Country Driving [64]
Beijing wasn’t too far away, only a couple of hours by car, but back then it was still unusual for city residents to visit the countryside. The auto boom was already growing—in 2001, Beijing issued over three hundred thousand new driver’s licenses, a 50 percent increase over the previous year. But people rarely took long road trips for pleasure. Occasionally an adventurous driver found his way to Sancha, and sometimes a group of serious hikers came to climb the unrestored Great Wall. But on most weekends Mimi and I were the only outsiders in the village. Locals didn’t know what to make of us—they knew I was a writer who had lived in China for years, and Mimi was a Chinese-American photographer; but there was no precedent for young city people spending time in rural conditions. Neighbors often wandered over to get a better look, and like anybody in the Chinese countryside, they didn’t bother to knock before entering our house. They inspected our threshing platform, and peered into the windows, and fiddled with our belongings. Sometimes I walked to the dirt lot and found two or three villagers huddled around the rental car that I had driven out from the city. They stared with a sort of benign intensity: faces calm, hands clasped behind the back, heads bowed as if in prayer—homage to a Jetta.
Once I went to the village alone, and while writing at my desk I had the sensation that I was being watched. I turned around and almost yelped—a man was standing in the middle of the room. He was one of the neighbors, a white-haired man in his sixties; his cloth shoes hadn’t made a sound when he entered. He was smiling softly, with the blank-eyed expression of somebody watching television—he hardly blinked when I turned around. That was the saving grace of Chinese staring: people never glanced away in embarrassment when you caught them looking, and it was hard not to respect such open curiosity. For a few seconds neither of us spoke.
“Hello,” I finally said.
“Hello,” he said.
“Have you eaten yet?” I said. That was a traditional Chinese greeting, often left unanswered.
“Have you eaten yet?” he said. “What time is it in your country?”
“It’s night there,” I said. “There’s a difference of twelve hours.”
He beamed—rural people are often fascinated by the time zones. There was another long pause and then he gestured to the far room. “You have a kang,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“You have a desk,” he said. I stood up and gave him a tour; he made approving comments along the way. (“You have a kitchen. You have a stove. You have a table.”) In fact Mimi and I had hardly touched the place since we moved in. The previous residents had been a young couple who had recently left the village for city jobs, and their decorations still marked the walls. They must have been fans of the costume drama Princess Pearl, because they had hung a poster of the TV show’s starlets in their silk and brocade Qing dynasty gowns. Another wall featured a photograph of twin baby boys, a common decoration in the countryside, especially for newlyweds. Twins represent a kind of lottery prize—for most people in China, that’s the only legal way to have two sons. The previous residents of my house hadn’t been quite that lucky, but they had given birth to a healthy boy, which was as much as anybody could ask for. Even the poster didn’t show real twins. When I looked closely, I realized that it was the same baby twice: the photograph had simply been duplicated and reversed. When I woke up every morning, that’s what I saw: an anonymous Photoshopped baby, abandoned by yet another young couple who had left the countryside.
I didn’t take down the poster, because Mimi and I had decided not to change the place, at least in the beginning. The floor was naked cement; the ceiling had holes. In the outhouse, the squat toilet consisted of a slit between two slabs of slate. At night I was often wakened