Paltry wages, Kazakhstan and Yunnan

Thoughts on exploitation and fulfilment

Image: Duoyishu, famous for its sunrise and clouds (the paddies are left filled with water until planting in Spring). Yuanyang, Yunnan, China. (Ping an Chang, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Last week, a large translation agency in Germany wrote to me. Could I do a 723-word sworn translation for them by Wednesday? They would pay me 40 euros. In 90 days, that is. If I didn’t need to remind them.

Seven hundred and twenty-three words at 40 euros all-in comes out at 5.4 cents per word. That is just a slight uptick on the price generally paid for checking work: checking what someone else translated. A sworn translation will generally sell to an agency at around 12 to 14 cents per word, but even that is getting hard to find.

What is less difficult to find is kitchen work. Washing up and cleaning floors. I get paid the same for kitchen work as for 723-word sworn translations as a certified State translator with full registration and qualifications. They pay exactly the same amount. The difference being that one pays at the end of the day, and the other pays three months down the line.

Oh, and AI hasn’t yet figured out how to clean mayonnaise out of a ramekin.

---

Have you ever heard of Kazakhstan? No? Surely you have. It’s where the Kazakh people live and around 38 per cent of the people who live in Kazakhstan are Kazakh people. Not that there are that many people in the country anyway. The population of Kazakhstan is only around 20 million. That’s around about twice the population of crowded little Belgium, but Kazakhstan is not twice the size of Belgium; it is pretty much the entire size of Europe. West to east, it would cover all the territory between Lisbon and Warsaw. It is immense, and most of the people who live there are not its natives but were implanted there by ... Russia ... during its imperial expansion in the 19th century, or are  ... Volga Germans ... even though they don’t speak German ... plus a few Tartars.

But, in most of Kazakhstan, there live none of these. Instead, there lives nobody. It’s not that there are no trains, which there aren’t, or no towns, which there aren’t, or no high-rise offices, which there aren’t, either; it’s that there is a lot of sand and salt and not much to live off. You see, in the past, there was a large inland sea in Kazakhstan called the Aral Sea. It lay to the west of a mountain range and was fed by two principal rivers, along which, not unsurprisingly, most of Kazakhstan’s population had settled.

The spring thaw in the high mountains to the east fed into these rivers, which flowed through fertile valleys into the Aral Sea, whereupon the water would evaporate and be carried by prevailing westerly winds back to the mountains, where it would fall as snow, and remain on the high peaks until the spring thaw came again, thus repeating the whole beautifully natural process.

However, whilst Kazakhstan was under Soviet administration, the Soviets undertook major earth-moving works in order to divert the feed waters into the Aral Sea instead into neighbouring Uzbekistan, which was also a Soviet republic at the time. As a result of this, the cycle of replenishment that had ensured the creation of the Aral Sea in the first place was broken and the Aral Sea has dried up. The area of the Aral Sea has eroded to the point where it is a fine-sand desert and the concentration of salt in the sea has killed off what little wildlife remained, and decimated the fishing fleet there. No water is carried by the wind to the mountains, obviously, so the glacial pack has receded to the point where the rivers, which were diverted into Uzbekistan, don’t forget, no longer flow with anything like the rate they used to.

You could be forgiven for having remained in ignorance about the plight of Kazakhstan’s ecosystems, demographics and economic situation, except for this one fact: some years ago, they discovered oil and gas in Kazakhstan. Oodles of it. More than even Norway has. So, whilst huge tracts of Kazakhstan are barren and unable to support life, either human, animal or plant, the tiny wee plankton that swam around the place gazillions of years ago are now attracting a great deal of interest. Given its political past, Kazakhstan must tread a fine line between outright independence of spirit and cow-towing to Muscovy and therein lies a conundrum, because to keep rapacious sticky fingers off its oil and gas, Kazakhstan is best served by the distraction to Moscow that is formed by Ukraine. Once Ukraine has been dealt a blow that might secure Moscow’s victory, there can be little doubt that its attention will turn to other jewels of its former crown that it would gladly see reinserted into its headgear of imperial glory.

Now, if all that sounds a little bit like strategic Machiavellianism (which, I’m surprised to find, is actually a word), spare a thought for how life is ordered in Yunnan.

---

Yunnan is in modern-day China and is characterised by its paddy fields, which have been carved out of perilous mountainsides over many centuries by the manual labour of villagers. Two villages in particular, the Hani and the Yi, combine their cooperative efforts under the guidance of a Grand Dragon, as he is called, who seeks inspiration for the places to dig and the times to dig from prayers offered to the wind, the streams, the buffalo-yak and the spirits. He is responsible for banishing evil spirits and for celebrating the life of his village with his people and for keeping the yak wet (otherwise the itch from their dry skin would send them crazy).

The people live in closed huts with no window and filled with smoke, which keeps them warm and secure. They eat rice and they ferment rice into alcohol, and share their bounty, to which everyone contributes their labour, with their neighbours on the hillsides. They wear clothes and headgear that are to our eyes extraordinary and strange, but elegant, practical and distinctive to the region. In one village, the women decorate themselves with bright, ebullient colours; in the other, the women are regarded as being of such excessive beauty, they modestly clothe themselves in dour colours lest their menfolk would be bedazzled by their pulchritude.

They have no telephones. They call around the valley, like the Swiss with their yodelling, to transmit important messages as to where and when the digging of the new paddies will be commenced. The Grand Dragon himself, whose son will one day take on his responsibilities of leadership, labours in twelve of his own paddies as an act of devotion to the spirits that have bestowed upon them such riches in such an arduous environment.

It sounds like a story from Grimms’ fairy tales. But it is modern China and it invites a thought process that takes us to why we need what we think we need, why we are not more grateful for what we ought to be grateful for, and what precisely are the content and features of leadership, responsibility, community and fulfilment.