Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  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.”

  I telephoned Sancha and Cao Chunmei answered. “He’s fine,” she said. “He just had a nosebleed, but it wasn’t serious.”

  “You can’t let him do anything rough,” I said. “Don’t let him play or run around. Just keep him in bed while we figure out what to do. This is serious—make sure he stays quiet.”

  I called Mimi and we considered the options. There was no transport in the village, apart from motorcycles. Mimi had her family car, but we had no idea where to take him; I wasn’t going to return to the Children’s Hospital. While we were talking, my cell phone rang.

  “Now his nose won’t stop bleeding,” Cao Chunmei said. She put her husband on the line. “It’s OK as long as he’s lying down,” Wei Ziqi said. “But if he sits up it starts bleeding again.”

  “He should be in the hospital,” I said. “The doctor made a mistake. Just keep him lying down and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I ran to Mimi’s apartment to get the car keys; she was already telephoning people, searching for a different hospital. I started the Santana and headed north, cursing the Beijing traffic. If I was lucky I’d make it there in less than two hours.

  CAO CHUNMEI GREW UP on the opposite side of the brick-and-stone Great Wall. Her home village is located down in the valley, where conditions are better than in Sancha, and her family wasn’t as poor as Wei Ziqi’s. But life was simple during her childhood, and she paid for school supplies with eggs—money was rarely used in those days. Every weekend, along with her brother and sister, she hiked the five miles to her grandmother’s house. Their route took them across the high pass at Jiankou, one of the most spectacularly steep sections of the Great Wall. The impressive brick fortifications were completed around the turn of the seventeenth century, near the end of the Ming dynasty, but none of that history mattered to Cao Chunmei as a girl. From her perspective, the Great Wall simply defined the two worlds of her childhood. It was the barrier between school and family, weekdays and weekends, and countless times she crossed the threshold of crumbling bricks.

  After finishing the eighth grade, Cao Chunmei left school and began working at a nearby garment factory where her older sister already had a job. The plant produced military clothes: standard-issue shirts and jackets, the kind of gear that’s also worn by peasants. On the assembly line, Cao Chunmei started by making collars; then she moved to cuffs, finally to button-sewing. She lived at home with her parents. By bicycle it was only a half hour ride, and her family was prosperous enough to allow her to keep her earnings. Later she recalled these years as some of the happiest of her life.

  On the assembly line, Cao Chunmei worked with a young woman from Sancha. One day, the woman asked if Cao Chunmei had a boyfriend, and she answered yes. But the woman didn’t seem to listen. “You should meet my uncle,” she said. She told Cao Chunmei that the uncle was only a little older than her, and he wasn’t married.

  “I decided to do it,” Cao Chunmei remembered, years later. “I thought my boyfriend at the time was too young, and he was from a place very close to my hometown. I’m not sure why I felt that way, but for some reason I didn’t want to marry somebody close to home.”

  The coworker, it turned out, was the daughter of the Shitkicker. The man and Wei Ziqi are distant cousins—they share the same great-great-grandfather—and the daughter arranged a meeting between Cao Chunmei and Wei Ziqi. In the countryside, evaluations of potential partners tend to be swift and brutal, and the passage of time does not necessarily soften them with gauzy nostalgia. More than a decade after they met, Cao Chunmei still recalled her exact impressions. “I thought he was very short and very black,” she said. “His skin was so dark! But when he spoke, I thought he was funny. He had a good sense of humor. He didn’t talk in the way that most people do; he was more interesting, and he said things that might not have been appropriate. I thought he seemed fun.”

  Eight months later, on New Year’s Day of 1993, they were married. They held the wedding at a restaurant in the small town of Miaocheng. Nearly fifteen years after Cao Chunmei’s wedding, she could not recall the name of the restaurant, the dishes that were served, or the guest list—the sort of details that, for an American woman, would be etched across memory for all time. But Cao Chunmei could still note every financial detail in perfect order. The banquet cost six hundred and ninety yuan—around eighty-five dollars. Gifts were cash, as is traditional at Chinese weddings, and the most the couple received from a single guest was twelve dollars. The wedding resulted in a net profit of one hundred and sixty dollars. When Cao Chunmei talked about the event, she recited these numbers like an accountant.

  For two years the young couple lived in Huairou, where Cao Chunmei worked as a cook. But she never felt comfortable in the city. “Too many people,” she told me once. “It makes me nervous. In the village, if you want to go somewhere, it’s easier to get around. And it’s quiet and peaceful. If you’re done with your work, you can relax in peace, or you can go for a walk.”

  Wei Ziqi held a similar opinion of city life, and after Cao Chunmei became pregnant they moved back across the Great Wall to Sancha. They lived with Wei Ziqi’s parents, whose house still had dirt floors and walls made of mud mixed with sorghum stalks. The conditions were far worse than what Cao Chunmei was accustomed to, but this didn’t particularly bother her. She liked the quietness of the village, and initially she was happy to live in a place that seemed poor but peaceful.

  Over time, though, her feelings about Sancha changed. In 1997, she gave birth to Wei Jia, and then both her in-laws died within the span of a year. Cao Chunmei became friends with other village women, most of whom had also married in from the outside, and she began to hear stories. At first they were hard to believe—the kind of tales that were told in whispers. She learned that one local woman had been involved in a decades-long affair with a relative of her husband. They even had a child together, although everybody pretended that it was the husband’s son. Another woman had borne three children to three different men. She had done it through migration—often this is the best way to avoid the planned-birth policy. Periodically the Sancha woman found work in a new city, where she invariably found a new partner and had a baby. Her legal husband remained in the village, where he conducted an ongoing affair with a neighbor’s wife. It was another open secret: whenever the neighbor went to work in the fields, the other man crept over to his house.

  “There’s a lot of this sort of thing in Sancha,” Cao Chunmei told me, after we’d known each other for a long time. She said there were a number of village affairs, and even some rumors of incest. “It has something to do with the local environment,” she said. “Somehow it became more accepted because this place is so remote. This sort of thing doesn’t happen so often in my village. But in my village there are more than two hundred families, and here there are so few.

  “When I first came here,” she continued, “I thought that everything was fine, that it was a normal place. But then in my second year I began to learn about all the affairs and the wrong things that people did. Wei Ziqi never talked to me about these things. Many people here are from his family, so he can’t speak openly about it.” She told me that sometimes an affair leads to violence, and inevitably the woman is the target. “Sometimes the man will beat his wife,” she said
. “But there’s never a fight between the two men involved.”

  In her first decade at Sancha, Cao Chunmei never visited the Great Wall above the village. For her, the ruins belong strictly to childhood, when she used to hike to her grandmother’s house, and she sees no point in making the two-hour trek in her new home. She is a heavyset woman with a round face, and her hair is white—it started to turn when she was only a teenager. Nowadays she dyes it black, but the roots still show pale. Her left eye is blue, her right eye brown. She has a quick, gentle smile, and she always seems happiest with Wei Jia; but there is a distinct sadness behind the woman’s mismatched eyes. She’s seen the peacefulness of the countryside dissolve like a mirage, and she knows there’s nothing easy about raising the last child in a village.

  I PARKED AT THE top of the dead-end road. Inside the Weis’ house, the boy lay on the kang. His face was pale and flecks of blood had dried dark around his nose. He didn’t say anything when I touched his forehead.

  “It’s a lot of trouble for you to come out here,” Cao Chunmei said.

  “It’s no problem,” I said. I pressed the boy’s brow—he was on fire. His eyes looked frightened but still he didn’t speak.

  “Will you eat some lunch?” Cao Chunmei asked politely.