NOBLE COW: MUNCHING GRASS LOOKING CURIOUS AND JUST HANGING AROUND
23.
"Help! My Cow Speaks Cantonese!"
China’s most ambitious projects of the last two decades, the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Diversion, have required hundreds of thousands of villagers to move to new homes far from where they were born.
For the residents of Xingang village in Guangdong province, it’s ten years since the government moved them from their birthplace in Chongqing Municipality, to an area 1,500 kilometers from their original homes.
Integration into their new hometown is a long process and will take a lot longer than ten years.
At first, lots of migrants couldn’t get used to life in Guangdong and wanted to return to Chongqing.
Most of the migrants didn’t have that option – they had nothing left in their home region; relatives and friends had also been relocated.
Migrants have encountered many difficulties, one of the biggest being the language— it’s hard for them to learn Cantonese, the Guangdong dialect. Local people can always tell that they are migrants by their accent.
Still they are able to manage the language issue with the locals somehow. But the toughest part is dealing with the animals!
After buying a cow in Guangdong, one migrant says that he couldn’t get the animal to obey him. It was used to Cantonese, and didn’t understand the Chongqing dialect of its new master!
"Help! My Cow Speaks Cantonese!"
China’s most ambitious projects of the last two decades, the Three Gorges Dam and the South-North Water Diversion, have required hundreds of thousands of villagers to move to new homes far from where they were born.
For the residents of Xingang village in Guangdong province, it’s ten years since the government moved them from their birthplace in Chongqing Municipality, to an area 1,500 kilometers from their original homes.
Integration into their new hometown is a long process and will take a lot longer than ten years.
At first, lots of migrants couldn’t get used to life in Guangdong and wanted to return to Chongqing.
Most of the migrants didn’t have that option – they had nothing left in their home region; relatives and friends had also been relocated.
Migrants have encountered many difficulties, one of the biggest being the language— it’s hard for them to learn Cantonese, the Guangdong dialect. Local people can always tell that they are migrants by their accent.
Still they are able to manage the language issue with the locals somehow. But the toughest part is dealing with the animals!
After buying a cow in Guangdong, one migrant says that he couldn’t get the animal to obey him. It was used to Cantonese, and didn’t understand the Chongqing dialect of its new master!
“Human society needs only sufficient grain and sufficient cows to solve its economic problems. All other things but these two are artificial necessities created by man to kill his valuable life at the human level and waste his time in things which are not needed.”
—Srila Prabhupada (Srimad Bhagavatam 3.2.29)