Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  These infractions, along with a host of others, were described at the first parent-teacher conference. In Chinese schools, such meetings are communal: all of the parents attend at once, and all of them listen as the teacher summarizes each student’s performance. The good students are praised, the bad students are criticized, and the listening parents are socialized in much the same way as the children: by the power of the group. There is no greater loss of face than hearing in public that your child does poorly at school. And the bad ones always receive the most attention. At the first Shayu parent-teacher conference, certain children emerged as prominent subjects of public discussion. Zhang Yan was a bully. Wang Wei cracked jokes. Li Xiaomei was a dormitory bed-wetter. (“She doesn’t do it at home!” the girl’s mother said, at one of the many subsequent conferences that harped on the poor child.) And Wei Jia—he was the fidgeter, the classroom-wanderer, the kid who played with pebbles in the principal’s presence. The boy’s father was forced to listen to all of these infractions in excruciating detail, and then he made his way back to Sancha.

  That evening I had dinner with the family. Wei Ziqi was quiet throughout the meal, eating quickly and avoiding eye contact. He had a sharp temper, and his outbursts were usually preceded by silence—that heavy dead air before a storm. Nobody knew this weather pattern better than Wei Jia, but now he did his best to feign ignorance. After dinner he sat on the kang, looking at a picture book. His father stared at him for a good five minutes, and I could see the boy tracking him out of the corner of his eye. Finally Wei Ziqi spoke.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Reading a book,” Wei Jia said.

  “Where’s your homework?”

  “In my bag.”

  “Get it out, now.”

  On the whole, six-year-old boys are not naturally cut out for the demands of boarding school, and Wei Jia was especially disorganized. Often I picked him up on Friday afternoons, on my way to the village, and I always reminded him to make sure he brought the books he needed. But every Friday evening, back in Sancha, it was a complete mystery what would emerge from within the bowels of the Mickey Mouse backpack. Wei Jia opened the bag like a magician: anything could come out, and the trick was that even the boy had no idea. Tonight he conjured up four textbooks, a few pencils, and a dozen crumpled papers. His father snatched one of the pages.

  “What’s this? This is your homework! How are you going to do your homework if it’s torn up like this?”

  Wei Jia stared down at the kang.

  “Where’s your math book?”

  Hopefully, the boy looked inside the Mickey Mouse backpack, but it was empty—no more magic tonight.

  “Where’s your math book?”

  “I forgot it,” Wei Jia said softly.

  “How are you going to do your homework if you don’t have the book?” Wei Ziqi’s voice became sharp. “You know what Teacher Yang said today? She said that you always forget your homework. And you don’t pay attention in class! What’s going to happen to you if you don’t study well?”

  The boy glanced over at the picture book, but his father snatched it away. “And she said that you weren’t paying attention during the principal’s speech! Every other child stood there, but you had to kneel down. What’s wrong with you? Look at me!”

  But the child refused to make eye contact. His mouth held stubborn until Wei Ziqi reached over and cuffed him sharply on the side of the head; all at once the boy collapsed into tears. “You need to listen to Teacher Yang!” Wei Ziqi shouted. “She says you walk around the classroom whenever you feel like it. You can’t do that! And she says you don’t eat all of your dinner in the dormitory.”

  Cao Chunmei spoke up: “You know what will happen if you don’t eat well? You’ll get sick again. Do you want to go back to the hospital?”

  Suddenly Wei Ziqi reached over and pulled the boy’s trousers up to his knees, revealing his bare legs. “What if you get those bruises again?” Wei Ziqi shouted. “What are we going to do if that happens?”

  Cao Chunmei rushed over to examine the boy. “You need to eat well or you’ll get sick! You don’t want to get sick again!”

  The parents’ voices grew shrill, almost panicked. But there was a sudden tenderness to their touch; together they inspected the child’s legs, looking for bruises. It was as if all the unspoken fears from last year’s crisis had returned, and they gathered close on the kang. The boy wept—he threw back his head and wailed.

  THE FEARS OF CAO Chunmei ran deeper than those of her husband. Wei Ziqi’s approach to life was essentially pragmatic, and tangible threats tended to occupy his attention: the burden of loans, the politics of the village, his son’s health and education. He felt the pressures of his new business, but he had faith in the outcome of hard work. And he watched his customers carefully—he picked up cues from the city folk. He dressed neatly whenever he went to Huairou, but he still wore peasant clothes at home. He recognized that this is what customers expect: nobody goes to the countryside because they want to see a peasant aping an urbanite. Wei Ziqi became skilled at playing both roles, shifting between the demands of Sancha and Huairou.

  For Cao Chunmei, though, contact with the outside world was far more jarring. She was essentially stuck in Sancha, working in the kitchen. It wasn’t her responsibility to gather funding or supplies, and thus she never had the opportunity to enter Huairou or Beijing on her own terms. Instead, city people came to her, and these interactions sometimes left her feeling ashamed. Once a customer from Beijing wandered into the kitchen, curious to see how countryside people cook, and the city woman blurted out, “Your hands are so black!” She didn’t mean any harm, but afterward Cao Chunmei felt bad. She started scrubbing her hands frequently when customers were around. She dressed better, too—she bought a new silk shirt with sequins that she often wore on weekends.

  Her changes were different from Wei Ziqi’s. His shifts were more calculated; he wore new clothes and smoked cigarettes not strictly out of shame, but rather because it helped him do business. At some level, he was comfortable with being from the countryside—after all, that was the appeal of his restaurant. But Cao Chunmei had never felt entirely at home in Sancha, and now she realized that even a successful business wouldn’t expand her world beyond the village.

  For years she had been searching for some more meaningful connection with the outside. Young people in Sancha often felt that way; it was hard to live in a place where neighbors and friends had departed. Back in the mid-1990s, the village hit a low point: the population was dropping fast, and the people who remained had a tendency to gossip about the affairs and scandals of their neighbors. But something changed when a few villagers began to practice the breathing exercises and simple calisthenics known as Falun Gong. At that time, Falun Gong had the appeal of feeling both new and old: it was invented by a contemporary, a man in the northeast named Li Hongzhi, and he drew on familiar traditions of Daoism, Buddhism, and tai chi. Falun Gong was hard to define—in some ways it felt like a religion or a philosophy, but it was also a basic exercise routine. All of these elements combined to create something enormously popular, and this was especially true in the economically troubled parts of northern China. In Sancha, practitioners liked having a new structure to their lives, and soon others began to join them. By the late 1990s it seemed that most villagers met every morning in the lot at the top of the dead-end road. Cao Chunmei and Wei Ziqi became part of the faithful, and years later she described that period fondly. “It was good for our health,” she told me. “Wei Ziqi didn’t drink or smoke in those days, because Falun Gong says you shouldn’t do that. And he wasn’t so angry then. It seemed that people in the village were happy; we all spent time together in the mornings.”

  Falun Gong’s range of influences appealed to average people, but the lack of definition was a political liability. In China, the Communist Party allows only five official religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism. All faiths are monit
ored by government agencies, and there’s no tolerance for independent leadership; for example, Chinese Catholics aren’t allowed to recognize the pope. From this perspective, Li Hongzhi represented a problem, especially after he emigrated to the United States. And as Falun Gong became more popular, it attracted critics as well as adherents. Chinese journalists sometimes attacked the practice in print, claiming that it was nothing more than superstition. In April of 1999, a critical article inspired more than ten thousand believers to assemble in downtown Beijing. They peacefully surrounded the central government compound, hoping to receive some sort of recognition. Sure enough, they got noticed—this represented the biggest protest in the capital since the Tiananmen Square student demonstrations of 1989. Within months the Party banned Falun Gong, and soon the organizers of the protest were being sent to labor camps for reeducation.

  Nobody in Sancha had attended the Beijing protest, but the village quickly felt the crackdown. Local Party members, some of whom had been avid practitioners, held meetings to criticize Falun Gong, and the morning rituals in the empty lot came to an abrupt end. In China, the coordination of such nationwide campaigns is a strength of the Communist Party. As a source of new ideas, the Party might be bankrupt, but it’s still incredibly well organized and coordinated. And the Party understands the significance of local power in a nation that’s mostly rural. A command can be given in Beijing and immediately reach countless settlements, and there are essentially no rural residents who live beyond the reach of village politics. When I visited Ma Yufa, the hermit of Sancha, he had no idea who was the leader of China. But he answered immediately when I asked about the village Party Secretary. He knew her name, and her husband’s name; he told me exactly how the man was related to the Wei family. In Chinese villages, those are the politics that matter, and after 1999 they were turned against Falun Gong.

  Across China, the crackdown was often brutal. According to human rights groups, hundreds of believers died in custody, usually when local police used excessive force in order to gain a conversion or a promise to stop practicing. Thousands more were sent to labor camps. But practitioners originally numbered in the tens of millions, and most of these people simply decided not to participate anymore. In Sancha I knew of only one villager who was reluctant to give up his new faith, and he changed his mind after spending a week in a Huairou jail. Even when it comes to religion, the Chinese can be pragmatic—they might possess the desire to believe, but few will cling to a doomed faith once the government applies serious pressure. And the religious impulse often has more to do with a search for community than anything else. In China, rapid change has left many people with a hollow feeling: they no longer believe in the Communist ideology of old, and the forces of migration and urbanization have radically transformed society. The new pursuit of wealth can seem empty and exhausting; many people wish for a more meaningful connection with others. Some of them turn to religion not necessarily because they desire a personal relationship with God, but because they want to share something with neighbors and friends. This is one reason why the crackdown on Falun Gong was largely successful—after the community was broken, most people saw no reason to believe in that particular faith. A half century of Communism had taught them patience; they knew that something else would eventually appear.

  By 2003, when the Wei family business began to succeed, it had been nearly four years since Cao Chunmei abandoned Falun Gong. During that time she had stayed alert to new ideas, especially after the business began to bring more visitors to Sancha. One weekend, she heard a group of tourists from Beijing talking about Buddhism. They were middle-class, the type of city people who often scorn peasants, but Cao Chunmei noticed a difference with this group. They treated her with respect, and they talked in a way that appealed to her. “In their conversation, they often referred to the Buddha,” she told me later. “They talked about all sorts of situations, and they were interested in how a person should respond to each. Every time something complicated came up, they were able to refer to the Buddha. I thought there was something good about it. They had ideas about how a person should live.”

  Shyly, Cao Chunmei worked up the courage to ask one woman a question. “I asked her what effect Buddhism had on her life,” Cao Chunmei remembered. “I asked her if it had helped her solve any special problems. She said that wasn’t the only reason she believed in Buddhism—it wasn’t because of some specific need she had. It didn’t solve problems quickly like that. But it helped her understand the right way to act in many different situations, and that was more important.”

  Cao Chunmei knew exactly what the woman meant—she often felt a desire that ran deeper than the mundane details of daily life. It was the first time she had ever felt a connection to her city customers, and a couple of weeks later the Beijing woman returned to Sancha. This time she brought two books: The Book of Third-Generation Karma and The Book of Ksitigarbha and Bodhisattva. Cao Chunmei studied the texts, and she noticed that they helped her feel calmer. After a while she built a shrine in the family’s main room. She placed a table against the wall, covered it with yellow silk, and erected two large plastic statues. One was Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and the other was Caishen, the God of Wealth. In the mornings Cao Chunmei burned incense before the statues, and she made offerings, always in odd numbers: three oranges, five apples, three glasses of baijiu. Such shrines are common in southern China, especially among people doing business, but they’re rare in Beijing homes. The first time I noticed the statues I asked Cao Chunmei who had arranged them.

  “I did,” she said proudly. “They came from a shop in Huairou.”

  And then—I had been in China too long; the question was all but automatic—I asked how much the statues had cost. Cao Chunmei’s tone was friendly but she set me straight.

  “We don’t say that we ‘bought’ something like this,” she said. “We say that we ‘invited’ the statues to come here. I invited them here because I thought they would help our household.”

  IN SANCHA, 2004 BECAME the Year of Construction. Modern Chinese time works like that—the traditional calendar follows its path through the zodiac, from monkey to rooster to dog; but for most people it’s the details of development that matter most. The Year of the Horse—2002—is memorable in Sancha because that’s when the road was paved. The Year of the Ram was the Year of the New Car. The Year of the Monkey was the Year of Construction. And unlike the age-old patterns of the zodiac, there was no mystery about the modern parade of Road to Car to Construction. The new road allowed new cars to bring new people to Sancha, and they brought new money that could be used for construction. New sounds, too—all year the village rang with the pounding of hammers and the hum of drills and saws.

  Like many economic changes in Sancha, the work was pioneered by Wei Ziqi. First he refinished the interior of his home, and then he built a small guesthouse. He designed it himself, a low cement building with a half dozen rooms, and he organized all the construction. For labor he hired his neighbors and close relatives at a rate of three dollars per day, which was standard for any Sancha building project, public or private. In Chinese villages, locals typically provide such labor, which is why the government’s road-building campaign of 2003 and 2004 was so important. It improved transport in the countryside, but it also gave underemployed farmers something to do.

  In the Sancha region, the government even commissioned a modern version of the Great Wall. County officials had noticed how the Beijing car boom was bringing more people to northern villages, where one of the main attractions was the Ming relic. Recognizing an opportunity for subtle branding, the cadres decreed that all settlements must decorate their roads with structures that resembled the top of the Great Wall. These fake walls were built of red brick, covered in cement, and painted gray. They had crenellations etched with lines that resembled seventeenth-century stonework. From a defensive point of view, the barriers were of questionable value—they were only two and a half feet tall, and if a Mongol had be
en moving south on a moonless night, at a high rate of speed, maybe his horse would have stubbed a hoof on the new Great Wall. But this structure had been designed with the automobile in mind. The new walls often ran on both sides of the road, giving motorists the impression that they were driving atop the Great Wall. It finally fulfilled one of the dreams of the 1920s, when the Shenbao newspaper had suggested that converting the Great Wall into a highway “would make it easier to do business.”

  Certainly it was an effective way to put money into peasants’ pockets. Everybody who built the walls earned the standard wage of three dollars per day, and in Sancha the villagers were happy to have the work. They built the new Great Wall, and they worked on Wei Ziqi’s home and guesthouse; and they made repairs to the paved road. The day wages added up, and soon other villagers started to make improvements to their homes. The empty lot at the dead-end road became a depot for construction materials—every time I drove out to the village, I parked amid piles of sand and brick. For a while I mourned the lost tranquility. It seemed like ages since my first year in the village, when the road was still dirt and I could sit at my desk and hear nothing but the wind in the walnut trees. That had been 2001: the last year of silence.

  But I had lived in China long enough to accept that nothing stays the same, and finally I did what everybody else was doing: I remodeled. Mimi and I had always believed that our house should remain at the local standard, but by 2004 that standard was changing. We hired a crew of local workers, who made the same interior renovations that they had just finished in the home of Wei Ziqi. He had undertaken the most extensive improvements in the village: new ceilings of plaster, linoleum floors with the pattern of wood grain, and clean white walls covered with paint instead of old copies of the People’s Daily. Once the Party Secretary saw the results, she immediately commissioned the same thing for her own house—she wasn’t about to fall behind Wei Ziqi. Over time, most locals followed suit, and the work crews moved throughout the village. In the same steady way that they had built the new Great Wall, crenellation after crenellation, they gave every house the same marks of modernity: plaster ceilings, linoleum floors, painted walls.