Yingli Village in Changyuan, Henan, Achieves Whole-Village Prosperity by Selling Fruit and Small Goods

About the author: Yanhui Feisan Zhijian, born in the 1980s, a native of Changyuan, Henan, author of the full-length novel "Because We Were Young Then", on sale at Dangdang Bookstore and Taobao

I think when you see this article, the first thing you'll think of is the words "small millstone sesame oil". Every person from Changcun knows that Yingli produces sesame oil; this is another village with a cultural symbol. This village, prospering through hard work, has become a model worthy of praise for the whole township. But we cannot help but also recall several other impressions of Yingli people that surge to mind: shrewdness mixed with a touch of petty worldliness; stinginess overflowing with a simple rural flavor; and cunning hinting at a helpless self-protection.

To be honest, as a child I did not think highly of the people of Yingli, even to the point of being somewhat extreme. As neighboring villages for several hundred years, we inevitably share deep ties, and between the two villages there is no lack of the customary rural intermarriage.

Many girls from our village married into that place, and many girls from Yingli married into ours. Trivial matters of daily life continue the tangled, inextricable relationship between the two villages.

The conventional thinking of the countryside will inevitably pass down those trivial matters invisibly, seeping into the next generation and influencing the tender, budding outlook on life of the children of both villages.

In rural areas, there is a particularly ancient traditional role in the wedding custom, called in the local dialect "the cart-pressing child", also known as the happy child, usually a boy from the groom's family, seemingly to show that the groom's family is prosperous in descendants and can bring good fortune to the newlyweds, meaning an early birth of a son. Now, somehow, it has become the bride's family bringing a child, or both families bringing children, or no child at all; anyway, it's all a mess. Some traditions are being changed and destroyed by the crude and vulgar attitudes of people today, and occasionally there is even a hint of nonsense about it.

The first time I was a happy child as a kid was when my uncle got married; my future aunt came from Yingli, the neighboring village.

As children, we were all greedy for food. Being a happy child meant getting to eat those tempting apples, oranges, and other fruits, and if lucky, even being given a red envelope with a few yuan. When my aunt got married, I saw with my own eyes that child from Yingli Village wrapping colorful candies and two red apples in a small handkerchief, which made my cousin and me green with envy. It was also from that time that waiting to be a happy child at my uncle's wedding became a childish, beautiful wish of ours.

But reality is cruel; I guessed the beginning of the story, but could not guess the ending.

What my aunt's family prepared for me was a bag of roasted peanuts.

I collapsed!

Where's the money? Where's the money? Where's the money? You don't fool the future of the motherland like this!

I was battered beyond recognition by reality, as if I had swallowed a lump of ice in my heart. The cruel, merciless childhood wound came crashing down on me along with a bag of peanuts from my aunt's maiden home.

My first dream in life was thus wounded by a bag of peanuts from Yingli, and from then on, in my childish youth, the seed of "Yingli people are shrewd and stingy" was planted, accompanying me all the way to my humble coming-of-age ceremony. Later, among my playmates, there was even a saying that when we grew up we would not dare marry a girl from Yingli. Why? For fear of not outsmarting the wife!

It was not only me who held this view; it seemed that everyone who had dealt with Yingli people felt the same. Shrewd and stingy seemed to have become synonyms for Yingli people. There were also more negative stories about Yingli people, such as going through the lanes and into homes doing small business and cheating on the scales, and fake sesame oil passed off as genuine, and many other jokes. Since this article is published on a platform, I cannot recount them here word for word.

But no matter how outsiders evaluate them, the people of Yingli have always lived according to their own way of thinking, truly and steadily playing their role in the tide of the new era and new policies, continuing their own mission!

My change of view toward the people of Yingli came many years later, with the changes in my aunt's family, the Western-style buildings and courtyards that were built one after another. The people of Yingli always do incredible things one step ahead of others. Although it cannot be called great wealth, it is truly prosperity through hard work.

This kind of motorized tricycle used to be a must-have means of transport for every household in Yingli. A loading capacity of just a few square meters nevertheless carried the future and hopes of the people of Yingli.

At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, when people in many villages were still foolishly unable to find work, comfortably guarding their one mu and three fen of land, gambling out of boredom, squatting against the wall in the sun like idiots, and complaining about society's unfairness while they were at it, the thinking of Yingli people began to leap forward. They knew the principle of hard work, and they also knew the principle of keeping their feet on the ground. Although among those with their feet on the ground there appeared a few unscrupulous profiteering merchants, they were ultimately striving hard for their own food and clothing.