In recent years, however, many women approaching 40, who have undergone forced tubal ligation, have had surgery to reopen their fallopian tubes and have a second child. A woman in a neighbouring village, 40 this year and with a son born in 1994, now in his third year of elementary school, had another boy last year. I saw the infant during this stay. My father blames social pressures, saying “everyone is having children nowadays.”

Early one morning, a woman came hobbling along the road to the west of our village, her stomach thrust out. I didn’t know her, and asked my mother who she was. “Just somebody,” she replied. Originally, it transpired, this woman had had two children, a girl and a boy, but the daughter had died three years earlier (when I was back home this time, I went past the grave; she had been only 15 or 16 years old). Only the son was left, and so she had another operation and was now pregnant again.

I didn't ask, but I would guess she was over 45 years old.

This is what happens in the country, the real country. Women aged 45 and 18 go through the travails of pregnancy and birth. The arrival of the internet in the countryside has made it even easier to get pregnant. A boy and girl hook up through an internet dating site, a child will be born out of wedlock, and an elderly midwife will be called in - it’s much the same in the country now as it is in the cities.

On a wall of a house at the entrance of the village, you can see a large-character AIDS-prevention poster; I cannot remember exactly what it said.

Whenever I go back to my village for the New Year, I always ask my father who died over the past 12 months. All of the people in the village are getting on, and of the ones I know well and have fond memories of, any could die some day without my knowing. Of course, my time will come too. I have already chosen my parents’ and my own grave plot. All of us will be buried in a field that is now green with young wheat.

I have never worried much about how many babies were born over the year, since I have nothing to do with them. At least, they are not part of my memories. In 2008, three people died in our village, a woman and two men. The woman died in an accident. She fell off the top of a newly roofed two-storey house, and failed to recover from untreated head injuries.

I want now to say a bit more about these two men. At their deaths, one was 59 and the other just past 60. They both succumbed to cancer, having only been diagnosed in the late stages of the disease. Less than six months later, both were gone. Before their deaths, they had been great stalwarts of local farming. Of course, lacking medical insurance, they did not think of getting their health checked. They were like animals in the wild, quietly passing their lives, calmly waiting for the sudden onslaught of disease to carry them off.

In the country, people often say that happiness is “having enough to eat and drink, and escaping illness and disaster.” But if one day they do fall ill, it can mean death. A minor illness, untreated, will deteriorate into a serious one. Then it is just a matter of time.

Of these two men who died in 2008, I didn’t know the elder, and won’t say anything about him just now. But I do want to say a few things about the 59-year-old, who was an acquaintance of my father.

He was the eldest of two brothers. The family had a well-known sesame oil workshop (they fried the sesame seeds and stone-ground the oil out, getting one catty of oil from every three catties of seed).

When he was young, he was too poor to find a wife, but later, in the 1980s, he bought a girl from Yunnan. Later, she bore him a daughter, but then ran away. After that, he devoted himself to care of the daughter, remaining single. His younger brother married and fathered two sons. However, when I was at middle school, one summer afternoon, the younger brother hanged himself from a roof beam in his house. It was said he was wearing white hand-made clothes at the time of his death.

After his death, the people of the village wanted to bring the older brother and the widow together to form a new household, but the girl did not agree because of the age difference. Later, she set up home with another man.

Now, the older brother too has died, of stomach cancer. He was diagnosed in summer, and passed away at the New Year.

I remember when I was in my second year of elementary school, three village girls committed suicide by drinking pesticide. The strange thing was that their graves were dotted around three sides of the village. This created much unease among the villagers, who feared that somebody else might be carried off to occupy the fourth side.

One afternoon before New Year, I went for a stroll in the fields, and in the distance saw a new grave. On top of it there were still a few wreaths. As soon as I got back home I asked my father who it was. He didn’t know. After the New Year I went back and saw that more new graves had appeared amid the fields outside the village.

Still on this morbid subject, I’d like to say a little bit about cremation. Some time ago, the government began forcing people to cremate their deceased. This was good news for crematoriums in our county, which had suffered a string of closures. Now they were unexpectedly brought back into operation, and reportedly made good money. During the summer holidays in my third year of elementary school, I went to the funeral of one of my relatives on my mother’s side.

Village custom required use of a coffin, even after cremation, so the bones and ashes were placed in a cinerary casket inside the coffin. Afterwards, they held a funeral ceremony and lowered the coffin.

Later, there was talk of backhanders. By offering a bit of cash to the crematorium (several thousand yuan – the exact amount was determined by the strings you could pull) it would have been possible to avoid burning the corpse; instead, in return for the money, the crematorium would simply issue the death certificate. Of course, if it had been somebody with influence, a dignified, direct burial without cremation could be arranged without greasing palms.

Some years ago, things got so busy in the funeral trade that the village had to consider building a single public cemetery for cinerary caskets. But these plans later fizzled out. As a rule, the deceased are now always buried in the fields of their family. They become a kind of embellishment dotting the fields. The only difference is the new grave mounds are smaller than the old ones.

Cremation was proposed as a way of keeping valuable farmland in cultivation. Now, in our county at least, it has become another official routine, and sometimes a hotbed for shady deals. In the Chinese countryside, even the dead have their price.

According to official sources, the proportion of university students from rural areas is now in steady decline.

At year-end, I went to a wedding banquet, and sat among a group of village elementary school teachers, roughly aged from 40 to 50. I did not know them very well. We drank and began to chat.

At the table, somebody took out a mobile phone. I glanced at it, and saw it was a LG model, worth, I guess, several hundred yuan. Somebody asked: Director Liu, where did you get hold of that new phone? The man said someone gave it to him. The school principal had one, he had one, and later the school supplies manager had got one too.

The person who asked the question laughed and said: “So, it’s graft. You guys will be the ruin of the Party! I’m going to hand in my membership if you go on like that!”

Afterwards, the people continued to drink and brag. I listened quietly at their side.

A middle-aged teacher, who had just had an operation (apparently some kind of haemorrhoids problem) said he could only drink standing up now. “I am now just like Kong Yiji, I only ever drink on my feet.” Everybody laughed.

Mention of Kong Yiji gave me a start. How sad! Today, the countryside is full of Kong Yijis, but where is Lu Xun?

Although in theory the countryside has a nine-year compulsory education system, this is basically just empty talk. Most village children either drop out early or leave after middle school to become migrant workers.

A 15-year-old neighbourhood girl dropped out during elementary school. Before she was physically mature, she spent a year away from the village working. In the spring she went to pick tea, and then to work at a family business in Nantong in the neighbouring province of Jiangsu. She was earning 500 yuan a month to pack food. She never had Saturday or Sunday off, every day she had to start work just past seven o’clock. I asked her when she finished in the evenings, and she said it varied. Sometimes they went on past ten o’clock. There were two other girls of her age. After the wheat harvest, she went home with 2,900 yuan for over half a year’s work.

Two thousand nine hundred yuan: the fruit of six months’ toil for a 15-year-old girl. When I spoke to her, she had no complaints. She said that was simply her lot in life. Endurance and obedience: that is all that is required. She is only 15, her hair is straight, she has a slightly city-girl look, but her hands are rough like those of an old person because of all her cuts and calluses This was her youth, the sweetest time, the springtime of her life, but this is what has become of her.

On the ninth day of the Lunar New Year, she had to go back to Nantong. I gave her my mobile phone number, telling her to call me if anything happened to her.

You will often hear village people say “it makes no difference whether you go to college or not,” or “what’s the point of going to university, you will still end up a migrant worker.”

I am ashamed to say that in the last ten years, I am the only person from our village to pass the university entrance exam and go on to graduate school, maybe even the only one since the resumption of university entrance examinations in 1978. In close to ten years, this village has produced only three undergraduate students, including myself. I say this with sadness, not pride. As Lu Xun said; “It is like seeing a pile of bodies deeply asleep in an iron cell, none of whom show signs of life.”

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