- A Novel by Moira Laidlaw
Preface to the Stories:
I am a volunteer with Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) in China, teaching Methodology to teacher-education students in Guyuan Teachers College, a small city in rural Ningxia Province in the northwest of China. I am on a two-and-a-half year contract and will return to England just before Spring Festival 2003.
These stories grew out of my increasing fascination for the lifestyle here, which is so unlike anything I have ever encountered before. They also grew out of my ignorance and my desire to understand more of what remains to me a highly complex society.
The people are real, at least in terms of their ability to move me, to remind me of why I came here in the first place - to take part in China’s ambitious educational development programme. I have taken care, however, to disguise specific identities, not using real names for example. Anna is also not me, although in her physical description as the baitou, she might be mistaken for me. The people are reminiscent of characters I have met, but are not identifiable as such. Particular values I have found in different people have been expanded to envelop a whole character.
To write a series of stories around the festivals also seemed appropriate. In China festivals are very much an integral part of life in the countryside and people live their lives here, it seems to me, in harmony with cycles of expectations cohering around family and tradition. For this reason I have chosen to write entirely in the present tense in order to convey the permanence of tradition and custom.
VSO hopes that its volunteers will pass on information about rural China, as this part of the world remains largely a closed door to most foreigners. I hope that these stories give some insights into life here, even if only from an outsider’s perspective.
Moira Laidlaw, Spring Festival, 2003.
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