Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (23 page)

I telephoned Sancha and Cao Chunmei answered. “He’s fine,” she said. “He just had a nosebleed, but it wasn’t serious.”

“You can’t let him do anything rough,” I said. “Don’t let him play or run around. Just keep him in bed while we figure out what to do. This is serious—make sure he stays quiet.”

I called Mimi and we considered the options. There was no transport in the village, apart from motorcycles. Mimi had her family car, but we had no idea where to take him; I wasn’t going to return to the Children’s Hospital. While we were talking, my cell phone rang.

“Now his nose won’t stop bleeding,” Cao Chunmei said. She put her husband on the line. “It’s OK as long as he’s lying down,” Wei Ziqi said. “But if he sits up it starts bleeding again.”

“He should be in the hospital,” I said. “The doctor made a mistake. Just keep him lying down and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

I ran to Mimi’s apartment to get the car keys; she was already telephoning people, searching for a different hospital. I started the Santana and headed north, cursing the Beijing traffic. If I was lucky I’d make it there in less than two hours.

CAO CHUNMEI GREW UP
on the opposite side of the brick-and-stone Great Wall. Her home village is located down in the valley, where conditions are better than in Sancha, and her family wasn’t as poor as
Wei Ziqi’s. But life was simple during her childhood, and she paid for school supplies with eggs—money was rarely used in those days. Every weekend, along with her brother and sister, she hiked the five miles to her grandmother’s house. Their route took them across the high pass at Jiankou, one of the most spectacularly steep sections of the Great Wall. The impressive brick fortifications were completed around the turn of the seventeenth century, near the end of the Ming dynasty, but none of that history mattered to Cao Chunmei as a girl. From her perspective, the Great Wall simply defined the two worlds of her childhood. It was the barrier between school and family, weekdays and weekends, and countless times she crossed the threshold of crumbling bricks.

After finishing the eighth grade, Cao Chunmei left school and began working at a nearby garment factory where her older sister already had a job. The plant produced military clothes: standard-issue shirts and jackets, the kind of gear that’s also worn by peasants. On the assembly line, Cao Chunmei started by making collars; then she moved to cuffs, finally to button-sewing. She lived at home with her parents. By bicycle it was only a half hour ride, and her family was prosperous enough to allow her to keep her earnings. Later she recalled these years as some of the happiest of her life.

On the assembly line, Cao Chunmei worked with a young woman from Sancha. One day, the woman asked if Cao Chunmei had a boyfriend, and she answered yes. But the woman didn’t seem to listen. “You should meet my uncle,” she said. She told Cao Chunmei that the uncle was only a little older than her, and he wasn’t married.

“I decided to do it,” Cao Chunmei remembered, years later. “I thought my boyfriend at the time was too young, and he was from a place very close to my hometown. I’m not sure why I felt that way, but for some reason I didn’t want to marry somebody close to home.”

The coworker, it turned out, was the daughter of the Shitkicker. The man and Wei Ziqi are distant cousins—they share the same great-great-grandfather—and the daughter arranged a meeting between Cao Chunmei and Wei Ziqi. In the countryside, evaluations of potential partners tend to be swift and brutal, and the passage of time does not necessarily soften them with gauzy nostalgia. More than a decade after
they met, Cao Chunmei still recalled her exact impressions. “I thought he was very short and very black,” she said. “His skin was so dark! But when he spoke, I thought he was funny. He had a good sense of humor. He didn’t talk in the way that most people do; he was more interesting, and he said things that might not have been appropriate. I thought he seemed fun.”

Eight months later, on New Year’s Day of 1993, they were married. They held the wedding at a restaurant in the small town of Miaocheng. Nearly fifteen years after Cao Chunmei’s wedding, she could not recall the name of the restaurant, the dishes that were served, or the guest list—the sort of details that, for an American woman, would be etched across memory for all time. But Cao Chunmei could still note every financial detail in perfect order. The banquet cost six hundred and ninety yuan—around eighty-five dollars. Gifts were cash, as is traditional at Chinese weddings, and the most the couple received from a single guest was twelve dollars. The wedding resulted in a net profit of one hundred and sixty dollars. When Cao Chunmei talked about the event, she recited these numbers like an accountant.

For two years the young couple lived in Huairou, where Cao Chunmei worked as a cook. But she never felt comfortable in the city. “Too many people,” she told me once. “It makes me nervous. In the village, if you want to go somewhere, it’s easier to get around. And it’s quiet and peaceful. If you’re done with your work, you can relax in peace, or you can go for a walk.”

Wei Ziqi held a similar opinion of city life, and after Cao Chunmei became pregnant they moved back across the Great Wall to Sancha. They lived with Wei Ziqi’s parents, whose house still had dirt floors and walls made of mud mixed with sorghum stalks. The conditions were far worse than what Cao Chunmei was accustomed to, but this didn’t particularly bother her. She liked the quietness of the village, and initially she was happy to live in a place that seemed poor but peaceful.

Over time, though, her feelings about Sancha changed. In 1997, she gave birth to Wei Jia, and then both her in-laws died within the span of a year. Cao Chunmei became friends with other village women, most of whom had also married in from the outside, and she began to hear sto
ries. At first they were hard to believe—the kind of tales that were told in whispers. She learned that one local woman had been involved in a decades-long affair with a relative of her husband. They even had a child together, although everybody pretended that it was the husband’s son. Another woman had borne three children to three different men. She had done it through migration—often this is the best way to avoid the planned-birth policy. Periodically the Sancha woman found work in a new city, where she invariably found a new partner and had a baby. Her legal husband remained in the village, where he conducted an ongoing affair with a neighbor’s wife. It was another open secret: whenever the neighbor went to work in the fields, the other man crept over to his house.

“There’s a lot of this sort of thing in Sancha,” Cao Chunmei told me, after we’d known each other for a long time. She said there were a number of village affairs, and even some rumors of incest. “It has something to do with the local environment,” she said. “Somehow it became more accepted because this place is so remote. This sort of thing doesn’t happen so often in my village. But in my village there are more than two hundred families, and here there are so few.

“When I first came here,” she continued, “I thought that everything was fine, that it was a normal place. But then in my second year I began to learn about all the affairs and the wrong things that people did. Wei Ziqi never talked to me about these things. Many people here are from his family, so he can’t speak openly about it.” She told me that sometimes an affair leads to violence, and inevitably the woman is the target. “Sometimes the man will beat his wife,” she said. “But there’s never a fight between the two men involved.”

In her first decade at Sancha, Cao Chunmei never visited the Great Wall above the village. For her, the ruins belong strictly to childhood, when she used to hike to her grandmother’s house, and she sees no point in making the two-hour trek in her new home. She is a heavyset woman with a round face, and her hair is white—it started to turn when she was only a teenager. Nowadays she dyes it black, but the roots still show pale. Her left eye is blue, her right eye brown. She has a quick, gentle smile, and she always seems happiest with Wei Jia; but there is a
distinct sadness behind the woman’s mismatched eyes. She’s seen the peacefulness of the countryside dissolve like a mirage, and she knows there’s nothing easy about raising the last child in a village.

I PARKED AT THE
top of the dead-end road. Inside the Weis’ house, the boy lay on the
kang
. His face was pale and flecks of blood had dried dark around his nose. He didn’t say anything when I touched his forehead.

“It’s a lot of trouble for you to come out here,” Cao Chunmei said.

“It’s no problem,” I said. I pressed the boy’s brow—he was on fire. His eyes looked frightened but still he didn’t speak.

“Will you eat some lunch?” Cao Chunmei asked politely.

“I already ate,” I said. “I think we should go now.”

They decided that Cao Chunmei would stay behind until Wei Jia was settled in the hospital. She had prepared a change of clothes and a roll of toilet paper in the Mickey Mouse backpack. Wei Ziqi carried his son down the hill and into the backseat of the car. The boy lay with his head in his father’s lap.

The road from the village is steeply switchbacked, and I drove slowly, so the car wouldn’t bounce. After ten minutes Wei Jia said that he felt sick, and I pulled over. He made gagging noises and twin trails of blood trickled down from his nostrils. Wei Ziqi dabbed at them with the toilet paper; in the sunlight the boy looked even paler. After a minute we set off again.

Autumn is the best season in northern China, and it was a beautiful day, the sky clear and bright. The peasants had come to the final crop of the year, the soybeans, and rows of men with short-handled scythes stood bent in the fields, heads bowed like penitent monks. People threshed the haylike stalks all along the road. We had nearly an hour of rough mountain driving before the Badaling Expressway, and I tried to keep calm by focusing on the details of the countryside. We climbed out of the Huaisha River valley, across the tunneled pass, and then we descended to Nine-Crossings River. The waterway colors caught my eye—the orange-painted rails of the bridge, the dark pools of stagnant
water, the white-barked poplars along the banks. At Black Mountain Stockade we had to stop again; this time the boy vomited. His nose was bleeding steadily. His father tore off fresh pieces of paper and shoved them inside to stop the flow.

The road climbed again, winding steeply through walnut orchards, and then we reached the last pass of the day. From there it’s all downhill to the valley where the Ming emperors are buried. Their tombs are scattered across the plain, each laid out to face the south, and the gold-tiled roofs shined bright in the October sunshine. We drove by the grave of Xuande, the fifth Ming ruler. According to legend he killed three Mongols with his own bow. Next we passed the tomb of his grandfather, Yongle, the great ruler who established the capital in Beijing in 1421. Just beyond that grave, Wei Ziqi asked me to stop again.

Wei Jia murmured that he had to go to the bathroom. His father took down the boy’s pants and he produced a sickly stream of diarrhea. He was completely white now and there was no expression in his eyes. We were less than ten minutes from the highway.

“I think we should keep moving,” I said.

“Give him a minute,” Wei Ziqi said.

I had pulled over in a ditch beside an apple orchard that had been recently harvested. On the road, a steady line of tour buses roared past on their way to the Ming tombs. I wondered if any tourists caught a glimpse of the scene: the parked car with its flashing lights; the father in the ditch, cradling his son. The harvested orchard, fruit picked clean, branches bare in the stark autumn light.

MIMI HAD ARRANGED A
spot for Wei Jia in the children’s ward of the Peking University Health Center Number Three, where the blood specialists were supposed to be good. We registered the boy, and after he was in bed he seemed to recover some of his color. But now he was so frightened that he struggled against anybody in a white coat; when they tried to take a blood test, he bit one nurse and took a swing at another. His father and I pinned him to the bed while they performed the test. Afterward he calmed down, and a nurse said that he would be kept
under close observation to see if his platelet count improved. She asked who would stay with the boy tonight.

“I will,” Wei Ziqi said.

“You can’t!” the woman said sharply. “Only female comrades are allowed to spend the night in the hospital.”

“His mother will come tomorrow,” Wei Ziqi said. “Can’t I stay with him for one night?”

“Absolutely not! Only female comrades allowed!”

“Look, they live two hours away,” Mimi said. “I’m sorry, but the only family he has here is his father.”

“The father cannot stay here! Female comrades only! You can stay if you wish, but not the father!”

The nurse was a heavyset woman in her fifties, and she had planted herself solidly in front of Wei Jia’s bed. She kept repeating that phrase—
Female comrades only!
The more she said it, the stranger it sounded; almost nobody used those old Communist terms anymore. The boy began to cry again, his face panicked. “I don’t want to stay here alone!” he said. “I don’t want to stay here alone!”

“Don’t worry, you’re not going to stay here alone,” Mimi said, and I turned to the nurse: “Can we talk about this outside?”

I didn’t want to get angry, because Chinese hospitals have a reputation for mistreating people from the countryside. As calmly as possible, I explained the situation, and Mimi begged the nurse to make an exception. But she was adamant—people in Chinese bureaucracies often behave this way, especially those who are middle-aged. They were educated during the chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution, and many of them have spent their entire adult lives in the work-unit system of Communist China. They essentially missed out on the Reform years, and they lack the flexibility and pragmatism that have become so common among younger Chinese. In the hospital the nurse refused to budge, and finally I decided to drive back to the village and pick up Cao Chunmei.