Country Driving [205]
She shook her head curtly. The baby began to cry once more, but his mother refused to look at him, and Mr. Tao had no choice but to return across the alley. Over the next forty-five minutes the baby became increasingly frantic. Mr. Tao’s wife held him for a while, and then she passed him to me, and I passed him back to Mr. Tao. All of us tried to talk softly and calm him down, but it was hopeless; he screamed and his little head shone red beneath the fair hair. Whenever somebody approached the mother, she ignored them. She had failed to control her husband, and the bonfire had been an embarrassment, and now she directed the last of her rage at the only person she could overpower.
We stood with the baby until after nine o’clock, when the Tao sisters showed up. They had just finished an overtime shift at the factory, and Yuran, the oldest girl, immediately took the screaming baby. Yuran was only seventeen, and she had just worked an eleven-hour day, sorting out pink and purple bra rings, but now she took this new challenge in stride. She cooed at the baby and bounced him gently; at last his exhausted eyes began to close. The first time Yuran took him across the alley, his mother refused. Yuran waited patiently, baby on her hip, and then she tried again. She never said a word—she simply held the baby toward the woman. And finally, nearly two hours after the scene had started, the woman accepted her child. Together they disappeared into the back of the shop.
The next time I saw Yuran, I asked if there had been a problem when the shopkeeper’s husband finally returned. She shook her head: he’d come back late that night and nothing happened. Yuran had a young, girlish face, but often her words seemed old. “They do this kind of thing all the time,” she said. “It’s just the way they are. Some people like to fight.”
SOUTH OF LISHUI THE government had already started building another highway. Eventually it would connect with the Jinliwen Expressway, and the new road would run southwest past the development zone and into the countryside. The project was still in its early stages; work crews were blasting tunnels through the cliffs. Apart from the demolition sites, the region was mostly quiet, and sometimes, when I wanted a break from the development zone, I took a drive in that direction. A few years from now the factory towns would begin to rise, but for the time being this area remained peaceful farmland.
One of the expressway’s future exits would be near a place called Dagangtou, which is less than twenty miles from Lishui. In the past, Dagangtou was a small fishing village on the Da River, where an old stone weir had been built many centuries ago. The village has a cobbled main street lined with traditional houses of wood and tile, and the city government identified it as the perfect location for a “green industry.” Because of Lishui’s early reliance on pleather factories, the cadres were looking for ways to encourage cleaner business, and in Dagangtou they decided to start an artists’ commune. Their goals were twofold: painters would produce marketable work, and after the expressway was finished the place would also attract tourists. The only thing lacking was a vibrant arts community, which the government intended to attract in the exact same way that they attracted industry. In the development zone, factories received tax breaks for their first three years of residence; in the artists’ commune, any painter who moved to town received discounted rent for the first three years. If it worked for pleather,