Country Driving [45]
“No,” I said, confused. “Who is Han Heliu?”
“He’s from our village!” the old man shouted. “He’s gone to Beijing to work! I was wondering if you had met him!”
I told him I’d keep an eye out. The old man wore a weathered cap and rough blue cotton clothes. He was mostly toothless; a wispy beard hung from his chin. His traveling companion was the most strikingly pretty woman I ever saw in the north. She was twenty years old, with hair that had been dyed a light red; her lipstick was bright pink and a tiny beauty mark had been tattooed between her eyebrows. She wore a red silk jacket, tailored tight at the waist, with gold flowers embroidered across the front. She was small-boned, with a birdlike name—Wang Yan, which means “Swallow.” In this hard landscape she seemed completely out of place, like an exotic that had been blown off course and then alighted in the City Special. She perched stiffly in front, her back not touching the seat.
“He’s my grandfather,” she said. “We live together in Jingbian.”
In the backseat, the old man leaned forward. “Are you sure you’re not going to charge us?” he shouted. “It’s usually five yuan to Jingbian! We can’t pay more than that!”
We drove south past rows of willows that had been planted in the sandy soil. Wang Yan was shy—she stared straight ahead, eyes on the road, and she answered my questions in a soft voice. She had just visited her parents at their farm; a few years ago she had migrated to Jingbian, which was the nearest township, and recently her grandfather had joined her in the small city. “All of the young people leave our village,” she said. “Nobody stays there anymore. I’m not planning to go back.” In Jingbian she worked in a beauty parlor. Among uneducated female migrants, jobs tend to be sharply divided according to looks. A pretty woman is more likely to find work in a barbershop or as a restaurant hostess; the plainer girls end up as waitresses or factory workers. Jobs are easier for women who are good looking, but there are also pitfalls. Most beauty parlors offer the basics—hair styling, makeup, hair-washing, and simple massages—but there are also shops that double as fronts for prostitution. It occurred to me that Wang Yan’s family had probably sent the grandfather to live with her to make sure she didn’t get into trouble.
After twenty minutes the old man leaned forward once more. “Are you Chinese?” he shouted.
“No. I’m American.”
“I thought you weren’t Chinese!” he said, with a big smile. “You’re the first foreigner I’ve ever met!”
In Jingbian I dropped them off at the beauty parlor. It was called the Jian Hua—“Build China”—and we carried the bags of salt inside. Four young men and women were working, and they greeted Wang Yan warmly. The men had the look of small-town hipsters; their hair was long and they wore leather jackets covered with zippers. It was too early for customers and they put a Madonna disk in the video player. A full-length mirror ran along one wall, and the employees pushed aside the barber chairs and practiced dance moves. They were focused on their reflections, repeating the steps over and over, trying to get it right. At the far end of the shop, Wang Yan leaned close to another mirror, fixing her road-worn hair and makeup. The grandfather stood alone near the door. Upon entering the shop he had fallen silent, and now he watched the young people intently, his face expressionless. In a room full of mirrors he was the only person not staring at himself.
THE FARTHER I DROVE across northern China, the more I wondered what would become of all of the villages. The cities were easy to predict, at least in terms of growth—their trajectory was already laid out in tracks of cement and steel. In the countryside, though, it was impossible to imagine who would be living here in a generation. Often I stopped in a village and saw only the very old, the disabled, and the very young, because migrants left their children behind to be raised by grandparents. Workers still didn’t feel settled in the cities, although inevitably that was