I've been giggling for several minutes now about you having a conversation with your husband about the commonness of pig toilets in China, and I just wanted you to know that.
I aim to please, at least some of the time.
Fun China fact: starting in the Tang Dynasty and through the early Ming, middle class and wealthy peasants created a brisk demand for mass produced grave goods. These things are like dollhouses made of glazed ceramic and would be interred with the deceased so they’d be well appointed in the afterlife. Common miniatures included a house, a guard tower, and you guessed it: a pig toilet, complete with miniature ceramic pigs.
These minis are common enough that you can go see them in many museums; the Met, the Museum of Natural History, and the Harvard Art Museums all have examples on display. And while I don’t think they’re out there because the museums have an unwholesome interest in ancient toilet practices, these minis do give you a very good idea of what aspirational middle class homes, guard towers, chicken coops, and public pig-powered toilet systems looked like.
At home in Beijing (在北京家)
Beijingren who own their own home and keep a household registration in Beijing (more on household regs later) are a very well off lot, at least on paper. Even housing that looks like some of the most dire and crappy commie blocks can be worth millions in USD if their location is optimal. Most people live in apartment housing, but my fam has a single family home. (4 bed, 3 bath, 1-car garage.) they also have a decent sized fenced in garden. You would think that people in such wealth would just put up a lot of ornamentals and flowers, but you don’t know the Chinese mindset. Despite the present situation of their life, and the insanely cheap prices of produce, much of the yard is given over to
vegetable farming, of all things. This compulsion to produce and accrue food is comparable to Americans who lived through the Great Depression canning and preserving and hoarding food, along with any other thing they think might be useful. My
MIL was intent on growing food on our stony, marginal, and completely shaded out Massachusetts lawn and did not understand why we hadn’t been farming our two acres. She ended up finding out why we don’t farm in Dover: the sunlight in our yard sucks and whatever does grow is eaten by rabbits and deer, none of which are to be had in Beijing.

This habit is not unique to my in-laws, it is a scar on the collective living memory of China as a result of decades of food shortages. I have noticed vegetable gardens and small-scale urban farming all over China. In the countryside, peasants supplement their meager farming income by farming marginal land under high-speed elevated railways. Urban churches and temples that have grounds with arable land will use it to grow bok Choy and spinach. If you are lucky enough to have a house with land of your own, it is common to raise veg on it. On my first trip to China in 2017 I was walking around Shanghai and saw a bunch of chickens scratching and picking out an empty tree pit on the sidewalk. This is sort of like keeping chickens in Midtown Manhattan.
Why do the Chinese do this? One, scarcity of land. With 90% of the country’s people living on just 10% of its land area, private pleasure gardens are a luxury that even the rich hesitate to indulge in. Another is the memory of food shortages and rationing. Everybody in my in-laws’ generation, and to a lesser extent Gen Xers, were subject to the ration card system. This was basically a price-fixing scheme by limiting purchase volume: the price of commodities like white rice, meat, sugar, milk, flour and “rough grains” were extremely low, but the catch was that you were limited in how much you could buy at the official market. (Black market was another story; you can buy as much as you can afford, but prices were much much higher, and there was no QC.) people who still couldn’t afford cooking oil or whatnot would sell these ration cards to those who could, but the official ration per person per month was minimal. An adult was entitled to 500g of flour or rice, 50g of meat, 100mL of oil, 200ml of milk, 3 eggs, 2kg rough grain (sweet potatoes, corn, white potatoes, barley etc) so on. (Despite 75% of the country being lactose intolerant, milk was still valuable, mostly as a supplement food for babies.) One of the things that were NOT rationed was fresh produce, so people grew lots of it to supplement these extremely low allowances. This habit carries on today, even though ration cards are long gone and meat is no longer a rare treat. Wasting food is also frowned upon. My in-laws tend to serve leftovers meal after meal until it’s all been eaten. Xi Xinping hates food waste so much that he has imposed new rules and campaigns to stop hotels and restaurants from wasting food. Millenial Chinese people do not have this experience of widespread food insecurity, so their relationship to food is much more Western.
It is somewhat odd to square being in a major urban center and still see farming taking place. It’s probably a throwback that will not last. My husband notes that when his parents generation passed away, they will take with them the know-how for a lot of kinds of food that is troublesome to prepare and made from off cuts, eg dishes made from lungs, stomach, tripe and such.
The Hukou (household registration)
Living in big cities is a privilege in China. Being a citizen of a major city entitles you to access to public schools, pensions and hospitals. Rural people get diddly. It’s not like in America, where if I fancy to become a resident of NYC I just need to find an apt and pay NY state taxes. There are people who are allowed to live in Beijing and those who are transients; migrant workers remain registered to whichever podunk rural town they came from. The government can decide who gets a new household registration to major cities, and it’s possible to de register people and send them back to their village. (This was one potential punishment for flouting the one child policy, for example, but it also ensured that fired employees couldn’t loaf around the capital, and it allows the government to deport homeless people out of major cities.)
The hukou is basically a roster of who has legal residency in your house. When we visit, we have to go to the police station to get a temporary registration in my FIL’s houkou. (This entitles us to nothing, but by law we have to do it so the state can keep tabs on us.) it has sometimes been compared to a caste system, as people with hukous in nice cities get better government benefits than rural people. In practice this can mean that families can be rich on paper by holding a lot or apartment that has appreciated some crazy amount, but the house on it sucks and they’re functionally poor because they can’t really sell their asset and be able to afford in to a different apt in the same city, and leaving the city means abandoning those sweet hukou gibs, which many of them rely on. Which is why there are chickens on the street in Shanghai. Truly a Teufelskreiz dilemma playing out there.
Tomorrow, we have lunch with family and then I am taking a sleeper train to Xi’an. I’ll update you during the middle of the night when also eludes me, as it sometimes does on those overnight trains. I got the top bunk, hope it doesn’t make me claustrophobic like the Amtrak roomette top bunk does.
Just give it time. We never would have guessed that she would admitted to snacking on ass when this thread was created.
Don’t hold your breath.
The one he originally quoted is the most common use of the term, it can be used in the way she used it but its weird. Its usually used to refer to the greatness or depth of an impact of something, in a metaphorical or philosophical way, rather than to describe the greatness of an amount of something.
If you wanted to use it as an adverb the way she is using, to quantitate something, its applied more to things that are difficult to conceive of, like 'space is profoundly vast' or 'Stan is profoundly fat'.
In the medical field it can work the same way as the words “patently” and “grossly”.
Ex. “._. Is profoundly retarded”
“._. Is patently autistic”
“._. Is grossly disabled and in need of significant accommodations in a group care setting”
Thanks for acknowledging that I’m a much better writer than 90% of you, especially old Soviet bloc Pedo Cat