Reminiscing about the Past in My Seventies, Part 2: Human Hunting and Gathering Traditions as Seen Through the Games of Rural Children

(Li Yousheng, November 2017)

Taoism advocates taking animals, children, and even infants as role models to pursue the realm of the true person. If today’s world represents civilized humanity transforming its innate playful traditions into real life, then six thousand years of civilization has been a game played out in earnest. Although we can see traces of playfulness in people’s leisure activities today, the violence and pornography in online games, movies, and dramas have strayed far from humanity.

In the 1950s, rural China was still in a quasi-primitive stage of society, close to a natural way of life. If the farming and weaving practices of adult farmers had already moved beyond the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of modern humans over the past 200,000 years, then the lifestyle of rural children in the 1950s better reflected human nature; they were still naturally intelligent humans. From my observation, children in my hometown spent their time on their own, with adults offering no interference, only paying slight attention to safety, such as not allowing children to play with knives—which are not natural objects but creations of civilization. The result was that rural children in China in the 1950s lived entirely in nature, allowing their human nature to be fully revealed.

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle of pre-civilization humans can be seen as an innate instinct, not an invention of any one person, nor a cultural creation in human history. Prehistoric people, walking through forests or grasslands, even when not hungry, found genuine enjoyment in picking sweet wild fruits and eating them. This was also the kind of game I played as a child in a rural area of northern China; it can be seen entirely as an expression of human nature, rather than a creation of cultural tradition.

In my hometown, five- or six-year-old children would gather together, led by older children, and play around the village. Usually, there were groups of three to five children, mostly boys, but a few girls would join in. The girls would also form their own groups of three to five, usually sitting together at home or in the alleyways playing games like “house,” using clods of dirt and sticks to represent their parents and children, then taking turns making up stories about their family life. Here, I will mainly describe the games I participated in, which were mostly played by boys.

Near my village was an old riverbed overgrown with weeds, a frequent playground for us, but we also played in orchards, cemeteries, and even fields. We picked wild fruits and vegetables to eat, and caught insects and small animals like field mice. After catching them, we would release them immediately, but often we would also start a fire on the spot to roast them and then share them. We could catch and gather a lot of grasshoppers and several common wild vegetables, sometimes collecting them to take home where the adults would cook them and we would eat them together. My impression is that this was one of the most popular activities for children in our area, comparable to the hunting and gathering activities of prehistoric humans. I often caught grasshoppers around the house, roasted them in the ashes left over from my parents’ cooking, and then shared them with my younger siblings.

Zoologists believe that young mammals play games in preparation for adulthood. Human children’s games should also be like this, preparing them for adulthood. Besides foraging and catching animals, we also have purely playful activities. These include games like hide-and-seek and races, which both boys and girls participate in, and wrestling for boys.

All of these games and play activities stem from human instinct and can be completed on an instant impulse. Because of this, these games and play activities usually occur within a context of group strolling and wandering. There are also two games that belong to the inheritance of traditional culture, although they may also begin with children’s own improvisation: kicking a cot and playing marbles.

The game of kicking a house involves drawing five or six consecutive squares on the ground. Children then hop on one foot, kicking a tile from one square to another. The first person to complete all five or six squares wins. I saw white children playing this game in Canada at least once. The marbles are glass balls, one or two centimeters in diameter. These marbles can be replaced with pebbles collected from the riverbank or clay balls made by the children and then baked in a fire. In my hometown, there are two or three different ways to play this game, all involving hitting a target with a single marble. The most common way is to hold the marble in your hand and flick it with your thumb to hit the opponent’s marble.

During the Great Leap Forward in 1958 when I was in middle school, a classmate wrote down the following bold words:

Using the Earth as a projectile.

It landed on my eyelashes.

It’s stuck.

I can’t get down.

These two games, along with wrestling and racing mentioned above, all have winning and losing as their ultimate goal. However, children only pursue the immediate pleasure of winning and forget about it afterward. Therefore, in my hometown, there are no titles like “wrestling master.” This is similar to how prehistoric tribes used wars conducted according to certain rituals to resolve disputes, where the victor would not take a single penny from the loser. Only civilized humans have linked war and other forms of conflict with material interests. There is only one conclusion: children, driven by human nature, only know the immediate pleasure of playing games and have no consideration for long-term material gains or losses—in other words, they have an innate, leisurely, and Taoist perspective.

In 1954, I was eleven years old. I walked twelve li (about 5 kilometers) with about ten classmates from my village to attend primary school in nearby Daguo Village. Every morning we would gather together, walk there together, and walk back together after school. On the way, besides chatting and playing games, we often chased each other and wrestled. That year, Hebei had a lot of rain, and we had to wade through a small swamp. We tried to catch fish there for fun, but the fish were few and small. One day, we suddenly got the idea to throw all our shoes into the muddy water, and then we all groped around in the mud to find them, calling it “fishing”—treating the shoes as fish.

The closest thing to these games played by rural children is the casual conversation of rural women. Usually, three or five women would sit together in the courtyard of a farmhouse, most holding needlework, such as mending clothes, while a few sat empty-handed chatting. They were clearly primarily engaged in conversation and entertainment, their needlework limited to occasional stitches. This needlework seemed more for show, a constraint of their conscience than of today’s moral standards. Their conversation consisted of village gossip and old stories; they often chuckled, but not excessively. We can infer that women in the hunter-gatherer era also mended clothes with animal hides in this way.