We’ve learned to expect this by now in China, but it is still strange to exit the train in a place you’ve never heard of and find a metropolis the size of Chicago, filled with McDonald’s, Starbucks, and dozens of Apple stores. Downtown Changsha, even more than Nanning, was filled with neon lights and modern shopping complexes, all overlain by the roar of hundreds of loudspeakers and microphones shouting bargains from the storefronts or playing scratchy pop music. Above the hubbub, the construction cranes rose from the horizon like the heads of wading birds, continuing to build. Here we are, two weeks in, and the overwhelming impression in China remains not just the bigness, but the newness of everything.
This growth has led to inevitable clashing of old and new, and the incongruous results of this clash are fascinating to observe. This is particularly evident in Changsha, an area that clearly used to be primarily rice-growing villages and where cities and shopping complexes give the impression of having sprung up overnight. After a few hours of wandering around and finding no swallows, we took a taxi to a village outside the city- although the city is growing ever closer to the villages.
I wasn’t sure what to expect when the taxi driver told us he knew of a “village” where we could look for swallows. In Russia last summer, a “village” meant 10 or 20 log-cabin style houses on a dirt road, with outhouses out back; a “town” was a couple hundred, or couple thousand people, and maybe had a few places with running water. These varied remarkably little over the 5,600 miles we traveled. In China, a “village” has meant anything from a few ramshackle buildings to clusters of apartment blocks to streets lined with new, tile-faced houses. Likewise, the “towns” we’ve passed through are home to hundreds of thousands of people, with 50-story apartment blocks sprouting like weeds along the skylines.
Outside Changsha, the village turned out to be 50 or so new-seeming two-story houses marooned on concrete islands among rice paddies and canals. Everything felt unpolished and unlived-in, like buildings where they’ve finished construction, but haven’t really tidied up or done the landscaping yet. Trash and construction debris scattered the edges of carefully swept concrete yards. Inside, the houses also felt unfinished- concrete floors and whitewashed walls seemed to be awaiting carpets and coats of paint. Concrete roads, raised above the fields on earthen berms, connected the houses in a maze of paths just wide enough for a car. The roads were filled with a jumble of chickens, motorbikes, and shiny new sedans, none of which seemed to have learned basic traffic regulations and all of which sent up a constant chorus of honking. A woman told us that no building in the village was more than 20 years old, but the taxi driver pointed this place out as somewhere that still had old houses. I couldn’t fault him for this- 20 year old buildings seem dated compared to the massive high rises and shopping complexes now occupying former rice fields.
It’s interesting to see which parts of life in these places seem to have changed and which have not. Big, multi-lane highways, separated by landscaped medians, plow past the villages and over rivers spanned by elegant bridges. Minibuses connect even the dirt roads to the main bus network, which goes everywhere and is cheap. Water is everywhere and the new houses we visited had flush toilets and showers. But the drains, canals, and ponds around the houses and paddyfields were stagnant and filled with garbage and dead fish. Old men in waders stood on the banks of the larger ponds, fishing or collecting weeds. The people in the villages, with tile-fronted houses and shiny cars, seemed to be mostly farmers- we visited midday on a Tuesday, and nearly everyone was at home. Some people were bent over in the fields, working by hand. Several houses had pig stys attached to them, and foul-smelling containment pits nearby. Everyone was growing vegetables in their gardens. It smelled like garbage. The children ran around without diapers, and instead just had slits in the back of their pants. Grandparents perched on tiny stools in the yards, minding the children and spitting. The surroundings may have changed recently, but it seemed like the behavior is the same as it was 50 or 100 years ago.
And there were barn swallows! Most of the people we talked to liked them, and allowed them to nest in the front rooms of their houses. We spent three days working our way through the maze of paths and roads, ending up with 18 birds. People were unfailingly friendly, bringing us sesame tea and taking photos with Caroline and I even when they wouldn’t allow us to catch their birds.
On our last day, after exhausting all the nests in the village, we walked down the road to another village we’d seen across the lake. This turned out to be a newly built tourist attraction: a cobbled street, lined with storefronts built in the traditional Chinese style: swooping black eaves, pagoda-style roofs, and a Buddhist temple. But the stores were empty, and the only people we met were those working in small convenience shops and selling fresh meat. Still, we’ve run into quite a few of these old-style places now, mostly packed with tourists- it makes sense that more would be built. It seems that somewhere in China’s rush to tear down the old, there remains some nostalgia for the past.
-Liz
note: despite all the construction, the internet is often painfully slow, at least for English websites, and Google barely works at all- hence the delays in blog posts. Sorry!
On our last day, after exhausting all the nests in the village, we walked down the road to another village we’d seen across the lake. This turned out to be a newly built tourist attraction: a cobbled street, lined with storefronts built in the traditional Chinese style: swooping black eaves, pagoda-style roofs, and a Buddhist temple. But the stores were empty, and the only people we met were those working in small convenience shops and selling fresh meat. Still, we’ve run into quite a few of these old-style places now, mostly packed with tourists- it makes sense that more would be built. It seems that somewhere in China’s rush to tear down the old, there remains some nostalgia for the past.
-Liz
note: despite all the construction, the internet is often painfully slow, at least for English websites, and Google barely works at all- hence the delays in blog posts. Sorry!