Bill's village - and the winner is...baijiu

APRIL 30, 2007: Finally got out into the countryside, 'real China', as i'd been promoting it to myself. Photos

We got up at 4am to head out to the village where Bill, the boss, grew up. To get there we had to pass through miles and miles of cratered, lunar wasteland that apparently used to be arable until they overdid the fertiliser. The area around here is as flat as the ocean, no joke, not a hill in sight and this only added to the desolation.

Once we got off the highway the roads got much worse, varying between cobbled and cratered. And not a signpost in sight. Quite an admirable leap from Boxxy, too, heading far from the highway over dodgy, unsignposted roads, to an unknown, unnamed village in a people-mover full of strangers (Bill didn't come) with whom she shared a common vocabulary of less than 10 words.

The immediately striking thing as we arrived in the village was the unmistakeable smell of burning garbage piles - plastic fumes mixed with that rank taste you get when you inhale and find your cigarette has gone out. The Swiss guy, who came too, speculated the abundannt chugging 3-wheeled peasant trucks, which have no exhaust, were responsible but it took me right back to Dili on a calm day. There was rubbish everywhere, especially plastic bags, (which people don't seem to see as rubbish) even in the air, where vaporised plastic bags and haze hung. (And it was a windy day.)

They clearly have major garbage problems and raw sewage runs straight from the latrines into the street, but that's not to say the village was very backward. The 3-wheel utes were everywhere and every peasant we passed on the way there was driving a tractor. The village had electricity and what looked like radio and television masts.




Bill's childhood house was made of mud and straw and consisted of two rooms. Its most notable feature was its built-in heated bed, a piece of ancient engineering genius. Basically about one-third of the bedroom was raised from the floor, a kind of mezzanine about 2 feet above the rest of the room. Underneath it existed a tunnel that opened out into the fireplace in the room next door (the cooking/washing/living room). A few hours before bed, the homemaker stokes a fire in the tunnel and pushes more fuel in to keep it burning all through the freezing night.

The stated purpose of our visit was to set up the grapevines - yes, grapevines in sub-Siberian Jilin Province! When we arrived the place looked like a dusty dead patch with a bunch of sad, redundant-looking pergolas. But we left it a dusty dead vineyard.

They completely bury the vines before winter hits and, dig them up in spring and lash them to the pergolas and hope they grow. I think they would because shit has gotten green so quickly here in the past week or two. Time-lapse photography would be awesome. As far as non-human life here's concerned, a year is only 4-5 months long, so it all happens at a frenetic pace. Perhaps also because of the blatant sacks of hormones that go down here:


The secondary - maybe even the primary - purpose for the trip was to drink a lot of baijiu. Naturally i was dismayed and saw the only proper course of action to be drinking the lot of them under the table. I managed that quite easily in the lunch break (the job was only half done), and we were soon back digging up more vines. I'd only just started to sober up by the time dinner was ready (it was this MASSIVE fish cooked in a wok a good deal bigger than most satellite dishes). Again to my dismay, two more bottles of baijiu were produced. Except this time no-one told me it wasn't a drinking contest and i got hideously, slobberingly, incapably drunk. So drunk that when we hit the bumpy roads to return to Songyuan i kept falling off my seat in the people-mover.

Blank.