I spent several days in a village in Henan during a stretch of heat above 40°C, and the experience overturned my old assumption that rural life had already improved dramatically. Some things have improved on the surface, but the basic hardship is still there, and in many cases it remains relentless.

The forecast high was 42°C. Because of the drought, people still had to irrigate their fields. They got up at four in the morning, came back before eleven to rest, then went out again after three in the afternoon. On paper, that schedule avoids the hottest hours at noon. In reality, when the temperature peaks at 42°C, simply standing outside at daybreak is enough to make you sweat, let alone working in the fields.

Most of the people still farming are already in their sixties or seventies. Farming does not pay, so younger people do not want to do it and often cannot bear the physical toll anyway. A family plants one crop of wheat and then one crop of corn. Except for winter, there is almost always work to do. Yet the annual income from one mu of land is less than 1,000 yuan. If a household only has a few mu, then farming alone brings in just a few thousand yuan a year, and even that depends on favorable weather.

Because that income is nowhere near enough, people have to take temporary jobs whenever there is a gap in the farming cycle. That is why it is common in the countryside to see men and women in their sixties and seventies still doing casual labor for others. Their age works against them, and most have no specialized skills, so the daily pay is usually only a few dozen yuan. If the work is especially heavy, it might rise to a little over one hundred.

Many homes now have air conditioners, which is visible proof that village life is better than it used to be. But having one installed does not mean people use it freely. A lot of families are reluctant to turn it on because they cannot bear the electricity cost. They rely on fans or whatever shade they can find instead.

That makes hospitality revealing. When a guest arrives, the first thing the host does is not offer a seat or pour water, but switch on the air conditioner. Even after the guest has sat there for half an hour, the room may still not have cooled down, and everyone is already soaked in sweat. When the guest finally leaves, the host gets to enjoy a brief, almost luxurious spell of cool air.

The same contradiction shows up in household toilets. In response to the push to modernize rural sanitation, many families installed Western-style toilets. But villages generally do not have the drainage channels or sewage treatment systems needed to handle toilet wastewater. So beside the toilet, many households buried a large plastic tank to collect waste, and when it fills up they have to call a suction truck to empty it.

Each pumping costs 50 yuan, which is painful for rural families. The water used for flushing also costs money. So in some homes people have simply smashed through the bottom of the toilet and set it over the old squat pit, avoiding both flushing and pumping expenses. The result, however, is that a toilet that cannot be flushed is even more disgusting than the original squat toilet. The waste sticks to the bowl, and it is uncomfortably close to the body.

The villagers still retain the traditional warmth and simplicity that people often associate with rural life. Guests are always offered fruit and snacks. But if a guest truly lacks social awareness and enthusiastically eats through everything on offer, the host will almost certainly show visible distress at the cost. In that sense, rural hospitality, ritual refusal, and even fierce-sounding arguments over who should accept what have become part of a formalized social code. If you do not understand that code—if you take every polite insistence literally—you can easily become an unwelcome guest.

Because incomes are generally low, many elderly parents live separately from their adult children in what is treated as a separate household. This separation is not just about living apart. It also means financial independence. As a result, many people are still forced to support themselves through manual labor well into their seventies.

This arrangement also weakens emotional bonds within families. Some elderly people have several children, yet still live in the most dilapidated courtyard and endure the harshest conditions in old age, almost as if they have been left to "return to nature" for their final years. Their children, being younger, stronger, and often equipped with some practical work skills, usually live better.

There is also a cruel paradox: the more children people have, the harder their old age may become. Parents are expected to build houses and arrange marriages for each son. Naturally, more sons means a heavier burden, and the cost is often paid over decades.

What makes it harder to watch is that people can leave their own elderly parents in the worst house, then turn around and mock or lecture others for being unfilial. That habit of ridicule and moralizing seems to be part of village culture too. Together with the ceremonial warmth shown to guests, it formed my strongest impression of the place, and it was far from the idealized image many people hold.

That does not mean rural people are inherently malicious or hypocritical. To me, poverty is the real cause. When life is financially strained but people still feel compelled to maintain etiquette and keep up appearances, a distorted kind of falseness develops. For people from cities who are used to directness, this can be difficult to navigate. If you enter the village but do not adapt to its customs, you may quickly become an object of ridicule.

The lack of information also seems to encourage empty talk and exaggerated claims. In a way, it comes from the same place as ritualized hospitality under financial strain.

What I took away from this trip was a sense of scarcity in both material and spiritual life. That scarcity shapes the everyday hardship of rural living and helps explain why old age in the countryside can so often look painfully bleak.