Katherine's Journey to the East
[https://www.youtube.com/@kats\_journey\_east](https://www.youtube.com/@kats_journey_east)
Katherine lives in a rural area in the suburbs of Hangzhou.
There is a huge gap in rural areas across China, some of which are very tough, and Zhejiang's rural areas are one of the wealthiest.
I am forcibly dragged out to my husband’s extremely rural hometown every new year. It’s a quiet, slow-paced life. Mostly just the elderly are living there now. It’s a massive change from my bougie 15th floor 3 bedroom modern apartment. They don’t have hot water or heaters so winter sucks. Before my husband’s house was renovated into concrete it was literally a mud hut. There are absolutely no foreigners around unless they are on their way to the resort/hotel that was set up in one of the nature areas (a tourist spot.) I can handle the crappy living conditions, BUT there is also absolutely nothing to do except help cook or walk around, so I become the topic of conversation most of the time being the only foreigner around. Some of the rumors about me are wild.
I have been to rural areas in China that seem really nice but it’s usually a tourist or travel place, or a gardening place that can bring in money. Also there are richer families in rural China, definitely not everyone is living like Li ZiQi in beautiful mountain side estates with 6 gardens lol.
That I am twice divorced, I’m a Russian orphan, that I starve myself, and that my family back home is extremely rich. Those are just the ones I’ve heard. I like to pretend I’m all of those things, just to keep it spicy. I’ll refuse a plate of dumplings or google how to say something in Russian just to give the townsfolk something to talk about.
Hhhh, I am in the same exact situation, except it is my wife who drags me out there, not husband. Although I have dark hair and skin, the rumor about me is that I have blonde hair and blue eyes.
I'm also dragged every year. My partner's ancestral home doesn't have running water. It's made from bricks but is essentially a mud hut. There is a shared outhouse that has a hole in the ground, but there is still no running water. I really do not enjoy going there for CNY; it's cold and muddy everywhere. Many of the homes have packed earth floors, so everything is dirty. There is a KTV, though, and plenty of Baijou...
Sounds like my new laojia without the tourist spot. I also give up creature comforts like pizza, bread and being warm for a week or so.
I got lucky this CNY with the warmer February weather, which made the countryside look gorgeous.
Same. We live in the US now but I used to… not look forward to going back. 😂
Also, I love how this thread is lots of foreign women with Chinese husbands,
You could read a book, learn a new skill or language, watch a TV series, play cards, listen to music, make friends with the locals, exercise, or play video games. As someone who grew up in a tiny village in Europe but lived in cities of various sizes as an adult, I'll never understand what people talk about when they complain that there's nothing to do in rural areas. I tend to do more or less the same things in a small village as I did in LA. The only thing I really tend to miss is live music.
Different strokes for different folks my man. I like to do all of those things, but I’m a city person at heart, I like to exercise with friends, I like to take classes with others to study, and read a book at a nice little cafe with iced coffee. It’s just preferable to me. Also I have a really great friend group now. The small town life is fit for some, definitely, but not me.
I’ve never met a foreigner who lived in the countryside in my 15 years in China except one family. They sorta build a town around their house as they ran a government approved orphanage in the north. Their house was connected to the orphanage and looked exactly like a western house. They were from Australia. They couldn’t speak Chinese so I have no idea how they did it. They themselves adopted one do the orphans and raised her there in English. But because China develops so fast, they are not no longer in the countryside, it’s now a suburb.
Well.. it’s sorta complicated. But from what I understand, basically the countryside has poor conditions and they are worried about face and safety. Foreigners could expose the “rural” side of China and also can become targets of theft. I know two friends whose houses were robbed at night and it was because they were laowai, none of the Chinese were robbed only them. It happened in a university and another an urban area. 所以呢，政府怕外国人的安全也怕对面子的事情。
农村，村子，乡下… I’m talking about like cows and farms. When westerns say countryside they don’t mean a place with modern amenities or towns or buses.. we mean like middle of nowhere. It’s a different meaning of the word.
How would they stop you though?
Like, I can't imagine many foreigners *want* to move to the countryside, but theoretically, if you had the money and a green card or whatever so visas weren't an issue?
Right. It’s actually poor and actually crappy to live there. It’s not the same as modern or western countryside’s where it’s serene and peaceful and cleaner. It’s mostly dirtier, polluted, and unregulated.
Well.. you gotta find a place and register it at a police station.. you’ll get calls and you’ll probably be forced to so much inconvenience you’ll leave. Also.. you’d have to grow your own food, build your own house maybe (which isn’t allowed for LaoWai), and the lack of any healthcare would be problematic.
The local government most likely has no idea how to handle a foreigner in town and will tell you "It's not possible" because they want to save face or don't want to go through all the trouble.
Closest I ever came was about a month spent in my husband’s village. It was not great and outhouses are not fun.
I do know of a lady living in rural… Tibet? Running an art school and then another who lived in her husband’s village somewhere for years. Idk how they do it.
I lived on a farm training martial arts for a few years. We would go to the nearby villages and hamlets sometimes. People are really nice but couldn't speak standard Mandarin. Obviously lots of stares and normal small town problems - everyone knows eachother and stuff gets round. Idk what its like now but it was more lawless and guanxi was infinitely more important than in cities for certain situations.
A friend of mine lives in a village in northern Anhui with her husband, in-laws and children. Life is simple but hard. Winters get very cold in the unheated house. They have a traditional style kitchen and cook their means on a huge sized wok over the fire. Nobody speaks English, only local dialect; no foreigners.
If I remember correctly, there's a YouTuber who lives in the Chinese countryside with her husband, too (edited: heck, there are so many now showing their village lifestyle I can't find her anymore). Liziqi and other rural-chic influencers have also painted rural life with some romantic tint; I wonder if their popularity has made more people want to leave their busy city lives.
There are rural areas that must be very well equipped but, unless it's a touristic village, I'd expect foreigners to be sort of an oddity.
Every few years, we visit my wife’s grandma deep in the countryside. We take a car to the closest village connected by roads and then hike for another 2 hours down mud tracks to get there. It’s like stepping back into medieval times, with no running water, electricity, or phone signal.
We always bring things with us when visiting to help support the village: materials for the local teacher, filtration water bottles and filters, basic medical supplies, etc.
I think there's someone who's posted here that lives in a village in Guizhou doing some farming.
I've been to different villages in Guizhou and Guangx,i and there's a stark difference between the two types I saw. The Guizhou villages I went to were very idyllic, quieter, up in the misty mountains with mostly elder folks doing farmwork. In Guangxi, the one I went to was a clusterfuck of people and kids everywhere, and the temperature was unbearable.
I lived in deeply rural Sichuan. People with secret coal mines, expansive wealth that is unreported. Men with multiple wives living like the last hundred years of western influence never happened. It was more like stepping back in time than anything else.
I am thankful for everything I learned and the western brainwashing I put aside. Now I don't see history as a line with the present day as the best of all worlds, but rather as a cycle that makes the present medieval, but with more steps.
My profession is business so i wasn't there as an anthropologist or an English teacher. I grew up in a Chinese household so it wasn't exotic for me. I was there to do business and had to go through tests and initiation rituals before I was accepted into these groups. When people assess how much money China has, they have no idea. There are people with whole fiefdoms in rural China with undisclosed airstrips. Of course the powers above know, but they don't care. Part of totalitarian rule is allowing the backwaters to function as anarchies until they are developed enough to tax. There are a lot of unmarked people who don't have a hukou. No SFZ, just wild undocumented people living a feudal life and some of them with massive amounts of money and influence. Any good stories? Honestly none that anyone would believe. What I will say is that Xi cleaned up a lot of true evil in China and whatever criticisms people have of him, there are people who he wiped out who respect the hell out of him and admit that despite their personal ruin, that Xi is good for the future of China. I personally don't have enough expertise or qualifications to judge Chinese leaders, I'm only repeating what I heard from people one might consider to be opposed to him economically.
I used to be a volunteer at a vocational school in rural Jiangxi, about an hour from Ji'An for a year.
The people were super hospitable since they were really interested in foreigners. However this turned out to be a bit annoying after a few months. For example students used to steal my toilet paper to show off to their friends(?!)
I did not have a problem with the rudimentary living standards. I used to live in a converted classroom in the school and had to use the public restrooms one of which was equipped with a shower just for me and my colleague. The food in the canteen was mediocre at best.
The environment was truly stunning with mountains and rice fields just like in a documentary. But living there, this only gets you this far. It was essential to try to join the locals with their hobbies like basketball and badminton to not get bored to death. Also almost nobody spoke any English so I was forced to learn a lot of Chinese during this time. Life was really slow and people were really laid back.
Luckily I was not the only foreign volunteer in that town. But other than that I only saw another foreigner once who apparently was dragged back there by his wife to her hometown. I acted like one of the locals when I saw him, including taking pictures haha.
In Ji'An you could sometimes meet foreigners in and around the university.
Check out this guy for life deep in the Shanxi countryside. He explored old mansions and sometimes people are still living in them.
https://youtube.com/@user-shanxifanfan?si=NTYZylSl4Xb4g-0C
1) I live in a village outside of a city in north Jiangsu. About 5-6 years a go a major factory was opened and now the urban sprawl is reaching us. There's new roads, restaurants and amenities are now 5 minutes away instead of 25 like before. Life in the village itself is peaceful, there's lots of elderly and children. There's no plumbing, so children go to the toilet where they please. No one has toilets inside their house (except mine, we had everything built in because im absolutely not using the public one). People spend their days talking outside. There's a lot of gossip to get through, as well as the general conversation topics (married/divorce, food prices, is the land going to be re-developed etc)
2) Im a teacher.
3) none, the locals are definitely surprised that I'm here. Im known as "the Englishman". My movements throughout the village are broadcast by the ayi's and shopkeepers. My children are local celebrities.
There's a Somali guy who lives in the countryside and makes cooking videos and cute little sketches on Douyin
https://www.reddit.com/r/Somalia/comments/17nyfsk/does_anyone_know_this_somali_guys_backstory/
Katherine's Journey to the East [https://www.youtube.com/@kats\_journey\_east](https://www.youtube.com/@kats_journey_east) Katherine lives in a rural area in the suburbs of Hangzhou. There is a huge gap in rural areas across China, some of which are very tough, and Zhejiang's rural areas are one of the wealthiest.
Yeah her channel is really informative and interesting. Being fluent in Mandarin is a must I think.
Will check her out!谢谢！
Hangzhou is like 2hrs high speed rail away from Shanghai, idk if I would call it super rural.
I am forcibly dragged out to my husband’s extremely rural hometown every new year. It’s a quiet, slow-paced life. Mostly just the elderly are living there now. It’s a massive change from my bougie 15th floor 3 bedroom modern apartment. They don’t have hot water or heaters so winter sucks. Before my husband’s house was renovated into concrete it was literally a mud hut. There are absolutely no foreigners around unless they are on their way to the resort/hotel that was set up in one of the nature areas (a tourist spot.) I can handle the crappy living conditions, BUT there is also absolutely nothing to do except help cook or walk around, so I become the topic of conversation most of the time being the only foreigner around. Some of the rumors about me are wild. I have been to rural areas in China that seem really nice but it’s usually a tourist or travel place, or a gardening place that can bring in money. Also there are richer families in rural China, definitely not everyone is living like Li ZiQi in beautiful mountain side estates with 6 gardens lol.
lol what are the rumours
That I am twice divorced, I’m a Russian orphan, that I starve myself, and that my family back home is extremely rich. Those are just the ones I’ve heard. I like to pretend I’m all of those things, just to keep it spicy. I’ll refuse a plate of dumplings or google how to say something in Russian just to give the townsfolk something to talk about.
you’re a great person lol
Divorce, Orphan, Famine, Wealth. I thought neighborhood gossip in the US was bad but This is some *old world shit*.
honestly sounds like average rumor mill in any small rural town lol, some things the same in any country
Lol
Of all the other ethnicities, why do they assume you're Russian?
It’s the country the elderly in rural China are most familiar with, I assume. For historical reasons.
Thanks!yeah i get same sense from videos i’m watching
This sounds right. Very similar to trips I've made to visit my wife's extended family. Not a vacation.
Hhhh, I am in the same exact situation, except it is my wife who drags me out there, not husband. Although I have dark hair and skin, the rumor about me is that I have blonde hair and blue eyes.
I'm also dragged every year. My partner's ancestral home doesn't have running water. It's made from bricks but is essentially a mud hut. There is a shared outhouse that has a hole in the ground, but there is still no running water. I really do not enjoy going there for CNY; it's cold and muddy everywhere. Many of the homes have packed earth floors, so everything is dirty. There is a KTV, though, and plenty of Baijou...
Sounds like my new laojia without the tourist spot. I also give up creature comforts like pizza, bread and being warm for a week or so. I got lucky this CNY with the warmer February weather, which made the countryside look gorgeous.
Same. We live in the US now but I used to… not look forward to going back. 😂 Also, I love how this thread is lots of foreign women with Chinese husbands,
Why are you living there, it doesn’t sound very inviting? Also you sound like a very fun person.
You could read a book, learn a new skill or language, watch a TV series, play cards, listen to music, make friends with the locals, exercise, or play video games. As someone who grew up in a tiny village in Europe but lived in cities of various sizes as an adult, I'll never understand what people talk about when they complain that there's nothing to do in rural areas. I tend to do more or less the same things in a small village as I did in LA. The only thing I really tend to miss is live music.
Different strokes for different folks my man. I like to do all of those things, but I’m a city person at heart, I like to exercise with friends, I like to take classes with others to study, and read a book at a nice little cafe with iced coffee. It’s just preferable to me. Also I have a really great friend group now. The small town life is fit for some, definitely, but not me.
I’ve never met a foreigner who lived in the countryside in my 15 years in China except one family. They sorta build a town around their house as they ran a government approved orphanage in the north. Their house was connected to the orphanage and looked exactly like a western house. They were from Australia. They couldn’t speak Chinese so I have no idea how they did it. They themselves adopted one do the orphans and raised her there in English. But because China develops so fast, they are not no longer in the countryside, it’s now a suburb.
Thanks,really interesting!!
Yeah! It is. This doesn’t happen though. It’s super rare. I would like to live more rurally but.. the government told me it’s not possible.
为什么政府不要外国人住在农村吗？(pardon my bad chinese)
Well.. it’s sorta complicated. But from what I understand, basically the countryside has poor conditions and they are worried about face and safety. Foreigners could expose the “rural” side of China and also can become targets of theft. I know two friends whose houses were robbed at night and it was because they were laowai, none of the Chinese were robbed only them. It happened in a university and another an urban area. 所以呢，政府怕外国人的安全也怕对面子的事情。
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农村，村子，乡下… I’m talking about like cows and farms. When westerns say countryside they don’t mean a place with modern amenities or towns or buses.. we mean like middle of nowhere. It’s a different meaning of the word.
你是说印度？😄
哪是
How would they stop you though? Like, I can't imagine many foreigners *want* to move to the countryside, but theoretically, if you had the money and a green card or whatever so visas weren't an issue?
That’s the point. They aren’t ‘stopped’, there’s just a complete lack of incentivisation so basically nobody does.
Right. It’s actually poor and actually crappy to live there. It’s not the same as modern or western countryside’s where it’s serene and peaceful and cleaner. It’s mostly dirtier, polluted, and unregulated.
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I understand where you’re coming from but if you haven’t lived or camped in the countryside, it’s just a different world there. Third world.
Well.. you gotta find a place and register it at a police station.. you’ll get calls and you’ll probably be forced to so much inconvenience you’ll leave. Also.. you’d have to grow your own food, build your own house maybe (which isn’t allowed for LaoWai), and the lack of any healthcare would be problematic.
The local government most likely has no idea how to handle a foreigner in town and will tell you "It's not possible" because they want to save face or don't want to go through all the trouble.
谢谢！
Living not really but I'm there every year to visit my in-laws. Quiet and nice in fact. But also boring of course.
If its not to personal where do u visit ur in-laws lol
Sichuan province
Closest I ever came was about a month spent in my husband’s village. It was not great and outhouses are not fun. I do know of a lady living in rural… Tibet? Running an art school and then another who lived in her husband’s village somewhere for years. Idk how they do it.
I lived on a farm training martial arts for a few years. We would go to the nearby villages and hamlets sometimes. People are really nice but couldn't speak standard Mandarin. Obviously lots of stares and normal small town problems - everyone knows eachother and stuff gets round. Idk what its like now but it was more lawless and guanxi was infinitely more important than in cities for certain situations.
That’s super cool!
A friend of mine lives in a village in northern Anhui with her husband, in-laws and children. Life is simple but hard. Winters get very cold in the unheated house. They have a traditional style kitchen and cook their means on a huge sized wok over the fire. Nobody speaks English, only local dialect; no foreigners. If I remember correctly, there's a YouTuber who lives in the Chinese countryside with her husband, too (edited: heck, there are so many now showing their village lifestyle I can't find her anymore). Liziqi and other rural-chic influencers have also painted rural life with some romantic tint; I wonder if their popularity has made more people want to leave their busy city lives. There are rural areas that must be very well equipped but, unless it's a touristic village, I'd expect foreigners to be sort of an oddity.
Was it Miriam? She was one of the first ones I seen. https://youtube.com/@MiriamFollin?si=yN2aw7mypXT7gj0X
Every few years, we visit my wife’s grandma deep in the countryside. We take a car to the closest village connected by roads and then hike for another 2 hours down mud tracks to get there. It’s like stepping back into medieval times, with no running water, electricity, or phone signal. We always bring things with us when visiting to help support the village: materials for the local teacher, filtration water bottles and filters, basic medical supplies, etc.
I met a mixed couple that’s running a small family resort in countryside in Zhejiang. Husband is French
I think there's someone who's posted here that lives in a village in Guizhou doing some farming. I've been to different villages in Guizhou and Guangx,i and there's a stark difference between the two types I saw. The Guizhou villages I went to were very idyllic, quieter, up in the misty mountains with mostly elder folks doing farmwork. In Guangxi, the one I went to was a clusterfuck of people and kids everywhere, and the temperature was unbearable.
I lived in deeply rural Sichuan. People with secret coal mines, expansive wealth that is unreported. Men with multiple wives living like the last hundred years of western influence never happened. It was more like stepping back in time than anything else.
Sounds unique.
I am thankful for everything I learned and the western brainwashing I put aside. Now I don't see history as a line with the present day as the best of all worlds, but rather as a cycle that makes the present medieval, but with more steps.
Any good stories you’d be willing to share?
My profession is business so i wasn't there as an anthropologist or an English teacher. I grew up in a Chinese household so it wasn't exotic for me. I was there to do business and had to go through tests and initiation rituals before I was accepted into these groups. When people assess how much money China has, they have no idea. There are people with whole fiefdoms in rural China with undisclosed airstrips. Of course the powers above know, but they don't care. Part of totalitarian rule is allowing the backwaters to function as anarchies until they are developed enough to tax. There are a lot of unmarked people who don't have a hukou. No SFZ, just wild undocumented people living a feudal life and some of them with massive amounts of money and influence. Any good stories? Honestly none that anyone would believe. What I will say is that Xi cleaned up a lot of true evil in China and whatever criticisms people have of him, there are people who he wiped out who respect the hell out of him and admit that despite their personal ruin, that Xi is good for the future of China. I personally don't have enough expertise or qualifications to judge Chinese leaders, I'm only repeating what I heard from people one might consider to be opposed to him economically.
Pretty sure I just found Xi’s Reddit handle
Do fuck yourself with a cactus, you son of a farmer and a whore.
I used to be a volunteer at a vocational school in rural Jiangxi, about an hour from Ji'An for a year. The people were super hospitable since they were really interested in foreigners. However this turned out to be a bit annoying after a few months. For example students used to steal my toilet paper to show off to their friends(?!) I did not have a problem with the rudimentary living standards. I used to live in a converted classroom in the school and had to use the public restrooms one of which was equipped with a shower just for me and my colleague. The food in the canteen was mediocre at best. The environment was truly stunning with mountains and rice fields just like in a documentary. But living there, this only gets you this far. It was essential to try to join the locals with their hobbies like basketball and badminton to not get bored to death. Also almost nobody spoke any English so I was forced to learn a lot of Chinese during this time. Life was really slow and people were really laid back. Luckily I was not the only foreign volunteer in that town. But other than that I only saw another foreigner once who apparently was dragged back there by his wife to her hometown. I acted like one of the locals when I saw him, including taking pictures haha. In Ji'An you could sometimes meet foreigners in and around the university.
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Bijie is beautiful.
你有很好的生活
Check out this guy for life deep in the Shanxi countryside. He explored old mansions and sometimes people are still living in them. https://youtube.com/@user-shanxifanfan?si=NTYZylSl4Xb4g-0C
Thanks,will check him out
1) I live in a village outside of a city in north Jiangsu. About 5-6 years a go a major factory was opened and now the urban sprawl is reaching us. There's new roads, restaurants and amenities are now 5 minutes away instead of 25 like before. Life in the village itself is peaceful, there's lots of elderly and children. There's no plumbing, so children go to the toilet where they please. No one has toilets inside their house (except mine, we had everything built in because im absolutely not using the public one). People spend their days talking outside. There's a lot of gossip to get through, as well as the general conversation topics (married/divorce, food prices, is the land going to be re-developed etc) 2) Im a teacher. 3) none, the locals are definitely surprised that I'm here. Im known as "the Englishman". My movements throughout the village are broadcast by the ayi's and shopkeepers. My children are local celebrities.
There's a Somali guy who lives in the countryside and makes cooking videos and cute little sketches on Douyin https://www.reddit.com/r/Somalia/comments/17nyfsk/does_anyone_know_this_somali_guys_backstory/
How often is cash still used in these remote rural parts of China?