Responses of the elderly

Declines in physical health meant that people over 65 had fewer options when it came to responses to the drought, relative to both young people and middle-aged couples.

None of the villagers belonging to this group of “the elderly” were engaged in off-farm work. In general, their experiences of and responses to drought were closely related to the amount of social and economic support that other family members provided to them. In the field site hamlets, because they received income support from their children, some of the elderly were able to partially or completely withdraw from farm work. Therefore, drought exerted very limited impact on their daily life. However, they were not passive dependants, but constantly contributed to their households. Studies of retirement decisions in rural China suggest that rural elderly “work until they drop” (Pang et al. 2004). This is also confirmed in my field site hamlets. Informants repeatedly said that as long as they are mobile, they keep working.

For example, Bai Jian lives with his wife in Baijia Hamlet. He is in his late sixties, and she is over seventy. The couple has two children. Their daughter is married and lives in the township. Their son and daughter-in-law live in Baijia and take major responsibility for supporting Bai and his wife. Bai had a heart attack in 2007, after which the old couple withdrew from tobacco production and gave their tobacco land to their son’s household to farm. Since then, the old couple has only tilled small parcels of rice and vegetable land for household consumption. The majority of their living costs have been covered by their son and daughter-in-law.

During the drought, the household of Bai Jian’s son suffered a great decline in income. As with other middle-aged couples in Baijia, Bai’s son and daughter-in-law expanded their production to make up for the losses. In the meantime, the son got a part-time job in a nearby quarry. Bai and his wife also re-joined tobacco production to relieve their children’s burden. They helped with light work such as composting and transplanting. “They are so busy, and we need to do something to help them. Growing tobacco is definitely hard work, but we are accustomed to it, and besides, it is for the family,” said Bai Jian. Meanwhile, Bai’s wife helped her daughter-in-law with some domestic and care work such as cooking and looking after her two school-aged grandchildren.

Despite the considerable effort old people have devoted to both production and reproduction work to sustain their households, cultural stereotypes of the elderly as unproductive influence their positions in the household and generally exclude them

from household decision-making processes. Many old people with whom I talked in the field site hamlets described themselves as hard-working farmers having the responsibility of helping their adult children through the hard times of the drought, but they rarely said they made an individual contribution to the household.

Elderly men in my field site hamlets were likely to be even more deprecating of their abilities and contributions than women. As argued by Jacka (2014, 202), even after they have become too frail to work in the fields, women continue to be appreciated for their domestic work and childcare, whereas men, once they are no longer able to work either in waged labour or on the farm, tend to lose their respected role as breadwinner.

In contrast with the elderly who were supported by their families and therefore, less affected by the drought, old people who were unable to fully support themselves due to physical constraints, and were also unsupported by their children for various reasons lived in a miserable condition during the drought. In Shijia and Baijia, slightly less than 30 percent of old people belonged to this group. Yang Rucai and his wife, both in their seventies, provide an example.

When I was doing my household survey in Shijia, I asked villagers which household suffered most in the drought in their community. Over 70 percent of informants referred to Yang Rucai and his wife. The couple has three adult children. Their only son, who works in Kunming, has not provided any economic support to his parents since leaving the village five years ago. According to other villagers, he has an internet addiction problem and what he earns barely covers his own expenses, let alone supports his aged parents. The couple also has two daughters; both of them are married within Shijia. The elder daughter’s household is one of the wealthiest in Shijia, with the largest number of goats. However, the son-in-law has always looked down upon the old couple and refuses to provide them with any help. He has never invited his in-laws to his household for a cup of tea or for the pig-slaughtering meals and has prevented his two daughters from visiting and showing their respect to their grandparents.

During the course of my fieldwork, Yang Rucai’s younger daughter and son-in-law were doing construction work in Guizhou Province. According to Yang, they left the village for off-farm employment in 2013, because tobacco production was unprofitable after consecutive years of drought and they had limited savings to invest in goat raising.

Since the young couple has a school-aged boy to support, they send very limited remittances to their parents (about 1000 yuan in each Lunar New Year). Before their migration, they helped Yang and his wife with tilling their land as well as herding and feeding their domestic livestock. After they left, the old couple had to undertake all these tasks by themselves. They were too weak to grow tobacco, so instead, they tilled 3 mu of land with vegetables and raised two pigs and three cattle.

When drought disturbed the daily life of villagers in Shijia, Yang and his wife encountered a great crisis. Yang’s household used to share a small collective well with four other neighbouring households. During the drought, the well dried up. The neighbours complained about two households, who always overused the ground water. However, the two households insisted that the drying of the well was caused by water shortage, and therefore, refused to take any responsibility. Meanwhile, these two households worked together and dug a new well for themselves. In response to this, the other three households, including Yang’s household, also planned to dig a new well together. The old couple were too poor to afford the construction fee, so they negotiated with their neighbours and they made an agreement that Yang could use the well but would be charged 40 yuan per month for the water bill. However, several months later, Yang and his wife were accused of wasting and overusing water by their neighbours and were declined access to the well. Since then, the old couple have had to walk long distances to fetch water from the village collective well. Even worse, Yang Rucai was diagnosed with a brain tumour at the end of 2014. From then on, his wife undertook all the agricultural and domestic work by herself, and in order to pay the medical fees for her husband, she sold all the livestock to her elder son-in-law, but only received about 10,000 yuan, definitely an uneven trade.