Concerning urban peasants

China, points out almost every demographic writer who clichés themselves onto the topic, has a huge peasant population.  I live in a heavily urbanized city of approximately 4 million people, though, so it stands to reason that I wouldn’t have any idea what they are like.  I mean, what defines a peasant? For me growing up, peasants were just what you used to either sap moats during sieges or roadblock approaching troops so you can arrow them from afar.

I did a google image search for ‘Chinese peasant’, and this crazy old man came up.  He’s interesting in that he is wearing a green hat (something my students assured me means that his wife likes to run around on him), but otherwise completely typical: wrinkly as hell, with at least one exaggerated facial feature.  This man has giant ears.  He can probably hear your thoughts.

I do, of course, see scraggly old be-wrinkled men all the time, but I can’t say that he represents the dominant image in my mind of the urban peasant.  No, for that we must turn to the completely superfluous street-cleaning person.

There are a thousand variations on the following theme present, one presumes, in every provincial town: an old person (often female, or at least female-esque) is put into the kind of numbered jumpsuit you’d expect first-time space-campers don before climbing into the spinning vomit gyroscope, or whatever it is actually called.  Then they have a broom of some kind – which can mean straw, bits of shredded old clothing, or plastic strands of indeterminate origin – in front of them as they walk, knocking dust up into their own lungs.

On particularly unlucky days I will have one of them precede me to work by about 20 metres or so, which means I need to perform a 30-40 second breath hold while walking at top speed to outrace the carcinogenic death clouds that these workers raise in place of their government-restricted children.  They are responsible for leaf collection (for immediate burning), garbage collection (delayed burning), and taking abuse from imperious Chinese people who believe that they have offended their dignity in some way. 

Once at the grocery store I had my right elbow bustled into by a vegetable peasant, who was silently fleeing towards the storeroom behind the meat counter; in his wake was a pudgy six-footer wearing khakis who had class warfare on his mind.  My great debate over whether to trip him up outlasted my opportunity, alas, as I watched him disappear after the man at top speed into the cold storage unit.  Keep this in mind the next time the deli girl at the grocery store gives you too much ham: YOU CAN JUST CHASE HER FOR RETRIBUTIVE VIOLENCE.

They’re everywhere, doing the jobs that require nothing (standing and stamping receipts listlessly as you leave the store, hitting trees with rakes so that leaves will fall off for more convenient burning, etc.) but the ability to show up and breathe dusty air, and completely bum the shit out of anyone from more developed countries.

This, I believe, is the group from whence you see the most incidences of toothlessness, spitting on escalators, and off-handedly instructing toddlers to simply defecate in public parks.  It’s completely insane in a way, but it is the fate of uneducated rusticarians the world over.  I mean, it ensures that when I place anything recyclable outside it will disappear quickly, but there must be something more meaningful these people could be tasked on than the kind of stuff we would outsource to shitty 80’s-era robots?

Perhaps I need to spend more time in the country, where they can be seen fishing for carp while simultaneously throwing plastic garbage into the river.  God damn, there are so many things you have to block out here sometimes to avoid becoming horrifically depressed… less than 3 months until the big reprieve!