Communities of Complicity by Hans Steinmüller

Author:Hans Steinmüller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn
Published: 2015-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

— Chapter 4 —

CHANNELLING ALONG A CENTRING PATH

Like many others of his age, Wang Wei stopped studying at the age of sixteen after he finished middle school. Two years later, a relative helped him to find work as a waiter in Shanghai, where he stayed for the next six years doing odd jobs. He started out cleaning and serving in a restaurant, worked as an electrician, later found a job in a massage parlour, and finally in the reception of a medium-sized hotel. Shortly after he returned to Zhongba for the Spring Festival in 2006 he met Song Yan, Song Haomin’s daughter, and they became a couple (tan pengyou). Song Yan had also left school at sixteen, and whilst she is very bright, speaks perfect standard Chinese, and enjoys reading books,1 she has never left Bashan. By helping her parents at home, she also made it possible for her younger brother and sister to attend school for some more years. But she does not begrudge the fact that she did not have the same chances, and just like her mother, Song Yan always has a smile and a good word for those around her, and seemed to me full of unshakable optimism.

When I arrived in Zhongba in May 2006, the two had just recently begun their relationship, and Wang Wei was working occasionally for Song Yan’s father. As we were so close in age – Wang Wei is just one year younger than me – we spent a lot of time together. Several times during my fieldwork, my girlfriend came to visit me from Beijing, and then the four of us regularly went down to the township to eat at the street stalls. Often we joked with each other about which couple would get married first. In the winter of 2006, it became clear that it would be Wang Wei and Song Yan. The wedding was set for a date shortly after the Spring Festival in 2007, on the 18th day of the first lunar month, which was 7 March 2007.

After the tea season had ended, the workers had gone home, and only Song Yan and her parents stayed in the tea factory, doing maintenance work, and safeguarding the equipment. During the winter, hours were spent eating, drinking, and chatting, sitting on the low wooden chairs around the table in the small side room of the tea factory. Often the conversation would turn to the many family celebrations and banquets that one had to attend. And of course, the most important issue that winter was the preparation of the wedding of Song Yan and Wang Wei.

One of the first expressions that I learned in the dialect of the Enshi region is qu qijiu (P. qu chijiu), literally to ‘to go and eat wine’, but meaning to attend a celebratory banquet for an important event. It means to visit someone else’s family celebration: a wedding, a funeral, a house-warming party, the birth of a child, a birthday (36, 60, 70, 80

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