Country Driving [105]
“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