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Two Chinese Villages, Two Views of Rural Poverty
Also impossible was the suggestion that the women might be lonely. Asked if she missed her husband, who left for the city of Lhasa two months ago, Chen burst out laughing. She missed him, she said, but only in the sense that he "can come back and help me with the work."
And then Chen, wearing a red and black coat with sequins, a green velvet head scarf and orange paint on her fingernails, excused herself. She had to cook lunch for eight neighbors and relatives.
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China's Great Divider of the Sexes: Poverty In the rural Chinese villages of Dacitan and Sale, poverty forces men and women to live separate lives. 
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Years ago, many of Dacitan's 250 households hardly had enough to eat. Now children take steamed bread to school. Even though the village has not prospered like large towns or other cities, some progress has come. Houses are no longer made of just mud and straw. A paved road to the village was also built last year.
Still, Ma Yagubai must walk two hours to the closest bus route.
"Compared to 10 years ago, you can see the clothes people are wearing are better," he said. "But the food is the same. It used to be that you couldn't drive a car here. You would have to bicycle or walk.
"It is the same now," he said, "but I can always ask a neighbor for a ride on his three-wheel motorcycle."
Men Going Nowhere
To arrive in Sale (pronounced sa-LUH) is to drive up a dilapidated road and see men and boys everywhere. Women are scarce.
A large portion of the men say they are bachelors. They complain that they are so poor no one will marry them, unless the women come from even more impoverished villages. Dowries can be 600 percent of what a man here makes each year.
The village is home to about 1,000 people. It is at least five miles from the closest paved road, making escape difficult for anyone without connections or money. The slopes are steep, and the men say they cannot leave all the farming to the women who remain. Every rooftop has a lifeless hose that droops down to a metal bucket meant to catch rainwater, increasingly infrequent. The drinking water is gray.
"The road is broken, it's a mountainous region and there is no water," said Ma Jinghai, 26, who returned to Sale recently after two months on a construction site. He earned $125 but had to spend more than half that on his bus trip home.
Given the conditions and their despair, the men have resorted to a dubious means of securing wives, some villagers say: luring women here on false pretenses.
"Some women were tricked here -- they don't even understand the local dialect," said Ma Jinghai, who said he was upfront with his own wife, telling her exactly how poor he was when they met in the city of Lanzhou.
