Chapter 6: "Roosters in the Morning"

[Note: This post is dated 1-24-20 only to create chapter sequence.Back to Chapter 5]

The four largest cities in the  U.S. follow this order from East to West and North to South: New York City: 8,550,405.Los Angeles: 3,971,883. Chicago: 2,720,546. Houston: 2,296,224.

Add the population of all four of those U.S. cities together, and they are still smaller than Shanghai, China, a city of 24,500,000 and growing (first photo). In fact, if NYC was in China, there would be at least ten cities that are bigger.

What about Enoch's home town, the city of Guiyang? With a population just over 3,000,000 it's bigger than Chicago, but ranked #42 by size in China. Guiyang is not a hub of typical urban sprawl where one city blends into another. It is nestled in the lush mountains of one of the least developed provinces in China, Guizhou.

(Click on arrow to view Guiyang promotional video.)

I have watched portions of this video with Enoch, and nearly all of it is as foreign to him as it to us in America. Readers may think, "But wait a minute. I thought you said this was his home town. And in Chapter One, he spoke of a 30 minute bus-ride he takes twice a day from the outskirts of Guiyang to near the city center." Yes. That's true, and Enoch knows that bus route very well. If he is not doing homework on the bus, he has stared at the passing streets countless times. Other than that route, however, his life has had little time for "Sunday drives" or trips to the country or weekend excursions. The schedule for school (also in Chapter One) does not include the notion of a "weekend" or time for recreational sight seeing. When telling me these things, Enoch gave no hint of feeling cheated, but he also was not impressed by the video. He simply says when watching such tourism videos, "They only show the good things. They will not show my district. My district is where the farmers from the country end up living, but we cannot afford to live in the video parts of the city."

Enoch is not a complainer; he is not cynical; but he does have a quiet confidence in the things he has seen first hand. The subject of Chinese propaganda is a serious matter, but when it comes to tourism, let's face it, our US marketing experts do the same thing. Take for instance this "Discover Flint, Pure Michigan" radio spot, promoting one of the most scorned cities in America. It almost makes me want to go their just for a drink of water! 

Living on the outskirts of Guiyang means still living "in the city limits" while being far from the trees, hills, serene lakes and scenic waterfalls in the video. It means enduring a 30 minute bus-ride with the smell of diesel smoke and the shrill drone of countless small motorcycles weaving in and out of traffic like hornets. Then stepping out and onto the busy sidewalks framed in modest modernity but nothing as nice as the "city center" highlighted in the video.

While we watched the video, I said to Enoch, "When I was in Beijing on one of the clear days when we had traveled to the wall, I suddenly noticed that something had been missing all day. It is a natural sound that is common everywhere in Michigan. I heard no birds. I saw no birds, but it was first their song that I missed. And someone told me 'That is because millions of small birds (mostly sparrows) were killed during the Great Leap Forward because they ate needed grain, etc.'  Mao seemed to forget that the sparrows also ate insects, and thus one pest was replaced by another to disastrous results. Someone else told me that the lack of pigeons in the city was because they were all eaten during the same time period. Do you know if this is true. Do you have birds in your neighborhood--like the birds in the video."


Enoch laughed. "The only birds I see are chickens, and the only birds I hear are the roosters. Every morning before even the sun is up, I hear the roosters through my window."

"How are there roosters in the city?" I smiled. 

He laughed, and with no bitterness about it, he said, "It is an old district. People who now live there used to live in the country. They were farmers. Now they live in the city and they bring chickens for sale and for eggs. The authorities let them do it, but it is the rooster making that noise... how you say...?"

"Crowing?" I guessed.

"Yes, crowing while we are still trying to sleep. That is what I do not like." 

"But I thought you lived in an apartment building surrounded by many apartment buildings."

"Yes, we do, but many chickens get out of wire... wire cage... they get out. Even if a rooster is in a cage, he will crow and wake me." He laughed the way we humans laugh at little things we cannot change.

"But do you know what else they do not show in that video? We have problem with the ... tubes. How do you say? The tubes that bring the water..."

"Pipes?" I guessed. "Do you mean the plumbing that brings the water to your house."

"Yes. Yes. That is what are the tubes. For sink and toilet and drinking and getting clean. One day our tubes quit bringing water. No water, and this happened long time."

"When did it happen?" I asked.

"Very long time." he repeated.

"I mean 'When did it happen?' Was it a long time or a long time ago. Like when you were little?"

"No. This happened in 2018 when my father was still in prison and it was for more than half a year. Eight months, I think. It only was fixed a couple months ago while I was waiting to come to Calvary."

"So when your father came home after 2.5 years in prison, you had no running water?"

"Yes. It stopped when he was gone and stay stopped many months. The authorities said, they tried to fix but the people who tried to fix took the money we paid and did not do the fix."

"Was this just your apartment or the whole building?

"No. Not building. Whole district had no water."

"I am so sorry that happened," I said incredulously. "How did you survive without water?"

"The authorities brought a flexible tube...how you say...?"

"A hose?"

"Yes, is a hose flexible? So then yes, hose. It had good water, but it was down by the gate of our district a few blocks away where we live. We fill a (he looked up a word on his phone) a barrel. We fill a barrel and bring it back to our apartment building. And then each family takes water from barrel in buckets to their own place. Very heavy to carry water in big buckets."

"And you live on the second floor?" I asked.

His eyes widened. "No. We live on the fourth floor. Many steps and very heavy. We tried to make the water in each bucket last, but it takes one bucket to flush the toilet. So we had many trips to the barrel each day." he laughed again as he had laughed about the rooster. [This is a picture I took in a modern school building in Guangzhou, China. It represents the style of toilet common in China. It is not meant to reflect the plumbing found in older districts.]

"We kept clean each day from bucket, but we took our showers on Sunday morning before church. Pastor "T" [I will call him this]  is the other pastor who did most of service when my father was gone. He lives closer to the city center on our way to the church. We would go to his apartment one hour before church and each take a shower. We did that every week for over half a year. But now our tubes... plumbing you say... have water again."

"Enoch, it is just unacceptable that such a thing would take so long to fix for all those people. How could the city get away with that. Did no one complain?"

"Everybody complain all the time, but it did not bring water." Here he did not smile. I think he saw the sadness in my eyes and knew that my heart hurt--not at the creative way they learned to cope--but that this basic need went unaddressed for over half-a-year. I still don't understand. Perhaps someday I will.

Now in the morning when I hear Enoch singing quietly in the shower behind the closed door of his bathroom, I;m very happy he is here. I am happy that God made this possible, that his parents saw the benefit of it, that they have entrusted us to make it a positive time in his life. I think he "feels at home" in an American sense of the phrase.  For his own sake, I hope he feels safe, secure, befriended, loved, and very much like he belongs already. But I also know he is far from home, and we wish to do nothing to replace his feelings for home in the truest sense of the phrase. I know not to do that because I have learned to love the hardest parts of my life--the far-from-perfect parts of my childhood.  Life is rain and sunshine, sorrow and joy, our worst and best days. When family is involved, we are who we are because of the quiet hours, chaotic days, cozy nights of shared life.

I believe that someday Enoch will hear a rooster crow in the distance on a morning far from now--Who knows where or when?--But I'm confident that someday Enoch will hear that sound again, and the same crowing he hated as a boy will bring back all of these memories--the smell of diesel from the bus, the drone of motorcycles on the street, the blur of a thousand nameless faces passing by, the weight of water buckets stretching his tired arms, the quiet tears of missing his father, the meals his mother made each day, his little brother's laugh... I hope a rooster crow will awaken all of these old familiar sights and sounds and feelings in his mind, and I pray they make him smile.

[On to Chapter 7]