Earning a Chinese New Year’s feast
Posted: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 12:42 PM
Filed Under:
Beijing, China
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
YUBAI QU, Chongqing Municipality – It was a Chinese stand-off.
Wang Chen, our 30-something driver from Chongqing, was looking at me anxiously.
I was grappling with not just anxiety (his) but also a mixture of guilt and resentment (mine).
The problem came up when Wang teased us with the prospect of interviewing migrant workers from his wife’s ancestral village about 40 miles outside of the center of Chongqing.
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| Adrienne Mong/NBC News |
| Paying respects during the Lunar New Year. |
We were working on a story about how the global economic meltdown is affecting Chinese migrant workers and their hopes for the New Year. For the past couple of days, we had been driving around one small town several hours’ drive away, talking to workers who had returned from the economically blighted coastal areas for the weeks-long Lunar New Year holiday.
But a group of local officials turned up, and in spite of their friendly demeanor, their presence intimidated the villagers. Where earlier the workers had spoken frankly about the difficulties of trying to make ends meet in an economic downturn, they suddenly were limiting their comments to praise for the government. Needless to say, we weren’t entirely satisfied with the quality of the interviews.
So the following day we were toying with the idea of driving half a day to Chengdu, where we could try again to get a solid lead. But Wang – who was fielding regular and somewhat irate phone calls from his wife urging him to join her at her parents’ village – was trying to persuade us to stop by their village under the pretext of enjoying a meal with the family.
We understood the significance of the meal – the Chinese New Year is the most important day of the calendar and is the one time all year when families are reunited across the country for days, if not weeks.
But we were here to work, and we had a deadline to meet.
When I explained to Wang our problem, he offered to enlist his wife’s help to find a migrant worker in her village. But when we arrived, he told me that there were no migrant workers.
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| Adrienne Mong/NBC News |
| Men play mah jong, a favorite pastime during the Chinese New Year. |
The stand-off
"They’re all at lunch now," he said, a little too blithely. "So why don’t we just go up to my wife’s parents’ home now and eat?"
I stared back at him and dug in my heels. "Our agreement was that we would come here for a meal once we had finished shooting." It seemed churlish to deny him a chance to see his in-laws, especially as we were only a few hundred yards away, but I suspected that he had engineered the situation so that we would be guilted into being with his family.
"We’ll come back here to see your wife once we’ve checked out the next village," I said.
Thus motivated, Wang Chen sped onto the next town, where the main street was bustling with activity. Children shopped for fireworks. The elderly played mah jong, a favorite pastime during the Chinese New Year. And the young buzzed around on motorcycles bought with the income from their earnings as migrant workers in the big city.
And it was one of those young migrant workers that Wang found for us: Mr. Zhang, a 30-year- old who started working in Guangdong province back in 1997. After several years’ working in a garment factory, he opened his own restaurant. Business was good the first few years, but then last year it dried up, so much so he had to shut down the restaurant and come back home. Now he’s trying to figure out the next step.
We filmed Zhang and then the town’s main street.
"So do we still need to go to Chengdu?" asked Wang, the same anxious expression reappearing on his face. "No, that interview went really well, thank you, we’re done," I said. "Let’s go meet your in-laws."
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| Adrienne Mong/NBC News |
| The Pang family treated the NBC News team to a lavish New Year meal in their modest peasant home. |
The reward
A little later, in the warm glow of local hospitality
, we were treated to a homemade feast consisting of produce grown on the farm and meat from a 220-pound pig raised by the family and slaughtered for the occasion.
"Good thing we didn’t come here before we got that interview in the other town," said our correspondent Ian Williams. Out of politeness, we were all knocking back countless cups of local beer that our hosts insisted on pouring for us.
So with each pour, we raised our paper cups to toast Wang Chen and his family and to wish them good health and great prosperity.
And, hopefully, his wife’s forgiven me.
Related links:
VIDEO: Global Year of the Ox celebrations
SLIDESHOW: Year of the Ox
