Silkworms
SilkwormsSpring Silkworms
"Spring Silkworms" reflected the life in a village where for hundreds of years the pattern of everyday life seemed to have remained largely unbroken. It also inspires a lot of social qualities. The feelings that the story mourned over are very universal and common in people during that time.
All the family in the village ran a silkworm business. They were ran by their own family too because hiring people would cost more money. Family member was definitely the cheapest and safest human resource. Old T'ung Pao's family was quite successful when he was young. However, the phosphorous did not maintain after a generation. Yet, the structure and hardship of his family continued to mirror the rigidity of traditional Chinese society. They borrowed money to buy more mulberry trees for the silkworms. After they had sold the silk, they would repay part of the debt. There is never enough to cover the whole debt because the harvest was always worse than they expected. Even if they had a great harvest on the cocoons, there would not be enough people to spin the silk. They were never be able to get out of debt. It is amazing how they managed to survive under such poor economy. Things such as predicting harvest by the amount of sprouts that a garlic put out, the way they isolated Lotus believing that she would bring bad luck to them just because her family had a bad harvest, and Huang's interest in Taoism, they were all somehow reflection of Mao's affection. Just around the same period of time, he has been encouraging the peasants for abandoning the worship of Gods and rejecting Buddhism. T'ung Pao hated the foreigners. Since they brought in foreign goods in, in other words, they brough in competitions. The global power seemed to have shifted irrevocably from East to West since the Opium War in 1842, in a clash of cultures amid an atmosphere of ignorance...
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