Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (18 page)

I pitched my tent in the shadow of the fort. A small stream ran in the distance, surrounded by marshland, like a thin ribbon of green tied taut across this parched landscape. The sky was restless—fugitive clouds scattering across a dome of blue. At midnight the gusting wind shook me awake. It hummed across the Gobi, and whistled through the ruins, and I lay there listening to the same song that stirred soldiers in the days of the Han.

AFTER HECANGCHENG I TURNED
for home. Highway 215 heads south out of Gansu, and I followed the road to the border of Qinghai Province. At the boundary, a pass stood at an elevation of twelve thousand feet, and after that I was in the high country of the Tibetan Plateau. There were no more forts, no more signal towers, no more Great Wall—all of it had been left behind.

The road was newly built. It consisted of two lanes, surrounded by high desert landscapes of rock and dirt, and periodically the monotony was broken by a sign: “Danger! On This Slope It’s Easy to Fall Asleep!” At one location the government had suspended a small sedan above the highway. It was smashed almost beyond recognition; the front end was crumpled flat and the remains of a door dangled in strips of steel. Painted across the back end were the words: “Four People Died.” The whole thing had been erected on spindly poles, fifteen feet off the ground, like some gruesome version of a children’s treat: a Carsicle.

At the next bend in the road, a sign noted that fifty-three people had died here. A billboard presented the speed limit like options on a menu:

40
KM/HR IS THE SAFEST

80
KM/HR IS DANGEROUS

100
KM/HR IS BOUND FOR THE HOSPITAL

Along that road I saw two truckers who had broken down. Both stood beside All-Powerful Kings, waiting for their partners to return,
and both refused a ride. One trucker had already been there for two days. He asked if I had any food or water, and I gave him two bottles and the last Oreos from my stash. Other than that the road was empty. To the west, snow-covered peaks rose to over eighteen thousand feet.

For one hundred and fifty miles I saw almost no signs of human habitation. There weren’t any gas stations or shops; the landscape was so barren that nobody had bothered to carve propaganda into the mountains. The first town I passed had been recently razed. It had the look of a former military installation; the buildings were arranged in neat rows, and at one point there must have been a couple hundred people living there. But now it was abandoned—roofless walls stood stark on the plateau, lonely as the traces of some lost empire. Not far beyond that, a pair of empty dirt roads branched off the highway. One headed east, the other west; a signpost gave the names of military-sounding destinations. A left turn led to a place called “Build.” A right turn went to “Unite.” I took a deep breath and drove straight through.

THE YEAR THAT I RECEIVED MY DRIVER’S LICENSE, I BEGAN
searching for a second home in the countryside north of Beijing. Empty houses weren’t hard to find—occasionally I came across whole villages that had been abandoned. They were scattered across the front range of the Jundu Mountains, in the shadow of the Great Wall, where the farming had always been tough and the lure of migration was all but irresistible. Sometimes it felt as though people had left in a rush. Millstones lay toppled over; trash was strewn across dirt floors; house frames stood with the numb silence of tombstones. Mud walls had already begun to crumble—these buildings were even more broken-down than the Ming fortifications. Whenever I saw an empty village, I thought: Too late.

I hoped to find a place where people still farmed, their lives tuned to the rhythms of the fields. I had a vague idea of a writer’s retreat—somewhere I could escape the city and work in silence. For a while I searched near the Hebei border, on the far side of the Miyun reservoir, where the roads were still dirt and most vehicles were two-stroke tractors. Sometimes I traveled by car, sometimes by foot; I carried my tent and sleeping bag. I used the Sinomaps to track roads that ran alongside the crenellated symbol of the Great Wall.

One day in early spring of 2002, I went for a drive with Mimi Kuo-Deemer, an American friend who was also looking for a place in the countryside. We passed through Huairou, a small city at the northern edge of the Beijing plain, and then we entered the foothills of the Jundu Mountains. On a rural road we picked up a hitchhiker. The old man
wore an army surplus jacket, and he was headed home from market. He didn’t hesitate when we asked what was the most beautiful stretch of wall in these parts.

“Tianhua Cave,” he said. “That’s where you should go.”

The region had been named after a fissure in the limestone cliffs. Locals had turned it into a shrine—there were two statues of Buddha, a quiver of burned-out incense, and a plate of rotting fruit offerings. Above the cave, a section of the Great Wall led to a massive tower atop the ridgeline’s highest peak. This was the first row of mountains north of Beijing, rising more than three thousand feet above the plains, and the view from the tower was stunning: the mist-covered fields on one side, the blue-gray peaks on the other. But it was a tiny cluster of buildings to the northwest that caught our eyes. They perched high on a hillside, in complete isolation—there were no other settlements for miles.

We climbed down from the wall, got back in the car, and found the village at the end of a dirt road. The place was called Sancha, and within an hour some locals had shown us two empty houses; by the end of that month we had signed a lease for one of them. The home had three rooms, a wood-fired
kang
, and mud walls that had been papered with old copies of the
People’s Daily
. There was an outhouse nearby. We had electricity and a phone line; water came straight from a spring in the mountains. Rent was three hundred and sixty yuan a month—for each of us, a twenty-dollar time-share. From the front door, where a broad dirt platform had been laid out for threshing crops, I could see the Great Wall. The brick towers rose from the valley floor, snaked their way along the folded peaks, and disappeared over the western horizon—headed toward the loess plateau, the Ordos Desert, the Hexi Corridor. In the past, a glimpse of the Great Wall had always made me think about traveling, but when I saw it from Sancha I said to myself: This is where I’ll stay.

SANCHA HAD ALWAYS BEEN
a small village, and in recent years it had become even smaller. In the 1970s the population had been around three hundred; now there were fewer than one hundred fifty people left.
Most of them lived in the lower part of the village, although there was another cluster of homes up in the hills, at the end of a winding dirt road, which was where we found our house. The government called this upper settlement Spring Valley, but to locals it was all Sancha—they made no distinction between the two parts. And the whole place had been fading for decades. The local Buddhist temple had been demolished during the Cultural Revolution, along with smaller shrines that were scattered throughout the hills, and nobody had bothered to rebuild them. The school shut down in the early 1990s. None of the villagers owned a car; nobody had a cell phone. There were no restaurants, no shops—not a single place where a person could spend money. Three or four times a week, a peddler’s flatbed truck puttered up from the valley, loaded with rice, noodles, meat, and simple household goods. During autumn other trucks appeared to buy the villagers’ harvested crops. In the upper settlement, all vehicles parked at the top of the dead-end road, where the dirt surface had been widened. That patch of earth represented the full range of local commerce—it was a parking-lot economy.

The average resident’s annual income was around two hundred and fifty dollars. Almost all of it came from orchards: walnuts, chestnuts, and apricot seeds that were grown high in the mountains. They sold most of these nuts, but everything else was raised for food. They kept chickens and pigs, and they grew corn, soybeans, and vegetables. It was far too dry for rice; even wheat grew poorly in these parts. Occasionally, if a villager was lucky, he trapped a badger or a pheasant in the hills. There were feral pigs, too—wild animals with big tusks and matted hair.

Beijing wasn’t too far away, only a couple of hours by car, but back then it was still unusual for city residents to visit the countryside. The auto boom was already growing—in 2001, Beijing issued over three hundred thousand new driver’s licenses, a 50 percent increase over the previous year. But people rarely took long road trips for pleasure. Occasionally an adventurous driver found his way to Sancha, and sometimes a group of serious hikers came to climb the unrestored Great Wall. But on most weekends Mimi and I were the only outsiders in the village. Locals didn’t know what to make of us—they knew I was a writer who had lived in China for years, and Mimi was a Chinese-American photographer; but
there was no precedent for young city people spending time in rural conditions. Neighbors often wandered over to get a better look, and like anybody in the Chinese countryside, they didn’t bother to knock before entering our house. They inspected our threshing platform, and peered into the windows, and fiddled with our belongings. Sometimes I walked to the dirt lot and found two or three villagers huddled around the rental car that I had driven out from the city. They stared with a sort of benign intensity: faces calm, hands clasped behind the back, heads bowed as if in prayer—homage to a Jetta.

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.