Country Driving [121]
“Ho Wei doesn’t like walnuts,” he said.
“Why doesn’t he like walnuts?”
“Foreigners eat different things.”
Forty feet high in the tree, Wei Ziqi was invisible, but his voice recited a familiar litany: “He doesn’t like eggs, either. He won’t eat meat on the bone. He doesn’t like bean paste…”
The feel of the walnuts—the cool rough texture and the fresh scent on my hands—brought back childhood memories. The trees had been common in my Missouri hometown, where most people saw the crop as a nuisance; walnuts clogged up lawnmowers and rolled into streets. Kids liked to throw them at cars. One year my mother heard about a business in the nearby town of Booneville that bought walnuts in bulk. For a week, my sisters and I composed a small but determined peasant work crew, ringing doorbells to ask for permission to fill garbage bags with the harvest. We packed them into the family’s AMC Hornet and drove to Booneville, where a man emptied the walnuts into an automatic desheller and grinder. The black pulp that came out was so condensed that it fit into a single supermarket-sized bag. The man placed it on a scale, consulted a fee book, and wrote a check for one dollar and seventy cents. For months the Hornet stank of walnuts, and it wasn’t for many years that I understood why my mother couldn’t help laughing when the man handed us the check.
In the Sancha orchards I told the story to Wei Ziqi. He was impressed that Americans leave walnuts to rot in the street—he picked up a big one and remarked that it was worth one jiao, or one and a quarter American cents. That year the walnut market was good, and it was getting better—every couple of days the dealers raised their prices.
After night fell, all of us ate dinner in the Weis’ home. Cao Chunmei had spent the afternoon cooking: potatoes and tofu and pork, fresh-picked beans and fried corn cakes. She barbecued trout from the family pond. But she didn’t sit down to eat with the men: Sancha meals are often segregated. Even the two women who had labored alongside me were relegated to a smaller table in the back room.
The men gathered around the main table, where they argued briefly about the place of honor. Finally Cao Chunmei’s father agreed to accept—at fifty-eight he was the oldest harvester. He was seated at the table’s head, directly below the Denver skyline. The digital readout on the portrait said that it was twenty degrees Celsius.
One harvester was named Wei Congfa. He is Wei Ziqi’s cousin, and he’s slightly deaf. The man had never seen the Denver photograph before, and now he looked at it quizzically. “Is that the temperature in that city?” he asked.
“It’s the temperature in this room,” somebody explained.
But Wei Congfa couldn’t hear. “It’s the temperature where?”
“IT’S—THE—TEMPERATURE—IN—THIS—ROOM!”
“Here in the house?”
“IN—THIS—ROOM!”
“So what’s that city for?”
I sat next to Yan Kejun, a man in his thirties who lived in the lower part of Sancha. He was one of the brightest people in the village, the kind of man who liked watching the news, and he always had questions about America. For the past month he had been focused on the news of Hurricane Katrina. A couple of days earlier, at another harvest dinner, we had a conversation about the events in New Orleans.
“You know,” he said, “when something like that happens in America, it actually matters. The population is so low that you have to worry about losing a few hundred or even a thousand people.”
He took a sip of baijiu. “This might sound ugly,” he said, “but in China we could lose one hundred million people and it wouldn’t matter. It would probably be good for the country.”
In other parts of the world, people had been shocked that such