Country Driving [128]
IN SANCHA, 2006 BECAME the Year of Garbage. For half a decade, everything had led to this point: there were new roads and new cars and new construction; the villagers acquired cable television and cell phone coverage. But the clearest evidence of their prosperity was trash. When I first moved to Sancha, people simply threw their garbage down the hillside into the creek that ran dry most of the year. In those days there wasn’t much waste; villagers reused almost everything and they rarely ate packaged food. But all of that changed with business and tourism. Instant-noodle containers and cookie wrappers accumulated, and soon the creekbed was choked with Styrofoam and plastic. One year Mimi sponsored a cleanup, but it wasn’t until 2006 that the county government finally instituted regular garbage truck service. That same year, peddlers started appearing in flatbed trucks to buy anything recyclable: bottles, cans, newspapers. In the past it would have been unimaginable—driving all the way to Sancha to buy garbage!
Inevitably some city folk had started to settle there. In Beijing it was becoming popular for middle-and upper-class people to find second homes in the countryside, and sometimes a village turned over completely to outsiders. Down in the valley, not far from Sancha, one section of a place called Tiekuangyu was purchased wholesale by city folk. Within months local life was finished: the natives moved out, the houses were demolished, and new mansions of concrete and glass rose above the orchards. In Sancha, villagers hustled to sell long-term contracts on any empty residence. They weren’t allowed to build new structures without government approval, and soon all the abandoned houses in town had been snapped up. Even the Shitkicker arranged a deal with a man from Beijing. After they made an agreement, the Shitkicker began an ambitious remodeling of his home. When the work was half finished, and new walls of brick had risen fifteen feet high, he abruptly raised the price. There was no legal foundation for any of this, because individual villagers can’t sell their property; any long-term rental agreement depends entirely on goodwill and faith. Contracts are common but they’re worthless, and there was nothing the Beijing resident could do but pay the extra cash or walk away from the deal. To everybody’s surprise, he walked. And that was when the Shitkicker realized that he was completely out of money.
After that, the building’s frame stood untouched. If he could have finished construction, perhaps he would have found another renter, but like anybody in the countryside he had few ways to raise capital. In the old days he might have pawned land—this is what his own father did in 1946, when he was broke and turned his fields over to Wei Ziqi’s grandfather. But the Shitkicker didn’t have this option, and he couldn’t apply directly for a bank loan. He needed approval from the village, which denied his application. The Party Secretary was responsible for this rejection: for years there had been bad blood between her and the Shitkicker. They were both Party members and distant relatives by marriage, but they didn’t get along, and in the end the man had no recourse for a loan. Along with his wife, he was forced to live in the dirt-floored shack that he had once tried to rent to Mimi and me. The place was so small that most belongings had to be piled up outside, covered in plastic. They were the only villagers whose living conditions had deteriorated since the car boom began. At twilight I often saw him wandering around the abandoned construction site, muttering to himself. Nowadays he greeted me politely; his hatred wasn’t directed at me anymore. He had more important enemies to think about.
There were rumors about the Party Secretary. In the past, most villagers had spoken of her respectfully; the