The Week That Was
This week, a field visit off the beaten track required a journey on a slow K class train back to base. Having gotten used to the sleek new D class service, this felt rather like slumming it. As the train pulled into the station very late the feeling was confirmed. The train was very full and hardly anyone got off at our “rural outpost”. The hoards struggling to get on pushed, shoved, cried and swore until the guards started pulling the last stragglers off so that the doors could close.
I began to feel that they were the lucky ones as we pulled out of the station. There was barely room to breath and standing in the aisles left one rather closer to one’s fellow passengers than the etiquette books allow. Moving up to the buffet carriage, the original plan, proved impossible and even the beverage trolleys gave up the ghost after the first attempted run through. It was the most unpleasant journey by train in 6 years in China and put a dent in my otherwise unstinting praise of China’s rail system.
My own take on the packed train is it represents the ongoing stresses of urban migration. 1% of the population is leaving the countryside for the urban areas every year. Rather like the tide coming in, the change is imperceptible as one views the water, but looks away for moment, and on returning, the change becomes obvious. Revisiting the world of slow trains, the preferred means of transport of the poor, allowed me to see how quickly the tide is rising. The next few years are going to only increase the structural stresses; I fear it is going to be an uncomfortable ride.
In an allied, unrelated experience this week, I got a glimpse of how the Church is adapting to the new environment. Rural Migrants tend, quite naturally, to congregate and recreate their home villages in the big city, just as my relatives recreated Mayo’s Falmore in Holyoak, Massachusetts. In the Catholic villages, religion is a huge part of everyday life. The urban churches are structured very differently and can seem quite alien. These transplanted villagers are nothing if not resourceful however. This week I met a young couple who, without reference to any existing parish, have turned their apartment into an informal Church meeting place. Their unregistered chapel provides a focus for pious villagers to recreate the comforting rhythms of daily prayer and have Mass whenever a priest from home is available. For me the interesting thing is that this not the rehashing of the fading underground/overground split, but the emergence of a new potential source of tension between the established urban Catholics and their recently arrived, rather less sophisticated brethren.
It is a rather jaded comment to observe that China is experiencing an extraordinary social upheaval, but what is endlessly fascinating to observe is just how that upheaval is played out in the lives of individual men and women. I did not like it very much to have to ride the rails facing into the armpit of a sweaty farmer from Guilin, but the pace of the rural influx is too easy to ignore if I only ride the “migrant free” D rails. Equally, the resourcefulness of the “simple Catholic peasants” is invisible when one prays only in the city’s grand old Churches. If I am really to understand China, I need more weeks like the one that was.