Once I went to the village alone, and while writing at my desk I had the sensation that I was being watched. I turned around and almost yelped—a man was standing in the middle of the room. He was one of the neighbors, a white-haired man in his sixties; his cloth shoes hadn’t made a sound when he entered. He was smiling softly, with the blank-eyed expression of somebody watching television—he hardly blinked when I turned around. That was the saving grace of Chinese staring: people never glanced away in embarrassment when you caught them looking, and it was hard not to respect such open curiosity. For a few seconds neither of us spoke.
“Hello,” I finally said.
“Hello,” he said.
“Have you eaten yet?” I said. That was a traditional Chinese greeting, often left unanswered.
“Have you eaten yet?” he said. “What time is it in your country?”
“It’s night there,” I said. “There’s a difference of twelve hours.”
He beamed—rural people are often fascinated by the time zones. There was another long pause and then he gestured to the far room. “You have a kang,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You have a desk,” he said. I stood up and gave him a tour; he made approving comments along the way. (“You have a kitchen. You have a stove. You have a table.”) In fact Mimi and I had hardly touched the place since we moved in. The previous residents had been a young couple who had recently left the village for city jobs, and their decorations still marked the walls. They must have been fans of the costume drama Princess Pearl, because they had hung a poster of the TV show’s starlets in their silk and brocade Qing dynasty gowns. Another wall featured a photograph of twin baby boys, a common decoration in the countryside, especially for newlyweds. Twins represent a kind of lottery prize—for most people in China, that’s the only legal way to have two sons. The previous residents of my house hadn’t been quite that lucky, but they had given birth to a healthy boy, which was as much as anybody could ask for. Even the poster didn’t show real twins. When I looked closely, I realized that it was the same baby twice: the photograph had simply been duplicated and reversed. When I woke up every morning, that’s what I saw: an anonymous Photoshopped baby, abandoned by yet another young couple who had left the countryside.
I didn’t take down the poster, because Mimi and I had decided not to change the place, at least in the beginning. The floor was naked cement; the ceiling had holes. In the outhouse, the squat toilet consisted of a slit between two slabs of slate. At night I was often wakened by rats in the walls. They were particularly active whenever the moon was full; on those nights I heard them rolling walnuts to hidden stashes in the ceiling. But Mimi and I didn’t want to appear to be the rich foreigners, so we left everything the same. That was our plan: keep a low profile. It took us by surprise the first time a police car rolled up the dead-end road.
There were two officers in uniform. They had come from the nearest station in Shayu, a bigger village six miles away in the valley. Cops never visit a remote place like Sancha unless there’s a problem, and these two knew exactly where to go—they made their way directly to our house. They asked to see our passports, and wrote down our Beijing addresses, and then one of them gave the bad news.
“You can’t stay here at night,” the officer said. “It’s fine to come here during the day, but at night you have to go back to Beijing.”
“Why can’t we stay here at night?” Mimi asked.
“It’s for your safety.”
“But it’s very safe here. It’s safer here than in Beijing.”
“Something might happen,” the man said. “And if anything happens, it’s our responsibility.”
The officers were friendly but adamant, and that evening we left the village. The next time we came out, the same thing happened. Our house rental was handled by a local man named Wei Ziqi, who finally explained the reason. One of the neighbors called the police every time we arrived in Sancha.
“Do you remember the first time you came here?” Wei Ziqi said. “You looked at two houses: this one, and a house that belongs to another man. He’s the one who calls the police.”
“Why does he do that?”
“Because you’re not renting from him,” Wei Ziqi said. “He’s angry about that.”
Most men in our part of the village were related, and the whistleblower shared Wei Ziqi’s family name: they had the same great-great-grandfather. But they weren’t close, and Wei Ziqi responded quickly when we asked what the man was like. “I’ll give you an example,” he said. “In the mountains you aren’t allowed to cut down certain trees for firewood. This is true even if they’re dead, which doesn’t make sense. So people do it anyway, but sometimes that man will call the police to report it. That’s the kind of person he is. He likes to cause trouble.”
It was the first time I’d heard a character sketch that involves firewood, but who doesn’t know a man like that? Certainly our first impressions had made us wary. He was in his late forties, and he had a handsome face, but his gaze was unsettling. There was something calculated about it—he had none of the open curiosity of the other villagers. He spent most of his time alone, although sometimes I heard him speaking gruffly to his wife. She had a haunted, nervous air; whenever I encountered her on the village pathways she smiled uncomfortably and stammered so fast that I couldn’t understand. Other villagers told me that she was mentally ill, and some of them believed that she had been possessed by a spirit. One evening, when I was spending the night alone in my house, I heard a noise and went outside to investigate. At the edge of the threshing platform, something rustled in the shadows; I shone a flashlight and saw that it was the woman. She muttered incoherently and scurried away into the darkness. Nobody else had ever responded like that—if they came to stare, they simply stared. For much of that night I lay awake, listening to the wind in the trees, but I never saw her near my home again.
We could have rented her husband’s house, which might have seemed like the simplest solution. The place was terrible, with a dirt floor and smoke-stained walls; the rent was low and we could have paid the money and left it empty. But it seemed a bad precedent, and it would only open up further dealings with the neighbor. Between ourselves, Mimi and I called him the Shitkicker: he stirred things up in the village. In this case, he had involved the police down in the valley, and over the next year we did everything possible to win their trust. We stopped frequently at the police station, and periodically we gave gifts—mooncakes at the Mid-Autumn Festival, fruit and cigarettes at the Spring Festival. Mimi’s parents, who live in Beijing, drove out and took the chief of police and other officials out to an expensive lunch. I talked to a lawyer friend, who gave me a Beijing newspaper article about how foreigners can reside in the countryside, so long as they register with the authorities. I gave the story to one of the police officers, and eventually we worked out a system where the cops allowed us to stay as long as we alerted them before every visit. In the end, that was all it took—a reassurance that rules were being followed. Chinese police can be brutal, but usually they’re as pragmatic as everybody else in the country. Quite often their primary goal is to be absolved of any responsibility whatsoever. For months the Shitkicker kept calling, but finally the cops told him to cut it out.
In the beginning, everything I learned about the village came from Wei Ziqi. He handled the rent for our house, although it didn’t belong to him; the owner was his nephew, the young man who had moved with his wife to the city. Wei Ziqi was one of the few people of that generation who had stayed in Sancha—almost everybody else in their twenties and thirties was gone. All of them had grown up in rural poverty, but by adulthood they could see the ways in which the reforms were changing the cities, and departure was usually an easy choice. Wei Ziqi told me that as a child he was so poor that he often ate elm bark—villagers mixed it with corn and made noodles.
In 1987, after finishing the tenth grade, Wei Ziqi followed most of his classmates and left Sa
ncha. He found a factory job on the outskirts of Beijing, where he worked on the assembly line, turning out electrical capacitors for televisions. After a year he switched to another plant that manufactured cardboard boxes. But he never liked factory work, and he didn’t see a future to the jobs. “It was the same thing every day,” he told me once. “If you’re in a factory, you’re always on the same place in the assembly line, and nothing changes.” Wei Ziqi was naturally intelligent, but his formal education was limited, and there are few options for a rural man with such a background. If he had been a woman, he might have actually found better opportunities—smart Chinese women with little education often become accountants or secretaries, and from these positions they can rise in the factory world. But uneducated men have fewer alternatives to the assembly line; usually they work on construction crews or they become security guards. Eventually, Wei Ziqi found a job as a guard at another factory, but after a couple of years he decided the work was leading him nowhere.
Probably he was also limited by his physical appearance. In the Chinese work world, looks matter greatly, especially for jobs with little educational requirement. It’s common for job listings to request applicants to be of a certain height: security guards at good companies often have to be at least five foot eight inches tall. Wei Ziqi stands less than five and a half feet, and he has the rough complexion of a farmer. He’s barrel-chested, with squat, powerful legs; his hands are scarred from fieldwork. He looks like somebody who belongs in Sancha, and finally that’s where he returned. In 1996, after nine years of city work, he came back to the village, where he acquired the rights to farmland that had been left behind by other migrants. He tended nearly two hundred walnut and chestnut trees, and his apricot groves were scattered among the high peaks. He lived with his wife and son, and he also cared for his oldest brother, who was mentally disabled. Their income was modest: less than two thousand dollars a year for four people. The arrival of Mimi and me didn’t represent a windfall, because our rent money went to the nephew in the city.
Nearly all of Wei Ziqi’s peers were gone. The local school that he once attended had been shut down, and of his eleven former classmates, only three still lived in the village. His able-bodied siblings—two older brothers, two older sisters—had all left. His path was unusual, but he refused to see it as a retreat; in his mind, the village wasn’t doomed. He was convinced that someday there would be an advantage to staying behind, and he dreamed of doing something other than farming. Every time he visited relatives who had moved to Huairou, the nearest city, he kept an eye out for business ideas.
Such possibilities can be found everywhere in a small city like Huairou, where many entrepreneurs have originally come from the countryside. On the streets people pass out pamphlets for direct-marketing schemes, and buildings are plastered with ads for training courses, door-to-door products, and get-rich-quick scams. Even television offers ideas. Whenever Wei Ziqi visited Huairou, he stayed with relatives who had cable, and he liked watching China Central Television Channel 7. Some programs cater to viewers who are making the transition from farming to business, and they often feature successful rural entrepreneurs. One evening in Huairou, Wei Ziqi happened to watch a Channel 7 program about leeches. The host interviewed farmers in Hebei Province who raised leeches to be sold to manufacturers of traditional Chinese medicine used to treat numbness and paralysis. Some of these leech entrepreneurs supposedly earned nearly three thousand dollars a year, and after the show was over, Wei Ziqi called the television station for more information.
In 2002, that became his first attempt at business. He visited three successful leech farmers in the Huairou region, and then he raised investment money from his nephew and a neighbor. Together the three men collected five hundred and fifty dollars. Wei Ziqi used some of the cash to build a small cement pool beside his house, and then he traveled alone to Tangxian County. The journey represented the farthest he had ever been from Sancha: four hours by bus. Tangxian is home to a major leech farm, and Wei Ziqi visited the place and picked up two thousand young leeches for two hundred fifty dollars. He stocked them in a pair of water-filled barrels for the long bus ride home.
That month, whenever I visited the village, Wei Ziqi was busy with leech maintenance. He fiddled with the cement pool; he stirred the waters; he inspected the tiny creatures. They were so small they looked like the squiggles of a calligrapher’s brush, and in the beginning they swarmed across the pool’s surface. Every day, Wei Ziqi fed them the fresh blood of chickens, sheep, and pigs. He told me that he planned to eventually sell them to a medicine factory in Anguo County. But after two weeks the squiggles in Wei Ziqi’s pool began to diminish. He wasn’t sure why: maybe the temperature was too cold, or perhaps the pool was too deep. But soon all the creatures had died, and the investment money was gone; and that was the end of Wei Ziqi’s career as a leech farmer.
The leeches were followed by Amway. The company was becoming popular in China, especially in smaller cities, and somebody in Huairou gave Wei Ziqi some pamphlets. For a spell he thought seriously about it, but then he decided that the village was too small for direct marketing. Briefly he became interested in a Chinese company that called itself Worldnet. Wei Ziqi picked up a flyer in the city, and he showed me a copy and asked what I thought. I told him the truth: it looked like a classic pyramid scheme.
Increasingly, though, he talked about tourism. He knew that Beijing car owners didn’t spend much time in the countryside, but occasionally they visited tourist sections of the Great Wall, like Badaling and Mutianyu. He believed that eventually, as the drivers fanned out and began to explore, they’d find their way to more remote places like Sancha. In his opinion, the village needed to develop some sort of identity, so in his spare time he took notes on possibilities. He collected these writings in an exercise book that he called his Xiaoxi, or “Information.” The Information featured key data, like altitude and range of temperatures, and it listed local landmarks: Dragon’s Head Mountain, Eagle-beak Cliff. Wei Ziqi sketched simple maps of the Great Wall and local trails. I rarely met Chinese who were so intent on tracking their surroundings, especially in the countryside; the only other time I’d met a mapmaker was near the Shanxi border, where the old man named Chen researched the local Great Wall. But Wei Ziqi was interested in business, not history. He filled one page with potential names for a guesthouse:
1. Farmyard Leisure Garden
2. Mountain Peace and Happiness Village
3. Sancha Farmyard Paradise
4. Sweet Waterhead Farmyard Villa
5. Great Nature Mountain Farmyard Villa
6. Sancha Plant Garden
7. Sancha Great Nature Farmyard Leisure Paradise
8. Nature Ecological Leisure Farmyard Villa
9. Natural Ecological Plant Paradise
10. Natural Ecological Village
The list was followed by a rough outline of a business plan:
If each family invests a little money we can receive the tourists in our yards, and if the big developers invest in our project then we can turn our village into a paradise where tourists can go sightseeing, appreciate the wild scenery, climb the Great Wall, enjoy peasant family meals, and pick wild mountain fruits and vegetables.
But it seemed unlikely that Wei Ziqi would find business partners in Sancha. Nobody else was as motivated; most people with aspirations had left the village long ago. There was something lonely about his ambition, and I could tell that he was thrilled when Mimi and I began visiting from the big city. He liked the fact that we were involved in writing and photography, and his questions about the outside world had a depth that was rare in the village. Even a common subject, like the time zones in America, became more interesting when Wei Ziqi brought it up. Once he kept asking me detailed questions about the time in America, and finally I told him that if you flew directly from Beijing to Los Angeles, you would arrive earlier than your departure, because of the international date line. For a minute the man was completely sile
nt. He sketched some vertical lines on a piece of paper, and drew another trail intersecting them; he studied the thing hard until his face lit up. After that, I often heard him explaining the Beijing to L.A. flight to other villagers. None of them seemed to understand—they simply nodded, a dazed look in their eyes.
Wei Ziqi was also the most literate person in Sancha. In 1998, after returning to the village, he’d taken a correspondence course in law, and he had a collection of more than thirty books, mostly legal guides to the Reform era: Economic Law, International Law, A Survey of the Chinese Constitution, Compilation of Laws and Regulations in Common Use. These were new books, but they reflected an old tradition in rural China. Even as far back as the seventeenth century, printed books could be found in villages, where literate peasants often kept guides that showed them how to write up simple legal agreements. When Mimi and I first arranged to rent the Sancha house, Wei Ziqi consulted a book called Modern Economic Contracts. It was a cheap paperback with a cover photo that featured the EU flag superimposed atop the Hong Kong skyline. Using the book as a guide, Wei Ziqi produced a handwritten agreement with eleven clauses, all of which were written in formal language: “Party A offers Party B private rooms which are located at Shuiquan Valley of Sancha Village of Bohai Township of Huairou County (the rooms include a kitchen).” The contract noted that our agreement was “based on the mutual benefit principle.” Clause number six specified that we could not use the house to “store contraband inflammable objects or explosives.”
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