Country Driving [110]
“Actually he didn’t smoke Red Plum Blossom.”
“No, he didn’t. Too expensive. In the old days he smoked Black Chrysanthemum.”
“You can’t even buy those anymore. They were popular in the 1980s.”
That was the first detail anybody had attached to the dead and the group stood in silence for a moment. Finally Wei Ziqi spoke up. “Hao,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Before leaving the field, one of the men turned around. “That cigarette will be fine, right?”
“It’s not a problem.”
A tiny wisp of smoke drifted upward into the sky. Together we followed the switchbacked trails, descending to the valley, where the apricot buds were scattered across the orchards. Entering the village we heard the propaganda speakers announce the annual ban on grave-burning. It was 6:30 in the morning; the men dropped off their baskets and shovels and returned to work in the fields. For the next two months the mountains were alive with spring labor.
THAT YEAR I HAD promised Wei Jia that after his exams were finished, and summer vacation began, I would take him on a trip to the city. When the day arrived, and I picked him up in the village, he wore shorts and a T-shirt. He carried nothing—no duffel bag, no backpack. He didn’t have a change of clothes, or a toothbrush, or one jiao of Chinese currency. His mother was preparing a meal for some guests, and I asked her if the boy needed anything for his trip.
“No,” she said. “He’s only going for three days.”
American parents fill minivans whenever a child travels five blocks, but things are different in the Chinese countryside. I asked Cao Chunmei if there was anything the boy shouldn’t eat.
“Don’t give him cold drinks,” she said. “And don’t let him eat ice cream. He’ll ask you for it, but don’t give it to him.”
According to traditional Chinese medical beliefs, it’s bad to put anything cold in your stomach.
“Is it OK if he watches me eat ice cream?” I asked.
“That’s fine,” Cao Chunmei said, smiling.
When we arrived in Beijing, I gave Wei Jia a tour of my apartment. He was impressed by all the books.
“Did you write all of these?” the boy said.
There were more than a hundred on the shelves. “No,” I said. “Those books were written by other people.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“What about those?” He pointed to a stack of magazines on a table. “Did you write those?”
“No.”
Wei Jia looked vaguely disappointed, as he did whenever we had some version of this conversation. In the village he often stopped by my house, and if I was reading a book he always asked the same thing: “Did you write that?” I had explained to him repeatedly that I had written only one book, and now I was working on the second, but he never quite understood. How could it take so long? And what’s the point of being a writer if you don’t sit around reading your own books?
The boy was the easiest guest I ever hosted. He never complained, and one advantage of a child without possessions is that he has nothing to lose. Every detail of the city impressed him, even the miserable parts—a packed subway train was an adventure, and he enjoyed getting stuck in traffic, because it allowed him to stare at cars. After I took him for a boat ride on Houhai, a small lake near my apartment, he asked if the ocean is any bigger. He absolutely loved taxis. From his perspective, it was a miracle of city life: if you wave your hand, pretty much any red car will stop immediately. By the second day I learned to watch him, because he liked to call cabs on his own. We’d be on foot, a block from my apartment, and his little arm would pop up; I’d have to tell the poor driver that in fact we weren’t going anywhere. People had no idea what we were doing together. Sometimes a taxi driver asked delicately what our relation was, and Wei Jia always answered matter-of-factly that I was his uncle. We went