Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (22 page)

The other children had already arrived, and they sat quietly behind tiny desks, playing with Lego-like blocks. There were twenty total, only three of whom were girls. One was a strikingly pretty five-year-old with pigtails, and another had her hair cut short like a boy. The third girl was undersized, with enormous black eyes, and the teacher told us immediately that she was a
ruozhi
. It’s another term for somebody who is disabled: literally it means “weak wit.” The girl looked up when the teacher said it—obviously she was accustomed to people uttering this word in her presence.

Outside, Wei Jia stood in the dust beside the car. He was crying harder now, and he struggled against anybody who tried to lead him back to
the classroom. First his mother spoke to him, and then his father. Usually Wei Ziqi was strict with his son, but he seemed to sympathize with this particular fear. “Everybody goes to school,” Wei Ziqi said gently. “I went to school, and so did your mother. Aunt Mimi went to school, and so did Uncle Monster.”

The fact that Uncle Monster was educated didn’t soothe the boy in the least. In the schoolyard, the daily flag-raising began: loudspeakers crackled, the national anthem played, and children marched out wearing the red kerchiefs of the Communist Party Young Pioneers. Wei Jia’s face was creased with panic; he had never seen so many children together in one place. By now he was mute—he simply lunged at the car whenever somebody tried to pull him away.

It took nearly forty-five minutes to calm the boy. Finally his father carried him into the classroom; his mother seated him behind a desk. Other kids turned to stare—the girl known as the
ruozhi
spun around in her chair, eyes blazing. Wei Jia’s chest was heaving; his cheeks shone with tears. After ten minutes, he made another attempt for the door, but this time they caught him. He cried again, a final hard burst, and then he calmed down, exhausted. Lines of resignation crept across his forehead, like the furrows of an old man’s brow.

We left as quietly as we could. I asked Wei Ziqi where the bathroom was, and he told me to use the schoolyard fence on the way out. I could hear children’s voices—talking, laughing, reciting lessons—while I pissed in the weeds. On the way home the car seemed empty without the boy and the Idiot.

THAT DAY THE IDIOT
escaped twice from the government office. The first time, the cadres caught him just outside the gate. The second time, he made it into Bohai Township, and it took a while for them to track him down.

The officials telephoned Wei Ziqi and told him to pick up his brother; Wei Ziqi demanded the subsidy. Neither side would budge, and finally, late in the day, the cadres put the Idiot in a car and drove into the mountains. They dropped him off two miles outside of Sancha. The
Idiot had never been alone so far from home, but he found his way back—some instinct must have told him to walk uphill.

I learned all of this later from Wei Ziqi. He said his brother had been exhausted and frightened, but otherwise he was fine; nobody in the government had mistreated him. Wei Ziqi seemed satisfied with this chain of events: in his view, he had shown the cadres that he was serious. They had finally agreed to submit the request to the county government, a higher level of authority, and Wei Ziqi believed he had a good chance of receiving the subsidy. As far as he was concerned, this had been the best course of action. Officials are often inclined to ignore responsibility, and sometimes you have to act aggressively in order to push them.

I felt guilty about the incident, although I had no idea what I should have done differently. And I hadn’t fully understood the situation while it was unfolding. I often felt like that in China; the place had a way of making me feel slow-witted. Sometimes I benefited from this stupidity, especially as a writer. Over the years I had learned to be patient, and probably I was more open-minded than I had ever been in America. But my reactions could be slow and sometimes a situation developed before I could respond. In any case, life is complicated in China, and often there isn’t a good solution regardless of how quick you are. The people have a common expression for that:
Mei banfa
, they often say. Nothing can be done.

I had always liked the challenge of living in China, and there was something about the foreigner’s solitude that appealed to me. The villagers accepted this—they understood that I was different, and that I spent a great deal of time alone, and they didn’t judge me for that. They were curious only in the broadest sense: people often asked me what time it was in America, and they were always interested in how much something had cost. They asked detailed questions about the things I eat and don’t eat. But they never inquired about my writing or my personal life, which was one reason I felt so comfortable in Sancha. Often the villagers referred to Mimi as my
laopo
, or wife, and I didn’t bother to correct them. In fact we had dated briefly before finding the country home, but we rented the place as friends. Over time, each of us dated other
people, and we continued to share the house; sometimes we brought new partners to Sancha. The villagers couldn’t have cared less—that was the distance between their world and ours.

A week after the incident with the Idiot, I went to Sancha for a few days. It was as if the man had been waiting for me: he stood at the top of the road, where he greeted me with a huge grin, pointing at my parked car. I had never seen him so animated; he kept grunting and gesturing toward the vehicle. I realized that he was telling the story of our drive into the valley. “I know,” I said. “I remember.” I wanted to apologize; I wished I could let him know that I hadn’t understood that situation until it was too late—
Mei banfa
. But there was no way to communicate my regret, and the Idiot continued his wild gestures. He seemed thrilled to see me again.

WEI JIA’S FIRST HOLIDAY
was in October, for National Day. All Chinese schools had a week off, and the boy returned to the village. His teacher reported that he was still unaccustomed to the classroom; in her words, he had “a wild-eyed look.” Wei Jia had always had a penchant for roughhousing, and initially his parents weren’t concerned when they noticed a pattern of bruises across his back.

In the village, the corn harvest had just come in, and Wei Ziqi had gathered six hundred pounds of the crop. He stacked the corn alongside their house, and Wei Jia spent a morning climbing and sliding down the bright yellow pile. Afterward his mother noticed more bruises across the boy’s legs—angry smudges of purple that covered every few inches of skin. Wei Jia said he felt fine, but his face looked pale. Mimi and I had driven out to the village in her family’s car, and now I offered to take Wei Ziqi and the boy to the hospital in Huairou.

It was the afternoon of the holiday, the fifty-third anniversary of the founding of Communist China. The roads were empty all the way to Huairou, and we parked at the city’s main hospital. Inside, a nurse wrote a prescription, and we went to the blood clinic for a test. The place had the feel of a speakeasy: patients shoved their arms through a hole in the wall, where an unseen technician waited with a needle. At first Wei Jia
resisted but his father spoke sternly: “Be
laoshi
!” The boy wrinkled his face but didn’t cry. Afterward the nurse gave us a computer printout and told us that his
xuexiaoban
count was low. I didn’t understand the technical term, and I hadn’t brought my dictionary; but I could see from the woman’s face that it was serious.

“His count is only seventeen thousand,” she said. “It should be more than a hundred and fifty thousand.” She recommended that we go immediately to the Children’s Hospital in downtown Beijing for further tests.

Wei Jia had been born at a hospital in the capital, and this was his first time back to the city. Usually the boy was excited to be in a car, chattering questions about everything along the road, but today he was quiet. The moment we entered the Children’s Hospital, I knew that it was a mistake to come here. Kids were screaming; parents chased down stubborn charges; the staff looked harried. Wei Ziqi seemed overwhelmed: he entered the place and halted right in the doorway. A city man bumped him from behind, cursing under his breath (“Out of the way!”) as he hurried past. Wei Ziqi wore army pants and a military-green Public Security vest, and here in the city it was as if the camouflage actually worked. People jostled him, and jabbed with elbows, and brushed him aside. When he asked hospital employees for help, they just waved him away. He might as well have been invisible—that’s what happens when you wear peasant clothes into the city.

Finally I picked up Wei Jia and marched to an information booth. The attendant snapped to attention and answered all of my questions; it made all the difference in the world when she saw a foreigner instead of a peasant. The woman told me where to go for the blood test, and we paid a fee of a few dollars and joined a line of waiting patients. A sign hung on the wall of the blood clinic:

WITH YOUR COOPERATION AND OUR EXPERIENCE

WE WILL TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR PRECIOUS

The line already contained more than twenty Preciouses. Each was accompanied by at least two adults; some kids were surrounded by both
parents and two full sets of grandparents. In urban China, young children possess a freakish gravity—the smaller the kid, the closer the adults hover, like massive planets trapped in orbit around some dense little sun. But such proximity does nothing for discipline, and the waiting room rang with shouts and screams. Preciouses chased each other around the room, darting in and out of line; at the front they screamed bloody murder when it was time to get pricked. We had been there for less than five minutes when one Precious vomited straight onto the floor. Another girl broke free of her orbiting adults and slipped into the testing area, where she fiddled with a rack of tubes. “Stop that!” shouted a nurse, slapping the girl’s hand.

Wei Jia was by far the worst-dressed kid in the room. He wore a filthy green sweatshirt, and there were holes in the toes of his cloth shoes; his neck was streaked with dirt. But he was calm—I was grateful for that. When he finally reached the front of the line, his face twisted, and his father spoke again—“Be
laoshi
!”—and then the blood test was over.

It wasn’t until later that I realized only a fool goes to the Children’s Hospital on a holiday. The doctor on duty just hoped to evacuate the place—he glanced at Wei Jia’s test results, scribbled a prescription onto a piece of paper, and told us the boy should rest. We picked up the medicine: a bottle of Vitamin C pills. On the way back, I decided to take the new Badaling Expressway, and both father and son became alert. “This is a highway,” Wei Ziqi explained to the boy. “Look how big it is—that’s so people can drive faster here.” The boy fell asleep, but his father woke him up in the heart of the Jundu Mountains so he could see his first tunnel. By the time we reached Sancha, it was dark, but Cao Chunmei and Mimi were waiting at the end of the road, flashlights in hand. Mimi told me that ever since we had left, the mother had worried incessantly about
baixuebing
, “white blood cell disease.” Wei Ziqi reassured her, repeating the doctor’s words, and they put the boy to bed. But that night I couldn’t sleep. I found myself thinking about the same thing—“white blood cell disease” is the Chinese term for leukemia.

MY OWN CHILDHOOD HAD
included more than its share of medical problems. As a boy, I’d been hospitalized for asthma and pneumonia, and I was injury-prone—the kind of kid whose parents were always getting phone calls about broken bones and bad injuries. Part of the problem was size: I was always one of the smallest children in my class. In 1974, when I was five years old, I weighed only thirty-five pounds—not much bigger than Wei Jia. My nursery school teacher recommended that I repeat the year, to give me time to grow.

Wei Ziqi and I are almost exactly the same age: I was born two weeks ahead of him, in June of 1969. Once, we discussed our educational experiences, comparing the years that we had entered various grades, and after a while he looked shrewdly at me. “Did you flunk?” he said.

In all my years of American education, I had always been a year older than my classmates, but nobody ever asked me that question. Back in 1974, my parents referred to it as “being held back,” and they always stressed that I was undersized rather than stupid. But there is no such euphemism in the language of the Chinese countryside.

“Yes,” I said to Wei Ziqi. “I flunked nursery school.”

“I figured you must have flunked a year,” he said with a grin. He told me that he’d failed as well—he’d repeated fifth grade, mostly because he was also undersized.

By the time I was an adolescent, my health was good, but I never shook a lingering fear of hospitals. Taking Wei Jia into Beijing had been a kind of torture—it reminded me how I’d often felt as a child. The morning after his blood test, I left the village and returned home to downtown Beijing, where I finally had a chance to look up
xuexiaoban
in a dictionary. The term means “platelet,” and I went online, searching for childhood diseases with bruising and low platelet counts. Over and over, the same thing kept coming up: leukemia. In a panic, I sent e-mails to three doctor friends in the United States, copying the printouts from Wei Jia’s blood tests. The messages went out late at night, my time; by early morning all the doctors had already responded: one from
San Francisco, one from Missouri, one from New Jersey. Each believed that leukemia seemed unlikely, although they recommended a biopsy. Independently, they all guessed that it was a condition known as ITP—immune thrombocytopenic purpura. ITP is a disease with unknown causes, and it often strikes children. Usually, if the patient rests and eats well, the situation resolves itself within two months. Rarely is it chronic, but Wei Jia’s platelet count was so dangerously low that his blood might not clot; in particular, there was a risk of bleeding in the brain. “I’d give him steroids or immune globulin,” one doctor wrote. My friend Eileen Kavanagh, who was finishing medical school in New Jersey, responded, “The thing that bothers me the most is that they didn’t put him in the hospital to figure all of this out.”