... Chinese look forward to [old age] as a relaxed time of leisure and high status. The "entering the ancestral hall" ceremony at age 60 celebrates a man's release from the backbreaking slog of field labor.... But whether he actually retires at this point depends on having one son, or better yet two, to slog in his place. I remember seeing a grizzled old peasant at work on a private plot some distance from the village on a dreary winter's day, his hoe rising and falling in a slow, tired rhythm. In his tattered black cotton trousers and coat of coarse cotton burlap, shoeless despite the cold, he made a pathetic figure alone in the fields. I judged him to be nearly 70, and asked my companion in surprise what such an elderly man was doing in the fields. "That's Old Man Wang," he replied. "His wife died several years ago, and his daughters have all married out. He lives alone." Then, after we had gone a few steps farther, he grimly observed, "You see, that is what happens when you have no sons." Wang, dirt-poor and pitied by his neighbors, has no choice but to continue toiling in the fields until he dies.
--Stephen Mosher in Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese (pub. 1983)
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