Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  “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.

  WEI JIA’S INITIAL EXPERIENCES with education could hardly have been less auspicious. He missed almost all of kindergarten because of illness, and the following year his first parent-teacher conference turned into an inquisition. The other targets of that meeting all continued to struggle: Li Xiaomei, the bed-wetter, flunked first grade, and the bully named Zhang Yan met his Waterloo the following year, when he was required to repeat the second grade. But Wei Jia sailed on—in fact, he did much better than that. Never again was his father shamed at a conference, and by the end of first grade the boy had the highest math scores in his class. In virtually all subjects he was near the top.

  Every semester he brought home his report card, which began with a twenty-item list entitled “Elementary School Rules of Daily Behavior.” The first rule was, “Be interested in national events, respect the national flag, respect the national emblem, know how to sing the national anthem.” Rule two: “Cherish the honor of the group and be a responsible member of the group.” Rule three involved good posture. It wasn’t until five that a regulation touched briefly on academics, and then rule six instructed students to “diligently perform your eye exercises.” Rule ten echoed Polonius: “If you borrow something, return it, and if you damage something, offer to pay compensation.” Pupils were reminded to trim their nails and bathe regularly. Spitting was banned. No playing with fire. No playing on public roads or railways. Stay away from wharves and docks. Avoid electric shocks. Don’t drown. Respect the elderly. On public buses, give your seat to pregnant women. Do your part to protect cultural relics. Cherish the fruits of physical labor. Stay away from “feudal and superstitious activities.” Don’t be noisy. No dangerous games. In the entire list, only one item was directly academic. The word bu—“do not”—was used twenty-eight times.

  The report cards were over thirty pages long, and evaluations ranged from academics to physical fitness to behavior. One page was entitled “Psychological Health.” (In second grade, Wei Jia was analyzed to be optimistic, in control of himself, and “capable of adapting to the environment.”) Most grades were given by the teacher, but parents and peers also contributed evaluations. Even Wei Jia was asked to self-evaluate. One part of the report featured unfinished faces where children drew mouths—smiley, straight, or frowning—depending on how they judged their own performance. By second grade, Wei Jia had figured out this part of the routine, and he gave himself straight smileys for “has an orderly life and takes care of himself” and “is capable of using common tools.” He drew a tensely straight mouth on “participates in labor for the collective welfare.” And on number five—“cherishes the fruits of physical labor”—he drew a big fat frown.

  Body measurements were taken each term and compared to the national average. The reports listed the boy’s height, weight, chest circumference, eyesight, hearing, and lung capacity. (Fourteen hundred milliliters in fourth grade.) When Wei Jia brought home a report card, his father sometimes got out a tape measure to double-check the stats. Invariably the boy was subpar on everything physical. (A fourth-grade male should have a lung capacity of 2,123 milliliters, according to the report card.)

  The terror of this document would have been unmitigated if it weren’t for a final section in which the instructor contributed a personalized evaluation. In second grade Teacher Liu wrote: “Everybody loves you. Your thinking is very nimble and the teacher and the other students all admire you. But only if cleverness is combined with hard work will you have improvement and an even higher score. You shouldn’t wait for others to press you. You have to take the initiative and study diligently, let’s go!”

  That’s the saving grace of Chinese education—people sincerely care, and their faith in learning runs deep. Despite low pay, teachers tend to be dedicated, and parents try to do their part, regardless of their own background. In the history of Sancha, only three students had ever made it to college, and neither of Wei Jia’s parents went past the tenth grade. But they recognized that their son might have a chance in a rapidly changing society, and they pushed him to work hard. This mentality is common all across China, where Confucian temples might be long gone but the traditional value of education still remains. Even the poorest people have faith in books—I almost never met a parent without educational aspirations for his child. It’s different from the United States, where people without much schooling have trouble encouraging their children, and some communities become essentially disengaged from formal learning.

  But if the strength of Chinese schooling consists of good intentions, the weakness lies in the details. I was amazed at the stuff Wei Jia learned—the most incredible collection of unrelated facts and desystemized knowledge that had ever been crammed into a child with a lung capacity of 1,400 milliliters. A surprising amount of it came from overseas. He had one textbook called The Primary School Olympic Reader, which focused on the Games that Beijing would host in 2008. Here in the Chinese countryside, in the shadow of the Great Wall, children studied pictures of naked Greeks wrestling and learned about a Frenchman named Gu Bai Dan who had reintroduced the Olympics to Europe in 1896. Another text was called Environmental and Sustainable Development. It must have been the product of some well-intentioned foreign NGO; the book taught the theory of “the 5 R’s”—Reduce, Re-evaluat
e, Reuse, Recycle, Rescue wildlife—which made no sense in translation. Fifth-graders had an entire textbook devoted to learning how to use Microsoft FrontPage XP. One Friday, I picked up Wei Jia from school, and he told me they had just studied Google. “It was started by a brother and a sister in America,” he said. “They started the company together and became rich.” That was the rural Chinese spin on Google—it might not be accurate, but at least it endorsed family values. That same weekend I heard Wei Jia reciting the opening verses of the Dao De Jing:

  Dao ke dao, fei chang dao,

  Ming ke ming, fei chang ming….

  The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;

  The names that can be named are not unvarying names….

  Ever since the nineteenth century, Chinese educators have struggled to find some balance between old and new, native and foreign, and the battle is still being fought in schools like Wei Jia’s. They’ve found ways to include new subject matter, but they haven’t yet reformed the basic learning strategies and classroom structures. Everything still revolves around memorization and repetition, the old cornerstones of Chinese education. Some of this tradition comes from the difficult script, which can be learned only if children copy characters again and again. In Wei Jia’s school, students diligently practiced their calligraphy, and they applied the same learning strategy to other subjects. It worked beautifully for math—those textbooks were far more advanced than the equivalent in an American school.

  But other subjects were taught without attention to analysis or creativity. When I heard Wei Jia reciting verses from the Dao De Jing, I asked him what they meant, and he didn’t have the faintest idea. In writing class, he wasn’t encouraged to tell stories or express opinions; instead he copied set phrases and idioms that are part of the Chinese literary tradition. On weekends, he sat for hours on the kang, writing the phrases over and over: “long and thin-thin,” “thick and soft-soft,” “sweet and silky-silky.” When he finally began to work on longer compositions, a typical assignment was: “Write an essay about your lamp.” (One evening I watched Wei Jia struggle with that topic. He wrote: “My lamp is very bright”—and then he stared at the blank page for half an hour.) In geography he never drew a map. Rarely was any subject personalized or contextualized; the world devolved into statistics and numbers and facts. One weekend in third grade, Wei Jia came home after a lesson about the giant carved Buddha statue in the city of Leshan. He knew all the details: Leshan is in Sichuan, the statue is exactly seventy-one meters tall, four children can sit on the big toe. I asked Wei Jia where Sichuan is located.

  “Is it in China?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Sichuan is a province. Do you know what a province is?”

  He had no idea. I asked him what country Lhasa is in.

  “The United States.”

  “Where is San Francisco?”

  “China.”

  His geography text included few maps, and every one was the same: a basic diagram of China. Nothing about provinces or cities, no sections about foreign countries. History lessons were narrowly aimed at proving the greatness of the Communist Party, and the revolutionaries of the past were so exalted that they seemed immortal. When I asked Wei Jia who led today’s country, he answered, “Chairman Mao.” In second grade he joined the Party’s Young Pioneers, like everybody else. The class did everything together, and the emphasis was always on their collective identity. No divisions were made with regard to ability level; there wasn’t such a thing as a reading group or a math group. If a child excelled, he learned to wait; if he lagged, he dealt with shame. Poor performances were public, and anybody who misbehaved was forced to stand in front of the class, where other kids helped the teacher point out shortcomings. Report cards always included a negative comment from some randomly selected peer.

  In second grade, Wei Jia brought home a report card with a criticism from a boy named Zhao. He had written, “Wei Jia, I hope that you can improve your handwriting.” I asked Wei Jia who he had judged, and he cocked his head, thinking.

  “Wang le,” he said finally. “I can’t remember.”

  “Do you remember what you wrote?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Do you remember if you criticized his behavior or his schoolwork?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was so deluged with negative remarks that they spilled off his back like water off a duck. None of it seemed to bother him, and like any Chinese child he became skilled at the self-criticism. He knew the right language, the correct tone, the proper pose: head down, voice soft. Certain targets were easy—the standard self-criticism is to say that you don’t work hard enough. Each semester, in the self-evaluation section of the report card, Wei Jia drew a frown across the face of physical labor.

  In third grade the teacher named him Politeness Monitor. The class was full of little cadres in training: there was also a Class Monitor, a Homework Monitor, and a Hygiene Monitor. I asked Wei Jia about his responsibilities as Politeness Monitor.

  “If somebody bullies somebody else, or starts a fight, or insults people, or says bad words, then I deduct points and tell the teachers.”

  “How many points?”

  “Five or ten.”

  “What are some of the bad things that people say?”

  “Fuck you, fuck your mother, stupid cunt,” Wei Jia said matter-of-factly. “Things like that.”

  “What’s the most points you’ve deducted at one time?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who gets in trouble the most?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He clearly wasn’t interested in talking about this subject, but I tried again. “Is it Wang Wei?” I asked, naming a child who Wei Jia often talked about.

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Do you remember the last person you penalized?”

  “No.”

  For a Politeness Monitor, these responses seemed awfully terse and uncommunicative, but who was I to judge? I was one of the few people who wasn’t asked to criticize Wei Jia on a regular basis. In any case, a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture. It’s truly the foundation—everything begins in places like Shayu Elementary School. The classroom reflects the way people behave in the streets, the way village governments function, even the way the Communist Party structures its power. Sometimes it depressed me, but I had to admit that the education was extremely functional. Wei Jia wasn’t necessarily learning the skills that I valued, but there was no question that he was being prepared for Chinese society.

  It was also true that he enjoyed school. He was comfortable with his classmates, and he excelled in his studies; he almost never complained. He liked his stark dorm room—bars on the window, eight mattresses on steel frames, a rusty radiator that stayed rock-cold until November 15. (Heat, like everything else at school, followed a strict timetable.) A child can adapt to anything, and there’s always a spark of the individual, even amid the most intense collectivization. Wei Jia’s Young Pioneer scarf never looked quite right; he knotted it at an odd angle and the edges were frayed and torn. His favorite subject was English—he seemed to like the fact that he had studied it earlier than the other children and could pronounce words better. He said that when he grew up he wanted to be either a professional driver or a computer technician.

  On Friday afternoons I often picked him up from school and drove him back to Sancha. In the upper village there was never any traffic, and usually I let him sit on my lap and steer the car through the switchbacks. On Monday mornings he guided us back down the hill. I never noticed much difference in his demeanor; he was just as happy to return to school as he was to leave every weekend. One Friday, when I stopped in the dorm to pick him up, he asked if I wanted to see something. He glanced around, made sure nobody was looking, and lifted the corner of his mattress. There were treasures hidden beneath: a trading card of the cartoon character Ultraman, a toy gun made from
elaborately folded paper. A creased photograph featured Wei Jia in a red martial-arts costume, standing at attention, on a day when he had been chosen to represent the school at the visit of a Japanese dignitary to the Great Wall. After we studied these treasures, and Wei Jia told me their stories, he glanced around and replaced the mattress. That was his secret—it remained safe every weekend, hidden in the dormitory, while he followed the long winding road back to the village.

  III

  WEI ZIQI’S BUSINESS LED HIM TO JOIN THE PARTY, AND the Party in turn led him to more business. Cadres from out of town occasionally came to the restaurant, especially if they had reason to go somewhere off the beaten track. For a while, a group of corrupt officials from Shunyi visited regularly in order to play high-stakes mah-jongg. Sancha was remote enough for them to gamble without drawing attention, and they knew that Wei Ziqi was politically reliable. Sometimes Wei Jia was enlisted to serve beer to guests, and for a while I wondered if he’d grow up like an errand-boy in a mafia movie: overhearing conversations, learning the ropes, plotting his own rise to Party Secretary. But the high-stakes mah-jongg games suddenly ended, probably because of some crackdown on corruption, and the Shunyi cadres stopped coming out.

  In 2005, the government launched a development campaign to “Build New Countryside.” China’s national leadership had changed hands—in 2002, Hu Jintao became General Secretary of the Party, replacing Jiang Zemin. Jiang had always been known for favoring the cities, but Hu began to put more emphasis on rural development. Every morning in Sancha, the propaganda speakers blared reports about initiatives and campaigns, and then funds started to trickle into town. That year, the local county used some of the money to support rural businesses that catered to the new car tourists. Wei Ziqi found a way to profit from this campaign; he applied for and received a cash grant to remodel his kitchen. It was another perk of Party membership—he often figured out how to capitalize on government programs.