Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (34 page)

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.

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.