Country Driving [70]
One morning I hiked up the trail and saw Ma Yufa watering his donkey. It was February, and the man was bundled against the cold; he wore padded army pants, a military jacket covered with patches, and old cloth shoes that had been sewed repeatedly. The torn army clothes gave him the look of a deserter—one of those soldiers who’s been hiding in a jungle for decades, unaware that the war has ended. But his face was strikingly handsome, weathered like a slab of local walnut, and he had thick black eyebrows. He told me that he was in his seventies, and I asked which year he’d been born.
“Sha shei zhidao?” he said with a snort. “Who knows that?”
He invited me into his home for a cup of tea, and we passed through the ruins of the Land of the Mas. He pointed out two sets of stone foundations that had been overgrown with brush. “Those people were named Ma, and the other ones over there were called Zhao,” he said. “They left ten years ago.” We trudged past another ruined home. “The people there were also called Ma. That was my uncle.” MaYufa’s brother’s house was still standing, although the occupant had moved to Huairou. A hand-carved coffin leaned near the entrance. “Whenever he dies, he’ll be buried in that,” MaYufa said.
MaYufa lived in a two-room house with mud walls, and he had no telephone or refrigerator. He told me that every day, at each meal, he ate corn porridge and flour cakes. “You need to eat meat when you’re young, but not when you’re old,” he said. Across the pass it’s nearly four miles of mountain walking to Haizikou, the nearest place with a shop, and the man and his donkey had last made the trip in December, two months earlier. He didn’t expect to return until April. There wasn’t much he needed: a few times a year, he bought corn and flour, and he sold his walnuts in the autumn. Other than those short journeys he had no contact with anybody. His annual income was less than two hundred dollars. Technically he was a Beijing resident—as with so many Chinese cities, the capital’s administrative boundaries stretch deep into the countryside. Until I met MaYufa, I had never imagined how isolated a human being could be in a city of thirteen million.
We sat on his kang, sipping tea, and he talked about the past. He remembered the Communist victory of 1949, but he said it hadn’t changed his life much. “We were so poor it didn’t matter,” he said. He hadn’t spent a single day in school, and he couldn’t read. He had never married. “Nobody would want to marry somebody who lives in a place like this,” he said. He had a radio and a television with a cheap satellite dish, but he must not have been watching the news. When I asked who was the top official in China, he paused to think.
“Hu Yaobang is the nation’s leader,” he finally said. In fact Hu Yaobang had never led China, although in 1981 he rose to become Party Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. He was purged in 1987, and two years later his death inspired the initial student protests on Tiananmen Square. Those events may have shaken the world, but they were meaningless in the Land of the Mas.
One thing MaYufa seemed completely aware of was time. The room was decorated with three calendars, and two of them had tear-off sheets, marked to the correct page. He didn’t throw away the used days; he stacked the little squares of paper neatly in a pan. He had an alarm clock with a second hand that ticked loudly. The longer I sat on the kang, the more the ticking of the clock unsettled me, until finally I thanked him for the tea and excused myself. Outside, the hills were silent—I felt relieved to see the bigness of the sky.
AT HOME, FROM THE desk beside my window, I could look across the valley and see the Great Wall climbing the western mountains. That was my retreat—I went there whenever I wanted to escape the city and do some writing. I liked the sounds of the village, which was so quiet that every noise seemed clear and distinct.