Country Driving

by Peter Hessler

  With a nervous expression, Wei Ziqi settled into the driver’s seat. He asked the dealer which gear was reverse—not a good sign—and then he turned the ignition. The rest of us stood nearby, watching. He popped the emergency brake, put it into gear, slammed the gas to the floor, and opened the clutch. He didn’t want to stall the thing but he had no idea it would move so fast. The engine roared and the tires spun; it sped backward through a huge puddle of dirty water, spraying a cement-colored arc of crap across the lot; and then the car headed directly toward a telephone pole. By this point Wei Ziqi wasn’t even attempting to look where he was going. He had his head down, studying the floor, searching desperately for the foot brake. At the last possible moment he found it—the car stopped less than three feet from the pole. My heart pounded in my chest; my mianzi must have been white. Once my voice returned, I said, “OK, I’ll drive.”

  I went for a test run with Wei Ziqi in the passenger’s seat. I wasn’t sure how to evaluate this vehicle, or where to set expectations—it was, after all, a Chinese version of a South Korean subcompact called the Charade. The last time I had been involved in the purchase of a used automobile, I was a high school student in Missouri, where I bought a 1974 Dodge Dart for seven hundred bucks. In many ways the Xiali reminded me of that Dart. There was very little power and the brakes were soft. The body looked like hell. But the engine sounded decent—no pings, no knocks. There was even a spare tire and jack. After driving with Wei Ziqi for a few miles, I said the same thing my father had said about the Dart back in 1986: “I think it’s OK.”

  At the garage Wei Ziqi handed out a round of Red Plum Blossoms. The cigarettes put the dealer in a magnanimous mood, and he said he’d throw in the sweat-stained bamboo seat covers for free. “Usually I’d sell this car for sixteen thousand yuan,” the man said. “But I’ll sell it for fifteen because you’re a friend of Yuan’s.”

  “Could you go cheaper?” Wei Ziqi said. “Maybe two hundred yuan cheaper?”

  The man agreed: twenty-five dollars less. “Is there anything else you’d look at?” Wei Ziqi said to me.

  “What’s the mileage?” I asked.

  “You can check,” the dealer said with a shrug. I poked my head inside: 14,255 kilometers. The odometer only had five digits, and there was no telling how many times it had rolled over: the total could have been 14,255 kilometers or 114,255 kilometers or 1,014,255 kilometers. There was no repair history, no mechanic’s approval. We knew nothing about how the Xiali had been used, or what role it had played in the demise of the Beijing Shanqili Guest Services Company. The dealer wouldn’t even write out a contract. “My calligraphy is bad,” he said. “Let Mr. Yuan write it.”

  He gave Mr. Yuan a preprinted form with the heading “Contract.” Mr. Yuan began filling out blanks—buyer, seller, date—and stopped. “My calligraphy is bad, too,” he said. Finally Wei Ziqi wrote the whole thing. The dealer convinced him to leave out the price. (“It’s simpler that way.”) The dealer also refused to sign his name. (“You can write it for me. My calligraphy’s really bad!”) Wei Ziqi hesitated but eventually signed both names. After it was over, and the cash had changed hands, the dealer handed out Red Gold Dragons, as a way of marking the end of the transaction.

  I drove the Xiali back to the city. We had to stop at the gas station down the street, because the owner had made sure the car’s tank was dry as a bone when it left his hands. I asked Wei Ziqi why the dealer had been so reluctant to sign the contract.

  “I don’t know,” Wei Ziqi said. “It seemed a little strange.”

  “What will you do if there’s a problem?”

  “I’ll talk to Mr. Yuan,” he said.

  Another friend helped him drive from Beijing back to Sancha. Later that afternoon I rented a Jetta and headed out to the village. When I arrived, Wei Ziqi was in the village lot, wiping down the Xiali. He had parked beneath the only shade tree, and the pockmarked hood was so clean it almost shone. Wei Ziqi was beaming, too—it was the happiest he’d looked in a long time. When I saw Cao Chunmei, I asked her what she thought of the Xiali. She shook her head and said, “What a terrible car!”

  FROM THE BEGINNING CAO Chunmei had opposed the purchase. She said they didn’t need a car, and it was too expensive; the family still had loans at the bank and with relatives. But the real reason for Cao Chunmei’s opposition was that an automobile represented freedom. “He already does whatever he wants,” she told me. “He goes into Huairou, he goes drinking with his friends. If he has a car, then it’ll be even easier for him to do that.” She reacted in a similar way to the village rumors that Wei Ziqi should run for Party Secretary. “I don’t want him to become Party Secretary,” Cao Chunmei told me bluntly. “I think it’ll turn into a big hassle. I see how busy the current Party Secretary is. If Wei Ziqi gets busier dealing with the village affairs, then he won’t have time to take care of things around here.”

  Despite Cao Chunmei’s distaste for local politics, she had decided that she wanted to join the Party herself. In some ways it was surprising—her Buddhist beliefs seemed incompatible with the Communists, who had always scorned religion. But Cao Chunmei’s interests in the Party weren’t philosophical, or even political: she simply wanted to be part of a group, and she wanted to go places. “They get to take a good trip every summer,” she said. “They get gifts and things like that. It just seems like it would be interesting to join.” For Cao Chunmei, success had become profoundly isolating; she was responsible for much of the business’s drudge work, and even the solace of Buddhism was something she experienced alone. It was the opposite of Wei Ziqi, whose every step led to more guanxi, more power within the village, more contact with the outside world.

  He also demanded more authority in the family. When Cao Chunmei began to talk about joining the Party, Wei Ziqi flatly refused. “There’s no need,” he told her, and left it at that. He rarely felt the urge to explain his decisions to his wife, and he kept his plans to himself. Whenever I asked Cao Chunmei about the village’s political rumors, she claimed that she didn’t know any more than I did. “Wei Ziqi won’t tell me anything,” she said. “He’ll do what he wants. I don’t control him.” That was her typical response to conflicts: Wo bu guan. I don’t control it. Her dream of Party membership, like the plan to start her own business, was abandoned quietly.

  LATER THAT YEAR, AFTER Wei Ziqi had become more comfortable with the car, he drove to Huairou and acquired a new name for his son. Like virtually all of Wei Ziqi’s projects, it wasn’t mentioned until it was finished. One Friday afternoon he picked up Wei Jia from school and informed the boy that from now on he would be known as Wei Xiaosong.

  In China it isn’t unusual for a name to be changed, especially if the person is a child or a young adult. Wei Ziqi had done this himself: originally he had been called Wei Zongguo. It’s the kind of patriotic name that was common in the countryside for babies born during the Cultural Revolution—guo means “nation.” In 1993, when Wei Ziqi was living in the city, he changed the name as part of his early attempt to become something other than a peasant. Back then, he read a book called Name and Life, which explained that a person called “ziqi” is likely to enjoy a career that’s “stable and developed.”

  Sometimes a child’s name change occurs for more serious reasons. Parents believe that an inauspicious name brings bad fortune, and a child who is chronically ill might benefit from a new title. When I taught in Sichuan, one of my colleagues had a daughter who suffered from childhood cancer, and after years of treatment the parents finally gave her a new name. Around the same time, they were granted permission to have another baby by the local Planned Birth authorities, who sometimes make an exception if the couple’s first kid has serious medical problems. The sick daughter was school-age—old enough to understand exactly what it means when your name is changed and your mother becomes pregnant. Later that year the poor girl died, and I always thought it was awful that she spent her last months with an unfamiliar name. It seemed terrible to leave
the world as somebody else.

  Wei Jia’s given name is simple: the character jia means “good.” But it requires fourteen strokes of the pen, an unlucky number in China, and the boy’s health had never been strong. He no longer suffered from blood problems, but he often complained of stomachaches and he had a tendency to catch colds. In the early years I blamed it on boarding at school; dormitory conditions were poor and he didn’t like the cafeteria meals. But recently junk food and inactivity had become bigger threats. The parents were strict about his studies; during weekends they made sure that he stayed on the kang, doing his homework. Their respect for education was admirable, but the boy never got any exercise, and certain traditional ideas about health were counterproductive. Given Wei Jia’s chronic colds, I recommended that he eat oranges, but his mother believed that a person should avoid too much fruit during winter—it’s bad for the qi, she said. Like most people in China, Wei Jia rarely drank water. The Chinese have countless obscure beliefs about which times of day are bad for fluids, and the end result is that most people simply don’t drink much. Once, Cao Chunmei and I took Wei Jia to Huairou for a routine checkup, and the doctor couldn’t run the urine test—the boy was so dehydrated that he had blood in his sample. But I couldn’t convince the parents to make sure he drank more, ate vegetables and fruits, and got more exercise. It was typical that the father responded to the boy’s health problems by changing his name. Sometimes they seemed to grasp instinctively at the worst of both worlds: the worst modern habits, the worst traditional beliefs.

  The longer I lived in China, the more I worried about how people responded to rapid change. This wasn’t an issue of modernization, at least not in the absolute sense; I never opposed progress. I understood why people were eager to escape poverty, and I had a deep respect for their willingness to work and adapt. But there were costs when this process happened so fast. Often the problems were subtle—this was hard to recognize as an outsider. In the West, newspaper stories about China tended to focus on the dramatic and the political, and they emphasized the risk of instability, especially the localized protests that often occurred in the countryside. But from what I saw, the nation’s greatest turmoil was more personal and internal. Many people were searching; they longed for some kind of religious or philosophical truth, and they wanted a meaningful connection with others. They had trouble applying past experiences to current challenges. Parents and children occupied different worlds, and marriages were complicated—rarely did I know a Chinese couple who seemed happy together. It was all but impossible for people to keep their bearings in a country that changed so fast.

  Wei Jia’s new name had been selected by computer. This detail was important to Wei Ziqi—he told me that computerized name analysis was becoming more common in the cities. A man in Huairou specialized in the service, which he usually performed for a fee of fifty yuan, or about six dollars. But he waived it for Wei Ziqi, because they had friends and guanxi in common. He gave Wei Ziqi a one-page computer printout with extensive analysis of the new name and its future prospects. As Wei Xiaosong, the boy could expect to enjoy good fortune and longevity, as well as wealth and honor. His personality would be self-restrained and generous. The machine spat out character traits that ran down the page like listings on a stock ticker: “Strong affections. Moderate. Chaste. Graceful.”

  The computer also examined the boy’s birth date and concluded that of the five traditional elements, water was the one most lacking. I didn’t need a machine to tell me that—pretty much everybody I knew in China was dehydrated. In any case, the computerized solution was to give the boy the character Song, which is the name of a river near Shanghai. Xiao means “little.” That was his new name: Little Song River.

  Cao Chunmei’s response was to wash her hands of the whole affair. “Wo bu guan,” she said. “I don’t control that. I don’t much like the name, but it’s not my business. It’s Wei Ziqi’s business.”

  We had dinner together on the weekend of the name change. It was Sunday night, and Wei Ziqi had driven down to the valley with another Party member for some mysterious meeting. It had something to do with the upcoming elections—often they met away from the village to avoid drawing attention. Wei Jia had finished his homework, and in the afternoon he read a book about dinosaurs. He was a fourth-grader now, and his reading was good; he still excelled at school. But every time somebody mentioned the new name he became very quiet. I had to ask about it several times before he answered.

  “Bu hao,” he finally said. “It’s no good.”

  I asked Wei Jia why the name was no good, and he answered in a voice so low it was almost a whisper.

  “Bu hao ting,” he said. “It sounds bad.”

  And that was all he said—he refused to expand on the topic. At dinner we ate fish and dumplings, and I could tell that Cao Chunmei was distracted. After the meal she made a phone call; she must have been trying to reach Wei Ziqi’s cell phone, but somebody else picked up. She listened for a moment and then cut in impatiently. “He’s drunk, isn’t he?” she said. “Is he coming back tonight? He has to go to Huairou tomorrow morning. Tell him to call me!”

  She brooded at the table for most of an hour. Wei Jia seemed oblivious—he was in good spirits, and after dinner we played a game with his chess pieces. He had a bad cough; for a week now he had been struggling with another cold. Finally the phone rang. Cao Chunmei went to the next room to answer it, but I could hear her words.

  “You need to come home tonight,” she said sharply. She told him there was a village meeting tomorrow morning at seven o’clock. “Do you understand? You have to come back tonight!”

  If Wei Jia heard anything, he gave no indication. We read a couple of his books, and then I told him I’d be back in the morning, to take him to school. On the way out of the house I was surprised to find that Wei Ziqi had returned. He was in the front room, leaning against a table; all the lights were off. When I flicked a switch I realized that the man was so drunk he could hardly stand.

  “Are you OK?” I said. But he couldn’t speak either. He slumped against the table, eyes unfocused. Cao Chunmei had followed me into the room. I asked her how he had gotten home.

  “Somebody drove his car back,” she said.

  “Will he be all right?”

  “It’s fine,” she said.

  The next morning it was still dark when I picked up Wei Jia. His parents were asleep on the kang, and the boy got ready for school in the family dining room. The place was a mess; a bag of sunflower seeds had been scattered across the floor. I asked him what had happened.

  “Dad was drunk,” he said matter-of-factly. “He was trying to pour some water and he spilled it and then he got mad and knocked those seeds everywhere.”

  Wei Jia had already dressed in his school uniform and now he packed his bag.

  “Is he like that often?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. The boy was still focused on his school bag. He didn’t look up and I changed the subject.

  “Do you have your red scarf?”

  “Yes,” he said. The scarf is the symbol of the Young Pioneers, worn by all schoolchildren.

  “Then put it on,” I said.

  He tied the knot around his neck. As usual Wei Jia’s scarf was ragged; it had a big rip in the side and greasy stains covered the front. Most Young Pioneers are well scrubbed but occasionally you see one with the look of a frontline soldier. Down in the valley we stopped for breakfast. Wei Jia had a racking cough but he ate his wonton soup eagerly, hunched over the bowl in the cold of the roadside restaurant.

  FOR THE NEXT MONTH the new name hung over Wei Jia’s head. His father told him he had no choice, and they needed to make the change now; in another year and a half he would enter middle school. They would register him as Wei Xiaosong, and he might as well get accustomed to it now. Once he started using the name, it would feel more natural.

  The boy never gave any reasons for his reluctance. He didn’t explain why he liked the old name, or
what it was about the new one that bothered him; he didn’t ask for a third option. He didn’t get angry and he didn’t cry to his mother, as he sometimes had during past conflicts. In fact he hardly said anything at all. When the topic came up, his only response was, “Bu hao”—No good. He muttered the words to himself, and over time the refrain acquired an odd combination of impotence and power. His father couldn’t penetrate Bu hao; soon he became frustrated. It reminded me of Bartleby—“I would prefer not to.” But I also recognized both parents in that simple phrase. His mother washed her hands of things she couldn’t control: Bu hao. His father was determined to change his world at all costs: Bu hao. As for Wei Xiaosong, the computer promised good fortune and longevity, and wealth and honor, and self-restraint and generosity; but in the end it was all bu hao. The boy simply refused to accept the name. After a few weeks his father gave up and never mentioned the change again. He had always been Wei Jia, the last child in the upper village, the first child to grow up in a businessman’s home; and now he would be Wei Jia forever.

  THAT WINTER THE IDIOT didn’t receive his Spring Festival holiday bonus from the government. He was given the usual sack of rice, along with the jug of cooking oil, but the twelve dollars were missing. The amount was too small for the family to bother with a complaint, and they knew exactly what it meant. The Party Secretary was sending a message: she still had power in the village, and she wasn’t happy about the election rumors.

  By now the talk was everywhere, and even Cao Chunmei couldn’t hide her interest. “People are discussing it all the time,” she told me. “They don’t want the Party Secretary and the Vice Party Secretary to be in office anymore. Lots of people curse them—behind their backs, of course. In the past people were satisfied with the Party Secretary, but now they don’t feel that way anymore. Her ideas are different. As time goes by, her thinking is, ‘I’ve been in power for some time, so I deserve some benefits.’ It’s bureaucratism.”