Country Driving [125]
There was no concept of discipline with regard to consumption. In the recent past the village had been so poor that people ate whenever they could, and a parent’s main responsibility was to feed a child as much as possible. Fifteen years ago, it would have been unimaginable that any mother would deliberately withhold something from her son, but all of that had changed so fast that people couldn’t adjust. I tried to explain to Cao Chunmei and Wei Ziqi that this is a common problem in America, where a careful parent has to limit television and snacks. And given the boy’s history of health problems, it was particularly important to monitor his diet. But the village mindset ran too deep: a child eating was always a good thing, and there was no point in having a new television if you didn’t use it.
During vacations the boy changed almost before my eyes. At school he couldn’t get snacks, and the cafeteria food wasn’t so fattening, but at home he watched cartoons and ate chips. Soon he had a belly; his cheeks grew round and his legs got flabby. By the time he was nine years old, he was overweight. Sometimes I forced him out to the empty lot to play soccer, but he got winded after five minutes. In the past, he’d always impressed me as incredibly tough—once, as a seven-year-old, he tagged along on a five-hour hike to the Great Wall without a word of complaint. But now if I tried to take him on a walk, he gasped for air and stopped for long rests. The child I remembered as wiry and quick had suddenly grown soft and domesticated—he was moving in the opposite direction of the feral pigs. “He doesn’t look like a peasant anymore,” his mother once told me. She said it proudly: from her perspective it was good that Wei Jia had started to resemble a city kid.
Wei Ziqi was the only family member who didn’t gain weight. He still did a great deal of physical labor, especially during the spring and fall, but he drank too much and his smoking was incessant. Every now and then he tried to quit cigarettes, turning to the kind of quack medicines that are popular in China. One year in Beijing he bought something with the English title: “EXXCig: The Cocktail Treatment.” It was expensive—over thirty-five dollars—and the package featured an American stop sign and photographs of happy foreigners who had supposedly used the product. The list of ingredients included Vitamin C, CQ10 auxiliary enzyme, and something called “bull sulpher acid.” The advertisement promised to “Keep Smoke Feeling,” which was exactly what happened: within two weeks Wei Ziqi was back on the packs of Red Plum Blossom.
Periodically he appeared in Beijing on some mysterious errand. There was never any advance warning for these trips; he didn’t call ahead to see if I’d be free. Instead, my telephone would ring and Wei Ziqi would announce that he was standing at an intersection a block away from my apartment. He seemed to envision the capital as another village, only bigger: he didn’t understand that people from other parts of the city rarely drop in on friends without a phone call ahead of time. In any case, he preferred not to talk about his city plans in advance. Even as he became successful, and learned the businessman’s game, he didn’t brag about future projects. In that sense he remained a peasant: he was careful with his words.
In December of 2005, he called one morning and said that he was waiting at the corner of Jiaodaokou intersection. I met him outside, where I recognized his city clothes: blue jeans and a brand-new black parka. His best leather shoes had been shined; his hair was neatly combed. He carried a fake leather bag, the kind that Chinese male entrepreneurs always tote around the city. The only difference between him and countless others was alertness. Whenever Wei Ziqi came