Country Driving [124]
She often adopted a pose of distance, even renunciation. On the surface it seemed Buddhist—she was removed from the world—but beneath the calmness ran an undercurrent of frustration. And there was more than a touch of passive-aggression. When Wei Jia misbehaved, she emphasized her powerlessness. “He won’t listen to me,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do about him.” If I asked about village politics, she waved her hand. “I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “It’s not my affair.” Once, when Wei Jia and I were reviewing some of his school materials, I asked Cao Chunmei who is the president of China. “Jiang Zemin?” she said, naming the politician who had been out of power for years. “I don’t know that stuff.” It might have been true—rural people have a remarkable ability to ignore national affairs—but the Sancha propaganda speakers had been barking about Hu Jintao three times a day since 2002. I suspected she was emphasizing her approach to life, her effort to distance herself from things she couldn’t control. For her, religion was partly a retreat. Even as the village became obsessed with materialism and modern progress, there were people like Cao Chunmei who moved in the other direction, toward older traditional beliefs.
But such reactions are never simple, and there was another part of Cao Chunmei that longed to be more active. No matter how much she disliked her husband’s new routines, she envied the freedom and the entrepreneurial status. Once she came up with an idea for her own business. She was an excellent cook, and she made corn noodles that she thought would appeal to middle-class people in the city. She described them as “organic”—that word was gaining currency in Beijing, where Western ideas about food had already changed the high-end restaurant scene. Cao Chunmei prepared some samples and traveled to the city, where she visited restaurants and tried to sell them on the notion of organic corn noodles. But despite all her authenticity, she lacked the male Chinese business tools: the packs of Chunghwa, the shots of baijiu. In the end, nobody ordered a regular supply, and she abandoned the idea.
Periodically she tried to change her appearance. She dyed her hair and bought new clothes, and she dieted. One month she lost twenty pounds with astonishing speed, because of a dietary supplement that she’d picked up in Huairou. When Chinese women want to lose weight, they often stop eating and rely on such drugs, which are essentially amphetamines. Cao Chunmei took the medicine during a particularly busy month, and whenever I talked to her in the kitchen she seemed dazed. Later she regained the weight almost as fast as she had lost it.
The family’s living standard had risen rapidly, but one effect was perverse: as they made more money, each member became noticeably less healthy. By far the biggest change occurred in Wei Jia, especially after 2005, when the village experienced the Year of Cable Television. In the past, villagers had access to only seven television channels; now they received more than fifty for a price of less than twenty dollars a year. The Weis bought a new twenty-nine-inch set, which was always on; during weekends, whenever the boy finished his homework, he sat on the kang and watched cartoons. At vacation time he did little else. City guests had a tendency to bring packaged snacks on their trips to the countryside, and they often gave the leftovers to the family before driving back to Beijing. Soon junk food composed a good