Hou Li, Child of the Oil Field, Born in 1973 | Housing and Our Lives ⑥

Housing is the largest commodity a human being can consume, and one of the witnesses to the changes in a person's life. QDaily is running a series of reports that use housing as a thread, to look at what happened in the past.

It is time to sum up a period of history.

Most of our readers lived through only the tail end of it; most of the story was written by the generation before them.

What we hope to pass on is the most valuable part, the part that deserves to be kept: a firm belief in progress and development; a conviction that society will keep opening better and bigger spaces for the individual; that effort earns its due reward; that freedom can be fought for, and that we will get there in the end.

These, in fact, are what universal values are.

When a word like "history" is set in front of us, it tends to be buried under grand narratives. Through interviews at a smaller, more personal scale, we hope to sort out what we can.

We begin this record with "housing," the thing people pay the most attention to in their own lives.

In 1962 there was not yet a city called Daqing — the place was Anda County then — and the oil field, still under a security blackout, went by the cover name "Farm Reclamation Station." At the end of that year, Zha Binhua and Yang Ruisong, a young couple, had just arrived. They were graduates of the urban planning program at Tongji University.

"We asked to go ourselves. Partly it was a sense of debt — the state had trained us, and we felt we should go where the motherland needed us most. Partly, I thought the oil field would build a new city, that on a stretch of wasteland I could 'paint the newest, most beautiful picture,' and spend my whole life building a modern oil city according to the latest planning theories!"

But this "modern" Daqing did not take shape as smoothly as they expected. Their first formal assignment there was to work out how to build houses out of rammed earth — a kind of dwelling called gandalei.

You may have heard of the "gandalei spirit." In 1960, more than 40,000 people came to Daqing for the oil campaign — pumping oil, building roads, building plants — and they lived in tents and prefabricated sheds. To meet the Siberian cold front due in September, they had to put up shelters that would keep out the cold through winter without slowing production. Gandalei were simple houses built purely from rammed earth, with no brick or tile. Daqing pulled in every spare hour and every spare hand it could find, and in the end built 300,000 square meters of them.

What came next was that rammed earth is not sturdy, and the houses had gone up in a rush, so they damaged easily. Yang Ruisong remembered waking up one morning, opening his eyes and seeing open grassland — only then did he realize the wall had collapsed.

Zha and Yang lived in Daqing for more than a decade, leaving only in the late 1970s. Hou Li, an associate professor at Tongji University's College of Architecture and Urban Planning, tracked down this pair of gandalei builders and recorded their story in her forthcoming book, Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State.

The Oil Field's Pioneers

Hou Li is herself a child of the oil field. Her father, of the same generation as Zha Binhua and Yang Ruisong, was a petroleum engineer at the Shengli oil field.

In 1975, when Hou Li was two, she and her mother traveled from their home in Sichuan to Shengli to join her father, who had spent years "opening up the wilderness" in Dongying. Husbands and wives living apart was ordinary then.

Hou Li's father was from Sichuan. His family was poor, and the Southwest Petroleum Institute offered very good "benefits" — no tuition, no living expenses, and a scholarship on top — so he enrolled there.

"Looking back, I see how one thing led to the next, how tightly an individual's fate was tied to the era. China's energy reserves and its industry were spread very unevenly: energy in the west, industry in the east. The state badly wanted to fix that imbalance, and Sichuan looked like the most promising spot — Zigong, for instance, had always had natural gas. People believed a major oil field would turn up in Sichuan, so several hundred thousand people were moved in and schools were built. The first few wells had huge output and more and more people gathered — and in the end it came to nothing. That whole group went straight on to the northeast, and that is how Daqing came about."

"If my father had graduated a little earlier, he would certainly have gone to Daqing. Shengli was found after Daqing."

The Shengli oil field sits at the mouth of the Yellow River, on the delta, thick with marshes and saline-alkali land. Before the flood-control works were built, the pioneers had to learn to live with the river's constant course changes and floods. Hou Li still remembers her father telling her that whenever a flood came, he and his colleagues were stranded on the drilling platform — the platforms were tall, and they had no choice but to wait up there until the water went down.

One year, with the Yellow River close to breaching its banks, Hou Li was "assigned" a bathing tub — that was her family's disaster education. Her mother told her that when the flood came she should climb into the tub and use it as a boat. The adults picked out other pieces of furniture; every year, whenever a storm hit, everyone had to be ready at a moment's notice. Only when the flood-control project was finished in 1978 did the shadow of flooding pass.

"I still remember we lived at the 'head station' then — the starting point for shipping crude, a huge oil tank with a cluster of shabby little houses next to it. By today's standards for disaster prevention it was very dangerous, far too close to the tank. One wall enclosed the cluster of houses, alone, with nothing but wilderness outside."

The first house Hou Li's family had at Shengli was a gandalei.

Gandalei Were Designed to Stand 50 Years; Most Fell Within Three. It Is Still an Idealist's Story

The pioneers' first homes at the oil field were tents and prefabricated sheds, and there was an even more primitive option: the diyinzi, an earthen dugout. People cut a pit into a slope, laid boards inside, spread thick grass on top, and moved in. Hou Li found an old photograph of people sleeping in a diyinzi in heavy cotton caps, out of the wind and snow.

"Gandalei," literally, names an action: you fill the gap between two fixed wooden boards with earth, then pound it solid with a mallet. The earliest gandalei were hardly designed at all — they simply copied the way farmers had always built, with walls more than a meter thick at the base, tapering toward the top. Rammed earth alone meant the windows had to stay small, so the rooms were dim and cramped. Later the state assigned architecture students from Tsinghua, Tongji, Tianjin University and other schools to Daqing.

"These were students of a peculiar era," Hou Li told QDaily. "They entered college in 1958, during the Great Leap Forward, and graduated in 1962 into the Great Famine. Hardly anywhere was taking people on — only Daqing wanted them, and in numbers." By her research, Tongji University alone sent more than 20 graduates that year. They were required to live in farmers' homes for a year, learning how to design and build the "best gandalei," studying how to hold the heat in, and reworking the load-bearing strength and interior layout of the existing rammed-earth structures.

Much like architects going into the countryside today, these designers "from the city" had to learn how to build vernacular architecture. Zha Binhua later spoke as a delegate at the Fourth National Congress of the Architectural Society of China. In her account, idealism slammed straight into reality.

"I had wanted to do something big, to build a city of real quality. But now the leaders control you, the masses control you, and they won't let you build a city at all — my whole design intent was thrown into confusion, so what was a designer like me supposed to be for? Around then I got letters from classmates who had stayed in the big cities — they were all doing neighborhood plans, master plans, big things. And me? I volunteered to come to Daqing, and what I was doing was 'gandalei,' which hardly counts as planning. At that time I really felt I had been dropped from the 24th floor of the International Hotel straight to the ground — it was so painful, and I regretted coming to Daqing."

In their first two years in Daqing, students from the various schools, Zha and Yang among them, ran building experiments — putting up houses and testing them, over and over, in the courtyard of the design institute. They worked in groups of three to five, some on foundations, some on roofs. Yang Ruisong told Hou Li that they tried every kind of roofing material and finally settled on one made mainly from residual oil, a waste product from the refinery. "But residual oil has a low melting point — it melted in the sun — so the proportions of the different materials really mattered."

When the design was finished, they went so far as to write a construction manual setting out the most basic building steps for ordinary people. It has not survived.

"Production first, living second" became a kind of political correctness, and these designers had to keep stressing that the wood they used was scrap left over from industrial construction.

In the end this group of graduates produced the "scientific gandalei," with a curved roof. "To build a rammed-earth house like that back then was really something," Hou Li told us. Then came the problem of upkeep: the houses were supposed to stand 50 years without falling, "but most of them had largely collapsed in under three years. It was still earth, after all — however well you maintained it, once the protective skin outside was broken the earth inside would loosen and spill out."

Once the "scientific gandalei" design was done, it was published in Architectural Journal, and the whole country was called on to learn from it. In the same years, Shanghai's Caoyang New Village — held up in the 1950s as a model of workers' housing — and the Soviet-style workers' district that FAW built in Changchun had both become targets of criticism. "Their construction standards were considered too high for the time, seen as pouring a lot of money into housing," Hou Li told us. Even the idea of "urban construction" was politically incorrect then; only industrial construction was acceptable.

"Being a Good Mother in Those Years Was Very Hard"

That speech by Zha Binhua was published in a special Daqing issue of Architectural Journal in 1966, and it was through that issue that Hou Li found her.

Zha was from Nanjing; her husband Yang Ruisong was from Wenzhou. The two were classmates in urban planning at Tongji, became a couple, and went to Daqing together. Years later Zha Binhua self-published their love letters, a record of their college years from 1958 to 1962. This collection of campus love letters, written through the Great Leap Forward, was called The Path Lined with Roses; the title page read, "May the happiness of first love shine on us forever!"

The letters traveled from a university campus in Shanghai to Daqing. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, when they burned all their books, this batch survived, hidden in the false bottom of a box under the bed, in the very gandalei house they had designed and built themselves.

Zha Binhua also self-published her own diary, Bygone Days at Saertu. Saertu was what this part of Daqing was called in the late 19th century, and it was also the command center for the whole oil field — a Mongolian word meaning "the place where the moon rises."

But the enthusiasm for building was soon put out. Zha Binhua once told Hou Li that going to Daqing together had been her idea, and that for many years afterward she blamed herself for a decision that had "ruined the whole family." Her own misfortune began with her pregnancy.

Hou Li describes Zha Binhua this way: "She said she was not normally someone who feared hardship, but once she was pregnant she turned 'delicate.' She could not eat anything, kept throwing up, lost a lot of weight and fainted often, so she was sent back to Wenzhou, to her in-laws. After giving birth she had postpartum depression. Her husband wrote letter after letter, insisting over and over that the baby had to stay in Wenzhou, that she should find a wet nurse there and come back alone." Yang did not explain why in the letters: by then the gandalei house they had designed and built had been confiscated, and they had been sent to a May Seventh Cadre School.

Zha Binhua reluctantly agreed and found a wet nurse in Yueqing. On the day she was to leave she went to say goodbye, and standing outside the window she heard her daughter crying — the wet nurse was busy with her own child. "She told me she was furious on the spot. That maternal instinct surged up, and she picked up her daughter and walked out, saying, 'Even if it kills us, we stay together.'"

The trip from Wenzhou back to Daqing was long and roundabout: a boat from Wenzhou to Shanghai, then a train from Shanghai to Nanjing. She had planned to rest a few days with her daughter at her parents' home, but her parents were themselves under investigation and the family could not keep her, so she set off again in a hurry, crossing the river by boat to board a train at Pukou Station.

That ride lasted more than 30 hours. In those Cultural Revolution years people climbed in through the windows and packed the carriage full. "She did not dare drink water, because she was afraid of the toilet — the toilet was packed with people too. She did not dare hand her daughter to anyone, so she held her the whole way. Her milk had dried up, so her daughter cried the entire trip."

Zha Binhua told Hou Li that the moment she stepped off the train in Daqing, she felt she "no longer looked human."

"Later she told me that under those conditions she did not have to be a mother at all. But at the time every woman took that same path, and it never occurred to her that there was another choice."

Not long after moving into the May Seventh Cadre School, Zha Binhua came down with appendicitis. The cadre school was far from any hospital, it was winter and the snow was heavy; two days passed before she was taken in. The hospital's surgeons had been sent out to sweep the streets, so the nurse on duty operated on her. She nearly died.

Zha Binhua later sent her daughter to a nursery. Oil-field nurseries were mostly run by farm women who had married into the oil field but held no non-agricultural household registration. The dependents went on to form agricultural production teams, farming, raising pigs, raising fish. Hygiene at the nursery was poor, and the daughter Zha had struggled to bring back from Wenzhou caught hepatitis. "Most families then had two working parents and no one to leave a child with; public transport across the whole area was very inconvenient too, so she stopped sending her daughter to the nursery and locked her in the house instead."

Being locked in the house as a small child is a memory shared by many oil-field children from dual-income families; Hou Li was locked in as a child herself. "When the adults got home, a baby who could not even crawl yet would be lying on the heated brick bed, its face streaked with dried tear tracks, or it would have rolled off into some corner of the room."

"Being a good mother in those years was very hard," Zha Binhua told Hou Li, describing how, distracted, she once dressed her daughter with both legs stuffed into one pant leg and sent her off to kindergarten that way. "My daughter's health has always been poor, and it is because I did not take proper care of her then."

Zha Binhua wrote in Bygone Days at Saertu: "As a person, a lifetime of hard work is in the end about realizing one's own value. And that value is not for you to decide — it has to be acknowledged by society, by other people. That is one reason our generation of women feels so much pain. Life is a race, and women carry the heavier load — childbirth, children, family — yet still have to race against men. A woman's whole life is so tiring! But society acknowledges only the final result, and takes no account of how much weight you were carrying. So I used to hope, quietly, that in later generations more women could throw off this load and go through life more lightly."

The 1980s: Shutting the Windows to Listen to Teresa Teng

In an era without "urban construction," military words like "command center" and "base" meant a cluster of public facilities — hospital, department store, post office — at varying distances from each production team and residential cluster. You got there on a Liberation-brand truck, free of charge but bumpy and crowded.

"To go shopping at the base you had to stand on the shuttle truck. If you lived far out it could take more than two hours; some people were closer. Everyone wore an army greatcoat and you had to keep moving the whole way, or your hands and feet would freeze on the truck — not frostbite, necrosis!"

Before reform and opening up there was very little to buy at the base. The store window showed washbasins, enamel mugs, thermos flasks, quilts, and cooking oil, salt, soy sauce and vinegar. "After being jolted around all that time there wasn't much to buy — always the same things, so we rarely went."

The oil field slowly grew up. Nearby villages held markets on the first and fifteenth of each lunar month, and at New Year traveling vendors came selling popcorn, tricking children out of their lucky money.

In 1979, Hou Li's family moved out of their half-earth, half-brick house and were allocated an apartment. "The standard then for a two-earner family was a 35-square-meter unit; a family of three could get 45 square meters. Oil fields across the country all used one standardized design."

"Unlike Zha Binhua, by the 1970s our family was fairly lucky — we lived close to a hospital, and it was only about half an hour by bicycle to the hospital at the base. A lot of production teams had their own clinics and barefoot doctors too. After some basic training they could at least give injections and hand out medicine. I was a healthy child and didn't get pneumonia until fifth grade. My sister was sick more often — she had scarlet fever as a child, an epidemic disease back then."

"People often say the oil field was very conservative, but in fact it was a pioneer of reform and opening up. It was among the first to work with American oil companies, buying drilling platforms and technology. We were still living in those single-story brick houses when my father, or colleagues from his work unit, were already going to the United States on business. On one trip my father brought back a Sanyo tape recorder, and he smuggled back a Teresa Teng cassette as well. People called it decadent music then, so we'd shut the windows and listen inside the shabby little house — it felt magical, and we even secretly recorded ourselves singing along."

For children of two working parents, growing up meant being handed a key on a string around the neck. "I was afraid of losing mine, so I didn't even carry it — I'd climb over the wall to get home. The key locked the yard outside the single-story house; the inner door was never locked. Honestly it wouldn't have stopped anyone, but every household at the oil field did it that way. Kids carried their bowls of food from house to house, and every kid thought the food at other people's houses tasted better. Oil workers' wages were actually good back then, about twice a regular worker's, and there was nowhere else to spend it, so it all went on food."

Hou Li also remembers that the dish she hated most as a child was luofeiyu. The oil field's dependents' production team farmed it on a large scale, and every family got a regular share, but it always carried a whiff of crude — "a leak somewhere, probably." Years later, studying in the United States, she ordered a cheap and very tasty fish called tilapia, looked it up, and found it was the same fish that had come with a crude-oil smell in her childhood.

"I always assumed luofeiyu had been brought in from Africa — the name has the character for 'Africa' in it. Around that same time, another of the imported foods you'd see was Iraqi dates, which were rumored to carry huge numbers of germs and even to set off outbreaks of hepatitis."

The Oil-Field Children's "Comfort Zone"

In 1990, Hou Li sat the college entrance exam. "Maybe it's true of everyone — once you know an environment really well, some people want to stay inside that comfort zone and some want out."

"The oil field was like one enormous village, a society of acquaintances — you did anything at all and everyone knew instantly. There was no privacy, and everyone minded your business down to the last detail. It was closed and conservative, and while people were relatively equal, rank still counted: seniority, administrative grade. Whether you were a 'worker' or a 'cadre' was drawn very clearly. It was dull and dreary."

Most oil-field children chose petrochemical majors and eventually went back into the petroleum system. Hou Li still remembers a male classmate who wanted to go to Beijing and wrote down physical education as his major. His father locked him at home and spent a week talking him around, until he changed it back to petroleum geology.

"I was interested in archaeology and geography at first — when my father heard that, he was horrified."

"A classmate's older brother was studying at Tongji and wrote letters home, and I just thought the name 'Tongji' sounded good, and the Shutong calligraphy it was written in looked good too. The first major on its list was architecture, the second urban planning — I had no idea what urban planning was, but I said, let's put that down. My father was delighted; it meant I would certainly never be assigned to the countryside. His generation, the moment they graduated, could be sent anywhere in the country, to very remote places — the same reason many people in Shanghai back then were reluctant to apply to university and preferred vocational or technical school, because that way they would never have to leave Shanghai."

"When Tsinghua came to recruit at our school they showed a documentary. The recruiter said our students are the best, extremely hardworking — look, it's already 11 at night and the classrooms are still lit up. Watching that I thought: absolutely not Tsinghua, too grueling, I'd only just got through what I'd already been through. Without that documentary I might have applied to Tsinghua."

Hou Li's older sister went to a technical school at the oil field. "That was considered the best option — you graduated straight into an iron rice bowl, and your seniority started early." Hou Li still remembers that on the way to the train station her father ran into colleagues from the oil field: "They all said my salary would surely never match my sister's."

There was a hierarchy of disdain inside the oil field. Hou Li describes the Shengli field she grew up in as an enclave; the oil-production plant was practically a little Sichuan, with Mandarin as the common tongue.

"We used to call the local people 'laoxiang' [fellow countrymen] — a word borrowed from the army, and quite condescending." Later, as a planner, she went to Dongying to work on projects for the city's planning bureau, and there she met someone her own age from Dongying, originally from Kenli County. The two of them had grown up in the same place and their lives had never once crossed.

"Oil-field children and the 'locals' lived in two parallel worlds — separate schooling, separate living space. They lived in places we simply never saw. That colleague at the planning bureau was quite good-looking, and he joked that good looks were no use: if your Mandarin wasn't standard, you had no chance back then of marrying into an oil-field family. So it really was an extremely closed, segregated society."

"Our Generation Probably All Carries a Rebellious Streak"

Once the 1990s arrived, change suddenly sped up.

Hou Li remembers that when she started college in 1990 her living allowance was 100 yuan a month. Classmates from coastal Guangdong were the rich kids in their eyes — a thousand yuan a month, and Adidas on their feet.

In 1993 came inflation, the first she had known, and Hou Li called home to ask for more money. "I felt hard done by, and baffled — why did money suddenly stop stretching? Prices had jumped several times over, just like that. My parents were shocked too. Everyone found it strange."

In 1997, Hou Li finished her graduate studies at Tongji and stayed on to teach. In 1992 and 1993 many planning students had graduated and gone off to Guangdong or Hainan, and Hou Li still remembers the legends she heard from classmates doing projects in Shenzhen: "They collected their design fees in sacks."

Most transactions were still in cash then. A single design fee might run to tens of thousands of yuan, and at the time the largest note was 10 yuan (the 100-yuan note came back into use only with the fourth series of the renminbi, issued from 1988). They carried the cash home in sacks and shoved it under the bed.

At Shengli and Daqing the pace stayed slow. Hou Li recalls the reforms of the Zhu Rongji era. "They had people buy out their seniority — some took early retirement and walked away with 100,000 yuan. But the 100,000 ran out fast. I think most people at the oil field were not suited to a market economy; inside the planned system they had been comfortable too long. Some took their 100,000 and started small businesses, and most lost money. Others did nothing at all, and a few years later found that 100,000 yuan was no longer worth much. The restructuring was floated for years and set off repeated conflicts, and in the end the state-owned enterprise gave way and let them come back to work."

"I think our generation, those of us born in the 1970s, went through enormous change in every single decade. I've talked to a lot of people about this — not everyone agrees, of course. But I think our generation probably all carries a rebellious streak, a distrust of everything, because everything you were ever told was 'correct' has been knocked down at some point, denied again and again. You have to learn to doubt, to ask what it is you are actually looking at."

"And toughness too — this whole generation came up out of widespread poverty."

Graphics: Lin Yuyao

Unless otherwise noted, the banner and in-text images were provided by Hou Li; the cover image is from Wikimedia Commons.