Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  “He didn’t get fat until he started the hormones,” said the boy’s mother. “Now he eats all the time, but he won’t eat fruit.”

  “Wei Jia won’t eat fruit, either,” Cao Chunmei said. She sat on the bed beside her sleeping son.

  “Fruit, eggs, milk—he won’t eat anything that’s good for him,” said the kidney mother.

  “Neither will Wei Jia.”

  “They should give him hormones, too,” the woman said. “He’s too small.”

  The twelve-year-old wore headphones and listened to a CD player. He had the gangly look of an adolescent and for the past week he had been living in this room, surrounded by the parents and their constant conversation. He had his music turned up loud. His grandmother was also there, a sixty-eight-year-old woman from the countryside of Hebei. Of all the adults, she was the most talkative, and now she offered advice to Cao Chunmei.

  “The first thing you need to take care of is the boy’s health,” the old woman said. “If somebody is healthy, he can always work and earn a living. The second most important thing is education. When I was young, I had no schooling—I still can’t read! When I was a little girl, I remember one of my aunts saying to my father, ‘Why should you pay for her to be educated? She’ll just marry into another family eventually. That means you’re paying for the education of somebody else’s family. Why would you do that?’ So they didn’t send me to school. That’s why I say that education is so important.”

  “I’m hungry,” said the fat child.

  Wei Ziqi laughed. “He’s hungry again!”

  “He’s always hungry,” Cao Chunmei said admiringly. “That’s why he’s so fat.”

  “You just ate!” the fat boy’s mother said.

  “I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” The boy’s voice rose as if he were going to cry. He cried all the time—he had the whining air of a city kid who knows how to get what he wants. The mother opened a wooden cabinet next to the bed and took out a hospital tray of half-eaten pork and rice. The boy set to it eagerly. Wei Jia was still sleeping. My cell phone rang.

  “It’s pretty good news,” the American woman said to me. She had discovered that our hospital used the same blood bank as her company; the only difference was that our hospital didn’t test as thoroughly. “I talked with doctors here,” she said. “They haven’t ever come up with a positive for H.I.V. That blood bank has been safe so far.”

  I thanked her and hung up. On impulse, I called Ted Scott, my doctor friend in San Francisco, and a cheerful voice picked up: “Hi! This is Ted, sorry I can’t come to the phone right now…” I had no idea what time it was; later he told me that he was working the swing shift at the ER. I stared at my phone, trying to think of somebody else I could talk to. I wanted to hear that we had done everything possible, that it would all turn out fine. But there was nobody else: Mei banfa. Finally I looked up at Wei Ziqi.

  “I think it’s OK,” I said.

  We went downstairs to the hospital’s payment division. Clerks sat behind windows like tellers at a bank, and cash was everywhere: packed into drawers, strewn across tables, spinning in counting machines. In China the largest bill is only one hundred yuan, the equivalent of about twelve dollars, and any major purchase requires a huge stack of cash. I had brought eight thousand yuan—a sheaf as thick as a novel in manuscript. I pulled the money out of my bag and handed it over to a clerk, who tossed it into a machine without a word.

  Upstairs, after I gave the receipt to the nurse, the doctors began to prepare for the transfusion. I knew the medical people didn’t want me around, so I told Wei Ziqi and Cao Chunmei I’d come back tomorrow. Wei Jia had woken up; the boy looked pale but he gave me a smile. I promised that once he got better we’d go to the zoo. I caught a cab home, took a shower, and had dinner alone. In the evening the numbness lifted and all at once, sitting in my empty apartment, I felt so helpless I could hardly breathe.

  AFTER THE TRANSFUSION, WEI Jia’s fever broke. Within two days his platelet count returned to normal, and it held steady for the rest of the week. The bone-marrow test showed no leukemia. The doctors decided that the condition was in fact ITP, and the worst threat had passed.

  At the end of that week a group of relatives came to visit. There were four men: Wei Jia’s maternal grandfather, his great-uncle, another uncle, and a distant relative named Li Ziwen. All but one of the men had arrived directly from the countryside, and they wore peasant clothes of military green and dark blue. The great-uncle was seventy-one years old and he told me that he hadn’t been to Beijing for almost three decades. Li Ziwen was the only city resident—he had grown up in Haizikou, across the pass from Sancha, but as a young man he had joined the military. After a decade of service he had accepted a government-assigned job in the capital, and now he had risen to become a low-ranking official. He wore black leather loafers with the Playboy logo and a sweater that said “Wolsey” on the breast. He had lost the leanness of the countryside—a soft cadre belly spilled over his belt.

  The men entered the hospital room and gathered around the bed. Wei Jia sat cross-legged; he had been reading a picture book. Cao Jifu, the grandfather, put his hand on the boy’s back and spoke softly to him. The sudden attention made Wei Jia shy and he bowed his head. The sheets had not been changed for more than a week and they were covered with red-brown stains from all the blood tests.

  After a few minutes somebody mentioned lunch. Li Ziwen, the city dweller, reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills: all hundreds. He dropped the money onto the bed.

  “Use this for the child,” he said.

  Wei Ziqi tried to give the money back, but Li refused. For a minute, the two men argued gently, and finally Wei Ziqi nodded his head in thanks. Then the uncle stepped forward and placed another stack of bills on the bed, followed by the grandfather. The great-uncle went last. He was poorer than the others and his stack included some tens and twenties. The money lay in four bright piles on the bloodstained sheets. There was an awkward silence, and then Cao Chunmei pushed the cash out of sight, beneath the boy’s pillow. Somebody mentioned lunch again.

  Cao Chunmei stayed with Wei Jia while the men went to a restaurant across the street. We hired a private room, where after another brief argument the grandfather was given the seat of honor, facing the door. Wei Ziqi studied the menu for a good five minutes before ordering. When the waitress brought a bottle of 120-proof grain alcohol, he examined the seal. “Can you guarantee this bottle isn’t counterfeit?” he said.

  The waitress seemed surprised. “I’m pretty sure,” she said. “But I guess I can’t say for certain.”

  Li Ziwen took the bottle and ran his finger along the cap. “I don’t know,” he said. “There’s a lot of fake baijiu nowadays. The fake stuff is bad for your health.”

  So is the real stuff, I thought to myself. Wei Ziqi sent the bottle back, and the next one as well. Finally the waitress returned with Red Star Erguotou. “We can guarantee this one,” she said.

  Wei Ziqi poured the Erguotou into shot glasses. The food began to appear, dish by dish, and each arrival inspired a fresh round of commentary. At a well-organized Chinese banquet there are no lulls in conversation: as long as you have food, you have something to talk about.

  “The fish-flavored pork is better than the one we had the other night,” Wei Ziqi said. “But the iron-plate beef at this place isn’t as good.”

  “It’s a little salty.”

  “These beans are OK. Just OK, though.”

  The waitress brought a dish of dried beef. Wei Ziqi tried it and said, “This doesn’t taste right.”

  One by one, the men tasted the beef and complained.

  “No, it’s not good.”

  “It’s too old, I think.”

  “If you eat that you’ll get sick.”

  Wei Ziqi called the waitress into the room. “This dish is bad,” he said. “You should take it back.”

  The woman removed the dish. The next time she entered the room, Wei Ziqi complained t
hat they had failed to put the duck’s head into our soup. “You should do that as a matter of course,” he said sternly. Here in the restaurant—inspecting the bottles, judging the food, making quick decisions—he seemed completely different from the man who had stood in the background during the arguments about his son’s blood transfusion. But it was simply rural logic: Wei Ziqi didn’t know anything about platelets and biopsies, whereas food was his trade, so here at the restaurant he was the expert. And perhaps he wanted the others to see him in control.

  The men drank steadily and the grandfather’s face was the first to turn red from the alcohol. He stood up and gave me a formal toast, using my Chinese name: “Ho Wei, we appreciate all of your help with Wei Jia.”

  Everybody held up his glass, and we drained them. “Ho Wei has a lot of friends in America who are doctors,” Wei Ziqi said. “They gave us a lot of help, too.”

  Somebody asked about the boy’s platelet count, and Wei Ziqi said that it had improved since the transfusion. He described our drive into Beijing, when Wei Jia was bleeding and we had stopped repeatedly on the mountain roads. After the story was finished, the other men continued discussing the boy’s health, and Wei Ziqi turned to me. “You know,” he said quietly, “I was frightened during that drive.”

  I told him that I’d been scared, too.

  All of the men had turned red and now the toasts came faster. Li Ziwen, the city resident, exchanged shots with the grandfather. “This is the second time we’ve drunk together,” the grandfather said.

  Li Ziwen laughed. “The first time was when Wei Jia was born,” he said. “Back then I was in the military, and they gave me two days’ vacation.”

  “We drank a lot that day!” the grandfather said. He raised his glass, and Li Ziwen joined him, and together they drank to the memory of the boy’s birth.

  II

  WINTER IS THE QUIETEST SEASON IN SANCHA. THERE ARE no crops, and almost no work in the orchards, apart from occasional pruning and grafting. The men gather firewood, and sometimes they follow game trails into the mountains, where they set loop snares in hopes of catching a badger or a feral pig. Mostly, though, people stay indoors. Snowfall is rare, because of the dryness, but the temperature is usually below freezing. At home the kang is the only source of heat. Much of daily life takes place atop those large brick beds, and if you walk into a home at nine in the morning there’s a good chance that people will still be huddled under the covers. They eat less—in winter they have two daily meals instead of three. They sleep nine or ten hours a night, and they often doze away the afternoon. Mornings are silent. On a cold day in the village, the place is so still that it seems as if the residents are in hibernation.

  After Wei Jia returned from the hospital, in November of 2002, he stayed home from kindergarten. For two months he hardly left the house, and his parents gave him a course of steroids that had been prescribed by the doctors. There was a brief period during which the boy whined and cried easily—he had learned this behavior from his roommate in the hospital, the pudgy city child. Whenever Wei Jia cried, his parents mocked him relentlessly. “You look like a monkey,” his father would say, laughing at the kid’s tears. “Cry, monkey, cry!” His mother joined in the fun, and soon the child abandoned that routine. Over the winter he gained nine pounds. His father taught him how to write some simple Chinese characters, and together they listened to English-language tapes.

  Winter became one of my favorite times to visit the countryside. Without the summer brush, trails were clear, and sometimes I hiked for hours along the Great Wall. The mountains were peaceful and there was a sleepy openness to the village; at night the peasants often gathered in somebody’s house to drink baijiu and play cards. One evening that winter, Wei Ziqi and I had dinner with his nephew Wei Quanyou, and the men began to talk about automobiles. Wei Ziqi hoped to get a license someday—that was a plan he often mentioned.

  “Ho Wei is a good driver,” Wei Ziqi said.

  “I’m average,” I said.

  “No, you’re not. How long have you been driving?”

  “Since I was sixteen. Many Americans start when they’re sixteen.”

  “Almost twenty years!”

  “Not quite.”

  “You should have seen what it was like when Wei Jia was sick,” Wei Ziqi said, and he told the story of our drive into Beijing. Wei Quanyou listened attentively, although I was certain that he had already heard the tale. The story had become a familiar one in the village, where there is a tradition of helping neighbors with medical problems. If somebody in Sancha goes to the hospital, other villagers stop by the home with cash donations—in a nation without rural health insurance, this is how the villagers protect each other against medical expenses. Recovery always means that the grateful family hosts a banquet. Wei Jia’s illness represented the first time that Mimi and I were truly involved in village life—we responded in ways that were recognizable to locals, and now they greeted us more warmly than in the past. And the experiences of the last year had made me feel differently about Sancha. In the beginning I had seen the village as an escape, a place where I could hike and write in peace; but now I went there for different reasons. In China it was the closest I ever came to home.

  That evening, Wei Quanyou had invited me to dinner, as a way of showing gratitude. He was a tiny man, not much taller than five feet, and he had the sweetest smile in the village. He never said much—at dinners he always seemed to be listening to other people’s stories. He lived in a rough-built house whose walls had been covered with old newspapers, and the only decoration was a cheap paper map of China. Across the map, various cities had been numbered by hand from one to thirty-four. The numbers began with Beijing and ended with Macau; in between they ran through Shanghai, Tianjin, Xi’an, Lhasa, Ürümqi—the whole range of the country.

  “Are these places you’ve traveled to?” I asked, after we had started eating.

  “Of course not!” Wei Quanyou said. “The farthest I’ve been is Beijing.”

  “So why did you write the numbers?”

  “Those are the cities on the China Central Television weather forecast,” he said. He explained: every night on CCTV, the forecast appears in the same order, with Beijing first, then Shanghai, and then all the rest, with Macau last. Wei Quanyou had memorized the order and marked it on his map.

  For a moment I was confused. “Is there a special reason you did that?”

  “No reason.” He laughed as if to say, What else are you going to do in Sancha during January?

  For Wei Ziqi, though, that was the first year the winter routines began to change. Six months earlier, in the summer of 2002, the government had paved the dirt road to the upper village, and then motorists began to find their way to the empty lot at the top of the hill. The capital’s car boom was gaining momentum—that year, Beijing residents purchased more than a quarter million new vehicles, the largest increase in the city’s history. More drivers were exploring the countryside, and during the summer Wei Ziqi and Cao Chunmei started serving simple meals in their home. They charged two and a half dollars a head, and business was good.

  In the winter Wei Ziqi decided to expand into a real restaurant and guesthouse. While the rest of the village hibernated, he worked hard: he paved the threshing platform in front of his house, and he built a new kitchen. He made frequent trips to Huairou in order to buy cement and other supplies. He began carrying a cell phone that could be used in Huairou; there was still no reception in the village. In the past, he’d always dressed the same regardless of where he was going, but now he was careful to avoid peasant clothes on trips to town—he’d learned that from our visits to the hospital. He bought a set of nonmilitary clothes, as well as a pair of city shoes: black leather loafers that cost four dollars. The brand name was Yidali—“Italy”—and he kept the box displayed prominently in his house. In the village he still wore camouflaged sneakers, like everybody else, but he slipped on the Italy whenever it was time to go to Huairou.

&nb
sp; Huairou lies halfway between Sancha and Beijing, and this midpoint is social as well as geographic. It’s hard to define exactly how the place feels: not quite a city, not quite a village. Fifteen years ago it was much closer to the village end of the spectrum. In 1995, when the Chinese government hosted the United Nations’ Fourth World Women’s Conference, they decided that they didn’t want Hillary Clinton and five thousand other politically oriented foreign women descending on the capital. So they sent them to Huairou instead—a type of banishment. At that time, most buildings were of the type that had already become outdated in the capital: squat, blocky structures of three or four stories, covered in white tile and blue glass. Streets were wide; cars were few. Huairou was a city of exile—there was no good reason to go there from Beijing.

  But over time it became something different to those who arrive from the opposite direction. Huairou is situated at the northern edge of the Beijing Plain, where roads fan out into the mountains, and the city is a natural first destination for people who leave villages. Beijing is often too big and disorienting, but Huairou is manageable for a person from the countryside. In the decade after the Women’s Conference, it grew rapidly, and today the downtown population is nearly one hundred thousand. Neither city nor village, it’s actually both: a city of villagers. Few residents are more than a generation removed from farmwork, and local businesses depend heavily on people moving back and forth between the countryside.

  Like so many new towns in China, Huairou has the feel of a training ground. It’s a city of gawkers and loiterers; people often appear to be lost. They stare at seven-story buildings; they gaze into shop windows; they wander into traffic—a Huairou driver learns to be attentive. On sunny days, crowds mill around the former site of the Women’s Conference, which is now flanked by a KFC and a McDonald’s. These fast-food restaurants are always packed, and the same is true for the single department store in town, which is called Da Shijie: The Big World. The Big World is five stories tall and stocked with virtually everything a Huairou shopper could want—appliances, clothes, toys, books. Peasants go there to ride the escalators. They stand poised before the moving metal, waiting for the perfect moment to take the leap; after a successful mount they clutch the rubber railings like a gymnast gripping the parallel bars. At the end of the line they hop to safety. They have a tendency to stop dead after dismount, as if waiting for a judge’s score. Within the department store, there’s a lot of good-natured jostling: people bump each other at the end of backed-up escalators, and they plow through crowded shop aisles, and they step on the heels of folks who are rubbernecking the central atrium. The decorating scheme of the Big World is simple in theme but complicated in execution. The theme is: things that shine and things that make noise. There are mirrors and glass railings and columns of polished steel; there are beeping lights and blaring loudspeakers; there are more reflective surfaces here than on a disco ball. It’s hard to imagine any place more different from a quiet mountain village, and people from the countryside love the Big World—they stagger up the escalators and blink happily in the glaring lights. That’s the trick of Huairou: it’s a city of transformation, where people change as quick as a peasant with a pair of Italy loafers.