Chapter 20 4. Goroso: basic story and variant story

I want to tell a few simple and ordinary stories of peasants who left their hometowns—definitely not heroic stories. In late May 1999, I went from village to household on the north bank of the Yangtze River. I visited three villages and visited 13 households. I sat in each household for two or three hours and listened to farmers talking about themselves.My identity is an official survey researcher, I ask and record in a stereotyped way, and the questions are all neutral without any emotional color.Nor is there any fiction on my part as recorder. Xiao Liu is a 33-year-old man who farms at home and takes care of two children.His wife Xiaoye works as a nanny in Tianjin and earns 500 yuan a month, accounting for 80% of their family's total income.Xiao Liu told me that when there was a disaster in the village in 1992, his wife Xiaoye followed her acquaintances to Tianjin to look for work, and she left for seven years.Xiaoye goes home every Spring Festival to have a look.One year when I went home, the youngest child saw his mother and didn't recognize her, and Xiaoye's tears fell down the ground.

Xiaoye makes six or seven phone calls to the village every year, to a neighbor who has a phone.On the phone, Xiaoye often complained about her grievances, saying that she wanted to go home.Xiao Liu fully understands Xiaoye's feelings. He said that Xiaoye lives frugally outside, lives in a hut, cooks for herself, and saves two or three thousand yuan a year to take home.Even so, Xiao Liu still disapproved of his wife returning home. Once his wife came back, life would be difficult to maintain.The two children need to go to school, and the annual tuition and miscellaneous fees need more than 1,000 yuan, plus living expenses, plus various taxes and fees, there is not much left.In fact, people's joys and sorrows are largely determined by one boring family account after another.I won't go into detail about this set of accounts here.

In 1998, there was another disaster in the village. After the flood, there was cotton bollworm. The cotton harvest was almost wiped out, and the money for fertilizers, seeds and pesticides could not be collected, and the family owed some debts.Xiaoye plans to work for another year or two, and come back after paying off her debts.Xiao Liu finally said that whether his wife will come back or not depends on the condition of the children.If the child has the ability and is the material for reading, Xiaoye will work for a few more years and accumulate more money for the child's tuition.If the child has no future, pay off the debt, save some money and come back.

The decisive factor for Xiaoye's return is whether the child is promising or not, and whether it is worth cultivating.This statement moved me.There seems to be a hidden meaning here.This meaning reminds me of a story told to me by two other lads. A young man surnamed Qiu, 31 years old, with a primary school education, is currently farming at home. He once went out to dig coal for five years.He digs coal in a small private coal mine and lives in a work shed.Each shift works for about six or seven hours, with a quota of carrying five or six tons of coal.Under the condition of fulfilling the quota, the daily salary is between 20 and 30 yuan.It was at this place that three people from their village died from a roof collapse in a small coal mine.I once visited the home of a deceased person. Now the wife of the deceased has married the younger brother of the deceased. The younger brother dug coal with the older brother. The older brother died, but the younger brother survived by luck.With the lesson of the death of an acquaintance, the danger becomes something very concrete.Xiaoqiu was afraid, so he went home to farm.But you can’t earn money from farming. Without money, you can’t build a house, and you can’t marry a wife and have children. These major events in life are difficult to accomplish.So he went out to dig coal again.Earning 20 yuan a day, I worked for another four years. In 1997, I quit completely.He said that although he made a lot of money, it was too hard.Carrying coal is harder than farming, crawling on the ground, and very dangerous.After getting married, his wife also thought it was too dangerous and refused to let him do it.Xiaoqiu said that he doesn't want to dig coal any more in the future, as he has already earned enough money to build a house.The money he brought back was about 20,000 yuan, which was mainly used to build a house.

Xiaoqiu repeatedly talked about earning money to build a house.He said that if you don't go out to earn money, you can't afford to build a house.His family's house was built in 1996. It has a brick-and-concrete structure. There are three rooms in total, with an area of ​​about 60 to 70 square meters.It cost him fifteen thousand yuan to build the house. Another young man surnamed Li also talked about the relationship between going out and building a house in the same tone.Now this young man is still running back and forth between his hometown and Shanghai. He is a plumbing plumber for decoration. He goes to the city when he has work, and returns home to farm when he has no work.His family's house has also been built, but it is relatively small. He plans to build another one after earning enough money.

After talking about the income and expenditure of the three peasant families, I should honestly explain the meaning hidden in it.This is: In their narratives, I seem to see a kind of life budget, a budget based on the entire life cycle and the nuclear family.Going out to work, whether as a babysitter or digging coal or doing renovations, is a necessary part of the overall budget. The task is to earn housing expenses and children's education expenses.Without this income, it would be unfair to rely solely on farming and raising chickens.This is a life design based on farming and raising chickens in my hometown.Going out is just an adolescent interlude to cover extra costs like building a house.If the migrants did not change their foothold midway, and did not change their entire life design, these farmers would return to their hometown sooner or later.Don't underestimate this simple accounting calculation. It determines the life pattern and joys and sorrows of hundreds of millions of contemporary Chinese farmers.This is the basic story of a huge group.

In the three villages I visited, the farmers who had migrant work experience accounted for at least 25% of the total labor force, and the most accounted for 88%.Most of them live by this basic story. There is another major variation in this story: Some farmers set off from their hometowns and went halfway, completely changing their original life plans.They don't go back, they don't farm and raise chickens anymore.The original life episode evolved into the main theme.I've heard of several such people, and I've seen one with my own eyes. The "transformed" farmer I interviewed was surnamed Ding, and he was the owner of a 100-ton transport ship on the Yangtze River.His son had just reached school age, so he sold the boat and returned to his hometown in order for the child to go to school.He planned to close his business for two years, settle his son in school, and then find a partner to resume his old business.Going out of business is out of the question.The life of the boat owner was originally very stable. A family of three lived on the boat, like a self-employed water transport operator.Life and income are good, and it is enough to live like this.Ding's family doesn't have a house in the village. The original house has been destroyed, and he doesn't plan to build it.His contracted fields have been transferred to his elder brother.All this shows that he does not intend to come back.But his son couldn't go to school, and this problem stumped him.So the wife was forced to disembark and return to her hometown to take the children to school.With only one man left, the work on the boat became impossible, and he was forced to go out of business.But Captain Ding still doesn't plan to build a house. He lives in a relative's house and will continue to be his captain if conditions permit.For him, returning home has become an episode instead.

There are nearly twenty people like Captain Ding in his village.Some people bought large ships with thousands of tons. It is hard to imagine that these people will come back to farm and raise chickens.There are several people who made a fortune outside to buy a house or found a permanent job in every village I visited, and some even transferred their household registration to the cities.Their exodus has become migration.For them, the life design with hometown agriculture as the starting point and destination has been completely changed.There are many farmers who are willing to make this change, but the problem is the lack of ability and conditions.

The basic stories and variant stories of contemporary farmers are largely predestined, but they also contain human factors. Factors that determine the basic story include heavy tax burdens, low farm prices, and small land holdings.On less than one mu of land per capita, growing crops that cannot be sold for a few dollars, and handing in 20 to 30 percent of their income without compensation, farmers are doomed to look for opportunities outside.As long as there is less land and more people, as long as the price of agricultural products in the world market does not skyrocket, as long as the number of cadres and workers who eat imperial food does not decrease, the basic story of farmers going out will continue to be played out.

Factors that determine the metamorphosis story include the scale and speed of urban development, employment opportunities provided by the urban economy, household registration policies, education policies and related fiscal policies, and so on.This area is more complicated, but also easier to make a difference. I have interviewed several peasant families who have returned home. One of the reasons I often hear for returning home is that their children study.The urban education system excludes and discriminates against farmers because they do not have urban hukou.Therefore, due to the interests of urban residents or the education department, another life story had to be staged.This is not because farmers are unwilling or unable to work, but because they face a discriminatory rule.For example, Xiao Liu and Xiao Ye mentioned at the beginning, why can't they move their family to Tianjin?The small house is already available, and there is no need for much extra cost.Xiao Liu also said that after the disaster in 1998, he went to Tianjin and found a job as an oddball in the cafeteria.He has a very good impression of Tianjin, thinking that there are many job opportunities and his income is several times higher than that of farming at home.The examples he gave me include doing odd jobs in restaurants, selling vegetables, fruits, and visiting paid toilets, all of which urban people are unwilling to do.But he had to come back because the kids couldn't go to school in the city.The request for children to go to school is simply too legitimate. According to the legal provisions of the nine-year compulsory education, this legitimacy has also been protected by law. Such a legitimate and legal request cannot be met. This reminds me of things like those in South Africa. what happened somewhere.At least from a moral point of view, I don't see any essential difference between this urban-rural division policy and the policy of racial segregation and caste discrimination.But I doubt whether China can produce Martin Luther King, or Mandela. This is not a question of race, but a question of soil and climate.

There are also many government factors that constrain the scale of this metamorphosis.In order to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, many roadside stalls were cleared in Beijing and Shanghai. As a result, a large number of farmers were driven away without compensation.I have met two such farmers.They themselves don't have many complaints, as if they should.This reminds me of the honest black man in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" again.But no matter how honest they are, the idea of ​​not daring to call the city their home is always indelible.It is obviously a very unsafe and unstable place, and if the government has a whim, they may have no food or clothing.Under such a background, I am afraid that there will not be many transformation stories. In fact, this urban-rural segregation policy is also hurting urban residents.A large number of laid-off and unemployment, one of the important reasons is insufficient domestic demand.And why is domestic demand insufficient?The rural market, which accounts for the vast majority of the population, is inferior to the urban market in terms of purchasing power.China claims to have a large market of 1.2 billion people, more than half of which cannot be counted as integers.This is not entirely because they don't want to be an integer, but they are restricted. In short, the changes of many man-made or natural factors will determine whether the variant story can change from weak to strong, and evolve into a mainstream story or a basic story.That will be a thrilling story, a story that will completely change China. The rural survey I participated in is officially titled "Research on the Return of Migrant Labor Forces in China's Rural Areas", and the project hosts are Bai Nansheng and Song Hongyuan. In September 2002, the research results were officially published. The title of the book is "Returning to the Hometown or Going to the City?" ".On the title page of this book, I read several explanations of ancient words: The word Yanhu surprised me. It turned out that the Tang Dynasty already had such an appropriate naming and corresponding household registration classification.According to this metaphor, the mainstream stories and variant stories I am talking about are nothing more than Yanhu's settlement in towns or his return to the countryside, which must be one of the two.However, the word Liuyong brought me into a more profound time and space, and made me realize that in addition to the above two stories, there is another kind of story that is repeated many times in ancient China. The imperial edict in the fourth year of the first Yuan Dynasty said, "The people are short of food, and they have not exhausted what they have left," describing the scene in 83 BC.At this time, if you can't get enough to eat at home and can't find a job outside, what stories will the vagabonds perform?This is a very real problem.The name of Bai Juyi, a great poet in the Tang Dynasty, was joked by people at that time. The so-called "living in Chang'an is not easy", the peasants who went to the city must have felt more deeply.If there is no way to survive in the towns and cities, and no one to hire, a vagrant cannot be called a vagrant. If you want to call a vagrant, the older word is "rogue", and the word familiar to contemporary people is "blind flow".Refugees are everywhere, desperate to make a living, roaring together in the mountains and forests, and the world is in chaos. This is a historical story that the Chinese are very familiar with, and it is also a tragic story that has always been bad in all dynasties. Now, there are more and more goose households, and the mainstream and variant stories about their fate unfold on the background of thousands of years of tragedy.