Country Driving

by Peter Hessler

  FEW PEOPLE IN THE village had traveled as much as Wei Ziqi. It was hard to go anywhere; there wasn’t any bus service to Sancha, and the mountain roads are too steep for bicycling. If locals needed to go to the city, they hiked down to Dongtai, three miles away, where minibuses stopped. From there it was forty-five minutes to Huairou, and then another hour to Beijing. But some villagers had never even seen the capital. A couple of local women still had bound feet—members of that unfortunate last generation who had had their feet broken as children. Once, Mimi and I stopped by to visit with one of the bound-foot women. She was eighty-two years old, and she lay on her kang with her shoes off. She wore thin nylon socks and her deformed feet were visible, toes clenched tight against the soles like angry little fists. She said that in eight decades she had never been to Beijing. I asked her if she’d like to go, and she nodded.

  “But I can’t,” she said. “You know why? Because I get carsick!”

  Recently she had taken motion sickness pills and made the journey to Huairou, to visit family. That was her first trip to a settlement of any size, and I asked her what she thought. “Not bad,” the woman said, and left it at that. She had grown up in a village across one of the mountain passes, a long day’s walk from Sancha. When I asked what Sancha had been like in the old days, she spoke bluntly. “There’s nothing interesting about this place,” she said. “Living in these mountains, at the bottom of a deep gorge—what can possibly happen here?” The only topic of conversation that interested the woman involved her children and their shortcomings. They had left Sancha for the city, and they rarely returned; young people are like that nowadays! They’re all so selfish! Nobody cares about old people! These complaints seemed to make the woman happy—stretched out on the kang, resting her crumpled feet, her face became peaceful as she decried the thoughtlessness of the young.

  People in Sancha sometimes still traveled long distances by foot or donkey, especially if they headed north. The village name means “Three Forks,” because the main settlement is located at the junction of a trio of valleys that fan northward. Each valley contains a footpath that leads to a high pass: one trail to the village of Chashikou, another to Haizikou, the third to the Huanghua Zhen road. All of these routes cross an old section of wall made of dry fieldstone. This part of the ancient Chinese defense network wasn’t built with brick and mortar, and the date of construction is unknown; texts from the late Ming dynasty simply refer to it as lao changcheng, “the old Great Wall.” A couple of miles north of the fortified passes, in the valleys of Haizikou and Chashikou, there is yet another stone barrier. This region was heavily fortified—the distance between these three parallel lines of Great Wall is only five miles. Sancha lies in the middle, with one Great Wall to the south, and two more to the north.

  Wei Ziqi had relatives in Chashikou, beyond the second barrier, and sometimes he set off in the morning and hiked across the pass. If he had to carry a lot, he saddled up a donkey. In the afternoons, when I was finished writing for the day, I went for long hikes along these routes. They were rocky trails, winding through the orchards, and they passed the ruins of remote settlements that had been abandoned. Along the path to Haizikou, there was a place where people had been gone for more than a decade, and the stone foundations of their homes had already been overgrown by young walnut trees. Grindstones lay in the weeds beside the trail—the last relics of the labor that once shaped this terrain.

  There was still one man living on the route that led toward the Huanghua Zhen pass. Of all the trails, that was the least traveled, and the pass could be hard to find during summer months, when the brush came up. Until the 1990s, this valley was home to two small communities of houses. They were named after the families that lived there: one settlement is known as the Land of the Mas, and the other is the Land of the Lis. By the time I moved to Sancha, the Land of the Lis was completely abandoned—a half dozen buildings stood empty, their paper windows torn and flapping in the breeze. But an elderly man named Ma Yufa remained in the other enclave. Local officials had offered him a room in a retirement home down in the valley, but Ma refused to go. He still farmed, despite his age. He told the officials that whenever he became too old to work, he would simply lie down on his kang and wait for death.

  One morning I hiked up the trail and saw Ma Yufa watering his donkey. It was February, and the man was bundled against the cold; he wore padded army pants, a military jacket covered with patches, and old cloth shoes that had been sewed repeatedly. The torn army clothes gave him the look of a deserter—one of those soldiers who’s been hiding in a jungle for decades, unaware that the war has ended. But his face was strikingly handsome, weathered like a slab of local walnut, and he had thick black eyebrows. He told me that he was in his seventies, and I asked which year he’d been born.

  “Sha shei zhidao?” he said with a snort. “Who knows that?”

  He invited me into his home for a cup of tea, and we passed through the ruins of the Land of the Mas. He pointed out two sets of stone foundations that had been overgrown with brush. “Those people were named Ma, and the other ones over there were called Zhao,” he said. “They left ten years ago.” We trudged past another ruined home. “The people there were also called Ma. That was my uncle.” MaYufa’s brother’s house was still standing, although the occupant had moved to Huairou. A hand-carved coffin leaned near the entrance. “Whenever he dies, he’ll be buried in that,” MaYufa said.

  MaYufa lived in a two-room house with mud walls, and he had no telephone or refrigerator. He told me that every day, at each meal, he ate corn porridge and flour cakes. “You need to eat meat when you’re young, but not when you’re old,” he said. Across the pass it’s nearly four miles of mountain walking to Haizikou, the nearest place with a shop, and the man and his donkey had last made the trip in December, two months earlier. He didn’t expect to return until April. There wasn’t much he needed: a few times a year, he bought corn and flour, and he sold his walnuts in the autumn. Other than those short journeys he had no contact with anybody. His annual income was less than two hundred dollars. Technically he was a Beijing resident—as with so many Chinese cities, the capital’s administrative boundaries stretch deep into the countryside. Until I met MaYufa, I had never imagined how isolated a human being could be in a city of thirteen million.

  We sat on his kang, sipping tea, and he talked about the past. He remembered the Communist victory of 1949, but he said it hadn’t changed his life much. “We were so poor it didn’t matter,” he said. He hadn’t spent a single day in school, and he couldn’t read. He had never married. “Nobody would want to marry somebody who lives in a place like this,” he said. He had a radio and a television with a cheap satellite dish, but he must not have been watching the news. When I asked who was the top official in China, he paused to think.

  “Hu Yaobang is the nation’s leader,” he finally said. In fact Hu Yaobang had never led China, although in 1981 he rose to become Party Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. He was purged in 1987, and two years later his death inspired the initial student protests on Tiananmen Square. Those events may have shaken the world, but they were meaningless in the Land of the Mas.

  One thing MaYufa seemed completely aware of was time. The room was decorated with three calendars, and two of them had tear-off sheets, marked to the correct page. He didn’t throw away the used days; he stacked the little squares of paper neatly in a pan. He had an alarm clock with a second hand that ticked loudly. The longer I sat on the kang, the more the ticking of the clock unsettled me, until finally I thanked him for the tea and excused myself. Outside, the hills were silent—I felt relieved to see the bigness of the sky.

  AT HOME, FROM THE desk beside my window, I could look across the valley and see the Great Wall climbing the western mountains. That was my retreat—I went there whenever I wanted to escape the city and do some writing. I liked the sounds of the village, which was so quiet that every noise seemed clear and distinct. Wind rustled the leaves of t
he big walnut tree outside my house, and occasionally a donkey brayed. Three times a day, at morning, noon, and early evening, the village propaganda speakers crackled to life. They broadcast local announcements, county news, and national events, all of it jumbled together, the Party’s words distorted by the echoes of the deep valley. Whenever a peddler’s truck appeared, I heard the villagers chattering as they gathered around the makeshift market at the end of the road. Apart from that, there were few voices, and I rarely heard the noise of children playing.

  There was only one child in the upper part of the village. My house was surrounded by fifteen other buildings, but nearly all families with young children had moved away. Only Wei Ziqi and his wife Cao Chunmei were raising a young child, a boy named Wei Jia. He was the smallest five-year-old I had ever known—he weighed thirty pounds, and his mother fretted about his health, because he was a finicky eater. But he had a wiry strength that I rarely saw among city children in China. Since the age of four, Wei Jia had roamed unsupervised around the village, and he knew his way along the mountain paths. His sense of balance was remarkable, and he could roughhouse endlessly; it was impossible to wear him out. He almost never cried. It was as if the toughness and dexterity of a nine-year-old had been squeezed into a three-year-old’s body, and I could never resist chasing the kid down and tossing him into the air. He called me mogui—“monster”—and at one point his parents reminded him to use the proper term of respect for an adult. That was how I came to be known as Mogui Shushu: “Uncle Monster.”

  Wei Jia often came to my house, and if I was writing I told him to play quietly and leave Uncle Monster alone. As the only child in the village, he was accustomed to entertaining himself, and sometimes I worked for an hour and forgot that he was still there. He had no toys to speak of, so he improvised with whatever happened to be lying around: a rusty rake, a broken plate. Once he spent a morning on my threshing platform, using an old cart and an empty beer bottle to pretend that he was driving a peddler’s truck. When Mimi or I took friends to the village, they sometimes gave toys to Wei Jia as gifts. “That’s a waste,” his father said once. “He’s only going to break it.” And that was true—the boy was so unaccustomed to real toys that he invariably destroyed them. If he got a toy, he might try stepping on it, or he’d twist some moving part until it snapped. After it was ruined, he didn’t seem at all bothered: for Wei Jia, a toy was a nondurable resource. If you were fortunate enough to get one, you should enjoy it as quickly as possible.

  The boy’s face was a perfect oval. He had black hair cropped close, and long thin eyes that sparked when he laughed. His ears were wonderful—that’s often the most endearing feature of small Chinese boys, whose ears stick straight out, giving them a perpetually startled expression. Neither of Wei Jia’s parents was particularly good-looking, but the boy was handsome. Sometimes, if I wanted to annoy Mimi, I’d praise him.

  “Wei Jia is so good-looking,” I’d say.

  “He’s ugly,” his mother would answer immediately.

  “He’s so smart.”

  “He’s stupid,” she said. “Not one bit smart.”

  “Cut it out,” Mimi would say, in English, but I’d continue: “What a nice child.”

  “He’s a bad boy.”

  In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother’s responses were automatic—it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn’t want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune. The only praise I ever heard the parents give Wei Jia was a single adjective: laoshi. The dictionary defines it as “honest,” but the term is difficult to translate. It also means obedient, as well as having a certain sense of propriety that is characteristic of people in the countryside. “Wei Jia is laoshi,” his parents would say, and that was the closest they came to pride.

  In the fall of 2002, the boy was scheduled to start kindergarten. He would attend a school twenty miles away, in the village where his mother had grown up, and he would return home only on the weekends. In rural China, because of poor transportation, it’s common for small children to board at school. The afternoon before Wei Jia started, Mimi and I drove up from Beijing, so we could take him the next day. In the evening we ate dinner with the family. “Are you excited?” I asked.

  Wei Jia was eating rice and he didn’t look up from his bowl.

  “Answer your Uncle Monster,” his mother said sternly. Usually the boy was talkative, babbling so fast that nobody could understand. But tonight he was silent—he sat there staring at his bowl. It occurred to me that I had never seen him leave the village before.

  “That’s OK,” I said. “He doesn’t have to answer.”

  We finished dinner and the parents prepared Wei Jia’s new school clothes and backpack. He went to bed in silence. All evening he had refused to say a single word about starting school.

  THE BOY WAS OF the sixth generation of Weis known to have lived in Sancha. In the upper part of the village, nearly all male residents share that family name, and the Weis are all related in one way or another. The women have all sorts of names—Cao, Li, Zhao, Han, Yuan—and most grew up in other villages around Beijing. In rural China, that’s the traditional pattern: men inherit their family’s land, and women marry in from the outside.

  Nobody is certain how the village was first settled. In the past, most residents were illiterate, and there are few historical documents in Sancha. The oldest known words are located a thousand feet above the village, where an inscribed stone tablet leans against a section of Great Wall. Of the three lines of wall near Sancha, this is by far the most impressive, and it’s the only local stretch that was built of brick and quarried stone. Originally many sections of brick fortifications contained inscribed tablets, but most have been looted or broken; nowadays fewer than twenty are known to still exist on the wall in the Beijing area. The tablet above Sancha has survived by virtue of remoteness—from the village it takes more than two hours of hard hiking to reach that spot. The inscription notes that in AD 1615, a crew of 2,400 soldiers built a section of Great Wall that is exactly fifty-eight zhang and five cun long. The tablet reflects the precision of Ming bureaucratic records: the cun is a unit of measurement shorter than an inch. All told, the length of this 1615 construction project was 638 feet, and it required a full three months of labor. The soldiers came from the eastern province of Shandong.

  Some villagers believe themselves to be the descendants of these soldiers. Others tell a different story: during the early Qing dynasty, there was a failed plot to assassinate an emperor, and a band of wanted men fled to the mountains. They settled at a fork in three valleys, founding the village that eventually became Sancha. Yet another tale involves an empress named Yan. Desiring to see the countryside, Empress Yan was borne north from the Forbidden City on a sedan chair. Upon reaching the mountains, she was so pleased by the journey that she granted the land to her bearers. In her honor they adopted the same family name, and to this day the lower village is home to a large number of Yans.

  All of these tales sound suspiciously familiar—they have an awful lot in common with the historical soap operas that villagers like watching on television. Such shows feature imperial courts and elaborate plots, and nowadays this is how many rural Chinese learn history. It seems natural that the people in Sancha would apply such tales to their own village, although I doubt that in fact the place was settled by failed assassins or sedan-chair bearers. It’s also unlikely that the builders of the Great Wall founded Sancha. During the Ming dynasty, soldiers typically returned to their homes after construction projects.

  Wei Ziqi has another theory about his family origins that sounds more reasonable. He’s heard that his ancestors arrived in the late nineteenth century, having fled a famine on the loess plateau, in Shanxi Province. But he has no idea if this is true, and he has never seen the Wei jiapu, the traditional genealogy kept by Chinese families. Some of these documents go back hundreds of years, and many peo
ple hid them during the Cultural Revolution, when political campaigns targeted such relics of the feudal past. In Sancha, the Wei jiapu survived that turmoil, but during the Reform years it suffered a different fate: the document fell into the hands of the Shitkicker.

  “He won’t let anybody see it,” Wei Ziqi said. “We don’t even know where he keeps it. He has it hidden somewhere.”

  I asked what the man planned to do with the genealogy.

  “Nothing,” Wei Ziqi said. “It doesn’t do him any good. He just wants to keep other people from seeing it.”

  Wei Ziqi’s personal family history is limited to a half dozen tattered land contracts that are signed by his ancestors. But none of these documents is still legally binding, and to him they’re just curiosities. He rarely talks about his ancestors or his parents, and like other villagers he doesn’t care much about history. He told me that when he was a boy, nobody in Sancha showed the least interest in the Ming-dynasty ruins. Locals didn’t even call it the Great Wall—back then, they referred to it as bianqiang, or “border walls,” a term that was commonly used during the Ming. Along with other children, Wei Ziqi played in the remnants of kilns that had been used to fire bricks for the wall. Sometimes children found intact bricks or other relics, but eventually the village expanded and people built their homes atop the kilns. In the 1970s, Sancha residents demolished a massive fortified gate that stood along the main road to the village. They used the huge blocks of stone for house foundations and road construction. Nowadays, there are some regrets about the destruction, because villagers believe the gate might have attracted tourists.