day 2 in 荣昌

f shows up at 9 am sharp the next morning. i wolf down my breakfast and get into his car. we drive into the green hills. we’re going to visit some peasants.*¹

we pull up to the county bureau office. a pickup truck full of small piglets pulls up to us, squirming up against each other in the wicker crate. no need to look there, he says dismissively, those aren’t rongchang pigs.

we get into the car of a soft spoken man who is an official at the local agricultural bureau. he drives us up a dirt road to a brick house. a young dog and a rooster trot in front of the door, tattered pieces of red paper hanging on either side of the opening.

we put on white coveralls, much like the infamous 大白 enforcers of china’s zero-covid policy, with blue plastic shoe covers to boot. we walk past the abandoned brick house up a hill to a second one.

an old man with tanned farmer-health glow walks out, along with presumably his wife—a woman who never says anything, but hovers and smiles. piglets circle their feet, and a cat paws at them from a stool in front of their front door. the piglets are 20 days old. within a month they’ll be too big to allow outside of the pen.

the pens are made of concrete and attached to the brick house. i walk in and see enclosed in a small concrete cell a big pig, the mother of these piglets running amok.

my feeling of intense live-pig deprivation yet unabated, i dwell as long as i can in the company of the calm mother pig, ears covering her face, chewing in the dim light filtering through the window.

too soon, f calls me outside for the interview.

first he tells the official who came with us to grab two piglets so i can take a picture with them, a piglet in each arm. he grabs one by its little ankle and it screams bloody murder. he grabs both of its hind trotters and it immediately goes quiet, docile “as a lamb.” he hands me the piglet, which immediately begins squirming and squealing, until i manage to fit its two hind trotters into a hand. one is enough, i say. no need to grab another.

f takes a picture.

i ask some simple questions, like how the pigs are fed, how long they’re kept, and the age of the piglets running around our feet. f interrupts with answers about the procurement system, about what peasants feed their pigs, about how each pig is insured by the local government.

before long, he says it’s time to go. we leave our white zip ups and shoe covers. we drive to another house. we put on a different set of white coveralls and blue shoe covers. here only a woman is home. she’s married in from a different village, and hadn’t raised pigs before.

it’s a lot of work, she says. pigs have a lot of needs. nobody wants to do it. but we do it to make a little money.

i ask her some more questions and f keeps interrupting with answers. soon it’s time to leave for a lunch party he has to make. an old classmate is having a 90th birthday celebration for his father, and since i’m in his charge, i’m going.

as we drive back, we make conversation about how he became a vet, how his parents were farmers, how they’ve passed. his daughter lives in chengdu.

rongchang pigs are more famous than rongchang people, he says, without a hint of bitterness.

we go to lunch. at each threshold — the main door, the opening of the elevator, and the entrance to the dining hall, f is greeted by a smiling familiar holding out a cigarette, like a chinese fist bump. he walks down the hall into the dining room holding one cigarette and smoking another. we sit down at a round table. he introduces me as a phd from peking university. hello, zhang phd, everyone greets me with a note of deference. my neighbor inquires about my research, picking at watermelon in front of the meat dishes piled three layers high on the lazy susan in front of us. so wasteful, f’s wife clucks next to me. she’s a language teacher at a local school.

after lunch, i’m feeling drowsy from the noontime feast. i can only imagine my compatriots feel the same way. but chinese tours don’t rest. we go to the canal, along which a carved mural of the history of pig production sits. a huge bust of the rongchang pig, along with other breeds, like the duroc, landrace, and yorkshire, sit on a neighboring plaza square.

after milling around and looking at the mural carved by local art students we go on search for pig buddha. c, who has joined us after lunch, remembers praying to them as a child. we drive to a temple, circling around the figurines. no pig buddha. a monk pokes his head out and we explain what we’re looking for. it’s over there, he gestures. we circle around some more, not finding it. finally an old lady pokes her head out. she comes up to my shoulder, about. pig buddha! she exclaims. she knows where it is. she walks over to the room full of small figurines we’d already been in and there in the very corner was a small stone pig with a red ribbon tied on it, ensconced in spider webs.

unsatisfied (clearly nobody has worshipped this pig in a long time) we drive into another farmer’s home, straight into their backyard, where a small slab of concrete sits amidst the soil, and two dogs stand next to our car, barking.

we get out. f explains we’re looking for their pig buddha. c knows there’s one out here, he remembers from his days playing in the mountains as a kid. the farmers motion to their backyard.

we wade through tall grass. walk through a stone archway, down cracked stairs. reach a shaded forest trail, along the side of which two moss-covered stone pigs sit under white plastic, the roof having long caved in. c removes the plastic covering, dusts off the rotting leaves that cover the stone with his hands and a stick. we have a prayerful moment. the mosquitos have painful bites. c covers the pigs up again with white plastic and we go back up the stairs.

we drive to one more, again walking into a farmer’s yard and into the mountains beyond. f stays behind this time, playing music loudly from his phone. we clamber up a steep slope into a small concrete house filled with “buddhas.” sitting demurely on a sow feeding her piglets by a corner on the floor is 送子娘娘 — a goddess of fertility. one hand on her stomach and another in her lap.

on our way back into town we drive through 西南大学, f’s alma mater. he points out the animal testing stations, the old dorms, walls where his name is. students milling around us.

finally it’s time for dinner. we drop f’s car off and take a didi. everyone is tired. we sit apart and scroll on our phones. soon we are called to go upstairs, and seat ourselves in a private room. the guests haven’t arrived yet. i make small talk with c. fan sits in a corner smoking and scrolling.

before our guests arrive, a waiter walks in and places two plates of bloody baby pig dicks on either side of the simmering chili oil pot.

1. chinese farmers are sometimes called farmers, sometimes called peasants. the thing is, there’s a titter about peasants because it’s such a “feudal” term and we’re supposedly past that. in chinese the name for “peasant” never changed, so it’s academic convention to say chinese peasants. so i use them interchangeably here. ↩︎