Country Driving [104]
Across China, the crackdown was often brutal. According to human rights groups, hundreds of believers died in custody, usually when local police used excessive force in order to gain a conversion or a promise to stop practicing. Thousands more were sent to labor camps. But practitioners originally numbered in the tens of millions, and most of these people simply decided not to participate anymore. In Sancha I knew of only one villager who was reluctant to give up his new faith, and he changed his mind after spending a week in a Huairou jail. Even when it comes to religion, the Chinese can be pragmatic—they might possess the desire to believe, but few will cling to a doomed faith once the government applies serious pressure. And the religious impulse often has more to do with a search for community than anything else. In China, rapid change has left many people with a hollow feeling: they no longer believe in the Communist ideology of old, and the forces of migration and urbanization have radically transformed society. The new pursuit of wealth can seem empty and exhausting; many people wish for a more meaningful connection with others. Some of them turn to religion not necessarily because they desire a personal relationship with God, but because they want to share something with neighbors and friends. This is one reason why the crackdown on Falun Gong was largely successful—after the community was broken, most people saw no reason to believe in that particular faith. A half century of Communism had taught them patience; they knew that something else would eventually appear.
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