It was Ching Ming Festival, and I was in the loess plateau region of Northwest China to visit an elementary school located in a cave home.
Fine drizzle greeted me, unusual for a land where the yellow earth stays dry throughout the year. Perhaps a sign that the traditional calendar was right--or maybe just heaven playing a little joke?
"My home is on the slopes of the yellow earth; heavy gusts whistle down from the tops of the hills..." So runs a favorite folk song of mine from the Northwest. But once actually present in this vast, bleak region riven by deep chasms, lacking running water, electricity and highways, the region dubbed the cradle of the Chinese Communist Party, it was hard for me to feel at ease. Instead, I could sense the miseries inflicted by this place on its generations of inhabitants.
The children at the elementary school in the cave lay propped on the ground, using twigs to practice writing while reciting their text, sing-song fashion, in dialect.
Innocent eyes sparkled from their chapped, frostbitten, dust-coated little faces. I wondered if in their little hearts they had ever imagined a time when they might have pens and paper to use. For a moment it was as if I had wandered down a time tunnel to some point in the remote past.
According to the village secretary there are still families in the area who do not have enough to eat. Life is mercilessly hard among these hills. It requires the grace of heaven to cultivate a patch of land, heat up a pan of gruel or even just enjoy a swig of water. Unfortunately, heaven is hard-hearted in these parts, shedding precious few tears of sympathy from one year to the next.
High hills and deep ravines criss-cross this land of bald yellow earth, making communication with the outside world difficult. Many of the older people have hardly travelled from the vicinity of their homes. It's not merely that they haven't visited the flourishing cities of China's seaboard--they have never even seen the paved roads and western-style buildings and factories of the county town.
On mud walls throughout this region can be seen the slogans: "People's Education for the People," and "People's Education Run by the People." The cave school I visited was one such independently run elementary school. Mr. Chang, the schoolmaster, returned to his home village after graduating from junior high school. Moved by the plight of the local kids who had nowhere to learn, he re-opened the long-neglected cave that had served as a schoolroom and began to take pupils.
At the same time as teaching for the last two years, Chang has had to keep a cautious eye on the crumbling walls and ceiling of the cave.
Chang himself lives in a small cave dwelling beside the schoolroom, where he practices his brush strokes at the weekend, making a calligraphy gallery of his tiny abode.
Some reporters who once visited from Hong Kong were so awed by Chang and his life of hardship (he lives off potatoes that he grows on a small plot nearby) that they sent several hundred Yuan to help him get by. But Chang can't bring himself to touch a penny of the money.
The ignorance of the people in this backward region is misfortune enough, yet even worse is that in their state of ignorance many believe they can join the legions prospering under economic reform, and pour blindly into the city hoping to strike it rich. Often they fall prey to the traffickers in flesh, dealers who lead young women away with the promise of work, only to abduct them, and sell them in distant provinces.
Pitifully, such women are frequently used as devices to swindle their families out of whatever money they may have left, by persuading them year after year to scrape together funds to mail away--funds that end up in the pockets of crooks.
One day among these hills was like a whole year of life, as if I had read an entire history of human misery. I hardly slept at all that night.
Morning dawned. I was hoping for molten sun to light up this frigid, murky landscape, but instead a heavy fog filled the air, and the temperature stayed at around freezing point.
The fog began to clear before noon, exposing the frost that layered the road verges and hillsides. Not a single glint of red had appeared in the East.
The villagers urged me to leave, explaining that if it should snow it might be seven or eight days before I could get away again, so impassable do the roads become. The weather in these hills is highly unpredictable, one moment bringing a vicious sandstorm, the next moment a blazing sun that threatens people and livestock with heatstroke.
It was with regret that I bade farewell to the hills, to the honest, simple people who live there, and to Chang, the schoolmaster, seeming to hear as I left a whispered refrain carried on the wind: "Millions of years on the yellow earth; bitterness and sorrow, yet no more tears to shed."
