Where Are We Going, Dad?

There is something about Reality TV shows that makes them an Instant HIT among common TV viewers. Channels experts claim it is a Greed for reality programming which gives viewers, young or old, a REAL "Slice" of life.

China is also not behind in the race of churning out more and more reality shows.

Recently, a new reality show gained much public attention - Where Are We Going? Dad (Chinese: 爸爸去哪儿, Pinyin -Bàba qù nǎ'er).

The show takes five celebrity fathers and their toddlers (including an Olympic diver and a male supermodel), takes them out of their comfortable urban lives, and throws them into life in China's remote countryside.

                To a new generation of Chinese, the countryside seems like another world.

                                         Star cast of "Where are we going, dad" 

 In this show, Rich dads and their spoil kids give up their toys, phones and i Pads, and learn to fend for themselves in a poor village - herding geese, catching fish and pulling lotus roots out of muddy ponds.

                       A villager in rural china shows a lotus root he has just pooled out

Celebrity watching in China is as appealing as anywhere else, and - in a country where dads don't do much of the child rearing - it's all the funnier to watch the rich and famous struggle with tantrums, and wrestle with pots and pans as they try to rustle up barely edible meals out of their meager supplies.
Some of the appeal of the show comes from the meeting of China's urban rich with the country's rural poor - two parts of this vast country that seem to grow further apart each year.

One child asks her father: "Daddy, is this what the countryside looks like?", while lying on a hard plank bed, unable to contemplate why people would live in a brick house with paper windows, or cook over a charcoal stove.

                                       A young woman cooking in Rural china

And while the rich children in their brightly colored dresses try to catch goats, in the background you can sometimes glimpse poor village kids wearing dusty grey clothes, looking on curiously.

 Scarcely a generation has passed since most Chinese lived on the land. But now, for millions of viewers from China's mega cities, rural life (albeit sanitized for TV) is just a spectacle - a glimpse into another world.

Above Kids in Village, below kids in Shanghai

            




               






 It's a measure of how fast and how far China has come, but perhaps also a hint at how divided the country now is.