Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (30 page)

Now I had to return a car without a front bumper. Wei Ziqi offered repeatedly to pay for it, but I told him not to worry; I should have known better than to let him drive in the first place. For the next two days the car sat in the village lot, bumperless, while I steeled myself for the journey back to the city. When it came time to leave, Wei Ziqi used some old wire to reattach the bumper so it hung off the front end. I went slow on the expressway, hoping that the thing wouldn’t fly off. Back in Beijing, when Mr. Wang saw the car, his eyes widened.

“
Waah!
” he said. “How did you do that?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I let somebody else drive. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.” I began to describe Wei Ziqi’s lack of experience with cars that had front ends, and Mr. Wang looked confused; the more I expanded on this topic, the blanker his expression became. I realized that if I continued with all the relevant details—the Liberation trucks, the Shunyi driving school regulations about starting in second gear, the Jetta-sized Great Wall in Sancha village—Mr. Wang’s head would probably explode. At last I abandoned the story and offered to pay for the bumper.

“
Mei wenti!
” Mr. Wang said, smiling. “No problem! We have insurance! You just need to write an accident report. Do you have your chop?”

In China, the chop is an official stamp, registered to a company. My formal registration was in the name of the
New Yorker
magazine’s Beijing office, although in fact this operation consisted of nothing more than me and a pile of paperwork. I almost never used the chop, and I told Mr. Wang that it was at home.

“
Mei wenti!
” he said. “Just bring it next time.” In the rental car office, he opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of papers. Each was blank except for a red stamp. Mr. Wang rifled through the pile, selected one,
and laid it in front of me. The chop read: “U.S.-China Tractor Association.”

“What’s this?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They had an accident, but they didn’t have their chop, so they used somebody else’s. Then they brought this page to replace it. Now you can write your report on their page, and next time bring a piece of paper with your chop, so the next person can use it. Understand?”

I didn’t—he had to explain this arrangement three times. Finally it dawned on me that the wrecked bumper, which hadn’t been my fault, and in a sense had not been Wei Ziqi’s fault either, because of the unexpected front end, would now be blamed on the U.S.-China Tractor Association. “But you shouldn’t say it happened in the countryside,” Mr. Wang instructed. “That’s too complicated. Just say you had an accident in our parking lot.”

I followed his advice—the report left out everything about the countryside and the Liberation trucks and the fake Great Wall. Instead it said that, driving on behalf of the U.S.-China Tractor Association, I had wrecked the Jetta’s bumper in the parking lot of Capital Motors. I signed my Chinese name across the tractor chop. Mr. Wang beamed and lit another cigarette, and that was where I left him, sitting beneath the company sign:

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION RATING
: 90%

EFFICIENCY RATING
: 97%

APPROPRIATE SERVICE DICTION RATING
: 98%

SERVICE ATTITUDE RATING
: 99%

AFTER FOUR YEARS, SANCHA
felt as familiar as any place I had known during adulthood. Much of my last decade had been spent traveling; it was a nomad’s life, and for the most part I enjoyed it. But in Sancha I came to know something different. I had routines—I knew what to expect from every season, every day. At dawn I awoke with the propaganda speakers, and then I wrote through the morning; at night
I had dinner with the Weis. When the weather was hot, I swam in the reservoirs near the hermit’s home, and in winter I went for long hikes across the passes. I came to know the trails well, and on foot I visited neighboring towns: Huanghua, Haizikou, Chashikou, Sihai, Guojiawan. They were sleepy, tiny villages, but all of them had started to change; even the quietest place had a new restaurant or guesthouse. And I noticed that the trails became harder to follow with each passing year. In the old days they had been used frequently by farmers and peddlers with their donkeys, but now buses and cars went to most of these towns. In another decade many footpaths would be gone.

The longer I stayed in Sancha, the more I appreciated the rhythm of the countryside, the way that life moved through the cycles of the seasons. Nowadays in rural China the overall trajectory is usually one of decline—that’s what I witnessed during my drive across the north. In the dying villages I glimpsed how local life was disappearing, but in Sancha I watched something different. Progress had arrived: each year led to some new major change, and always there was the sense of time rushing ahead. But the regularity of the seasons helped me keep my bearings. I liked being in Sancha at certain times—I liked the weeks in April when the apricot trees bloomed, and I liked the rush of the September harvest. I liked the calm steady days of winter. I liked to drive out for the Spring Festival, when the villagers stayed up past midnight and set off fireworks from their threshing platforms. I learned to be conscious of village time, and I made sure to be there for certain holidays and seasons.

In April of 2005, on the morning of Qing Ming, Wei Ziqi and I woke up at 5:30 and hiked up the mountain behind his house. He carried his basket and shovel; he wore camouflage farming gear. Down in the valley the apricot trees had just begun to bloom and the buds glowed like stars in the morning half-light. As we climbed higher, where mountain temperatures were cooler, the buds diminished. By the time we reached the cemetery they had disappeared entirely.

That year only seven villagers tended the tombs. The men worked steadily, piling dirt atop the grave mounds, and they chatted idly about who lay beneath.

“That’s my grandfather’s.”

“That’s not your grandfather’s!”

“I think it is.”

“
Xiashuo!
That’s nonsense! That’s your father’s older brother.”

They rarely mentioned names; every individual was simply a relation. There were no details, either—no specific memories attached to these mounds. As the morning light began to shine behind the eastern mountains I noticed a patch of burned earth where somebody must have made an offering a few days earlier. This time of year, the propaganda speakers always announced that the government had banned such burnings, but the villagers ignored the rules.

One grave had already been decorated before we arrived. Fresh dirt was piled high, and three white paper wreaths stood in front, marked with the character
dian
,
: “Offering to the dead.” Dozens of white pendants had been pinned to a nearby poplar tree. Atop the mound was a candle, decorated with the words “Eternally Young.” Sancha graves rarely had such elaborate memorials, and it meant that the occupant had died recently. I asked Wei Ziqi who was buried there.

“Wei Minghe,” he said. “He was the man who used to live in the suburbs of Huairou. He used to come back every year at Qing Ming. You gave him a ride home a few years ago.”

I remembered: the friendly old man, pouring
baijiu
atop the grave of his parents. That year he had told me about the good heat he enjoyed in his new city home. I asked Wei Ziqi when the old man had passed away.

“Last year. I don’t remember which month.”

Another man spoke up: “This is the first time we’re marking his grave.”

“Last year he poured dirt on other people’s graves,” somebody else said. “This year we pour dirt on his.”

I picked up a shovel and added to the pile. Wei Ziqi took a stack of grave money and ignited it; the flame quickly devoured the banknotes. After he finished, somebody lit a Red Plum Blossom cigarette and stuck it in Wei Minghe’s grave. The cigarette stood straight upright like a stick of incense. The men stepped back and looked at the mound.

“Actually he didn’t smoke Red Plum Blossom.”

“No, he didn’t. Too expensive. In the old days he smoked Black Chrysanthemum.”

“You can’t even buy those anymore. They were popular in the 1980s.”

That was the first detail anybody had attached to the dead and the group stood in silence for a moment. Finally Wei Ziqi spoke up. “
Hao
,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Before leaving the field, one of the men turned around. “That cigarette will be fine, right?”

“It’s not a problem.”

A tiny wisp of smoke drifted upward into the sky. Together we followed the switchbacked trails, descending to the valley, where the apricot buds were scattered across the orchards. Entering the village we heard the propaganda speakers announce the annual ban on grave-burning. It was 6:30 in the morning; the men dropped off their baskets and shovels and returned to work in the fields. For the next two months the mountains were alive with spring labor.

THAT YEAR I HAD
promised Wei Jia that after his exams were finished, and summer vacation began, I would take him on a trip to the city. When the day arrived, and I picked him up in the village, he wore shorts and a T-shirt. He carried nothing—no duffel bag, no backpack. He didn’t have a change of clothes, or a toothbrush, or one
jiao
of Chinese currency. His mother was preparing a meal for some guests, and I asked her if the boy needed anything for his trip.

“No,” she said. “He’s only going for three days.”

American parents fill minivans whenever a child travels five blocks, but things are different in the Chinese countryside. I asked Cao Chunmei if there was anything the boy shouldn’t eat.

“Don’t give him cold drinks,” she said. “And don’t let him eat ice cream. He’ll ask you for it, but don’t give it to him.”

According to traditional Chinese medical beliefs, it’s bad to put anything cold in your stomach.

“Is it OK if he watches me eat ice cream?” I asked.

“That’s fine,” Cao Chunmei said, smiling.

When we arrived in Beijing, I gave Wei Jia a tour of my apartment. He was impressed by all the books.

“Did you write all of these?” the boy said.

There were more than a hundred on the shelves. “No,” I said. “Those books were written by other people.”

“All of them?”

“All of them.”

“What about those?” He pointed to a stack of magazines on a table. “Did you write those?”

“No.”

Wei Jia looked vaguely disappointed, as he did whenever we had some version of this conversation. In the village he often stopped by my house, and if I was reading a book he always asked the same thing: “Did you write that?” I had explained to him repeatedly that I had written only one book, and now I was working on the second, but he never quite understood. How could it take so long? And what’s the point of being a writer if you don’t sit around reading your own books?

The boy was the easiest guest I ever hosted. He never complained, and one advantage of a child without possessions is that he has nothing to lose. Every detail of the city impressed him, even the miserable parts—a packed subway train was an adventure, and he enjoyed getting stuck in traffic, because it allowed him to stare at cars. After I took him for a boat ride on Houhai, a small lake near my apartment, he asked if the ocean is any bigger. He absolutely loved taxis. From his perspective, it was a miracle of city life: if you wave your hand, pretty much any red car will stop immediately. By the second day I learned to watch him, because he liked to call cabs on his own. We’d be on foot, a block from my apartment, and his little arm would pop up; I’d have to tell the poor driver that in fact we weren’t going anywhere. People had no idea what we were doing together. Sometimes a taxi driver asked delicately what our relation was, and Wei Jia always answered matter-of-factly that I was his uncle. We went to Shijingshan, the amusement park outside Beijing, where we spent the day with two friends named Frances and Alice.
Frances is Chinese, the wife of a good friend of mine, and Alice is the daughter of another American friend. The child speaks Chinese and is about the same age as Wei Jia; she’s blond and has skin as fair as porcelain. All afternoon we drew stares—nobody knew what to make of this mongrel family. People must have assumed that’s what happens when a Chinese and an American have kids: sometimes you get one that’s really white, and sometimes you get one that looks a lot like a peasant.

The single disappointment was pizza. For some reason,
pizza
was one of the first words covered in Wei Jia’s English class at school. His first-grade textbook featured a lesson that described children going to eat pizza with a monkey named Mocky. Why pizza? Why a monkey? Why the name Mocky? But these weren’t questions that concerned Wei Jia, and all year he had talked about trying pizza. In Beijing, we met Mimi at Pizza Hut, and the boy finally got his wish—and then he discovered another new word:
cheese
. In the Chinese countryside nobody eats that stuff; the boy wrinkled his face and spat it out. He scraped it off and ate the crust. Over the years, the Beijing visits became our summer ritual, and we rode endless cabs and revisited the amusement park. But we never ate pizza again—as far as Wei Jia was concerned, that was monkey food.