Country Driving [102]
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Reading a book,” Wei Jia said.
“Where’s your homework?”
“In my bag.”
“Get it out, now.”
On the whole, six-year-old boys are not naturally cut out for the demands of boarding school, and Wei Jia was especially disorganized. Often I picked him up on Friday afternoons, on my way to the village, and I always reminded him to make sure he brought the books he needed. But every Friday evening, back in Sancha, it was a complete mystery what would emerge from within the bowels of the Mickey Mouse backpack. Wei Jia opened the bag like a magician: anything could come out, and the trick was that even the boy had no idea. Tonight he conjured up four textbooks, a few pencils, and a dozen crumpled papers. His father snatched one of the pages.
“What’s this? This is your homework! How are you going to do your homework if it’s torn up like this?”
Wei Jia stared down at the kang.
“Where’s your math book?”
Hopefully, the boy looked inside the Mickey Mouse backpack, but it was empty—no more magic tonight.
“Where’s your math book?”
“I forgot it,” Wei Jia said softly.
“How are you going to do your homework if you don’t have the book?” Wei Ziqi’s voice became sharp. “You know what Teacher Yang said today? She said that you always forget your homework. And you don’t pay attention in class! What’s going to happen to you if you don’t study well?”
The boy glanced over at the picture book, but his father snatched it away. “And she said that you weren’t paying attention during the principal’s speech! Every other child stood there, but you had to kneel down. What’s wrong with you? Look at me!”
But the child refused to make eye contact. His mouth held stubborn until Wei Ziqi reached over and cuffed him sharply on the side of the head; all at once the boy collapsed into tears. “You need to listen to Teacher Yang!” Wei Ziqi shouted. “She says you walk around the classroom whenever you feel like it. You can’t do that! And she says you don’t eat all of your dinner in the dormitory.”
Cao Chunmei spoke up: “You know what will happen if you don’t eat well? You’ll get sick again. Do you want to go back to the hospital?”
Suddenly Wei Ziqi reached over and pulled the boy’s trousers up to his knees, revealing his bare legs. “What if you get those bruises again?” Wei Ziqi shouted. “What are we going to do if that happens?”
Cao Chunmei rushed over to examine the boy. “You need to eat well or you’ll get sick! You don’t want to get sick again!”
The parents’ voices grew shrill, almost panicked. But there was a sudden tenderness to their touch; together they inspected the child’s legs, looking for bruises. It was as if all the unspoken fears from last year’s crisis had returned, and they gathered close on the kang. The boy wept—he threw back his head and wailed.
THE FEARS OF CAO Chunmei ran deeper than those of her husband. Wei Ziqi’s approach to life was essentially pragmatic, and tangible threats tended to occupy his attention: the burden of loans, the politics of the village, his son’s health and education. He felt the pressures of his new business, but he had faith in the outcome of hard work. And he watched his customers carefully—he picked up cues from the city folk. He dressed neatly whenever he went to Huairou, but he still wore peasant clothes at home. He recognized that this is what customers expect: nobody goes to the countryside because they want to see a peasant aping an urbanite. Wei Ziqi became skilled at playing both roles, shifting between the demands of Sancha and Huairou.
For Cao Chunmei, though, contact with the outside world was far more jarring. She was essentially stuck in Sancha, working in the kitchen. It wasn’t her responsibility to gather funding or supplies, and thus she never had the opportunity to enter Huairou or Beijing on her own terms. Instead, city people came to her, and these interactions sometimes left her feeling ashamed. Once a customer from Beijing wandered into the kitchen, curious to see how countryside people cook, and the city woman blurted out,