damp with dew. Uncle Weiren told me that poplars had been in fashion in recent years because the trees were hardy and, fond of sandy soil, they grew fast (they can be ready for felling in eight or nine years), and the timber could bring a good price. Many families in the village had cleared patches of wild land and planted them with poplars. An acre could produce more than two hundred trees. Uncle Weiren had two acres of them, which was a virtually risk-free investment after the saplings had survived the first winter and spring. Once his poplars grew up and he sold the timber, he planned to expand his house to two stories. As long as the Party didn’t change its current agricultural policies, he felt that the country folks’ livelihood might improve some. In spite of my skepticism, I didn’t contradict him. I had read that some poor families in the countryside couldn’t pay taxes and abandoned their homes.
I didn’t see a single child, and only a few middle-aged men and women greeted Uncle Weiren. When I asked him why there were so few children in the village, he said that all the young people had left to work in the cities and would come back only once a year, mostly at the Spring Festival. People didn’t want to raise many children anymore, especially those young couples who already had a son. The one-child policy was still in place, but you might have more children if you were willing to pay heavy fines. “It costs too much to bring up kids,” he continued. “There’re still five or six tots in the village, in their grandparents’ care. The others are all gone. Our elementary school closed down two years ago ’cause there weren’t enough pupils. Parents pull their kids out of school earlier nowadays, even before they finish middle school.”
“They won’t send them to college anymore?” I asked.
“Way too expensive. Besides, after college they can’t find good jobs. So why even bother?”
We passed a few mud and straw adobes, dilapidated and deserted, some overgrown with dried brambles. Uncle Weiren was silent while I lapsed into thought. This place seemed to be dying and might disappear in twenty years. Clearly there were people who’d gotten a raw deal in the national economic boom. In some poor areas more villagers had uprooted themselves to make a living in cities, and they might never return to their native places. I had read that in some regions in western China, entire villages were deserted. The demise of the village would surely transform the country from within. But how would this massive migration affect Chinese society as a whole? Who would benefit? At whose expense? What might be the consequences in the long run?
The decrepit scene reminded me of eighteenth-century Europe, where rural people were driven off their land and drawn to industrial centers to work in factories. China was a capitalist country in the making and was relentlessly consuming the young blood from the countryside.
My grandparents’ graves were at the base of a foothill, where all the Shangs of the village were buried. Hundreds of mounds of earth spread to the side of a dried brook, many of them covered by wild grass. A few had wooden signs at the heads, but there wasn’t a single headstone. We stopped at a pair of graves near the southern end of the burial ground. These two were unmarked and appeared identical with some others.
“Here they are,” Uncle Weiren said.
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“We come here every spring to clean them up.”
Indeed, the two graves looked just tended, so I added a few shovelfuls of earth to them. We lit the joss sticks and planted them before the mounds. Out of the basket Uncle Weiren took a half bottle of liquor and poured some in front of the incense. In the alcohol something whitish swayed like a stringy ginseng root; thenI was astonished to see that it was a tiny snake. Why did he offer snake liquor to my grandparents? Grandma couldn’t have been fond of drinking,
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