Country Driving [137]
“Is he like that often?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. The boy was still focused on his school bag. He didn’t look up and I changed the subject.
“Do you have your red scarf?”
“Yes,” he said. The scarf is the symbol of the Young Pioneers, worn by all schoolchildren.
“Then put it on,” I said.
He tied the knot around his neck. As usual Wei Jia’s scarf was ragged; it had a big rip in the side and greasy stains covered the front. Most Young Pioneers are well scrubbed but occasionally you see one with the look of a frontline soldier. Down in the valley we stopped for breakfast. Wei Jia had a racking cough but he ate his wonton soup eagerly, hunched over the bowl in the cold of the roadside restaurant.
FOR THE NEXT MONTH the new name hung over Wei Jia’s head. His father told him he had no choice, and they needed to make the change now; in another year and a half he would enter middle school. They would register him as Wei Xiaosong, and he might as well get accustomed to it now. Once he started using the name, it would feel more natural.
The boy never gave any reasons for his reluctance. He didn’t explain why he liked the old name, or what it was about the new one that bothered him; he didn’t ask for a third option. He didn’t get angry and he didn’t cry to his mother, as he sometimes had during past conflicts. In fact he hardly said anything at all. When the topic came up, his only response was, “Bu hao”—No good. He muttered the words to himself, and over time the refrain acquired an odd combination of impotence and power. His father couldn’t penetrate Bu hao; soon he became frustrated. It reminded me of Bartleby—“I would prefer not to.” But I also recognized both parents in that simple phrase. His mother washed her hands of things she couldn’t control: Bu hao. His father was determined to change his world at all costs: Bu hao. As for Wei Xiaosong, the computer promised good fortune and longevity, and wealth and honor, and self-restraint and generosity; but in the end it was all bu hao. The boy simply refused to accept the name. After a few weeks his father gave up and never mentioned the change again. He had always been Wei Jia, the last child in the upper village, the first child to grow up in a businessman’s home; and now he would be Wei Jia forever.
THAT WINTER THE IDIOT didn’t receive his Spring Festival holiday bonus from the government. He was given the usual sack of rice, along with the jug of cooking oil, but the twelve dollars were missing. The amount was too small for the family to bother with a complaint, and they knew exactly what it meant. The Party Secretary was sending a message: she still had power in the village, and she wasn’t happy about the election rumors.
By now the talk was everywhere, and even Cao Chunmei couldn’t hide her interest. “People are discussing it all the time,” she told me. “They don’t want the Party Secretary and the Vice Party Secretary to be in office anymore. Lots of people curse them—behind their backs, of course. In the past people were satisfied with the Party Secretary, but now they don’t feel that way anymore. Her ideas are different. As time goes by, her thinking is, ‘I’ve been in power for some time, so I deserve some benefits.’ It’s bureaucratism.”
I often heard villagers use that phrase—guanliao zhuyi, or “bureaucratism.” “It means she doesn’t listen to other people’s ideas,” Cao Chunmei said. It’s an old Cultural Revolution term: during the Maoist campaigns, rural people sometimes used the phrase to justify attacks on local cadres. In those days, revolutionary politics were all that mattered, but now the Sancha villagers used the same accusation in a new context—they were worried about capitalist profiteering. They complained about recent land deals, whose details remained mysterious but were now starting to show their effects. A new restaurant was being constructed between the two sections of the village, where it would become the largest building in town. And two new roads were being built in the high valleys. Nobody had proven any corruption, but for