Rural life through the lens of Internet celebrity couple
Sitting in front of a wooden table laden with steaming freshly cooked dishes, with ingredients just picked from their vegetable plot, Xu Yan and her husband Zhou Xiaolong savor the delicacies and chat casually in front of a camera.
Also captured in the background are flowers swaying in the air and their pet dog chasing chickens in the yard.
Hours later, the edited clips are uploaded to Xigua, a video-sharing platform. They then sit and wonder what replies and how many likes they will receive from their 3 million followers.
These are typical scenes that have made up the everyday life of the two vloggers, Xu and Zhou, over the past two years.
The videos usually center on their daily life in Baihua Township in the city of Yibin, southwest China’s Sichuan Province.
Xu, 28, dependent on her grandmother for survival since her childhood, left home to make a living in her teens. Over the years, Xu has worked in factories, sold clothes, barbecued and been employed as a hairdresser.
In 2017 when Xu was selling seafood in Qingdao, a port city in east China’s Shandong Province, she met Zhou, who was providing customer service, on the Internet as they had a quarrel.
But soon after they began to chat on a daily basis and found they shared similar experiences.
“Zhou dreamed of starting his own business because of his years of experience in the e-commerce sector. But he got distracted by becoming a vlogger focusing on rural life and people,” Xu said, adding that back then, she was not quite familiar with the concept of “vlogger,” or video blogger, and she did not want to return to the countryside.
Her will for a settled life, however, drove her to follow Zhou to his home — Baihua Township.
In 2018, they renovated an old house, left by Zhou’s late father, hoed a field and learned how to make short videos. It took some time for the couple to adapt to rural life but they got there in the end.
“When I first returned, I felt the nights were way too quiet,” Xu said.
But the couple continued to record and upload videos of their everyday rural life.
In the first few months they wandered around the countryside recording whatever they found fresh or interesting.
“At first, we groped for what and how to present and quarreled many times,” Xu said.
They found it financially difficult to support themselves in the early months, so they went to Neijiang to make some money working for an ecommerce company to back up their career as vloggers.
The content uploaded changed dramatically from rural life to city life.
“At that time, I tried to speak Mandarin and created handmade articles in the videos,” Xu said.
“We shot countryside-themed videos only when we went back to Baihua Township during the holidays.”
As their fanbase increased they realized that their countryside videos got more comments and views than those they shot in the city.
Their followers left more messages asking for them to shoot more countryside videos so the couple decided to go back and live in Baihua Township.
After a few quarrels and reflections, they agreed that video recording is not merely a task — it is an art.
They also concluded that only when they were living a happy life could their audience enjoy the videos.
They recorded the countryside life as it is in all of its natural glory. And, when Xu stopped speaking Mandarin to return to her native Sichuan dialect, things started to turn around.
The couple picked up more viewers and that eventually increased to 3 million followers on Xigua within two years.
Zhou and Xu upload two videos each day. The content can be anything from digging wild vegetables or fetching mountain spring water. And all the while this is going on, the couple interact with their followers in the comment section on the video platform.
Xu and Zhou got married last year and shared their happiness by sending wedding sweets to many of their fans scattered across China.
The happy couple are not ready to rest on their laurels and have even bigger ambitions to sow more seeds this year.
They decided, together with a partner, to run a food processing factory near their house to produce local specialties, including honey, sausage and preserved meat, into standardized products and sell the products via ecommerce platforms, thus also helping more of their townsfolk prosper.
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