Family Environmental History
January 17, 2023 By: Siyuan Ge
In my family’s history, each generation starting from my grandparents has become increasingly distant from land and farming. This shift has paralleled China’s economic development and urbanization. My grandparents grew up in rural villages in Northern China and experienced the Great Chinese Famine. They valued their land and worked hard to preserve it. However, as China’s economy grew and more people moved to cities, my parents and I had less connection to farming and the land. Our move to Canada represents a further disconnection from our agricultural roots.
All of my grandparents were born in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in small villages in Northern China, next to the city of Tianjin. In ritual China, several villages always clustered around a small town to form a functional microsystem, where people’s basic needs could be met. My grandparents lived pretty close to each other before they knew each other. It was a custom in rural China where the go-betweens would find two matching families from two nearby villages to set them up. Therefore, my family has a rather homogenized environmental background from North China.
When my grandparents were born, the Chinese Communist Party just won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic of China, so they were never involved in wars but were caught up in destitution and starvation. The Great Chinese Famine, a period spanning between 1959 and 1961, struck the village. My grandparents told me that starvation was so horrible that it could completely deplete one’s dignity and humanity. People would eat up everything they could find in the environment, including rats, bugs, and barks. In the end, they would eat soil, making many extremely ill. Many people became refugees and died on the way to find food. Having grown up with such traumatic experiences, my grandparents cherish food and land dearly.
The situation improved in the early 1980s when every individual in rural China was assigned approximately 1/5 of an acre of land for farming. Although the land still belonged to the nation, the farmers had ownership of the agricultural products. People in the village understood that they could not make a fortune with such a small tract of land, but they could survive. They cherished their land and environment. At the same time, China began its rapid economic development, and urbanization drew many young people to the cities. In the 1980s, both of my parents went to university in big cities and settled there. My grandfather once told you that my father’s first monthly income in 1992 was equivalent to the annual income of the entire family from farming. Also, because of my grandparents’ declining health, farm work became difficult for them, so they rented out their farmland to companies. However, these companies usually rented the land for about 10 years before moving to new land, so they did not preserve the land as my grandparents did. They used too much fertilizer. After several years, the soil lost its nutrients and became hardened. As a result, all of my grandparents’ assigned land was deserted after being used by the companies.
Furthermore, more and more factories were set up in the countryside with few environmental concerns. My grandparents told me that the 1990s and 2000s were the two decades during which they saw the most pollution. Farmlands were reassigned to become commercial land for factories, shopping malls, or residential buildings; rivers became darker and smellier; and the air became more polluted. In the name of economic development, people put aside their environmental concerns and only focused on how much money they could make.
When it comes to my father’s and mother’s generation, they still had memories of farming while they were in primary or secondary school. During harvest time, they helped their parents with the farmland. However, they also realized that they could not have a decent life only by farming. Driven by the urge for a better life, they studied hard to leave their village. They met each other at the university and were surprised to find that they came from two nearby villages. Naturally, they married and settled down in Beijing, the capital city of China. Beijing is a city made up of skyscrapers, shopping malls, and human-made tourist attractions, which completely replaced the original beauty of nature. Living in air-conditioned houses and traveling in private cars, we can hardly find the rhythms of nature.
Therefore, my parents missed their days on the farmland, and they always took me back to their hometown during the summer vacation. However, every time when we were back, they could not help but worry about soil erosion and environmental deterioration. They realized that what China experienced was not sustainable. Moreover, either by talent or by fortune, both of my parents worked in the IT industry, which experienced astonishing development in China. Their worries about China’s natural environment and their savings from their works led my parents to relocate to Vancouver, a place where people cherish and appreciate nature.
We eventually settled down in White Rock. It is a beautiful coastal city said to have the most sunshine days in the Greater Vancouver area. When we first settled, it was not populous, but more and more new immigrants moved to my neighborhood. There is a big park called “SunnySide Park,” which is only a four-minute drive from my family’s residence. We love to walk in that park, enjoying the moments when we can let every single cell in our body absorb fresh and moist air. My house has a small backyard, where my mother grew some beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce. She called my grandmother several times for suggestions, and we had pretty good harvests these summers. Although my mother had not engaged in planting for almost three decades, she also said that the love and attachment to land is actually etched in every Chinese person’s DNA, prompting us to find a piece of land to plant something. My grandparents are all eager to come to Vancouver this summer vacation. I know they miss us dearly since we have not seen each other for three years because of the pandemic. More importantly, they love our backyard and want to plant something there.
My family’s story with land reflects the great economic development that China has experienced in recent decades. We are grateful for this development, as it has allowed us to live in Vancouver and enjoy its picturesque landscape. However, we also find that China’s economic prosperity has come at the expense of environmental deterioration, which has severed people’s time-honored connection with the land. In order to achieve sustainable development, it is important to maintain a balance between human needs and the needs of the environment. My father, who is a fan of Daoism, has taught me that in China, there is an ancient philosophy that everything, including ourselves, is just a modality of energy-matter, or ch’i. In this sense, we are connected to nature, and can say that we are nature and nature is us. However, people’s excessive pursuit of wealth has led us to turn away from this ancient wisdom. When we see global warming, extreme weather, and high cancer rates, it is clear that it is time for us to reflect on the impact we have had on our ecosystem.