Moving from mud huts to apartments

Wang Desheng said his earliest memory is of two shabby huts made of mud, reeds and straw. It's where he lived with his parents and three siblings in the Xiangyang people's commune in Nanjing's Jiangpu county.

The huts were built by a river. When he was 3 years old, he remembers, the inside of the huts became as muddy as the unpaved roads outside whenever it rained.

"The two huts collapsed after one heavy downpour," said Wang, now 47. "We had to move to the commune's oil workshop. My father worked from summer to winter to build another hut for us."

He remembers every step involved. His father first made bundles of reeds, binding them together with straw, before using the bundles to form four walls and a roof. Before covering the entire structure with mud, he erected wooden pillars inside to support the weight.

"The hut was easy to build but couldn't ward off the winter wind," Wang said. "We could feel the wind blowing inside. The walls, even though they were supported by wood, fell down easily on windy days. One day, a falling wall smashed an enamel bowl that my parents had bought for me. As a child, I was heartbroken for days."

The precarious living quarters were not the only problem the family faced. Wang's parents had to figure out how to feed six people on a combined income of less than one-tenth of a yuan per day.

"We had no food left around Spring Festival," Wang said. "People needed special tickets to buy food in those years, but we had none left. My father had to borrow money from many people and rode a bicycle about 150 kilometers to our hometown in Wuwei county in neighboring Anhui province to buy sweet potatoes secretly."

The family then ate sweet potatoes every day until June, when the wheat was harvested and could be made into noodles and steamed bread.

"We didn't have the feeling that we were in misery at the time, because almost all the people around us lived the same life," Wang said.

He said food shortages became a thing of the past for the family in 1980, when the commune started to let each family keep the grain they grew on the pieces of farmland they took care of.

"Life started to get better in the 1980s," Wang said, remembering the early days of reform and opening-up. "The farmland provided enough food, since my parents worked day and night. The farmers started to sell products at two newly formed markets, and some people became wholesalers, selling products from cities at the markets.

"Sometimes I sold shrimp and fish I caught. I even bought a comic book for the first time in my life with the money I earned. My family gradually saved enough money to buy an apartment and we didn't need to sweat on the farmland to make a living."

Jiangpu county changed its name to Pukou district in 2002 and became part of the Jiangbei New Area when that area was established in 2015.

"Almost all the dilapidated huts and buildings have been pulled down and people have moved to new apartments," Wang said.

"People we know have pensions, electric appliances and children around them. That is how reform and opening-up changed my life."