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An honest farmer reminds us of trust
By Wang Yong |
March 6, 2013, Wednesday
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Print Edition
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"MAO gu gu," said elderly Uncle Shi with a grin. He was replying to my neighbors' question why he didn't use a scale to weigh the vegetables they wanted to buy.
"Please don't mind, I just mao gu gu," he shouted from the other end of his farm field on a sunny Sunday afternoon. He was so candid that we all laughed with pleasure.
Mao gu gu is a local expression for "rough estimates" - mao means "rough" and gu gu means "estimate." We trusted his "invisible scale" - his conscience.
Uncle Shi is 70 years old. He began to work in the fields when he was 8. He and his 68-year-old wife, Ms Zhang, now own one and a half mu (0.1 hectares) of land on which they grow a wide variety of vegetables.
On Sunday, my neighbors and my family altogether bought 45 yuan (US$7.22) worth of freshly picked vegetables from the Shi and Zhang's field, enough to feed us for at least three nights.
No need to double check
Not for a moment did we think of double-checking the weight of our purchases after we went home. There was no need. As a frequent patron of local veggie markets, I could see with my eyes and feel with my hands that Uncle Shi gave us more than our money's worth.
What I "harvested" on Sunday were not just several bags of fresh vegetables, but also a sense of empathy with and trust among strangers.
I have met different kinds of people like Shi who are trustworthy, from craftsmen to migrant workers to taxi drivers. There's trust all around.
But if you expose yourself to the media world, that's another story - it's full of cheats and frauds, from food scandals to Ponzi schemes. I typed the Chinese words for "trust" in a major news search engine yesterday and found most results to be about a China short of trust.
What the media says may or may not be exaggerated, but if you trust media only, you will lose a significant amount of pleasure from trusting and being trusted in your daily life.
I have been cheated, for sure, but it sweeps too broadly to say - as many reporters would - that China faces a crisis of trust. Those reporters see a tree, not a forest.
Whenever I read such news headlines as "Why there's more trust in the West than in China?" I ignore them.
"Please don't mind, I just mao gu gu," he shouted from the other end of his farm field on a sunny Sunday afternoon. He was so candid that we all laughed with pleasure.
Mao gu gu is a local expression for "rough estimates" - mao means "rough" and gu gu means "estimate." We trusted his "invisible scale" - his conscience.
Uncle Shi is 70 years old. He began to work in the fields when he was 8. He and his 68-year-old wife, Ms Zhang, now own one and a half mu (0.1 hectares) of land on which they grow a wide variety of vegetables.
On Sunday, my neighbors and my family altogether bought 45 yuan (US$7.22) worth of freshly picked vegetables from the Shi and Zhang's field, enough to feed us for at least three nights.
No need to double check
Not for a moment did we think of double-checking the weight of our purchases after we went home. There was no need. As a frequent patron of local veggie markets, I could see with my eyes and feel with my hands that Uncle Shi gave us more than our money's worth.
What I "harvested" on Sunday were not just several bags of fresh vegetables, but also a sense of empathy with and trust among strangers.
I have met different kinds of people like Shi who are trustworthy, from craftsmen to migrant workers to taxi drivers. There's trust all around.
But if you expose yourself to the media world, that's another story - it's full of cheats and frauds, from food scandals to Ponzi schemes. I typed the Chinese words for "trust" in a major news search engine yesterday and found most results to be about a China short of trust.
What the media says may or may not be exaggerated, but if you trust media only, you will lose a significant amount of pleasure from trusting and being trusted in your daily life.
I have been cheated, for sure, but it sweeps too broadly to say - as many reporters would - that China faces a crisis of trust. Those reporters see a tree, not a forest.
Whenever I read such news headlines as "Why there's more trust in the West than in China?" I ignore them.
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