeply, yet still felt childhood was happy.
The leech, medically called Hirudo, lives by sucking blood. After eons of evolution it secretes an anesthetic-like substance, so that the animal being fed on feels no discomfort at first; by the time we feel the bite, it has already dined its fill. Leeches are extraordinarily hardy; their soft bodies are unharmed by pinching and squeezing. Working in the paddy, one simply endures the leech, and when it becomes unbearable, tears it off and flings it away. The flung leech quickly unfurls and swims briskly and merrily off in search of its next meal.
After transplanting and climbing out, our legs always bore several still-bleeding bites. The hirudin in leeches is a natural anticoagulant; the leech uses it to break down other animals’ clotting systems and feed well. Interestingly, both East and West, from ancient times to today, humans have liked to capture these bloodsuckers and use them medically for thrombotic disease. Even today, the best drug for thrombotic disease remains hirudin.
Urban parents seeing their children’s legs bloodied would likely be heartbroken. But in the countryside everyone is immune to these small wounds; we knew such nicks carried no mortal danger. A leech’s bite did not spoil a farmer’s mood, though long hours of bending were no light or comfortable matter.
Villagers used all kinds of jokes to dispel the fatigue. When I was a child, every busy season the fields were packed and bustling. Rows of paddy lay right next to one another, so everyone worked together. Few worked in silence; almost everyone chatted at the top of their voices about a great variety of things, mostly humorous. Country people seem born joke-tellers, and the jokes always set off peals of laughter. A whole morning or afternoon passed quickly amid bursts of laughter, and by quitting time the fields were dense with transplanted seedlings.
I think this seemingly ordinary daily life holds the very meaning of life. Born human, we are fated to earn our living by labor and to endure all manner of pains and boredom; but as a social animal we can keep one another company, creating countless small joys to offset those pains and dullness and make life less tedious. Leech bites are not wholly bad either; they raise our tolerance for suffering. Country people bitten as children grow up less fragile and do not collapse over small setbacks.
Fei Xiaotong said the defining trait of Chinese people is their rootedness in the soil and their earthy ways, because for most of Chinese history the village was the main place people lived. I understand why Chinese people speak loudly: working the land, everyone shouts, because a soft voice cannot reach the neighbors. I understand why Chinese women love square dancing: we are born carrying genes for group life; today’s city women dancing square dances are simply a modern version of our ancestors amusing one another while working the fields together.
Rural life has many collective activities; China has countless folk customs, most of them collective. Carrying idols through the village and performing village opera in the first lunar month, young men and women singing antiphonal mountain songs in spring, bustling temple fairs—these joyful collective activities are the crystallized wisdom our ancestors accumulated to drive away sorrow. Joy sometimes needs atmosphere. To functionalist anthropologists, no folk custom lacks a social function; folk customs are humanity’s best cultural heritage for creating joy and collective healing. We created festivals like Qingming and Zhongyuan to honor the dead, and these festivals ease the pain of losing loved ones.
Fei Xiaotong said that in his day some intellectuals thought country people silly and village children dim. In his view this was foolish arrogance. If you let urban children race village children along the ridges, few city children are as agile. We also habitually think village children shyer than city children—another urban conceit. The countryside has far more collective activity than the city can match; village children are already trained to be open and outgoing by all those activities, they simply have not yet adapted to the city. Put city children in the countryside and they too instantly look silly, clumsy, and shy.
A village child raised in a medium or large village receives far more care than a city child, because kin and neighbors all watch over him and praise him from time to time. Even a child in a tiny hamlet receives more childhood care than city children. Humanity’s evolved survival mode is to be kindly disposed within an acquaintance society. We often see road-ragers in the city open their doors and scream at a stranger who displeased them, but rarely see villagers do that. In a village, someone who cannot yield is criticized by the group.
Usually the unfriendly are ostracized, while the humorous and kind are liked and trusted. Out of fear of isolation, people automatically adjust their conduct to fit the friendly environment; this is how socialization happens. Though Chinese people have their small flaws, the tradition of harmony and solidarity in Chinese society is striking.
During the Republican era, the great philosopher Bertrand Russell was invited to lecture in China. After meeting Chinese people he was full of praise for their way of life. Westerners then were like most Chinese today, busy and frantic all day in factories and offices, living tense, dull, and unhappy lives. Ordinary Chinese then were far poorer materially than Americans, yet very happy, because most lived in the countryside a three-dimensional life; their existence was a rounded whole, not split into pieces.
Positive interaction between people is the source of human happiness; negative interaction only makes pain. A quarrel can ruin days of good mood, but a few friendly words, a compliment, or some comfort quickly lift it. Away from the group, most people find not wisdom but emptiness and panic. The brain needs stimulation and development through interacting with others; those who live alone for years end not with a calm mind but with dementia. Many mental illnesses arise from lack of benign interaction.
The countryside is far more open than the city; every household’s door stands open, and we could drop in on neighbors anytime to invite them out to play. Modern urbanites overvalue privacy and are too closed; shutting their doors, their favorite activity is lecturing their children, and some parents can always nitpick all kinds of faults in their children.
If children and parents spend too long together, such close contact is enough to suffocate. Fei Xiaotong said that a tyrant interferes less with any single subject in a lifetime than a pair of parents interferes with their child in an hour. The interference we inflict on our children can ruin their lives, yet most parents do not see it clearly; they call it love—and if this is love, it is a deformed love. We must admit that more often than not, we are the source of our children’s pain.
A responsible parent should put the child from infancy into an environment rich with people, letting them receive all kinds of stimuli and grow naturally—not watching their every word and deed and correcting them at every turn. I always feel that modern urban parents raise their children like guards watching thieves, perpetually in a state of battle. None of my childhood friends suffered anxiety or depression, but several of my son’s classmates already have moderate or severe anxiety and depression; lack of playmates and parental nagging have ruined many children’s good lives.
Psychology holds that a person needs more than 5,000 compliments in childhood to build sufficient confidence, and one criticism cancels out four compliments. By that standard, most rural children of my childhood received enough praise and far fewer criticisms. Neighbors and aunts and uncles made up for any shortage of parental praise; like discerning talent-scouts they always found good points in village children and praised us now and then. Our play space was vast; most of the time we roamed freely, not performing for our parents, so their eyes were not always on us and their nitpicking was far less.
Over the last two or three centuries this long-standing way of life has been badly damaged. The disappearance of acquaintance society leaves everyone living on islands that look bustling but are actually silent. Without the safe, inclusive buffer environment the village provided, parent-child conflicts erupt directly and cannot be quickly soothed. That is unthinkable in the village: there, if a parent scolds or disciplines a child too harshly, the neighbors step in to correct the parents and comfort the child. So a village child’s unhappiness usually passes quickly, while a city child scolded by parents or teachers stays morose for days. Without comfort, some children even take their own lives.
Modern schooling has also failed in emotional cultivation, so people grow ever more solitary. Today’s marriages are fragile too, because people generally cannot love and tolerate, only demand and criticize. When disaster strikes, a person lacks the emotional relief of kin and neighbors and easily falls into despair; what is a life without emotion but a desert? Our culture, on its evolutionary road, seems to have strayed into an inhuman dead end.
I still love farming. In my own small farming life today I still find echoes of my life before age ten. The elderly men and women I garden with are still as warm and humorous as ever; working together we joke kindly and help one another. One should of course have the ability to enjoy solitude and think independently, but emphasizing independence while ignoring community tears a person from the whole of nature and society, robbing them of many pleasures. Life’s pleasures are already few; subtract and subtract again and what remains but loneliness, pain, and emptiness?
A good life should balance activity and rest, work and leisure, mind and body; be solitary when solitude is fitting, lively when liveliness is fitting. Because the human species has diverse needs, only when each is properly met do we feel at ease.