Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  Periodically she tried to change her appearance. She dyed her hair and bought new clothes, and she dieted. One month she lost twenty pounds with astonishing speed, because of a dietary supplement that she’d picked up in Huairou. When Chinese women want to lose weight, they often stop eating and rely on such drugs, which are essentially amphetamines. Cao Chunmei took the medicine during a particularly busy month, and whenever I talked to her in the kitchen she seemed dazed. Later she regained the weight almost as fast as she had lost it.

  The family’s living standard had risen rapidly, but one effect was perverse: as they made more money, each member became noticeably less healthy. By far the biggest change occurred in Wei Jia, especially after 2005, when the village experienced the Year of Cable Television. In the past, villagers had access to only seven television channels; now they received more than fifty for a price of less than twenty dollars a year. The Weis bought a new twenty-nine-inch set, which was always on; during weekends, whenever the boy finished his homework, he sat on the kang and watched cartoons. At vacation time he did little else. City guests had a tendency to bring packaged snacks on their trips to the countryside, and they often gave the leftovers to the family before driving back to Beijing. Soon junk food composed a good part of Wei Jia’s diet. Whenever he pleased, he helped himself to the stash of chips and instant noodles; at meals he was rarely hungry. “He likes anything that comes in a package,” his mother complained. “He’ll always prefer that to whatever I cook. I can’t get him to eat anything else.”

  There was no concept of discipline with regard to consumption. In the recent past the village had been so poor that people ate whenever they could, and a parent’s main responsibility was to feed a child as much as possible. Fifteen years ago, it would have been unimaginable that any mother would deliberately withhold something from her son, but all of that had changed so fast that people couldn’t adjust. I tried to explain to Cao Chunmei and Wei Ziqi that this is a common problem in America, where a careful parent has to limit television and snacks. And given the boy’s history of health problems, it was particularly important to monitor his diet. But the village mindset ran too deep: a child eating was always a good thing, and there was no point in having a new television if you didn’t use it.

  During vacations the boy changed almost before my eyes. At school he couldn’t get snacks, and the cafeteria food wasn’t so fattening, but at home he watched cartoons and ate chips. Soon he had a belly; his cheeks grew round and his legs got flabby. By the time he was nine years old, he was overweight. Sometimes I forced him out to the empty lot to play soccer, but he got winded after five minutes. In the past, he’d always impressed me as incredibly tough—once, as a seven-year-old, he tagged along on a five-hour hike to the Great Wall without a word of complaint. But now if I tried to take him on a walk, he gasped for air and stopped for long rests. The child I remembered as wiry and quick had suddenly grown soft and domesticated—he was moving in the opposite direction of the feral pigs. “He doesn’t look like a peasant anymore,” his mother once told me. She said it proudly: from her perspective it was good that Wei Jia had started to resemble a city kid.

  Wei Ziqi was the only family member who didn’t gain weight. He still did a great deal of physical labor, especially during the spring and fall, but he drank too much and his smoking was incessant. Every now and then he tried to quit cigarettes, turning to the kind of quack medicines that are popular in China. One year in Beijing he bought something with the English title: “EXXCig: The Cocktail Treatment.” It was expensive—over thirty-five dollars—and the package featured an American stop sign and photographs of happy foreigners who had supposedly used the product. The list of ingredients included Vitamin C, CQ10 auxiliary enzyme, and something called “bull sulpher acid.” The advertisement promised to “Keep Smoke Feeling,” which was exactly what happened: within two weeks Wei Ziqi was back on the packs of Red Plum Blossom.

  Periodically he appeared in Beijing on some mysterious errand. There was never any advance warning for these trips; he didn’t call ahead to see if I’d be free. Instead, my telephone would ring and Wei Ziqi would announce that he was standing at an intersection a block away from my apartment. He seemed to envision the capital as another village, only bigger: he didn’t understand that people from other parts of the city rarely drop in on friends without a phone call ahead of time. In any case, he preferred not to talk about his city plans in advance. Even as he became successful, and learned the businessman’s game, he didn’t brag about future projects. In that sense he remained a peasant: he was careful with his words.

  In December of 2005, he called one morning and said that he was waiting at the corner of Jiaodaokou intersection. I met him outside, where I recognized his city clothes: blue jeans and a brand-new black parka. His best leather shoes had been shined; his hair was neatly combed. He carried a fake leather bag, the kind that Chinese male entrepreneurs always tote around the city. The only difference between him and countless others was alertness. Whenever Wei Ziqi came to Beijing, he was extremely watchful, in part because he feared getting cheated.

  On that day he had arrived to join the Great Wall Society of China. He had never mentioned it in the past, but now he explained that last year a Chinese hiker had stayed in the guesthouse before going up to the Great Wall. “He was a member of the Society,” Wei Ziqi said. “He told me I should join, too. It doesn’t cost very much.” Guesthouse conversations often had a deep impact on Wei Ziqi. He listened carefully to his city customers, and he kept their business cards in a special box in the family room, not far from the Denver skyline. Today he had written the man’s name onto a sheet of paper, along with the address of the Great Wall Society.

  I walked with him to the Society’s offices, which weren’t far from my apartment. The application process was simple: Wei Ziqi paid his five dollars in dues, and he gave two passport-sized photos to the office secretary. The only hitch occurred in the application section entitled “Résumé.”

  “Is it OK if I don’t fill this out?” Wei Ziqi said.

  The office secretary explained that every member of the Great Wall Society needs a résumé. Wei Ziqi studied the page for a minute. Finally he wrote:

  1969–1976 Born and became a child in the village

  1976–1988 Studied at school

  1989–1991 Worked as a security guard

  1991–Present Worked as a peasant in the village

  He was too modest to mention his business. The secretary looked through the forms to make sure everything had been filled out. She paused at one section entitled “Political Status.”

  “You’re a Party member, huh?” she said.

  “Yes,” Wei Ziqi said shyly. “Is that good?”

  “Of course it’s good,” the secretary said, laughing. “In school I was only a Communist Youth League member!” She pasted his photograph onto an ID card, applied a red ink chop, and then it was final: Wei Ziqi was a member of the Great Wall Society of China.

  Afterward I took him to lunch at a Sichuanese restaurant. I noticed he was carrying a new Party gift: a stainless steel thermos embossed with the words “Commemorating the Bohai Township Party Members Advanced Education Activity.” The thermos marked another twenty-day study session; Wei Ziqi said that they had been recently reviewing speeches by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. He filled me in on other village news: he planned to build a bigger fishpond, and he hoped to remodel some of the guesthouse rooms. Down in the lower village, a city investor had recently acquired another tract of land, and there were plans to build a small road into the hills. Near the end of the meal Wei Ziqi suddenly remarked, “Some people say that I might become the Party Secretary someday.”

  He had never mentioned this before. I asked when it might happen.

  “Not soon,” he said. “Whenever the current Party Secretary retires.”

  “When will that be?”

  “It depends on a few things,” he said. “The main question is whether she receives
another term.” He was silent for a moment. “This isn’t something I talk about,” he continued. “I don’t talk about becoming the Party Secretary. Other villagers are the ones who talk about it.”

  I asked if the Party members would be free after they finished the current meetings at the end of the month.

  “No. There will be more meetings.”

  “About what?”

  “About our own affairs. Self-criticisms.”

  “When does that start?”

  “Next month.”

  I asked if he already knew what he was going to criticize about himself.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t thought about it yet.”

  OVER THE YEARS I learned that every act of Wei Ziqi’s served a purpose. It was a quality I associated with the countryside, where people are efficient with everything, even their words. At leisure they might engage in long conversations about faraway lands and distant events, but they are close-lipped when it comes to personal affairs. And quite often they are single-minded. Wei Ziqi might spend months on a secret plan, preparing in silence, and then all at once he would take action. And he always followed up on a serious endeavor. I wasn’t surprised when one day in the village he asked if I’d drive him and the Idiot down to the valley, to visit the Shayu police station.

  “Afterward we’re going to take him back home, right?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Wei Ziqi said. “He just needs a government identity card. That’s the only reason we’re going.”

  It had been nearly four years since Mimi and I had last driven the Idiot down into the valley. During that period the man’s life had changed dramatically, like everything else in the village, and I often wondered how he interpreted these shifting routines. He had been given his own room at the end of the guesthouse—because the family was wealthier, with more space, they were able to segregate him. In the past, on winter evenings, the Idiot sat on the kang with everybody else; now he stayed in his own room. On weekends, when the family hosted customers, they often dressed the Idiot in new clothes, to make a better impression. One day, when Wei Ziqi and Cao Chunmei both had to leave in order to take care of business responsibilities, the Idiot panicked and ran down the village road. In the past he had never been left alone and the sudden solitude unnerved him. They found him at the signpost for Tianhua Cave, a couple of miles from Sancha. Apart from that brief flight, the man hadn’t left the village since our adventure of 2002.

  Today I found him waiting silently beside Wei Ziqi in the parking lot. I opened the back door to my rented Jetta, and the Idiot calmly entered. On the drive down he pressed his face close to the window, watching the scenery as we descended into the valley. Wei Ziqi explained that he still lacked an official identity card, which was necessary if the family continued with the government support program. Ever since the first incident, the Party Secretary had made sure that the Weis received their monthly payments. Each year at the Spring Festival holiday, they were given an extra twelve dollars, along with a jug of cooking oil and a bag of rice or flour.

  At the Shayu police station, a young woman led the Idiot to a stool in front of a white backdrop. He sat on his hands like a nervous child, tucking his legs behind the stool. He looked worried while the woman fiddled with a digital camera. The machine flashed and hummed, and the moment after the picture was taken, the Idiot finally relaxed into a toothless grin.

  In another room a policeman prepared an official note for Wei Ziqi. “He’s a longya, right?” the man asked. The word means “deaf-mute.”

  “That’s right.”

  The officer wrote quickly onto police stationery; he handed the paper to Wei Ziqi. “Give this to the Party Secretary,” he said. “She’ll give it to the township. He should get his ID card in about a month.”

  The Idiot watched intently on the drive back, as if savoring the journey. The next time I appeared in the village, he greeted me warmly, pointing to the Jetta in the parking lot. But I never saw him enter an automobile again. Now that he was officially registered, there was no need for him to go anywhere. Those two journeys, the ones I had witnessed, represented the farthest he had ever traveled in his life.

  Exactly a month later the Idiot received a twenty-one-inch Hisense brand color television. It was part of a new government program for the disabled, and now I realized why it had been so important to register that afternoon, although Wei Ziqi hadn’t mentioned the TV. The family already had a bigger set, so they gave the government television to one of Wei Ziqi’s relatives. The Idiot never watched TV anyway; he couldn’t hear the programs and in the evenings he sat alone in his room. The family didn’t accept money for the set, but I was sure that somehow, someday, it would be repaid through the complicated world of village guanxi. That’s also the way of the countryside: no wasted gestures.

  The Idiot’s new ID card listed his birth date and given name, and for the first time I saw who he really was. He was born on December 11, 1948, and his name is Wei Zonglou. On the ID, Wei Zonglou looks very old and very worried. He’s hunched forward, and his eyes appear almost sad; if only the picture had been taken a moment later, it would have captured his gentle smile. That character zong was also given to all three of the man’s brothers—it’s the mark of their generation. The word means “ancestor.”

  IN SANCHA, 2006 BECAME the Year of Garbage. For half a decade, everything had led to this point: there were new roads and new cars and new construction; the villagers acquired cable television and cell phone coverage. But the clearest evidence of their prosperity was trash. When I first moved to Sancha, people simply threw their garbage down the hillside into the creek that ran dry most of the year. In those days there wasn’t much waste; villagers reused almost everything and they rarely ate packaged food. But all of that changed with business and tourism. Instant-noodle containers and cookie wrappers accumulated, and soon the creekbed was choked with Styrofoam and plastic. One year Mimi sponsored a cleanup, but it wasn’t until 2006 that the county government finally instituted regular garbage truck service. That same year, peddlers started appearing in flatbed trucks to buy anything recyclable: bottles, cans, newspapers. In the past it would have been unimaginable—driving all the way to Sancha to buy garbage!

  Inevitably some city folk had started to settle there. In Beijing it was becoming popular for middle-and upper-class people to find second homes in the countryside, and sometimes a village turned over completely to outsiders. Down in the valley, not far from Sancha, one section of a place called Tiekuangyu was purchased wholesale by city folk. Within months local life was finished: the natives moved out, the houses were demolished, and new mansions of concrete and glass rose above the orchards. In Sancha, villagers hustled to sell long-term contracts on any empty residence. They weren’t allowed to build new structures without government approval, and soon all the abandoned houses in town had been snapped up. Even the Shitkicker arranged a deal with a man from Beijing. After they made an agreement, the Shitkicker began an ambitious remodeling of his home. When the work was half finished, and new walls of brick had risen fifteen feet high, he abruptly raised the price. There was no legal foundation for any of this, because individual villagers can’t sell their property; any long-term rental agreement depends entirely on goodwill and faith. Contracts are common but they’re worthless, and there was nothing the Beijing resident could do but pay the extra cash or walk away from the deal. To everybody’s surprise, he walked. And that was when the Shitkicker realized that he was completely out of money.

  After that, the building’s frame stood untouched. If he could have finished construction, perhaps he would have found another renter, but like anybody in the countryside he had few ways to raise capital. In the old days he might have pawned land—this is what his own father did in 1946, when he was broke and turned his fields over to Wei Ziqi’s grandfather. But the Shitkicker didn’t have this option, and he couldn’t apply directly for a bank loan. He needed approval from the village, which denied his application. The
Party Secretary was responsible for this rejection: for years there had been bad blood between her and the Shitkicker. They were both Party members and distant relatives by marriage, but they didn’t get along, and in the end the man had no recourse for a loan. Along with his wife, he was forced to live in the dirt-floored shack that he had once tried to rent to Mimi and me. The place was so small that most belongings had to be piled up outside, covered in plastic. They were the only villagers whose living conditions had deteriorated since the car boom began. At twilight I often saw him wandering around the abandoned construction site, muttering to himself. Nowadays he greeted me politely; his hatred wasn’t directed at me anymore. He had more important enemies to think about.

  There were rumors about the Party Secretary. In the past, most villagers had spoken of her respectfully; the woman was clearly competent and in particular she was skilled at acquiring government funding for projects. But the sudden influx of private investment seemed to have changed people’s opinions. Recently there had been three major land deals made by Beijing businessmen, who planned to develop some of the village areas for tourism. Two projects were located in high valleys that didn’t have any residents, and the details of the transactions had never been made public. Nobody knew the price that had been paid, or who the investors were, or how they planned to develop the valleys.