When 26-year-old folklorist Wang Xuewen, met white-haired farmer Zhang Jinghai, in his 60s, he was not sure what the old man could offer him concerning folklore culture protection.

"He handed me two big books of diaries, filled with misused characters and bad grammar, but I was surprised- for they noted down the stories and anecdotes of how the village he lives in came into being, why the village is called its present name, and what customs the villagers had followed," Wang said of his first visit to Xiaweidian Village of Mentougou District.

A doctorate student under senior folklorist Liu Tieliang at Beijing Normal University, Wang is one of the many young and old folklorists working on the "Folklore Culture Heritage Rescue Project" launched two years ago by the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Society.

Zhang told young Wang that he wrote the diaries simply as a hobby. He said he seemed to be pushed by an urge to record history. "Zhang told me: 'If I did not write it down, the people in the future may not know how we former villagers lived.' I was totally moved by his words," Wang said.

As one of the first programmes under the Folklore Culture Rescue Heritage Project, the Mentougou District Annals are soon to go into print, after two years of scrupulous survey, record and writing.

In it, farmer Zhang's diary, filled with incorrect characters and grammar, is copied down as a story with a photo to testify the value of keeping the folklore culture maintained.

Folklorists like Wang try to save the folklore cultures in two ways. First, they try to capture the folk culture that no longer exists at present but is still in the memories of those living. And secondly, they want to document the traditional folklore customs that are still among us, being passed down from generation to generation. "Our main task is to track them down while going into the field and talking with older people," Wang said.

For research purposes and to better document the customs, the researchers must first study any existing documents or annals that track the custom.

"Many Chinese folklore cultures are on the verge of extinction," Wang said. Unlike the mainstream, elite cultures recorded in historical books, folklore cultures, deemed as vulgar by high, dominant classes of society, have always been neglected and have rarely been recorded officially in written history.

Influenced by modern-living styles, economic progress and globalization, young people in some ethnic groups now tend to reject wearing their ethnic costumes. Old historic wooden homes are being abandoned by the ever growing sprawl of modern, concrete housing. Young people nowadays sing mostly pop songs sung by pop stars from China's Hong Kong and Taiwan, and foreign countries, rather than singing the old folk songs passed down from their ancestors.

Young folklorist Wang understands these changes, saying that "it is understandable for these youth, like us, they also have the right to pursue modern lifestyles and enjoy the cosy facilities of modern civilization."

It is an inevitable side effect of the process of modernization, that the age-old folklore cultures go extinct, however, Wang said, it is also a fact that folklore cultures have always been subject to change.

"The important thing is to realize everyone's sense of 'cultural self-consciousness' so much so that we can learn to appreciate our folklore culture as a treasure, and to record them before they die, if we can not keep them going," Wang said.

Together with other folklorists, Wang rode a bike to comb through a total of 15 villages in Mentougou District. "Each village has its own special features that lasted for centuries, like specializing in guarding royal tombs, baking coloured glazed tiles for the Forbidden City, or being a village of relatives of soldiers, who went to defend the borders in the west," Wang said.

As a folklorist, Wang said, one must be a person that can endure hardship.

Wang said he must be able to sleep on any type of bed and eat any type of food to survive his vocation.

Wang had to spend at least a half a dozen nights with villagers in the countryside to record a local temple fair during the Spring Festival in a distant village in Hebei Province. The temple fair included many activities one day after another. One night the event started after 11 pm. "We had no plan where to spend the night. When it was over, we had to go to the primary school in the village, where we put several desks together to make a bare bed to sleep on, no bed sheets, no quilts nor pillows," Wang said. And the next day they had to get up at 4 am and work another full day.

For food, the villagers quickly ate up bowls of vegetable rice, mixed with cabbages, starch noodles, and steamed buns. "We were hungry and gobbled like a tiger, but then I saw a big fly in my bowl- I could not react by vomiting nor throwing the bowl away," said Wang. He simply snatched the fly with his chopsticks, threw it away and kept on gobbling up the food.

Wang often rides his bike for dozens of miles in order to find an old person to talk with and to get mixed in with the locals in every way he can.

"A folklorist's life might be hard and poor, it's not easy nor glamourous, yet to get down to knowing real life and dealing with true people is what attracts me most to keep on with my career," Wang said.

Wang believes that in his efforts to maintain China's folk cultures, he will continue to meet interesting people like Zhang who also do their part in preserving the folk customs.

"Our past and present cannot be separated; it has relating threads of contacts of this kind or that. If we try to separate our present with our past, we become a person with no roots," Wang said.

(China Daily 06/10/2005 page5)