That was also the year Wei Ziqi joined the Communist Party and acquired a driver’s license. In the past, Wei Ziqi had never spoken about becoming a Party member, and the Huairou fortune-teller had specifically warned him to avoid getting involved in political matters. In China, even basic membership is complicated—it’s not like the United States, where a political party will accept anybody. The Communists require a formal application, followed by meetings and interviews; local members have the authority to reject anybody they deem inadequate. And membership is rare: across China, only seventy million people, or roughly 5 percent of the population, are card-carrying Communists.
In 2004, Sancha was home to seventeen members of the Party. The majority were older than fifty, and none was under the age of thirty. It was rare for a motivated young person to apply—most people of that description had left the village entirely. As a result, Sancha’s local leadership was conservative, and a few members had been slow to accept even the most basic elements of the new economy. Some could barely read. There were only three women, each of whom had some family link to the organization. The Party Secretary’s mother had been the first woman in the village to join, before the Revolution was even finished, and she had encouraged her daughter to become involved in politics. The third female member was married to a local official. None of the Sancha Party members was engaged in business on a significant scale. When Wei Ziqi applied, he represented something entirely different: the village’s youngest prospective member, and the first to have succeeded as an entrepreneur.
He rarely spoke in detail about his motivations. In China, people tend to be closemouthed about such matters; you can be friends with a person for years and never have a conversation about what he does in the Party. Wei Ziqi’s application took six months, and during that time he was evaluated repeatedly at village meetings. Sometimes he gave self-criticisms—a common routine in China. I asked him what he talked about in such situations.
“I say that I’m not enthusiastic enough about physical labor,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“If there’s some work in the village, and everybody is supposed to contribute, then sometimes I’m slow to participate. That’s how I criticize myself.”
Whenever I asked him why he applied, his answer was the same. “I want to help the country,” he said. “And I want to help the village. This is the best way to do it.” He left it at that—he never referred to personal benefits. But I knew that he was trying to solidify guanxi in the village, where his rise in status had made him vulnerable. In 2004 his income became the highest in Sancha, but his business plans were ambitious; he took out a loan of nearly three thousand dollars from the Agricultural Bank of China. Like all rural loans to individual farmers, it had to be approved by the village, and I suspected that Wei Ziqi’s pending Party status might have helped. In the end, there was little resistance to his application to join the Party, and only three members opposed it. The Shitkicker led this small clique, but Wei Ziqi easily gained the required majority. On July 1 of 2004, the eighty-third anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Wei Ziqi officially became a member.
It took another five months for him to get the driver’s license. He waited until the end of the harvest and the fall tourist season, and then he signed up for a driving course in Shunyi, a small city not far from Huairou. Tuition was costly—nearly five hundred American dollars—and this indoctrination was just as mysterious as the Communist Party membership. For one thing, Shunyi-trained drivers were expected to begin every maneuver in the second gear. The coach was adamant on this point, and I asked Wei Ziqi why it was so important.
“It’s harder in second gear,” he said. “The coach says it will make us better with the clutch if we drive in second.”
One day not long after he received his license, I rented a Jetta and drove out to the village. About an hour after I arrived, Wei Ziqi stopped by and asked me to move the car, because somebody needed to mix cement in the lot at the end of the road. Nowadays there was always activity out there, because of the construction boom; it seemed that every time I visited, I had to move the car. In the past I never would have imagined that parking in Sancha would become a problem.
That morning, I was writing at my desk, and Wei Ziqi offered to move the Jetta for me. I had let him drive a few times in the past, but only under close observation; he still wasn’t capable of driving alone, despite having spent fifty-eight hours learning how to start a truck in second gear. This time, though, I figured it was harmless—my car needed to be moved only a few feet. I gave him the keys and went back to work.
Half an hour later Wei Ziqi returned. He stood in the doorway for a while without saying anything. Finally I asked if everything was all right.
“There’s a problem with the car,” he said slowly. He was smiling, but it was a tight Chinese grin of embarrassment. Whenever I saw that expression I felt my pulse quicken.
“What kind of problem?” I said.
“I think you should come see it.”
In the lot, a couple of villagers had gathered around the car; they were grinning, too. The front bumper had been knocked completely off. It lay on the road, leaving the Jetta’s grille gaping, like a child who’s lost three teeth and can’t stop smiling. Why did everybody look so goddamn happy?
“I forgot about the front end,” Wei Ziqi said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not used to driving something with a front end,” he explained. “During my course, we only drove Liberation trucks. They’re flat in front.”
I had parked parallel to the fake Great Wall that bordered the village lot. Wei Ziqi had backed up and turned the wheel sharply, not realizing that the front end would swing in the opposite direction, toward the barrier. Last year, when the villagers built the tiny Great Wall, I thought it looked ridiculous, but now I realized that from a defensive point of view it served exactly one purpose. The crenellations were at the perfect height to tear the bumper off a Volkswagen Jetta. Kneeling in the lot, I inspected the metal—it was hopelessly bent.
“What do you think the rental company is going to say?” Wei Ziqi asked me.
“I have no idea,” I said. “I’ve never done something like this before.”
I was still renting from Mr. Wang at Capital Motors. In the past I had never reached the bottom of his patience, although I certainly plumbed the depths. I had broken virtually every company rule: I took Jettas onto dirt roads; I drove Jeeps onto dried-up creekbeds; I did unspeakable things to Santanas. I returned cars with dented doors and damaged tires, and I blew out a starter in Inner Mongolia. After signing contracts agreeing to keep a vehicle within the Beijing city limits, I had driven all the way to the Tibetan plateau. Every time I shattered another regulation, Mr. Wang smiled and told me, “Mei wenti!”—No problem! “You’re an old customer,” he always said happily, and his pride in our guanxi was so touching that it made me feel guilty. I couldn’t imagine a worse renter.
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 Grea
t 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 o
ne 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?”
Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Page 24