Country Driving [68]
1. Farmyard Leisure Garden
2. Mountain Peace and Happiness Village
3. Sancha Farmyard Paradise
4. Sweet Waterhead Farmyard Villa
5. Great Nature Mountain Farmyard Villa
6. Sancha Plant Garden
7. Sancha Great Nature Farmyard Leisure Paradise
8. Nature Ecological Leisure Farmyard Villa
9. Natural Ecological Plant Paradise
10. Natural Ecological Village
The list was followed by a rough outline of a business plan:
If each family invests a little money we can receive the tourists in our yards, and if the big developers invest in our project then we can turn our village into a paradise where tourists can go sightseeing, appreciate the wild scenery, climb the Great Wall, enjoy peasant family meals, and pick wild mountain fruits and vegetables.
But it seemed unlikely that Wei Ziqi would find business partners in Sancha. Nobody else was as motivated; most people with aspirations had left the village long ago. There was something lonely about his ambition, and I could tell that he was thrilled when Mimi and I began visiting from the big city. He liked the fact that we were involved in writing and photography, and his questions about the outside world had a depth that was rare in the village. Even a common subject, like the time zones in America, became more interesting when Wei Ziqi brought it up. Once he kept asking me detailed questions about the time in America, and finally I told him that if you flew directly from Beijing to Los Angeles, you would arrive earlier than your departure, because of the international date line. For a minute the man was completely silent. He sketched some vertical lines on a piece of paper, and drew another trail intersecting them; he studied the thing hard until his face lit up. After that, I often heard him explaining the Beijing to L.A. flight to other villagers. None of them seemed to understand—they simply nodded, a dazed look in their eyes.
Wei Ziqi was also the most literate person in Sancha. In 1998, after returning to the village, he’d taken a correspondence course in law, and he had a collection of more than thirty books, mostly legal guides to the Reform era: Economic Law, International Law, A Survey of the Chinese Constitution, Compilation of Laws and Regulations in Common Use. These were new books, but they reflected an old tradition in rural China. Even as far back as the seventeenth century, printed books could be found in villages, where literate peasants often kept guides that showed them how to write up simple legal agreements. When Mimi and I first arranged to rent the Sancha house, Wei Ziqi consulted a book called Modern Economic Contracts. It was a cheap paperback with a cover photo that featured the EU flag superimposed atop the Hong Kong skyline. Using the book as a guide, Wei Ziqi produced a handwritten agreement with eleven clauses, all of which were written in formal language: “Party A offers Party B private rooms which are located at Shuiquan Valley of Sancha Village of Bohai Township of Huairou County (the rooms include a kitchen).” The contract noted that our agreement was “based on the mutual benefit principle.” Clause number six specified that we could not use the house to “store contraband inflammable objects or explosives.”
FEW PEOPLE IN THE village had traveled as much as Wei Ziqi. It was hard to go anywhere; there wasn’t any bus service to Sancha, and the mountain roads are too steep for bicycling. If locals needed to go to the city, they hiked down to Dongtai, three miles away, where minibuses stopped. From there it was forty-five minutes to Huairou, and then another hour to Beijing. But some villagers