Country Driving [122]
Beneath the Denver skyline the men exchanged shots of baijiu. Cao Chunmei’s father was the first to turn red; the toasts came faster and by the end of the evening everybody was drunk. At 7:30 the next morning they returned to the orchards. I drove back to Beijing, where my legs were sore for days from all the squatting and chasing after walnuts. For most of a week my hands stayed black. All told, on that hot day in September, in eleven hours of labor, ten of us had harvested three thousand six hundred pounds of walnuts. They sold for four hundred American dollars.
DURING THE YEARS THAT I lived in Sancha, feral pigs became common. Locals called them “wild boars,” but most likely they were the descendants of domesticated animals that had escaped. If a pig begins to live by foraging, it changes shape: the shoulders broaden, long hair covers the body, and tusks poke from the corners of the mouth. In the past, such animals would have been hunted down quickly, because peasants spent more time in the highlands. But nowadays so many people had migrated, and those who stayed behind had new routines. Farmers used their spare time to work construction or do business, and increasingly their attention turned to the cities; the land around them grew more wild. In Sancha the highest crop terraces had been abandoned, and this was where the feral pigs proliferated. Sometimes they ventured down to the valley and ravaged a farmer’s corn.
During winter a few residents set snares, and in February Wei Ziqi captured a hundred-pounder. He had set the trap near the Haizikou pass, and it was simple—a loop of wire attached to a tree. But the animal stepped right into it, and the wire held firm. She was still struggling fiercely when Wei Ziqi and a neighbor checked the trap. They found a nearby tree, cut off two branches, and pummeled the animal to death. A day later, Wei Jia and I hiked up to look at the site. The undergrowth had been thrashed flat by the struggling beast, whose gore marked the trail. Drops of blood ran all the way to the village, a full two miles, tracing the route where the men had carried their prize.
For weeks the family ate boar every evening. The meat was leaner than pork, dark and rich and pungent; Cao Chunmei stir-fried strips with onions. But she made sure she had nothing to do with the killing or the butchering. It was bad karma, she told me—she left that part of the routine to Wei Ziqi. If he was plagued by any karmic worries, he overcame them heroically. While butchering the feral pig, he discovered that the animal was pregnant, so he cut out the fetus and put it in a jar of baijiu. Surrounded by the clear fluid it looked like a child’s plastic toy—a tiny white pig. The first time I saw the thing, I was so shocked I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Finally I said, “Why did you do that?”
“It’s for medicine,” Wei Ziqi said. The Chinese often make medicinal baijiu, filling a bottle of alcohol with herbs and even reptiles; snakes are particularly popular. But I had never seen a baijiu mammal, and Wei Ziqi couldn’t explain the specific health benefits of this drink. “It’s good for the qi,” he said vaguely—qi means “energy.” But I noticed that he never touched the stuff, and neither did anybody else. It was the first time I saw an animal product that was too gruesome for the villagers.
The jar was displayed in the main room of the family home. This space had been expanded during the last remodeling, and since then the Weis had accumulated more possessions. The decor represented a study in contradictions: the pig fetus floated a few feet away from the Buddhist shrine; the Denver skyline faced a People’s Liberation Army tank. There were two bottles of Johnnie Walker, along with the two Ming-dynasty signal cannons