Country Driving [71]
There was only one child in the upper part of the village. My house was surrounded by fifteen other buildings, but nearly all families with young children had moved away. Only Wei Ziqi and his wife Cao Chunmei were raising a young child, a boy named Wei Jia. He was the smallest five-year-old I had ever known—he weighed thirty pounds, and his mother fretted about his health, because he was a finicky eater. But he had a wiry strength that I rarely saw among city children in China. Since the age of four, Wei Jia had roamed unsupervised around the village, and he knew his way along the mountain paths. His sense of balance was remarkable, and he could roughhouse endlessly; it was impossible to wear him out. He almost never cried. It was as if the toughness and dexterity of a nine-year-old had been squeezed into a three-year-old’s body, and I could never resist chasing the kid down and tossing him into the air. He called me mogui—“monster”—and at one point his parents reminded him to use the proper term of respect for an adult. That was how I came to be known as Mogui Shushu: “Uncle Monster.”
Wei Jia often came to my house, and if I was writing I told him to play quietly and leave Uncle Monster alone. As the only child in the village, he was accustomed to entertaining himself, and sometimes I worked for an hour and forgot that he was still there. He had no toys to speak of, so he improvised with whatever happened to be lying around: a rusty rake, a broken plate. Once he spent a morning on my threshing platform, using an old cart and an empty beer bottle to pretend that he was driving a peddler’s truck. When Mimi or I took friends to the village, they sometimes gave toys to Wei Jia as gifts. “That’s a waste,” his father said once. “He’s only going to break it.” And that was true—the boy was so unaccustomed to real toys that he invariably destroyed them. If he got a toy, he might try stepping on it, or he’d twist some moving part until it snapped. After it was ruined, he didn’t seem at all bothered: for Wei Jia, a toy was a nondurable resource. If you were fortunate enough to get one, you should enjoy it as quickly as possible.
The boy’s face was a perfect oval. He had black hair cropped close, and long thin eyes that sparked when he laughed. His ears were wonderful—that’s often the most endearing feature of small Chinese boys, whose ears stick straight out, giving them a perpetually startled expression. Neither of Wei Jia’s parents was particularly good-looking, but the boy was handsome. Sometimes, if I wanted to annoy Mimi, I’d praise him.
“Wei Jia is so good-looking,” I’d say.
“He’s ugly,” his mother would answer immediately.
“He’s so smart.”
“He’s stupid,” she said. “Not one bit smart.”
“Cut it out,” Mimi would say, in English, but I’d continue: “What a nice child.”
“He’s a bad boy.”
In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother’s responses were automatic—it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn’t want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune. The only praise I ever heard the parents give Wei Jia was a single adjective: laoshi. The dictionary defines it as “honest,” but the term is difficult to translate. It also means obedient, as well as having a certain sense of propriety that is characteristic of people in the countryside. “Wei Jia is laoshi,” his parents would say, and that was the closest they came to pride.
In the fall of 2002,