On a rolling, treeless plain in a poor, rural village some 300 miles south of Beijing, Yang Xiangzhong is born on July 31, 1959 -- the year of the pig in the Chinese zodiac calendar.
Children born under that sign, Chinese astrologers say, tend to pursue goals with all their strength. There is no left or right for ``boar'' people. They never retreat.
Xiangzhong's parents rejoice at the arrival of their second-born son, but their joy does not change the grim mathematics of life in this small farming village of 1,000 on the edge of the North China plain. Each acre of land must support six or seven people, and if the Yang family is to survive they must scrape every calorie from the soil.
Xiangzhong's birth tilts the demographic balance of power in the village more heavily toward the Yang clan, who in the vast sweep of Chinese history are interlopers, having arrived here a mere three centuries ago. For more than a millennium, the village has been dominated by the Liang family, which is why Communist Party officials call the village Liangshan Jia. Both the Liangs and the Yangs call the cluster of earthen homes Dong Cun, or East Village.
Even though there are several settlements within a few miles, farmers seldom walk beyond their fields of wheat or corn. The inhabitants of Dong Cun live in isolation in the heart of the most populous nation in the world, intimate partners in a precarious bargain with land and nature.
The bargain is about to be broken.
The year of Xiangzhong's birth is, as the Chinese curse says, an ``interesting time.'' Supreme Leader Mao Tse-tung wants to catapult China into the ranks of industrial nations and cement its role as an emerging world power. Upsetting centuries of rural tradition, Mao calls upon villagers across the nation to forge steel as well as tend their crops.
It is Mao's Great Leap Forward, and it is a disaster. Bad weather and worse policy cause a catastrophic famine. Millions die of starvation.
In Dong Cun, where the misery ravages one family after the next, Xiangzhong's aunt comes by to check on her brother's family. She looks down at the emaciated infant and is shocked.
``Is he still alive?'' she asks.
It takes a year for the sharp bite of famine to slowly withdraw from Dong Cun, only to be replaced by the dull ache of hunger. As bad as times are, Xiangzhong's family has a touch more to eat than the neighbors because of the 10 cents a day Xiangzhong's father, Yang Wu-kui, earns teaching school.
Dong Cun had few teachers before World War II, but in 1947, Yang Wu-kui took a small knapsack with rice and a bowl and walked 20 miles to take an entrance exam for the Chinese equivalent of middle school. Yang Wu-kui's parents believed that if the teenager could learn to read and write, he could earn a few yuan recording documents for their illiterate neighbors. Yang Wu-kui was elated when he became one of a handful of farmers' sons in his country to be accepted to school.
That passion for learning was passed down from Wu-kui to his children. But it becomes clear early that the desire is strongest in Xiangzhong.
A Brother's Care
When Xiangzhong is 9, his mother gives birth to her fifth and last child, a boy. The father takes Xiangzhong aside and tells him, ``You must care for your brother. Your mother is needed in the fields.''
Xiangzhong cleans and dresses the infant every day. He chews hard sweet potatoes into a soft paste, then pushes it into the baby's mouth with his tongue. He bundles his brother in a homespun cotton blanket and takes the baby with him to the rudimentary village school.
But Xiangzhong's teacher takes one look at the infant, proclaims him disruptive and orders the children home. Xiangzhong does not go home. He positions himself outside the classroom window. There, day after day, through heat, dust or bitterly cold winds, the hungry child squats, devouring the teacher's lessons, feeding his baby brother the yams that he desperately wants to swallow himself.
Xiangzhong's intense desire to learn is at odds with the goals of Mao's Cultural Revolution, which prizes dedication to the party over personal ambition.
In a massive political, cultural and geographic upheaval, millions of students join the Red Guard to ensure the proper level of revolutionary ardor among the people. Many intellectuals are killed or sent to work on farms. China's university system is gutted. College entrance exams are abolished.
In the early 1970s, however, Communist Party officials back away from some of the movement's excesses and relent ever so slightly. They begin to select students for advanced study based upon their work ethic and commitment to the party.
Xiangzhong's father lobbies party officials to take his oldest son. Under Confucian tradition, the entire family works to advance the career of the eldest boy, and Xiangzhong knows his brother's selection from among all the youth of 17 villages is a great honor. He feels great pride that his brother will be one of the first from his village to attend college. He also strives to hide a deep and abiding sense of disappointment. He knows party officials will never select a second member of the same family in the same village.
Xiangzhong, still frail from his bout with starvation as an infant, resolves to serve his country and village through hard work. He chooses the dirtiest and least prestigious job in his village -- the care and feeding of pigs. He and his assistant, a mentally retarded man, spend their days slogging through waste and offal to clean out pig pens and feed the animals from scraps of village garbage.
His mother is appalled at his choice.
``You will never find a wife with that filth all over you,'' she scolds him in disgust.
``I will raise the best pigs in the district,'' Xiangzhong responds.
While he labors, he sings songs he learned from party cadres as a child. Local officials honor him for his diligence. They whisper to him that he has a future as a Communist Party functionary, one of the highest honors to which a villager can aspire.
A Thirst To Learn
One day in 1977, Xiangzhong is walking home from work and a friend tells him the Communist Party has reinstated the national college entrance exam, which had been abolished a decade earlier. Although party officials have promised him a political job, Xiangzhong gambles that if he can score well on the test, he might be chosen to attend a local agricultural college. He has only 28 days to prepare. Every night, after tending the pigs, he reads any book he can find in the village.
On the day of the exam, tens of millions of Chinese set out to district test centers. Across the most populous nation on Earth, a half generation of the best, brightest and most ambitious youth are on the march with a single goal in mind. Many, like Xiangzhong, are in their late teens. Many others are in their 20s, 30s or even 40s. All are eager for their first chance to obtain a higher education.
Only 1 percent of those who take the exam that first year are admitted to college. In China, this first class is dubbed the ``Fortune-favored Children'' and the campuses they attend the ``Edens of Contemporary Youth.'' Most rural students attend agricultural colleges in the countryside, but Xiangzhong is not admitted to one of them.
Instead, he is one of only 400 students from across China to be admitted to Beijing Agricultural University, the most prestigious agricultural school in the country.
Having never traveled more than a few miles from his home village, Xiangzhong soon finds himself in China's capital. The first few days in the big city, he sleeps in the university hallways because the Red Army has balked at abandoning the buildings they occupied for so many years during the Cultural Revolution. When the military leaves, Xiangzhong is assigned to a room he will share with five roommates.
That same year, a Western-educated pioneer in the in vitro fertilization of farm animals is restored to his post at the university. An Min, who had been banished to the countryside for insufficient revolutionary zeal, notices Xiangzhong's ambition and intellect and urges him to explore the mysteries of animal reproduction.
By the early 1980s, with the costs of Mao's Cultural Revolution apparent, China begins to ship its best and brightest students overseas for the graduate education it is not equipped to provide.
Among the ``Fortune-favored Children'' who take a new national exam, Xiangzhong receives the highest score in the country among those seeking an overseas degree in animal science.
Just five years removed from the hip-deep muck of a pig pen, Xiangzhong prepares to leave China for the United States.
He vows he will someday repay the debt.