Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (13 page)

We walked outside into the blazing sunshine. Beyond the mausoleum walls I could see flat dry scrubland, and the wind blew the woman’s hair around her face. “Of course the Mongols killed a lot of people in the old days,” she said. “But they also had great advances in culture and religion. It’s like Hitler—people might say that he’s bad, but at least he was capable of leading a country. You can’t deny that.”

“Do you think Hitler was bad or good?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “That’s not important for me to decide. What matters is that he left his name for history. You can call him fascist or anything else you want to, but he succeeded in leaving his name. The same is true for Genghis Khan. The whole world knew him and they still know him. Osama bin Laden is the same. When he attacked America, I was happy for him and the Afghans. Nothing against America, but the Taliban were a small race of people and they wanted to get noticed. Now everybody knows Osama bin Laden. He left his name for history, and I respect that.”

She wavered unsteadily in the wind and asked if we could sit down. We found a bench outside the museum entrance and she rested, closing her eyes in the sunshine. “I like to talk to strangers,” she said. “Sometimes it’s easier to talk with somebody I don’t know. And today it’s easier because I’m drunk. Usually I’m not as drunk as this, and usually I don’t talk so freely. But there are many things in China that I don’t like. You go to this museum and they say that Genghis Khan was a Chinese hero, and it’s nonsense. He fought against the Chinese. This museum is all garbage.”

Periodically other employees walked past, along with groups of drunken cadres, and everybody grinned when they saw us together. The woman didn’t seem to mind. “When I first started giving tours,”
she said, “people complained because I talked about the Mongols—the Mongol leader, the Mongol victories, the Mongol empire. They wanted me to say it was all Chinese. So the leaders criticized me and now I have to say that it’s Chinese, but I don’t believe it. Even so, the way that I tell the stories isn’t the same as other tour guides. People tell me it’s different. I don’t know exactly how, but it’s different in some way.”

“Maybe it’s different because you say the museum is all garbage,” I said, and she laughed.

“It’s different because I’m different from other people,” she said. “I talk with strangers, and women aren’t supposed to do that. My boyfriend doesn’t like that.”

On the bench she had edged closer, and now I could feel her leg against my thigh. Her breath came strong—the sickly-sweet smell of
baijiu
.

“Actually,” she said, “I don’t like my boyfriend very much.”

It seemed like a good time to change the subject, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. She studied my face closely, looking into my eyes, and finally she spoke. “Are you a spy?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’m a writer. I told you, I write articles and books.”

She pressed closer. “If you’re a spy, you can tell me,” she said in a low voice. “I promise I won’t tell anybody.”

“Honest, I’m not.”

“Come on!” Her tone was pleading. “You’re here alone, you speak Chinese, you’re in Inner Mongolia, you drove your own car. Of course you’re a spy! Can’t you just tell me the truth?”

“I
am
telling you the truth,” I said. “I’m not a spy. Anyway, why would a spy go to Genghis Khan’s mausoleum?”

She pondered this and looked crestfallen. “I’ve always wanted to meet a spy,” she said in a small voice. “I wish you really were one.”

The woman seemed less drunk now and she asked to write her name and phone number in my notebook, in case I ever returned. She wrote the words carefully, in both Chinese and Mongolian, and then she sketched a picture. It was the sun—childlike rays around a ball of flame.

FOR THREE HUNDRED MILES
I followed small roads through the southern borderlands of the Ordos. Usually the Great Wall was nearby, marked on my Sinomaps, but from the roads it was rarely visible. Sometimes I drove for an hour without seeing another car; when I turned on the radio, all I heard was Mongolian. Occasionally the wind picked up and a small sandstorm swept across the blacktop, the grit moving in waves like it was liquid. Near the Shaanxi border I saw two hitchhikers petting the invisible dog. One of them was an old man, and he shouted when I pulled over: “How much to Jingbian?”

I told him I was heading in that direction anyway. Jingbian is a small city near the Great Wall; the name means “Pacify the Border.”

“No money?” the man said in surprise. He asked where I had come from, and I said Beijing. He seemed slightly deaf—he leaned forward and shouted every time he spoke. “Can we bring these bags?” he yelled.

“Of course,” I said. “What’s in them?”

“Salt! It’s from my daughter’s farm!”

I opened the back of the City Special and helped the man lift the bags—they were fifty pounds each. That was the only major food group I had been missing; now the Jeep was fully stocked with Coke, Gatorade, Oreos, Dove bars, and Ordos salt. The old man planned to sell the salt in Jingbian. The moment he got inside the vehicle he shouted another question. “Do you know Han Heliu?”

“Who?”

“Han Heliu! Do you know Han Heliu?”

“No,” I said, confused. “Who is Han Heliu?”

“He’s from our village!” the old man shouted. “He’s gone to Beijing to work! I was wondering if you had met him!”

I told him I’d keep an eye out. The old man wore a weathered cap and rough blue cotton clothes. He was mostly toothless; a wispy beard hung from his chin. His traveling companion was the most strikingly pretty woman I ever saw in the north. She was twenty years old, with hair that had been dyed a light red; her lipstick was bright pink and a
tiny beauty mark had been tattooed between her eyebrows. She wore a red silk jacket, tailored tight at the waist, with gold flowers embroidered across the front. She was small-boned, with a birdlike name—Wang Yan, which means “Swallow.” In this hard landscape she seemed completely out of place, like an exotic that had been blown off course and then alighted in the City Special. She perched stiffly in front, her back not touching the seat.

“He’s my grandfather,” she said. “We live together in Jingbian.”

In the backseat, the old man leaned forward. “Are you sure you’re not going to charge us?” he shouted. “It’s usually five yuan to Jingbian! We can’t pay more than that!”

We drove south past rows of willows that had been planted in the sandy soil. Wang Yan was shy—she stared straight ahead, eyes on the road, and she answered my questions in a soft voice. She had just visited her parents at their farm; a few years ago she had migrated to Jingbian, which was the nearest township, and recently her grandfather had joined her in the small city. “All of the young people leave our village,” she said. “Nobody stays there anymore. I’m not planning to go back.” In Jingbian she worked in a beauty parlor. Among uneducated female migrants, jobs tend to be sharply divided according to looks. A pretty woman is more likely to find work in a barbershop or as a restaurant hostess; the plainer girls end up as waitresses or factory workers. Jobs are easier for women who are good looking, but there are also pitfalls. Most beauty parlors offer the basics—hair styling, makeup, hair-washing, and simple massages—but there are also shops that double as fronts for prostitution. It occurred to me that Wang Yan’s family had probably sent the grandfather to live with her to make sure she didn’t get into trouble.

After twenty minutes the old man leaned forward once more. “Are you Chinese?” he shouted.

“No. I’m American.”

“I thought you weren’t Chinese!” he said, with a big smile. “You’re the first foreigner I’ve ever met!”

In Jingbian I dropped them off at the beauty parlor. It was called the Jian Hua—“Build China”—and we carried the bags of salt inside.
Four young men and women were working, and they greeted Wang Yan warmly. The men had the look of small-town hipsters; their hair was long and they wore leather jackets covered with zippers. It was too early for customers and they put a Madonna disk in the video player. A full-length mirror ran along one wall, and the employees pushed aside the barber chairs and practiced dance moves. They were focused on their reflections, repeating the steps over and over, trying to get it right. At the far end of the shop, Wang Yan leaned close to another mirror, fixing her road-worn hair and makeup. The grandfather stood alone near the door. Upon entering the shop he had fallen silent, and now he watched the young people intently, his face expressionless. In a room full of mirrors he was the only person not staring at himself.

THE FARTHER I DROVE
across northern China, the more I wondered what would become of all of the villages. The cities were easy to predict, at least in terms of growth—their trajectory was already laid out in tracks of cement and steel. In the countryside, though, it was impossible to imagine who would be living here in a generation. Often I stopped in a village and saw only the very old, the disabled, and the very young, because migrants left their children behind to be raised by grandparents. Workers still didn’t feel settled in the cities, although inevitably that was bound to change; it seemed likely that in the future they’d find some way to have their families closer to work. For many of the northern villages this might be the last generation where a significant number of children were still growing up in the countryside.

An hour west of Jingbian, I stopped to visit the Great Wall near the village of Ansi. This region had been a major defense point for the Ming, and people told me that there were particularly impressive ruins near Ansi. The name means “Temple of Peace,” and when I pulled over in the village I saw only one adult. He was disabled, with a pair of rough-hewn wooden crutches, and he was minding a flock of children. In rural China, that’s become an archetypal scene: little kids dancing around somebody who can hardly walk.

The old man told me that the Wall wasn’t far away, but his directions
weren’t clear. Finally he pointed at the oldest boy. “Just take him,” the man said. “He knows the way.”

In a flash, the child was inside the City Special. Before he could close the door, four others piled in. They successfully slammed the door in the face of a nine-year-old girl, who stood forlornly in the dust, her face a taut little frown between pigtails. I looked at the old man, expecting him to call the children back out, but he didn’t say a word. He wore the slightly dazed expression that you find among people who have lived through war and revolution and famine and now, in their twilight years, have been assigned the task of raising young children.

“OK,” I said. “If all of you are coming, she gets to come, too.”

Sighing, one of the boys opened the door and the girl clambered in. We drove west along a loose dirt track; periodically I had to accelerate in order to plow through a patch of drifted sand. I heard the children whispering, and then I realized that I had told the old man virtually nothing about myself. They didn’t know where I was from, or what I was doing; all I had asked for were directions to the ruins. I pulled over and faced the children.

“I drove here from Beijing,” I said. “That’s where I live. But I’m an American. I’m visiting a lot of areas with the Great Wall, and that’s why I came here.”

The children listened intently. In the front seat there was a boy and a girl, and three more boys sat in the back. The oldest boy was twelve and in his lap he carried a two-year-old girl. All six were extremely serious, especially the baby—a look of worry creased her pudgy face. It occurred to me that this was a situation for chocolate. I divided and distributed three Dove bars, and then we headed off for the Great Wall. I felt like the Pied Piper—for all I knew, these kids represented the entire future of Temple of Peace.

Here in the southern Ordos, the elevation was nearly five thousand feet, and hills of sand had crept to the very edge of town. The Great Wall ran through the dunes, ten feet tall and made of tamped earth. “You could walk along it for a year and still not reach Beijing!” one of the boys announced as he jumped out of the City Special. The children scampered across a dune and I followed, great sheets of sand sliding away
beneath our feet. The wall led to a fort—it was square in shape and also made of tamped earth; there were turrets at every corner and a massive signal tower in the center. The tower was shaped like a pyramid, with a tiny hole at the base, like the entrance to some pharaoh’s tomb. One by one the boys vanished inside.

Following them, I crawled on hands and knees. The tunnel turned to the left; pale walls disappeared into darkness. I groped forward, scrambling across the dirt, and then a spot of light appeared. It opened into a shaft—a narrow chimney that rose straight up for fifty feet. In Ming times, soldiers would have used a ladder here, but the boys simply wedged their legs across the shaft and shimmied up. Grit rained down below; I covered my eyes. “Maybe you shouldn’t climb up here!” I shouted. “It’s too dangerous!”

“It’s fine!” one of them sang out. “We’ve done it before!”

I backtracked through the tunnel and rejoined the girl, who had been left holding the baby. By the time I emerged, the boys were already at the top, whooping triumphantly. After they descended I noticed that one of them had a filthy plaster cast on his arm. He told me that he had broken the bone at school, playing leapfrog. The youngest boy, who was seven, had an ugly bruise on his head from some other misadventure. If this was indeed the last generation of countryside children, at least these boys were making the most of it. Three of them were brothers, look-alikes with crew-cut heads. I never saw kids like this in Beijing—in the capital, nearly everybody is an only child, coddled and spoiled from birth.

When we returned to Temple of Peace, the old man on crutches was waiting patiently. I learned that he was the grandfather of the three brothers; he told me that in this particular region the planned birth policy hadn’t been strictly enforced. “People just pay a fine and have more kids,” he said with a smile. He still wasn’t the slightest bit concerned about who I was or what I was doing. In northern villages, people were rarely suspicious, and it was standard for them to invite me in for tea or a meal. I had no illusions about the toughness of rural life, and my time in the Peace Corps had taught me not to romanticize poverty. But nevertheless there was something poignant about driving through the dying villages. These were last glimpses—the end of small
towns and rural childhoods; perhaps even the end of families with siblings. And rural traditions of honesty and trust wouldn’t survive the shift to city life. There aren’t many parts of the world where a stranger is welcomed without question, and entrusted with children, and it made me sad to drive away from Temple of Peace.