Country Driving [120]
Bigger trees grow as tall as fifty feet, and harvesters have to climb onto the limbs. For Wei Ziqi, it’s easy: he wedges his fingers into the crevices of the bark and pulls himself up. Amid the branches he can move without relying on his hands. He wears soft-soled military sneakers, the kind he avoids for Huairou trips, and he curls the toes around limbs for balance. He edges out onto thicker branches, step by step, carrying his pole in both hands. If there’s a convenient limb at his back, he leans against it, but often he relies on nothing but balance. There’s no ladder, no ropes, no harness—no safety equipment of any kind. But high in the trees he moves easily, and his build is perfect for such work: short-limbed and efficiently muscled, with the right combination of strength and balance.
On the day of the harvest, I watched Wei Ziqi climb into the branches of the first big tree, and then he lowered himself to the ground. I asked if he had ever fallen, and he shook his head.
“Does anybody ever fall?”
“Almost never,” he said. “A couple of years ago one of the neighbors fell and broke his shoulder.”
We continued to the next tree, and once more he reached the top in a flash. I realized that in the past I had so often seen him out of his element—in the Beijing hospitals, in the shops of Huairou, in the driver’s seat of an unfamiliar car. Over the years I had witnessed his transition from farming to business, country to city; but I had rarely seen him work in the orchards. Here in the trees he was completely at home.
The Sancha harvest is overwhelmingly male. The only woman who climbs the trees is the Party Secretary; she’s strong enough to handle even the most demanding labor. Other wives do lighter work, like collecting walnuts on the ground and shelling the harvested crop. In the evenings, they cook meals for the work crews. This agricultural divide has shaped local culture, which is extremely male-dominated, even by rural Chinese standards. Apart from the anomaly of the Party Secretary, men wield the most power, and some local traditions, like grave-sweeping, are restricted to males only. In the southwest, where I once lived, the gender divide never seems quite so broad. But in those regions the main crop is rice, which requires a great deal of work but little strength, and women spend as much time in the paddies as men do.
Our harvest-day group of ten included only two women. They stayed on the ground, along with me and Cao Chunmei’s father, who had come from out of town to help. Each of us had some excuse to avoid climbing—gender or age or foreignness—and it was our job to collect the walnuts that fell from the high branches. They rolled down rocky slopes, and into bushes, and through thick weeds. Soon my arms began to itch, and my back ached; my hands turned black from the walnuts. Everybody else chatted idly, as if this were a social occasion. They talked about food and money, and they discussed the price of walnuts. Villagers usually sold to buyers who traveled around the countryside during autumn, and in past years the prices remained stable throughout a season. But nowadays rates changed rapidly—sometimes as much as 10 percent in the span of a single day. It was all because of the new roads: buyers could more easily reach the villages, and more people did this kind of business; their competition led to price wars. Villagers had to decide the best time to sell, and this was a common line of conversation while we chased walnuts through the undergrowth.
When