Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  There is only one tool for this kind of work: a thin lilac stick, ten feet long and tapered at the end. For smaller trees, a person can stand on the ground and use the pole to reach most branches. The harvest always begins this way: the crew circles a tree, eyes trained upward, beating the branches like children at a piñata party. When somebody makes good contact, the stick emits a loud thwack, and three or four walnuts thud to the ground. There are leaves as well—bits of branches that catch the sunlight as they flutter down. With everybody working, the calmness of the forest is shattered all at once, and there’s a beauty to the shifting sound and light: the whistling sticks, the fresh leaves floating through the air, the walnuts thudding heavily into the dirt. After it’s over the trees seem to sigh—branches hum softly, still vibrating with the memory of the assault.

  Bigger trees grow as tall as fifty feet, and harvesters have to climb onto the limbs. For Wei Ziqi, it’s easy: he wedges his fingers into the crevices of the bark and pulls himself up. Amid the branches he can move without relying on his hands. He wears soft-soled military sneakers, the kind he avoids for Huairou trips, and he curls the toes around limbs for balance. He edges out onto thicker branches, step by step, carrying his pole in both hands. If there’s a convenient limb at his back, he leans against it, but often he relies on nothing but balance. There’s no ladder, no ropes, no harness—no safety equipment of any kind. But high in the trees he moves easily, and his build is perfect for such work: short-limbed and efficiently muscled, with the right combination of strength and balance.

  On the day of the harvest, I watched Wei Ziqi climb into the branches of the first big tree, and then he lowered himself to the ground. I asked if he had ever fallen, and he shook his head.

  “Does anybody ever fall?”

  “Almost never,” he said. “A couple of years ago one of the neighbors fell and broke his shoulder.”

  We continued to the next tree, and once more he reached the top in a flash. I realized that in the past I had so often seen him out of his element—in the Beijing hospitals, in the shops of Huairou, in the driver’s seat of an unfamiliar car. Over the years I had witnessed his transition from farming to business, country to city; but I had rarely seen him work in the orchards. Here in the trees he was completely at home.

  The Sancha harvest is overwhelmingly male. The only woman who climbs the trees is the Party Secretary; she’s strong enough to handle even the most demanding labor. Other wives do lighter work, like collecting walnuts on the ground and shelling the harvested crop. In the evenings, they cook meals for the work crews. This agricultural divide has shaped local culture, which is extremely male-dominated, even by rural Chinese standards. Apart from the anomaly of the Party Secretary, men wield the most power, and some local traditions, like grave-sweeping, are restricted to males only. In the southwest, where I once lived, the gender divide never seems quite so broad. But in those regions the main crop is rice, which requires a great deal of work but little strength, and women spend as much time in the paddies as men do.

  Our harvest-day group of ten included only two women. They stayed on the ground, along with me and Cao Chunmei’s father, who had come from out of town to help. Each of us had some excuse to avoid climbing—gender or age or foreignness—and it was our job to collect the walnuts that fell from the high branches. They rolled down rocky slopes, and into bushes, and through thick weeds. Soon my arms began to itch, and my back ached; my hands turned black from the walnuts. Everybody else chatted idly, as if this were a social occasion. They talked about food and money, and they discussed the price of walnuts. Villagers usually sold to buyers who traveled around the countryside during autumn, and in past years the prices remained stable throughout a season. But nowadays rates changed rapidly—sometimes as much as 10 percent in the span of a single day. It was all because of the new roads: buyers could more easily reach the villages, and more people did this kind of business; their competition led to price wars. Villagers had to decide the best time to sell, and this was a common line of conversation while we chased walnuts through the undergrowth.

  When they weren’t talking about food or prices, or the price of food, they ate. Sometimes a walnut shattered on its way down, and the harvesters finished it off. They ate an amazing amount—the sounds of chewing were as common as the rustle of branches. When Cao Chunmei’s father offered me one, I politely refused. The last thing I wanted on a hot day of hard labor was a fresh walnut.

  “Ho Wei doesn’t like walnuts,” he said.

  “Why doesn’t he like walnuts?”

  “Foreigners eat different things.”

  Forty feet high in the tree, Wei Ziqi was invisible, but his voice recited a familiar litany: “He doesn’t like eggs, either. He won’t eat meat on the bone. He doesn’t like bean paste…”

  The feel of the walnuts—the cool rough texture and the fresh scent on my hands—brought back childhood memories. The trees had been common in my Missouri hometown, where most people saw the crop as a nuisance; walnuts clogged up lawnmowers and rolled into streets. Kids liked to throw them at cars. One year my mother heard about a business in the nearby town of Booneville that bought walnuts in bulk. For a week, my sisters and I composed a small but determined peasant work crew, ringing doorbells to ask for permission to fill garbage bags with the harvest. We packed them into the family’s AMC Hornet and drove to Booneville, where a man emptied the walnuts into an automatic desheller and grinder. The black pulp that came out was so condensed that it fit into a single supermarket-sized bag. The man placed it on a scale, consulted a fee book, and wrote a check for one dollar and seventy cents. For months the Hornet stank of walnuts, and it wasn’t for many years that I understood why my mother couldn’t help laughing when the man handed us the check.

  In the Sancha orchards I told the story to Wei Ziqi. He was impressed that Americans leave walnuts to rot in the street—he picked up a big one and remarked that it was worth one jiao, or one and a quarter American cents. That year the walnut market was good, and it was getting better—every couple of days the dealers raised their prices.

  After night fell, all of us ate dinner in the Weis’ home. Cao Chunmei had spent the afternoon cooking: potatoes and tofu and pork, fresh-picked beans and fried corn cakes. She barbecued trout from the family pond. But she didn’t sit down to eat with the men: Sancha meals are often segregated. Even the two women who had labored alongside me were relegated to a smaller table in the back room.

  The men gathered around the main table, where they argued briefly about the place of honor. Finally Cao Chunmei’s father agreed to accept—at fifty-eight he was the oldest harvester. He was seated at the table’s head, directly below the Denver skyline. The digital readout on the portrait said that it was twenty degrees Celsius.

  One harvester was named Wei Congfa. He is Wei Ziqi’s cousin, and he’s slightly deaf. The man had never seen the Denver photograph before, and now he looked at it quizzically. “Is that the temperature in that city?” he asked.

  “It’s the temperature in this room,” somebody explained.

  But Wei Congfa couldn’t hear. “It’s the temperature where?”

  “IT’S—THE—TEMPERATURE—IN—THIS—ROOM!”

  “Here in the house?”

  “IN—THIS—ROOM!”

  “So what’s that city for?”

  I sat next to Yan Kejun, a man in his thirties who lived in the lower part of Sancha. He was one of the brightest people in the village, the kind of man who liked watching the news, and he always had questions about America. For the past month he had been focused on the news of Hurricane Katrina. A couple of days earlier, at another harvest dinner, we had a conversation about the events in New Orleans.

  “You know,” he said, “when something like that happens in America, it actually matters. The population is so low that you have to worry about losing a few hundred or even a thousand people.”

  He took a sip of baijiu. “This might sound ugly,” he said, “but in China
we could lose one hundred million people and it wouldn’t matter. It would probably be good for the country.”

  In other parts of the world, people had been shocked that such a thing could happen in the United States. But in rural China, a man could watch and conclude: Maybe that would be a good thing if it happened here. I tried to think of a response, but before I could say anything, Yan changed the subject, and the conversation, like so many village discussions, soared off to new ground.

  Beneath the Denver skyline the men exchanged shots of baijiu. Cao Chunmei’s father was the first to turn red; the toasts came faster and by the end of the evening everybody was drunk. At 7:30 the next morning they returned to the orchards. I drove back to Beijing, where my legs were sore for days from all the squatting and chasing after walnuts. For most of a week my hands stayed black. All told, on that hot day in September, in eleven hours of labor, ten of us had harvested three thousand six hundred pounds of walnuts. They sold for four hundred American dollars.

  DURING THE YEARS THAT I lived in Sancha, feral pigs became common. Locals called them “wild boars,” but most likely they were the descendants of domesticated animals that had escaped. If a pig begins to live by foraging, it changes shape: the shoulders broaden, long hair covers the body, and tusks poke from the corners of the mouth. In the past, such animals would have been hunted down quickly, because peasants spent more time in the highlands. But nowadays so many people had migrated, and those who stayed behind had new routines. Farmers used their spare time to work construction or do business, and increasingly their attention turned to the cities; the land around them grew more wild. In Sancha the highest crop terraces had been abandoned, and this was where the feral pigs proliferated. Sometimes they ventured down to the valley and ravaged a farmer’s corn.

  During winter a few residents set snares, and in February Wei Ziqi captured a hundred-pounder. He had set the trap near the Haizikou pass, and it was simple—a loop of wire attached to a tree. But the animal stepped right into it, and the wire held firm. She was still struggling fiercely when Wei Ziqi and a neighbor checked the trap. They found a nearby tree, cut off two branches, and pummeled the animal to death. A day later, Wei Jia and I hiked up to look at the site. The undergrowth had been thrashed flat by the struggling beast, whose gore marked the trail. Drops of blood ran all the way to the village, a full two miles, tracing the route where the men had carried their prize.

  For weeks the family ate boar every evening. The meat was leaner than pork, dark and rich and pungent; Cao Chunmei stir-fried strips with onions. But she made sure she had nothing to do with the killing or the butchering. It was bad karma, she told me—she left that part of the routine to Wei Ziqi. If he was plagued by any karmic worries, he overcame them heroically. While butchering the feral pig, he discovered that the animal was pregnant, so he cut out the fetus and put it in a jar of baijiu. Surrounded by the clear fluid it looked like a child’s plastic toy—a tiny white pig. The first time I saw the thing, I was so shocked I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Finally I said, “Why did you do that?”

  “It’s for medicine,” Wei Ziqi said. The Chinese often make medicinal baijiu, filling a bottle of alcohol with herbs and even reptiles; snakes are particularly popular. But I had never seen a baijiu mammal, and Wei Ziqi couldn’t explain the specific health benefits of this drink. “It’s good for the qi,” he said vaguely—qi means “energy.” But I noticed that he never touched the stuff, and neither did anybody else. It was the first time I saw an animal product that was too gruesome for the villagers.

  The jar was displayed in the main room of the family home. This space had been expanded during the last remodeling, and since then the Weis had accumulated more possessions. The decor represented a study in contradictions: the pig fetus floated a few feet away from the Buddhist shrine; the Denver skyline faced a People’s Liberation Army tank. There were two bottles of Johnnie Walker, along with the two Ming-dynasty signal cannons that Wei Ziqi had foraged from the Great Wall. A calendar was dedicated to Huairou infrastructure. Sometimes, when we sat down for dinner at the family table, I looked around and thought: How could anybody hope to make sense of this world?

  The family’s changes seemed especially hard on Cao Chunmei. In the beginning, the pressure of loans and investment weighed on Wei Ziqi, but now business had been stable for two years. He took pride in his rising status—there was a new confidence to the way he moved around the village. But in Sancha a woman rarely occupies that role, and for Cao Chunmei, more customers only meant more work. On busy weekends she rarely left the kitchen; most mornings she woke up to a stack of dirty dishes from the previous night’s guests. She gained little pleasure from the new income, and her contact with outsiders was fleeting. The most important thing they had taught her was religion, but even Buddhism provided uncertain solace. She hated the killing of fish and animals at the restaurant—in the past it hadn’t bothered her, but the more she read about Buddhism, the more she disliked the butchering. If Wei Ziqi was around, he handled this work, but there were times when he was in Huairou on business.

  Cao Chunmei told me that she prayed for forgiveness during her morning offerings at the shrine. In the family, she was the only member who didn’t undergo Party-monitored criticisms, and unlike the others she couldn’t take the easy way out, saying that she didn’t work hard enough. Her self-criticisms were sincere: she felt incredible guilt about the meals she served. “If I have to kill a fish or a chicken, I pray for them,” she said. “They’re innocent; they had a good life, but I killed them. So I pray for their souls to be released from purgatory. If I don’t pray for them to be released, then I’m afraid that their souls will come back to punish me.”

  She also worried about other spirits around the home. These are old countryside beliefs, older than the recent resurgence of Buddhism, older than the brief fascination with Falun Gong, older than even the Communist revolution. Villagers speak of snake spirits, fox spirits, rabbit spirits, and weasel spirits; any of these animals can inhabit a home and turn it good or bad. Certain individuals have the gift of understanding this world, and the villagers call them mingbairen: clairvoyants. In the old days, a famous clairvoyant lived in Sancha, and people often traveled to see him. If a visitor arrived, the clairvoyant held his wrist, felt his pulse, and spoke in detail about the animal spirits that affected him. Back then, the clairvoyant lived near the Shitkicker’s childhood home, and the boy used to pour tea at the great man’s rituals. But it all ended during the Cultural Revolution, when the Communists intensified their suppression of religion. Eventually, the clairvoyant passed away, and the village was left without a seer.

  But religion, like some traditions, began to recover during the Reform years. The crackdown on Falun Gong was an anomaly, and it occurred because the government perceived the organization as a political threat. For the most part, the Communists allowed individuals to seek out faiths, and during the late 1990s and early 2000s the religious climate became more vibrant. Quietly the clairvoyants began to reappear, even in Sancha. Some villagers believed the Shitkicker had such powers—they had rubbed off during his boyhood contact with the local seer. Occasionally a person went to the Shitkicker for analysis, but Cao Chunmei preferred to go elsewhere. She knew a clairvoyant in Huairou who was famous for his gift, and early in 2006 she visited him. He told her that a fox spirit was active in her home, and he advised her to erect a shrine. And so a new ring of incense appeared in the main room, joining the two Buddhist statues, the feral pig fetus, the Johnnie Walker, the infrastructure calendar, the Ming-dynasty cannons, and the photograph of Denver.

  A fox spirit can bring unhappiness to a family, and it was true that Cao Chunmei and Wei Ziqi fought more often nowadays. They shared the responsibilities of the business, but it wasn’t a partnership; there was no doubt that the man made key decisions and gained the most benefit. And the deeper he moved into the routines of Party and business, the less interested he was in his home. If they didn’t have customers, he
stayed away for days, visiting friends in Huairou; at night he sometimes came home dead drunk. For Cao Chunmei, the simplest solution was to try to ignore the problems. “I don’t manage him,” she said. “I don’t know what he does. It’s not my business.”

  She often adopted a pose of distance, even renunciation. On the surface it seemed Buddhist—she was removed from the world—but beneath the calmness ran an undercurrent of frustration. And there was more than a touch of passive-aggression. When Wei Jia misbehaved, she emphasized her powerlessness. “He won’t listen to me,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do about him.” If I asked about village politics, she waved her hand. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “It’s not my affair.” Once, when Wei Jia and I were reviewing some of his school materials, I asked Cao Chunmei who is the president of China. “Jiang Zemin?” she said, naming the politician who had been out of power for years. “I don’t know that stuff.” It might have been true—rural people have a remarkable ability to ignore national affairs—but the Sancha propaganda speakers had been barking about Hu Jintao three times a day since 2002. I suspected she was emphasizing her approach to life, her effort to distance herself from things she couldn’t control. For her, religion was partly a retreat. Even as the village became obsessed with materialism and modern progress, there were people like Cao Chunmei who moved in the other direction, toward older traditional beliefs.

  But such reactions are never simple, and there was another part of Cao Chunmei that longed to be more active. No matter how much she disliked her husband’s new routines, she envied the freedom and the entrepreneurial status. Once she came up with an idea for her own business. She was an excellent cook, and she made corn noodles that she thought would appeal to middle-class people in the city. She described them as “organic”—that word was gaining currency in Beijing, where Western ideas about food had already changed the high-end restaurant scene. Cao Chunmei prepared some samples and traveled to the city, where she visited restaurants and tried to sell them on the notion of organic corn noodles. But despite all her authenticity, she lacked the male Chinese business tools: the packs of Chunghwa, the shots of baijiu. In the end, nobody ordered a regular supply, and she abandoned the idea.