The Searchers

Today is the weekend, and day two of the seven days I get off for Chinese National Day. I wanted to get another heater for my room since the real heaters haven't come on yet, about another month I think, but it's still pretty cold at night. One student who I knew lived to far away to go home for the holiday agreed to come with me to look for one. We biked down to a big bizarre about two kilometers from the school. We looked in a number of shops there but couldn't find anything. We eventually found one heater but it was far too big and expensive. While we struck out on the heater I got him to show me where the biggest supermarket in town is and they had peanut butter and jelly. Slav had shown me a little restaurant/bakery where I knew they had something like western bread so we biked over there and picked some up so I can now make PB&J sandwiches.

While we were there I treated him to a burger and fries since he said he'd never had American food before. He's a nice kid and while we were eating he told me some interesting things. His girlfriend, who is in another one of my classes, is spending the break picking cotton to make extra money. She gets paid one RMB for each kilogram of cotton she picks. He said that yesterday she made about 50 RMB in about 8 hours. That by the way is about half of what I could make in one hour working for private company in Changzhou. I suggested that he probably shouldn't mention to her that he spent the day eating hamburgers, which cost about 25 RMB wih fires and a drink while she worked in the fields. While we were discussing how in America no one ever uses the word peasant for a farmer he told me that his grandfather had been a low level official with the Kuomintang, the people who ran the government and fought against the communists before '49.

He was essentially the mayor of their village as I understand it and probably a property owner. I asked if he went to Taiwan when the rest of the Kuomintang did but he said that his grandfather was at far too low a level for that. He was though executed when the communists finally took over their town. This also meant that his father couldn't get an education, or probably any opportunities. He said his father only taught himself to read later in life. He expressed a lot of support for Deng Xiaoping who ended a lot of these policies and opened China up. It's amazing in China how fast you can go from the normal, looking for a heater, to the truly remarkable, stories of family struggle and world changing events.