Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (29 page)

By 2003, when the Wei family business began to succeed, it had been nearly four years since Cao Chunmei abandoned Falun Gong. During that time she had stayed alert to new ideas, especially after the business began to bring more visitors to Sancha. One weekend, she heard a group of tourists from Beijing talking about Buddhism. They were middle-class, the type of city people who often scorn peasants, but Cao Chunmei noticed a difference with this group. They treated her with respect, and they talked in a way that appealed to her. “In their conversation, they often referred to the Buddha,” she told me later. “They talked about all sorts of situations, and they were interested in how a person should respond to each. Every time something complicated came up, they were able to refer to the Buddha. I thought there was something good about it. They had ideas about how a person should live.”

Shyly, Cao Chunmei worked up the courage to ask one woman a question. “I asked her what effect Buddhism had on her life,” Cao Chunmei remembered. “I asked her if it had helped her solve any special problems. She said that wasn’t the only reason she believed in Buddhism—it wasn’t because of some specific need she had. It didn’t solve problems quickly like that. But it helped her understand the right way to act in many different situations, and that was more important.”

Cao Chunmei knew exactly what the woman meant—she often felt a desire that ran deeper than the mundane details of daily life. It was the first time she had ever felt a connection to her city customers, and a couple of weeks later the Beijing woman returned to Sancha. This time she brought two books:
The Book of Third-Generation Karma
and
The Book of Ksitigarbha and Bodhisattva.
Cao Chunmei studied the texts, and she noticed that they helped her feel calmer. After a while she built a shrine in the family’s main room. She placed a table against the wall, covered it with yellow silk, and erected two large plastic statues. One was Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and the other was Caishen, the God of Wealth. In the mornings Cao Chunmei burned incense before the statues, and she made offerings, always in odd numbers: three oranges, five apples, three glasses of
baijiu
. Such shrines are common in southern China, especially among people doing business, but they’re rare in Beijing homes. The first time I noticed the statues I asked Cao Chunmei who had arranged them.

“I did,” she said proudly. “They came from a shop in Huairou.”

And then—I had been in China too long; the question was all but automatic—I asked how much the statues had cost. Cao Chunmei’s tone was friendly but she set me straight.

“We don’t say that we ‘bought’ something like this,” she said. “We say that we ‘invited’ the statues to come here. I invited them here because I thought they would help our household.”

IN SANCHA
, 2004
BECAME
the Year of Construction. Modern Chinese time works like that—the traditional calendar follows its path through the zodiac, from monkey to rooster to dog; but for most people
it’s the details of development that matter most. The Year of the Horse—2002—is memorable in Sancha because that’s when the road was paved. The Year of the Ram was the Year of the New Car. The Year of the Monkey was the Year of Construction. And unlike the age-old patterns of the zodiac, there was no mystery about the modern parade of Road to Car to Construction. The new road allowed new cars to bring new people to Sancha, and they brought new money that could be used for construction. New sounds, too—all year the village rang with the pounding of hammers and the hum of drills and saws.

Like many economic changes in Sancha, the work was pioneered by Wei Ziqi. First he refinished the interior of his home, and then he built a small guesthouse. He designed it himself, a low cement building with a half dozen rooms, and he organized all the construction. For labor he hired his neighbors and close relatives at a rate of three dollars per day, which was standard for any Sancha building project, public or private. In Chinese villages, locals typically provide such labor, which is why the government’s road-building campaign of 2003 and 2004 was so important. It improved transport in the countryside, but it also gave underemployed farmers something to do.

In the Sancha region, the government even commissioned a modern version of the Great Wall. County officials had noticed how the Beijing car boom was bringing more people to northern villages, where one of the main attractions was the Ming relic. Recognizing an opportunity for subtle branding, the cadres decreed that all settlements must decorate their roads with structures that resembled the top of the Great Wall. These fake walls were built of red brick, covered in cement, and painted gray. They had crenellations etched with lines that resembled seventeenth-century stonework. From a defensive point of view, the barriers were of questionable value—they were only two and a half feet tall, and if a Mongol had been moving south on a moonless night, at a high rate of speed, maybe his horse would have stubbed a hoof on the new Great Wall. But this structure had been designed with the automobile in mind. The new walls often ran on both sides of the road, giving motorists the impression that they were driving atop the Great Wall. It finally fulfilled one of the dreams of the 1920s, when the
Shenbao
newspaper had suggested that converting the Great Wall into a highway “would make it easier to do business.”

Certainly it was an effective way to put money into peasants’ pockets. Everybody who built the walls earned the standard wage of three dollars per day, and in Sancha the villagers were happy to have the work. They built the new Great Wall, and they worked on Wei Ziqi’s home and guesthouse; and they made repairs to the paved road. The day wages added up, and soon other villagers started to make improvements to their homes. The empty lot at the dead-end road became a depot for construction materials—every time I drove out to the village, I parked amid piles of sand and brick. For a while I mourned the lost tranquility. It seemed like ages since my first year in the village, when the road was still dirt and I could sit at my desk and hear nothing but the wind in the walnut trees. That had been 2001: the last year of silence.

But I had lived in China long enough to accept that nothing stays the same, and finally I did what everybody else was doing: I remodeled. Mimi and I had always believed that our house should remain at the local standard, but by 2004 that standard was changing. We hired a crew of local workers, who made the same interior renovations that they had just finished in the home of Wei Ziqi. He had undertaken the most extensive improvements in the village: new ceilings of plaster, linoleum floors with the pattern of wood grain, and clean white walls covered with paint instead of old copies of the
People’s Daily
. Once the Party Secretary saw the results, she immediately commissioned the same thing for her own house—she wasn’t about to fall behind Wei Ziqi. Over time, most locals followed suit, and the work crews moved throughout the village. In the same steady way that they had built the new Great Wall, crenellation after crenellation, they gave every house the same marks of modernity: plaster ceilings, linoleum floors, painted walls.

That was also the year Wei Ziqi joined the Communist Party and acquired a driver’s license. In the past, Wei Ziqi had never spoken about becoming a Party member, and the Huairou fortune-teller had specifically warned him to avoid getting involved in political matters. In China, even basic membership is complicated—it’s not like the United States, where a political party will accept anybody. The Communists require a
formal application, followed by meetings and interviews; local members have the authority to reject anybody they deem inadequate. And membership is rare: across China, only seventy million people, or roughly 5 percent of the population, are card-carrying Communists.

In 2004, Sancha was home to seventeen members of the Party. The majority were older than fifty, and none was under the age of thirty. It was rare for a motivated young person to apply—most people of that description had left the village entirely. As a result, Sancha’s local leadership was conservative, and a few members had been slow to accept even the most basic elements of the new economy. Some could barely read. There were only three women, each of whom had some family link to the organization. The Party Secretary’s mother had been the first woman in the village to join, before the Revolution was even finished, and she had encouraged her daughter to become involved in politics. The third female member was married to a local official. None of the Sancha Party members was engaged in business on a significant scale. When Wei Ziqi applied, he represented something entirely different: the village’s youngest prospective member, and the first to have succeeded as an entrepreneur.

He rarely spoke in detail about his motivations. In China, people tend to be closemouthed about such matters; you can be friends with a person for years and never have a conversation about what he does in the Party. Wei Ziqi’s application took six months, and during that time he was evaluated repeatedly at village meetings. Sometimes he gave self-criticisms—a common routine in China. I asked him what he talked about in such situations.

“I say that I’m not enthusiastic enough about physical labor,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“If there’s some work in the village, and everybody is supposed to contribute, then sometimes I’m slow to participate. That’s how I criticize myself.”

Whenever I asked him why he applied, his answer was the same. “I want to help the country,” he said. “And I want to help the village. This is the best way to do it.” He left it at that—he never referred to personal benefits. But I knew that he was trying to solidify
guanxi
in
the village, where his rise in status had made him vulnerable. In 2004 his income became the highest in Sancha, but his business plans were ambitious; he took out a loan of nearly three thousand dollars from the Agricultural Bank of China. Like all rural loans to individual farmers, it had to be approved by the village, and I suspected that Wei Ziqi’s pending Party status might have helped. In the end, there was little resistance to his application to join the Party, and only three members opposed it. The Shitkicker led this small clique, but Wei Ziqi easily gained the required majority. On July 1 of 2004, the eighty-third anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Wei Ziqi officially became a member.

It took another five months for him to get the driver’s license. He waited until the end of the harvest and the fall tourist season, and then he signed up for a driving course in Shunyi, a small city not far from Huairou. Tuition was costly—nearly five hundred American dollars—and this indoctrination was just as mysterious as the Communist Party membership. For one thing, Shunyi-trained drivers were expected to begin every maneuver in the second gear. The coach was adamant on this point, and I asked Wei Ziqi why it was so important.

“It’s harder in second gear,” he said. “The coach says it will make us better with the clutch if we drive in second.”

One day not long after he received his license, I rented a Jetta and drove out to the village. About an hour after I arrived, Wei Ziqi stopped by and asked me to move the car, because somebody needed to mix cement in the lot at the end of the road. Nowadays there was always activity out there, because of the construction boom; it seemed that every time I visited, I had to move the car. In the past I never would have imagined that parking in Sancha would become a problem.

That morning, I was writing at my desk, and Wei Ziqi offered to move the Jetta for me. I had let him drive a few times in the past, but only under close observation; he still wasn’t capable of driving alone, despite having spent fifty-eight hours learning how to start a truck in second gear. This time, though, I figured it was harmless—my car needed to be moved only a few feet. I gave him the keys and went back to work.

Half an hour later Wei Ziqi returned. He stood in the doorway for a while without saying anything. Finally I asked if everything was all right.

“There’s a problem with the car,” he said slowly. He was smiling, but it was a tight Chinese grin of embarrassment. Whenever I saw that expression I felt my pulse quicken.

“What kind of problem?” I said.

“I think you should come see it.”

In the lot, a couple of villagers had gathered around the car; they were grinning, too. The front bumper had been knocked completely off. It lay on the road, leaving the Jetta’s grille gaping, like a child who’s lost three teeth and can’t stop smiling. Why did everybody look so goddamn happy?

“I forgot about the front end,” Wei Ziqi said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not used to driving something with a front end,” he explained. “During my course, we only drove Liberation trucks. They’re flat in front.”

I had parked parallel to the fake Great Wall that bordered the village lot. Wei Ziqi had backed up and turned the wheel sharply, not realizing that the front end would swing in the opposite direction, toward the barrier. Last year, when the villagers built the tiny Great Wall, I thought it looked ridiculous, but now I realized that from a defensive point of view it served exactly one purpose. The crenellations were at the perfect height to tear the bumper off a Volkswagen Jetta. Kneeling in the lot, I inspected the metal—it was hopelessly bent.

“What do you think the rental company is going to say?” Wei Ziqi asked me.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I’ve never done something like this before.”

I was still renting from Mr. Wang at Capital Motors. In the past I had never reached the bottom of his patience, although I certainly plumbed the depths. I had broken virtually every company rule: I took Jettas onto dirt roads; I drove Jeeps onto dried-up creekbeds; I did unspeakable things to Santanas. I returned cars with dented doors and damaged tires, and I blew out a starter in Inner Mongolia. After signing contracts
agreeing to keep a vehicle within the Beijing city limits, I had driven all the way to the Tibetan plateau. Every time I shattered another regulation, Mr. Wang smiled and told me, “
Mei wenti!
”—No problem! “You’re an old customer,” he always said happily, and his pride in our
guanxi
was so touching that it made me feel guilty. I couldn’t imagine a worse renter.