A Face of History

Whenever I walk around Beibei I see people of all shapes, sizes, financial back rounds, ages, etc.  You can learn a lot about a person just by looking at their appearance.  There are the simple traits that can tell you a lot about a person’s financial back ground such as how well they dress themselves or how nice their smile is.  Other traits can tell you about a person’s lifestyle such as the types of shoes they wear or how fit they look.  But the traits that I find most fascinating in China are the traits that distinguish a person’s age.  These traits allow you to ask yourself, “When did you come from?”  The Chinese people that are my age all look healthy and tall, they have nice smiles (and white teeth if they don’t smoke), and nice skin.  When you look at the older generations you see a slight decline healthy appearance.  And finally when you look at the old people in the population, you can see that they have come from a completely different era.  Most of them are very short, have many missing teeth (and what teeth they have left aren’t pretty), still wear uniform style clothing (communist issue), and have true grit mentalities.    

One day when I was walking to eat dinner to one of my favorite restaurants I passed a little old woman carrying her sleeping granddaughter. What I saw seemed very odd to me.  The old woman had to be no taller than 4ft 8inches or so and was carrying her granddaughter who was about two thirds her size.  At first I thought to myself, “That child seems to be too old to be carried like that”.  But then after thinking about it a little bit more I realized that the child was still very young and the grandmother was just so small.  Just seeing this simple situation made me start comparing the life of the grandmother to the life of the granddaughter’s.

The old people of China have survived a part of Chinese history that has experienced a lot of war, famine and political hardships. They would not be here today if they were not as tough as nails.  This grandmother looked like she was malnourished during times of her life (her small build) and she was still carrying her granddaughter who was in comparison to size, big (hard working grandmother).  Then I looked at life from the granddaughter’s point of view and saw that she came from a completely new/modern era.  She is a probably a single child and gets spoiled by her family (hence why she is being carried) and malnourishment is certainly not a problem for her because she physically looks very healthy.  I have just compared the old China with the new China.

I enjoy being able to see how the quality of life has rapidly changed in China from generation to generation just by comparing the faces of the old (old China) with the new (new China).  Rapid change has occurred since the Communists came to power in 1949 and even more so since the time of Deng Xiaoping (Chairman of China from 1978-1992).  Where else in the world can you see a picture (such as the one that I am trying to paint for you) that shows you how standard of living has rapidly changed and developed? You have to hand it to China for being able to do that.