A spacious village square now welcomes visitors to Pei Zhai with artwork designed by local schoolchildren. Basketball courts, ping-pong tables and well-maintained exercise equipment stand available for all to use, and neat rows of modern, terraced houses are now home to families that previously lived in dilapidated huts. As the country develops, these are the kinds of scenes that can be found in towns the length and breadth of China - so why is it that Pei Zhai still retains such a unique, ‘village’ character? The answer lies with its people: looking beneath the surface, it becomes clear that a village’s traditions cannot be abandoned as easily as its buildings. Here, elderly residents still gather each morning for their daily exercise, before returning home to take charge of the grandchildren when their parents head off to work. Later, they enjoy the afternoon sunshine in their front yards, which are planted with rows of vegetables or hung with the week’s laundry. Their homes are clean and welcoming, but scattered with the paraphernalia of rural life. Despite the upheaval of moving into their modern surroundings, their mentalities and daily lives have remained remarkably unchanged. It might be fleeting – children who have never known hardships like those of their parents and grandparents are already starting school here – but for now, the curious pull between past and present, between tradition and development, is all too apparent.
Particularly when it comes to food, old habits die hard. Everyone knows that food plays a crucial role in Chinese culture, and in that respect, Pei Zhai is no exception. We are invited to a lunch with other visitors to the village, and take our seats in a clean, brightly-lit hall at one end of the village square. Despite the decidedly modern surroundings, the cooking is done outside in a large vat, with a well-stoked fire roaring underneath. The food is delicious – a kind of vegetable stew served on a bed of rice – but the contrast of old and new is unmissable, especially when someone has to run the dishes in and out of the building from pot to table! I’m told that, no matter how good your kitchen is, nothing can beat the traditional cooking method. It’s a refrain that’s repeated throughout the village; more than once, we meet residents cooking steamed buns over an old-fashioned outdoor stove, right outside their perfectly functional kitchens. “Food is important,” says Pei Chunliang, “because it leaves an impression on you. If you leave a place full, you’ll have good memories of that place.”
The crowning example of the value still placed on traditional cooking comes with a celebration of fentiao, or ‘sweet potato noodles’. Throughout Pei Zhai’s historical struggles with drought and poor soil conditions, the sweet potato was the one reliable crop, seeing local farmers through many difficult times. Now that the village is enjoying relative prosperity, a festival has been organized in celebration of this faithful vegetable, and it is quite the event. The cooking area is open to spectators, and as traditional music is performed in the background, I witness the transformation of sweet potatoes into fentiao before my very eyes. First, the sweet potatoes are cut into small pieces and mashed with flour, forming a doughy mixture. Once the dough is of the right consistency, it is squeezed through a kind of sieve into long, thin strips, which land in a tub of hot water, the temperature of which is maintained by a fire underneath it. The chefs’ bright white outfits, which wouldn’t look out of place in an upmarket restaurant, clash with the smoke and flames as they work quickly and expertly. After a short time, the thin strips are scooped out of the water and hung over a rack to dry in the sun, before being used in various dishes. Nothing is wasted – even the roots of the sweet potatoes are exported to Japan, where they are apparently a delicacy, according to 62 year-old Wang Zhongmei, who runs a fentiao business with his son. Born and bred in Pei Zhai, Mr. Wang was one of Pei Chunliang’s teachers in middle school – and he’s confident that despite the huge changes he’s seen to the village in his lifetime, the appreciation of the sweet potato and its fentiao will endure. Speaking to some of the workmen employed to set up the event, it seems that sentiment is shared. “This festival gives us a new opportunity to show off our local specialty to outside visitors,” one of them tells me. “It gives local people a new outlet to display their produce and will bring them new success.”
Of course, the people of Pei Zhai have worked hard to get to this point, and it is certainly no longer the case that they all grow sweet potatoes. The village has come up with a number of innovative industries that employ local people and generate a significant income. An old proverb says, ‘Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime’. In Pei Zhai’s case, a more accurate saying might be, ‘Teach a man how to rear pet goldfish, and you create a highly successful business’. At one end of the village, a long, low building houses row after row of large tanks, in which goldfish of varying sizes are reared until they can be sold as pets in cities as far afield as Beijing. For a village that until recently suffered from devastating droughts, the decision to rear fish seems to me to be as symbolic as it is lucrative.