Two Returns to China, Two Very Different Feelings
Last year, my wife accompanied me back to Kunming, the Spring City we had left twenty years before.
Under the impact of reform and opening, Kunming had swollen like a pangdahai seed dropped into water, expanding until it seemed to swallow the green farmland all around it. Old houses throughout the city had been flattened and replaced by high-rise buildings. Streets were packed with traffic. Buses, taxis, bicycles, and pedestrians all fought for space, creating dangers everywhere. Hotels, rice-noodle shops, and snack stalls filled streets and alleys.
Some former classmates from my wife’s girls’ school invited her to a reunion. At noon, because one of the classmates was Hui, the group ate at an ordinary Muslim restaurant. There were three dishes and rice, meat and vegetables, for three yuan per person. My wife was handed an enormous bowl of white rice weighing more than eight liang, though she could eat only about two.
She told me that compared with her first return to China, this visit was heaven and earth apart. It was as if the whole world had changed.
Her first return was in 1962, during the difficult years of the Three-Year Disaster. She was twenty years old and brought her younger sister back to China to study. They flew from Rangoon to Kunming on a civilian airliner and checked into a large hotel.
That evening the two sisters went to a restaurant for dinner. The waiter asked them for grain coupons.
What were grain coupons?
Born and raised in Burma, the two sisters stared blankly.
They took out renminbi, but the waiter ignored it.
“No grain coupons, no food.”
They explained again and again that they had only just returned from overseas and had no coupons. No matter how they explained, the waiter remained unmoved. My wife became so upset that she burst into tears. She had returned to the motherland—and they would not even let her eat?
Someone watching must have felt sorry for them and telephoned the municipal Overseas Chinese Affairs Office. After a while, an overseas-Chinese affairs cadre arrived and finally helped the two sisters solve the problem of their empty stomachs.
Whenever she remembers the episode now, she finds it both infuriating and funny.
She lived in Kunming for twenty years. She studied, graduated, was assigned to work, fell in love, married, and had children. Grain coupons became an essential credential of daily life.
Rice and flour required grain coupons. Buying bread or snacks for our son required grain coupons. Going to a food shop required them. Even bean products such as bean sprouts and tofu cost grain coupons. Sweet potatoes, potatoes, and beans also had to be converted into grain-coupon equivalents.
In those days, grain coupons could be called the lifeblood of ordinary people. Sometimes they were even more important than renminbi. During the Cultural Revolution, we often saw mountain farmers come to the workers’ district to exchange cash for grain coupons—one yuan for a jin, sometimes even two yuan—when the official price of rice itself was only twelve fen a jin.
When we later left China, we distributed the dozens of jin of grain coupons we still had to relatives and friends. They actually became valuable gifts.
Kunming after twenty years truly had changed its old face for a new one. It was not only the cityscape and roads. People’s clothing, speech, values, and attitudes had all changed greatly.
Under the idea that “everything looks toward money,” people compared wealth and competed in display.
We visited many old coworkers and friends. Almost every family had spent money renovating its home, often more lavishly than those of us living in America.
Of course, workers who had retired early and survived on only a few hundred yuan a month still lived difficult lives. But among the younger generation, some newly rich people spent money so extravagantly that it was startling.
At restaurants we saw tables piled with dishes. After people had eaten and drunk their fill, they simply walked away, leaving quantities of food behind. It was such a waste. In America, people naturally pack up unfinished food and take it home. In China, many thought taking leftovers home was embarrassing.
My wife watched it and felt pain in her heart.
“Ah,” she said. “Chinese people today are really too wasteful!”
*(Originally published March 26, 2002; the newspaper title is missing in the source.)*