Author: Jude Jiang

Starting from June 19, 2020, the State Council consecutively approved four cities, Changchun (Jilin province), Chengdu (Sichuan province), Yantai (Shandong province) and Xingtai (Hebei province), to administratively convert surrounding rural counties into city districts, which means the former counties will be governed by their local cities. 

Over the past ten years, China has converted a total of 141 counties and meanwhile added 110 city districts. As China’s urbanization trend continues, not only the countryside economy would be affected by urban economic forces that focus on infrastructure, construction and improvement of public service, but the rural life would be affected by urban influences. 

As the consumption culture permeates areas that formerly relied upon agricultural subsistence, knowledge and experience in farming have decreased and become a rare skill. The lifestyle in rural China becomes a mixture of joy and woes.

Familiar, yet unknown 

It was after school in the gathering twilight, an interval of time during which Qi Qi, a nearsighted eleven-year-old girl with thick-lensed glasses, could relax before supper. She stood on her pink Balance Bike and slid around the yard where five square meters of home-planted vegetables were planted.  

“Even though I was born and grew up in countryside,” said QiQi, looking with a confused gaze at two similar-look green plants in Grandma’s front yard. “I barely can tell the difference between these two vegetables.”

Guo Wei, Qi Qi’s father, walked from the house and furrowed his brow at her confusion. He paused before picking a few sun ripened tomatoes for the meal already cooking within.

“They are eggplant and pumping seedlings,” Guo Wei responded. Throughout his childhood and teenage years, Guo spent most of his time assisting his mother on farm lands which are now rented out to a local herb planting and manufacturing firm. Guo left farming, to pursue selling ceramic tiles in a store as a more suitable way to support his family. 

Qi Qi leaned closer to the two greens seedlings and took a good at the leaves. “Ah, pumping seedlings have curvy strings!” She happily reported to her father. “Look, there are more greens growing! Let me check them out…” 

“You have to do your homework now,” Guo Wei stopped the child as she was about to sneak out of the yard to explore the natural world beyond. “Last night, you were up until 11p.m. Why can’t you finish the homework fast?”

It is true that Qi Qi has a propensity for procrastination, especially burgeoning load of daily homework issued by her school. She had successfully seized numerous moments to play and avoid homework throughout the first grade, a habit she has perfected now in fourth grade. As a result, her parents often sit beside her, enforcing her study time on a daily basis.   

As Guo Wei requested a second time for her to do homework,  Qi Qi reluctantly stepped off her Balance Bike and left the yard behind. As she dove into the boredom of working on several test papers, she couldn’t help diverting her thoughts back to the inviting yard and the two greens she just learned. 

Soon, on the margin of the test paper, a beautiful portrayal of pumpkin seedlings sprouted forth with curvy sprigs and blossoming leaves.  

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Pressure to Move On 

Like Qi Qi, many children and teenagers in the rural areas of China are loosing carefree time to competitive school study. Additionally, they have to attend tutoring classes to improve maths, Chinese or English after school and on weekends. Some even attend daily after-school classes if they have trouble accomplishing homework on their own. The tutoring fees for these classes range from 150 to 600 yuan per hour, depending on how effectively the classes can enhance the students’ exam scores.

Qi Qi’s cousin, Jin Wu, a sixteen-year-old teenager who was about to take High-school Entrance Examination within one week, had been taking tutoring class on maths at the cost of 360 yuan per hour. 

“As long as he can enter the best-quality high school,” Jin Wu’s father said, “I am willing to pay the higher tutoring fee.” He was concerned because in the latest mock exam, Jin Wu was only rated entering a mid-level high school. It required an increase of seven scores to enter a better tier of schools. 

When Jin had dinner with his family, not only his father, but his mother and grandparents would encourage him to study hard or give him special food treats. He barely responded beyond his thanks and quickly finished the meal to obediently return to study. 

“There is no way that this new generation will ever return to doing farm work in the future,” Jin’s father says. “They know nothing about farming skills. Study is the only access to their survival.”

Purchasing the future 

Both Qi Qi’s and Jin Wu’s parents bought apartments in town, about 14 kilometers away from their rural farm lands. They felt lucky they made the purchase decision early, otherwise they couldn’t have afforded it, since the price of residential land has dramatically surged over the past few years. 

Since the 2016 G20 took place in China, the real estate market in Hangzhou and the surrounding areas of Zhejiang province has boosted. In 2018, the city had to adopt a housing lottery system in order to prevent a property bubble. Needy families can only purchase apartments with winning the lucky draw. 

As many old residential complexes were dismantled, new high-rise residential buildings rapidly took their place. As exquisitely-designed as the ones in first-tier cities, these new apartments cost half or one-third of their urban counterparts.

“In my father’s generation, they built a three-store countryside villa on their farm property which will be the legacy for their offspring,” said Jianzhong Sun, a 42-year-old construction manager who lives in the same apartment complex as QiQi’s family. “But now, for the young generation like me, purchasing apartment in towns is a more rational decision for the future.”

At the price of RMB1.40 million (US$ 200,000 dollars), Sun bought a new apartment in 2019 in the suburban town of Xiaoshan, an administrative district of Hangzhou. The apartment is composed of two dinning rooms and four bedrooms, occupying 170 cubic meters, on the thirteen floor of an eighteen-floor high-rise.

Sun hopes to buy two more apartments as legacies for his two children in the near future. “Though my business seems profitable because of the the vast-scale of real estate development in China, it has become more competitive these days.” Sun added. He said his profit in the construction sector is down to 20% from 50% ten years ago. 

“Nowadays, we spend money much faster than we earn,” Jia Wei, Sun’s brother-in-law and a window-maker, says, “Twenty years ago, I could only make 50 or 70 yuan per day. I felt fulfilled since I could accumulate a few thousand by the end of the year. But now, the money I made yesterday can be fully spent today, even though daily income increases to be hundreds per day.” 

One week ago, Jia Wei purchased five automatic machines for his new plan for making windows, with a price tag of RMB150,000 (US$23,000). Adding the rental fee of workshop and salary of two workers, his overhead costs will exceed RMB300,000 annually. 

“It is inevitable that automation will replace hand craftsmanship, ” Jia says, “I have been considering this plan for years. It took me a lot courage to enter this new game with its higher stakes.”  

From Rural to Suburban China

On the way from QiQi’s grandmother’s farmstead to QiQi’s family apartment in town there is a famous real estate development program, known as the Forest and Sea. It occupies 204,000 square meters (5,000 acres), so far it is the biggest residential property in Hangzhou. It claims it will attract 100,000 residents to live there in the next ten years by providing full facilities and every urban convenience including hospitals, schools and supermarkets. 

“It will soon become an ideal residence for people working in urban areas,” Guo Wei commented when he drove by the the Forest and Sea. “If the place is built as it claimed, then there would be no need for people to leave the place because it would have everything.” 

At the back-seat of the car, Qi Qi leaned against the window. She looked out at the heavy equipment and the open scars where construction sites were being prepared. Then she opened her textbook and withdrew a pumpkin sprout she had pressed in the pages.  

Chinese pavilions spark sentimental visions.

By Jude Jiang

Near the corner of a noisy intersection filled with downtown Shanghai’s endless stream of traffic in lies a pavilion. Painted with faded hues, from its sky-blue tiled rooftop to its burgundy wooden pillars, the hexagonal structure elegantly demonstrates serenity and harmony. 

Chinese pavilions have long been a part of Oriental gardens and dotting the picturesque mountain tops. Ancient poets composed verses or leisurely discussed philosophy with lords and magistrates. Today, people may rarely find time for relaxation or waxing poetic. The pavilion, therefore, may get little use, apart from occasionally being used as an impromptu phone booth while someone stops to sit and make a private call on their mobile phone. 

Though it has fallen into disuse by the busy city people, the pavilion lures other residents to its eaves. Stray cats seem drawn to this shelter and place it in practical usage to play, groom their fur, rally for a fight, eat the food kind-hearted aunties bring for them or just lay down and soak in the sunshine. Feral cats are cautious but they are willing to leave behind the security of the bushes and hedges to stroll across the open spaces to reach this enticing architecture.

While gleefully indulging in their feline pursuits under the sunshine around the pavilion, the cats remain vigilant. They raise their heads as one, and freeze. Taut muscles poised and ready to pounce, they listen cautiously, and upon hearing any sound of footsteps approaching or vehicle passing nearby, they scatter to the nearby bushes. However, some wise elders remain and intently monitor the activities from their 360 degree vantage within the structure.

Often passersby neither notice the cats nor enter the pavilion. They continue on in their quick pace to their own destination under the watchful gaze of the pavilion’s feline guardians. But the cats are blissfully unaware of the grand history of humble buildings like these.

“Truly enjoyable it is sit to watch the immense universe above and the myriad things below, traveling over the entire landscape with our eyes and allowing our sentiments to roam about at will, thus exhausting the pleasures of the eye and the ear,” wrote Wang Xizhi, a renown Chinese calligrapher during Eastern Jin Dynasty (A.D. 353), in his famous essay, The Orchid Pavilion. In this verse, he extolled his sentiments to the view from the pavilion.

Is this not the very sentiment that attracts these stray cats? Wang Xizhi assembled with forty old and young illustrious scholars in the Orchid Pavilion where they chatted, sang, drank and relaxed. They also pondered philosophy.

Wang Xizhi mentioned that his pleasure not only came from viewing the mountains, trees, bamboos and streams from the pavilion, but also from noticing his companions,“unburden their thoughts in the intimacy of a room, and some, overcome by a sentiment, soar forth into a world beyond bodily realities.”

Though there was no traffic noise in that age to disrupt their fraternity within the pavilion. After the ripple of pleasures triggered by the view from the Orchid Pavilion, Wang found himself in a sad mood contemplating the limited space inside with the immense wilderness outside the pavilion. This image caused him to compare humans’ limited lifespan with infinity of the Universe.

 “Although our lives may be long or short, eventually we all end in nothingness. ‘Great indeed are life and death,’ said the ancients. Ah! What sadness!” Wang Xizhi surmised at the end of his essay. 

Modern architects employ cubic windows in their stark and impregnable concrete and steel behemoths made for residential, shopping and working spaces. When the buildings provide more internal space and security, do they also restrict our sentimental outlook?

Today one third of world’s high-rise buildings above 150 meters in height are located in mainland China. Thus, seeing a grand view through panes of high-rise building window is an ubiquitous experience, while discovering such grandeur in the windowless view from a pavilion on a mountain has become a luxury.

Love can no longer be defined by traditional ideals.

By Jude Jiang  (with additional writing by Richard Trombly)

Over the past 30 years, while China’s modernizing has given it an economy that rivals the West, its divorce rate has also developed apace. A recent statistic, released by Civil Affairs Department of China, shows that in 2019 four out of ten Chinese marriages ended in divorce. When in a single day over ten thousand Chinese couples absolved their mutual promise of a life-long vow, some people cast judgments and extol so-called traditional values.

It’s always been hard. Is it harder?

Divorce and break-up entail bleak, painful transformational stages. Eat alone, sleep alone, do hobbies that were once enjoyed with a partner, alone. It can be hard to readjust to single life. And some people have never lived alone before. We must also face the unbearable phantom of reliving memories of sweet moments shared with our “ex”. After our idealized expectations meet the reality wall, we endure the disillusionment and various emotional distresses. It can lead to painful introspection about questions like “What is love?”,  “Is there a true and everlasting love?” and other existential angst.

“In truth, our partners are as imperfectly human as we are. Perhaps that image of ideal love has damaged us because we never find that perfect partner that completes us and solves every problem and removes all sadness in our lives. When we have our eyes fixed on that illusory fantasy, we overlook so many wonderful sources of love in our lives, right in front of us.”

These questions have fueled the quest of poets, musicians, philosophers, writers and artists through the millennia because these issues are so very and essentially human. As modern societies keep growing under burgeoning populations, seeking and sustaining love relationships seems even harder where many aspects of fast-paced, high-tech, plugged-in modern life can challenge a couple’s relationship. Has the equation of love become harder to solve or are we so distracted by modern life that we have more trouble finding it? Modern Love, a recent series streamed on Amazon Prime explores this issue.

The Color of Love

When we express love for someone online or wear T-shirts that say “I love (something)”, the word love is often expressed as an image of a vibrant, red heart. This symbolizes our image of a volcanic powerful passion we connect with love. That emotion fuels an ardent energy that leads people to tackle great obstacles in the quest to find eternal love.

It is rare to see love symbolized in other colors of the spectrum. Psychologically, blue can represent calm and peaceful but in the very word blue is symbolized depression, so much so that there is an entire genre of jazz devoted to it. So it certainly seems out of place to see the poster for Modern Love, with its symbol of a heart painted in blue. While it seems so incongruous at first to see a blue heart, the series which is based on a column in the New York Times, explores love through this non-traditional lens.

Men have been raised with fairy tales of overcoming all the obstacles to win the perfect princess who will become your queen and be by your side eternally, while women were told to wait passively and their prince will come. We also have a huge body of idealized yearning and longing in song and poem as well endless novels of finding the perfect love that will give us a happily ever after ending if we find that one true love. We watch the same trope endlessly on the screen. Love solves it all and then you will be happy. In truth, our partners are as imperfectly human as we are. Perhaps that image of ideal love has damaged us because we never find that perfect partner that completes us and solves every problem and removes all sadness in our lives. When we have our eyes fixed on that illusory fantasy, we overlook so many wonderful sources of love in our lives, right in front of us.

Modern Love looks at what you have when you move beyond the fairy tale of the passionate, perfect or idealized love that we see all the time in literature and on the screen. It depicts how we experience love in modern times, with an accepting view of what love looks like, for the rest of us.

Based on the personal essays of New York Times readers submitted over the years to the column, Modern Love, this anthology series retains an intimate tonality of the original authors’ perspectives of love. The eight stories in the first season of Modern Love present a forum for observing a broader definition of love for our times, often with the hardships and depression it embodies, across the spectrum of non-traditional couple’s love relationships.

Modern Love is grounded solidly in the volatile modern reality where many human needs that are no longer met through the traditional societal structure of marriage and family, must now be satisfied through finding connection with others. The first episode is a wonderful example and one of the more compelling stories of a very different love.

Love Through Blue-tinted Lenses

In the first episode entitled When the Doorman is Your Main Man, we are introduced to a couple on the streets of the city on a first date. We expect to follow their romance. Instead, the date ends with an awkward kiss and the guy never calls Julie, our heroine again but we discover that she has a peculiar relationship with her fatherly doorman.

Guzim, the immigrant doorman, expresses his disdain of the admittedly ineligible men in whom Julie looks to find her prince charming. Instead of being offended, she instead bonds with him and even seeks his approval or rejection of the men. This bookish writer, who moved to NYC and is alone in the big city, is endlessly reading books and seems to be stuck in that world on the written page. Her relationship with the doorman is one of her few tenuous social bonds.

In her inept and immature quest for fulfillment of her desire to find the perfect love, she inadvertently finds herself pregnant. The biological father is neither eligible nor interested in being involved. After she turns to her unconventional mentor for advice and support, she makes the big choice to be a single mom. 

With Julie facing pregnancy and then raising her child alone, there is the ever-present protective influence of the doorman. The relationship between these two strengthens as he becomes involved as she takes on this new life. He even has moments as an impromptu babysitter when the realities of hectic schedules and city traffic create obstacles for the single mom. We naturally expect that there is a developing love that will be requited, even if this would be an autumn-spring relationship. However, the love that does develop between them is never sensual. In the end, maybe Guzim replaced Julie’s need for family love since she was distant geographically and spiritually from her family.

“…ours was a common and unsung friendship, that between women living in New York, single and alone, and the doormen who take care of them, acting as gatekeepers, bodyguards, confidants and father figures,” wrote Julie Margaret Hogben. “Not because it’s part of the job, but because they’re good men.

The other episodes in this anthology also treat unconventional aspects of love rather than romance. Maybe love will not take the shape of the fairy tale but if we look at it under a different lens, that might not be such a bad thing. The reality is, many will never find happiness in a traditional marriage but one might ask, if those marriages, so prescribed and inescapable in the past societies, were ever happy.

So, maybe, the modern world’s high divorce rate shouldn’t concern us too much. Love may come in many colors.