Rape Flowers, Azaleas and the Little Mountain Valley
A Chinese cabbage went bad before it was finished. My wife could not bear to throw it away and set it on the windowsill; within a few days, golden flower buds grew from the cabbage. These flower buds look very much like the rape flowers of my hometown, except they do not appear in vast fields as in my hometown.At this moment, in my home province of Hubei, over the mountains and fields, the most abundant are rape flowers and azaleas. As a child, when spring warmed the world and the grass was lush, we often led cattle to the little mountain valley to graze. In the mountain shrubs there were bright red azaleas. We plucked azalea petals and put them in our mouths; they tasted sweet and sour, delicious.Childhood memories are always beautiful. In my view, the countryside where I grew up as a child was the most ideal society on earth. I like that social model: neighbors helping one another, the whole village like one family. Even when there were conflicts, they could all be resolved very amicably.My father was like the village free judge. When I was small, our home was the place in our village for settling disputes. When villagers had a conflict, they would run to my home to ask my father to judge. Father would call both parties in, and call in several respected elders, listen to both sides argue, help them sort out right and wrong, and finally try to persuade both sides to make concessions and reconcile.Because of this experience, I was deeply moved when I read Confucius say: In hearing litigation, I am no different from anyone else; what is necessary is to make an end to litigation itself. My father, in handling disputes among villagers, could always in the end make an end to litigation. His prestige among the villagers, and his ability to sort out right and wrong for people, made him the village undisputed mediator; villagers recognized his integrity and ability.Unlike modern courts, this rural place for settling disputes charged no fee, and there was no such thing as a lawyer. Several respected villagers sat there, scolding those in the wrong a bit, then comforting them; voicing support for those in the right, then persuading them to yield a step; and so the conflict was resolved. After all, everyone was descended from the same ancestor, same surname and clan; there were no conflicts that could not be resolved to the death, and everyone knew that living in the village harmony was prized, so conflicts were not hard to resolve.There were also doctors in the village. The most common diseases in the countryside were colds and injuries from falls and blows, and these the village doctors treated. There were even three bone-setting doctors; their homes were lively in the evenings, as villagers who worked the fields by day went to the bone-setting doctor home at night for massage and joint setting, while others waited in line and chatted. Sprains did not need surgery; one just went to the village bone-setting doctor for help, and treatment was free. But none of those bone-setting doctors in our village lived long; they had to farm by day and heal people at night, and ultimately died early from overwork.The bone-setters art was not passed father-to-son; instead it was taught by finding the most perceptive child in the whole village and passing it on as master-to-apprentice. Because bone-setters needed helpers when treating injuries, some would find a young man they liked as their helper, and as they worked along, the craft was passed to him. For a long period, my father whenever free in the evenings would go help the bone-setter, so he learned a little too.But my father was a man of outstanding talent, and villagers had many expectations of him; later everyone jointly elected him as a village cadre. Father always said that in those days our family class background was not good; normally he could never have had the chance to be a cadre, and he himself did not dare to be one, but because the whole village wanted him, he could not decline.Finally he proposed that if everyone truly wanted him to be a cadre, it had to be with every single villager signing their agreement; otherwise he would not do it, because he feared being struggled against later. As it happened, all the villagers really did sign; this was perhaps the brightest moment of my father life. But he quit after only a few years as a cadre.I can never quite walk away from the kind of society I lived in as a child. My dream is to return to that rural world and be a village barefoot doctor, living by farming and reading, and in spare time practicing medicine to save the world. Being a bit worn out does not matter; I do not much care whether I live long. Of course, it might be better if villagers could change their mindset and let a village barefoot doctor like me earn a living from treating people, without spending too much energy farming, and having more time to study disease.But the Chinese countryside has vanished; that past society is gone forever. What I now see and hear when I return to the countryside is completely different from my childhood. Young villagers have all gone out to work; apart from a little bustle at New Year and festivals, on ordinary days only the elderly remain in the village. There are few children, because they have all gone to the cities to attend school; the village elementary school and the village middle school have both died out. That rural society of mutual watchfulness among neighbors that I knew as a child has actually disappeared.Now I live year-round in Beijing, not far from the National Library; one could say I live at the cultural heart of China. The area where I live is dotted with family housing compounds of many ministries, and the public security is about the best in the whole country.Living in such an area, one can truly say the living conditions are very privileged. But I can hardly experience the kind of happiness and well-being I felt as a child; I would rather return to that warm, human rural society, and am willing to give up everything now to go back to it, except that society has vanished without a trace.A great number of villages are now empty; villagers have bought apartments and settled in cities one after another. Few people truly want to live in the village; most prefer to live in economically developed places, despite how many unsatisfactory things such places have, such as lack of human warmth, a cold social circle, and many people who are vicious.The American Chinese scholar Mr. Xu Zhuoyun has written many works on Chinese and American society. From Mr. Xu works we can see that the disappearance of the village and kinship society is a global problem; similar phenomena exist in the United States. Kinship has grown faint; the old harmonious and strong interpersonal network no longer exists. The human survival model has been utterly changed by the Industrial Revolution, and the traditional emotional support system has collapsed.Man is a social animal; when people lose the emotional support system built in group life, body and mind inevitably suffer. In recent years, the incidence of depression and anxiety worldwide has soared sharply. I still hope to return to the past, but the past can never return to me; the true homeland now exists only in dreams. The boundless fields, mountains, rivers and deep kinship were the milk that nourished my soul; now we have lost these.Sometimes I really want to find a few close relatives and friends and recreate a similar social environment, but I also know this is fantasy. The wheels of history roll forward, and few people can truly leave modern life and return to that old rural world. We can only, in the dead of night, occasionally dream of our hometown, relive childhood life, and then wake up to continue living in the new social environment.