你好！Hello from my new home stay! I am currently blogging from a village named ShaPing outside of ShaXi town. This is a Bai minority agricultural village, so I am getting a taste of a new dialect of Chinese, and what it is like in rural China. The Bai minority is named after the color white because of the white houses, and emphasis of the color white in their traditional dress. The village is in the middle of a mountain range, and filled with corn fields.
The locals do not speack much mandarin. Yes, this rural area has its unique challenges, but mostly it is filled with lovely people willing to share their culture with you, beautiful ancient architecture, and a ton of shucking corn. This brings me to this blog post’s topic. For this blog I will not be focusing on my service and research that I am going to be starting in just a few weeks (yay!). But, instead, on a very basic and critical part of Chinese culture, familial piety.
Chinese people since the beginning of Confucianism, have put a large emphasis on the family unit. Specifically in the idea that the younger generation helps the older generation, or a continuous service to the family. Young people have an enormous pressure to serve their elders, and often take on this challenge with open arms. Upon entering a homestay in China this same concept flows. I am a 20 year old woman currently living in a house hold with a mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and a grandchild.
Although everyone helps out with little 2-year-old Likong, it is expected that each member of the family helps out according to how old they are. There is corn to be shucked, food to be cooked, a home to keep clean, and barn animals to be fed and looked after. This can be a lot to handle for the mother and father in addition to their day jobs.
As a foreigner from a country with a more individualistic ideology, this seems like a tough pill to swallow. However, my host parents do not see it this way, it is just what is right and necessary. It is just their life, and they are content. This may not be the case for all Chinese people, but this is true for my family. Trying to integrate into this family unit I have been happy to serve as much as they will let me. It is also part of Chinese culture to treat guests with welcoming arms and never make them work.
However, some more cultural tasks are easier for them to let me do because they want to teach me how to live like a Bai agricultural worker. Further, this is a very small village. My host grandparents had 8 children, who still live in the village and their families make up a large percentage of the population. Familial piety extends into service to the community. Everyone helps everyone, because everyone knows everyone.
It is very special to serve alongside this close knit community and learn about Bai culture in this hands on way. Service together also allows for the language barrier to become less important because so much of the communicating can be done through showing instead of telling. Also, if there is anything I have learned from serving anywhere, is that nothing brings people closer than working together to complete a task that they care about.
Coming from a city a rural homestay with larger barriers scared me, but this has proved to me that putting effort into the new relationships and serving a community will always bring you closer to that community. ShaPing village feels like home, and I am proud to have served them in whatever way they needed.