Country Driving [116]
With the remodeling crew, all at once we landed on the Korean peninsula.
“North Korea is still a socialist country,” somebody said.
“They’ve been divided for fifty years.”
“North Korea is even poorer than China!”
Wei Ziqi turned to me: “Have you ever been to North Korea?”
In 1999, I had spent some time on the northern border with China, and I told a story from my trip. That year, North Korea was suffering a famine, and refugees had been fleeing across the river. In the Chinese border town of Tumen I was walking along the banks when I came upon what appeared to be a child. I approached him from the back, assuming that he was ten or eleven years old; but then I glanced at his face. It was ageless: he could have been thirty; he could have been fifty. It was as if an old man’s head had been attached to a child’s body, and I stopped in my tracks, realizing that the person was a victim of the famine.
The moment I finished the tale everybody at the table burst out laughing.
“I told you North Korea is even poorer than China!”
“He was as small as a child!”
“He had an old man’s head!”
“Imagine somebody like that trying to work! He wouldn’t last one day!”
There was never any way of knowing what would happen when you tossed something into a village conversation. The men drank baijiu, and after a while Wei Ziqi got out the Johnnie Walker. I had given it to him years ago, after picking it up at an airport shop. There were two small bottles in a gift box with a clear plastic cover. Usually Wei Ziqi kept it in a place of honor at the front cabinet, but now he showed it to the men at the table.
“How much was this?” he asked me.
“I can’t remember exactly,” I said.
“It was more than two hundred yuan, right?”
“Probably more than three hundred.”
The tall man with the chopsticks was impressed. “So expensive! You could buy ten bottles of Erguotou.”
The men passed around the Johnnie Walker. After everybody had taken a good long look, Wei Ziqi returned the box to the cabinet. Originally I had felt a pang of guilt about the gift, because I knew he had a tendency to drink too much. But over time I realized that he would never open something so valuable; it was far more enjoyable to show it off.
Periodically the Communist Party distributed presents to every member in the village. Often these were decorative items, usually connected to some anniversary or series of meetings. As a new member, Wei Ziqi displayed the Party gifts prominently, because they were a sign of status in the village. For August 1, the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army, the Party gave all Sancha members a framed portrait of a tank gilded in gold. At New Year’s they handed out a calendar that celebrated major infrastructure projects. In Chinese government offices, it’s common to see such pictures, which often feature bridges or highways or cloverleaf exchanges. Usually the scenes are airbrushed to a brightness that’s almost lurid—development porn.
On Wei Ziqi’s infrastructure calendar, photos were accompanied by numbered inscriptions that described the responsibilities of a Party member. The page for November said:
The Duty of a Party Member (Number Seven): Integrate closely with the masses, propagate the Party’s positions to the masses, consult with the masses, promptly communicate the masses’ ideas and requests to the Party, defend the benefits of the masses.
The most impressive gift that the Communist Party ever gave Sancha members was the “Computerized Digital Information Calendar.” Its plastic frame included digital readouts of the temperature, time, and date, both in the Western and traditional lunar calendars, and all of this surrounded a three-foot-wide framed photograph of an unnamed foreign city. The city in the picture was hard to identify: it consisted