Assignment: Describe your family.
My home is in the Hang-Jia-Hu plain, Zhejiang province. The plain is known as the land of fish and rice and abound with silk.
There are five members in my family. They are my parents, my brother and his wife and my brother’s son. My family live in the countryside and are all peasants. My parents farm for the whole life, while my brother and his wife are workers in factories managed by the collective.
In the countryside there are so much farm work that my family are very busy all the year. As other peasants do there, my parents plant double-crop rice. In winter they raise wheat and rapeseed. They also take up silkworm breeding. In addition, my family has a small fish farm and some sheep. So my parents have to cut grass to feed them every day.
My family are very busy all the time, but we are still poor. The main reason is that the agro chemicals and fertilizer are too much expensive. 50kg unhusked rice is even cheaper than one bottle of agro chemicals. Although this year the government raised the price of unhusked rice it doesn’t change the situation greatly.
January 22, 2008 at 10:44 am
It’s interesting to peek behind the curtain of inevitable grammatical mistakes to see some differing assumptions about Chinese culture. First off, obviously this student can count, but he (?) decided not to count himself. Do you know if it is common to think of “me and my family” as distinct sets, rather than overlapping as we would naturally assume? Also, while leaving out himself, he included his sister-in-law and nephew. For me (us?), it would seem more natural to assume “family” means only the immediate parent-children context. So we can probably see that, as poor farmers, all these people are probably living together in one household. Makes me wonder how the child of a poor farmer got to go all the way to Beijing to learn English and Forestry.
January 22, 2008 at 12:35 pm
My understanding was that, with Communist-paid (free) education, money wasn’t an obstacle — it was simply a matter of test score. It’s still surprising that the child of a farm family would excel in education all the way to graduate school in Beijing … but such families weren’t necessarily uneducated. In the Cultural Revolution of the 1970’s, the Communist Party shipped many educated elites off to farming work units in order to reduce the possibility of enlightened political opposition.
January 23, 2008 at 11:25 am
From communism, springs meritocracy! How unexpected!