economizing stories

When SW was young there were tall vats in which everyone in the courtyard would throw their food scraps. At primary school the teachers encouraged them to throw their leftover rice and dishes into them as well instead of into the regular trash. Peasants from the surrounding countryside would come daily to collect the scraps, dipping it up out of the vats into their barrels to take home to feed the pigs. Today they only do that for the restaurants, then it was everyone. The peasants would give the kids tickets (taomipiao 淘米票, lit. “wash rice tickets”) when they faithfully threw their scraps into the vats. The kids would then give their tickets to the teachers who would praise them; the tickets were like merits, to be collected; the more you had the better.

At the Suguo (the local convenience store chain), they are selling green light canvas bags for one kuai, which is nothing. The making of the super-thin bags has already been suspended (and factories closed, jobs lost), but the giving away of free plastic bags in the supermarkets ban doesn't start till June.

FR wonders if ALL the plastic bags in the land will be done away with. If that is the case, she thinks, then certainly there will people who will stockpile rolls of these trashcan-lining bags; they will fill rooms with them. We laugh at her.

Then they tell me something I’ve never heard before. That people had to be taught how to use plastic bags, and the change came all at once about ten years ago, as the result of extensive propaganda. At that time people just put waste straight into their small bins and then dumped them into the big bins, or trashpiles. Then someone somewhere decided that the people needed to be using plastic bags, and suddenly there was propaganda everywhere telling people to line their trashcans with plastic bags. At first everyone thought it was strange, because they were used to the old way. It took them a month or two, but after that, they all got used to the plastic bags.

The bags should be gotten rid of, SW argues. They litter the sides of the streams in the country. China has so much countryside, and so many rivers, and they’re all so dirty, she says. I want to argue that there are much worse things polluting those rivers than plastic bags, but I don’t.

We talk of how Chinese people used to (and even in Hong Kong today?) use paper to wrap meat when they bought it . . . FR says she remembers "oil paper" to wrap the noodles they bought when she was young. Chinese people truly had a good, economic way of life, now everything is “broken.”

I try to explain how I still can feel the knowledge (and the will) buried, even in the current young people. You’re closer to it than we are in the US, I wanted to communicate. My grandparents’ generation may have had it, and even some of my parents’ generation. I struggled to explain by saying, “I feel like here, at least, I can always use a “save and economize” argument and it’s somewhat effective, at the very least, understood. SW’s interpretation of what I’d said was a bit off, but interesting. She thought that I was talking about how I’m not allowed to speak into other people’s lives in the US, because of cultural norms that keep us distant from each other. Like I can’t tell someone that they should turn off the water while they’re brushing their teeth, even if I’m completely convinced that it’s the right thing to do. I’m not allowed to tell someone that George Bush is an idiot, even if my bones want to scream it. (Those are my examples, not hers). In China, she was contrasting, you can tell people to do something just because you think its right . . . (hmmm, that has implications for current political debates, doesn't it?)

It's true, and an interesting cultural difference to think about, but what I'm trying to get at, and appreciate so much about China, is the economizing mindset that the society as a whole seems to have. Obviously it comes from a mixture of culture and poverty, and obviously its slipping away, but it's also still here.

When we were listing adjectives in English Island last week for a "good" person, there was "handsome" and "reliable" and "warm-hearted" and "smiling", and those were interesting, but the one that I liked the most? "Economic" (in Chinese, lit. "saving") Yes. That's why I live here.