Country Driving [72]
Wei Jia was eating rice and he didn’t look up from his bowl.
“Answer your Uncle Monster,” his mother said sternly. Usually the boy was talkative, babbling so fast that nobody could understand. But tonight he was silent—he sat there staring at his bowl. It occurred to me that I had never seen him leave the village before.
“That’s OK,” I said. “He doesn’t have to answer.”
We finished dinner and the parents prepared Wei Jia’s new school clothes and backpack. He went to bed in silence. All evening he had refused to say a single word about starting school.
THE BOY WAS OF the sixth generation of Weis known to have lived in Sancha. In the upper part of the village, nearly all male residents share that family name, and the Weis are all related in one way or another. The women have all sorts of names—Cao, Li, Zhao, Han, Yuan—and most grew up in other villages around Beijing. In rural China, that’s the traditional pattern: men inherit their family’s land, and women marry in from the outside.
Nobody is certain how the village was first settled. In the past, most residents were illiterate, and there are few historical documents in Sancha. The oldest known words are located a thousand feet above the village, where an inscribed stone tablet leans against a section of Great Wall. Of the three lines of wall near Sancha, this is by far the most impressive, and it’s the only local stretch that was built of brick and quarried stone. Originally many sections of brick fortifications contained inscribed tablets, but most have been looted or broken; nowadays fewer than twenty are known to still exist on the wall in the Beijing area. The tablet above Sancha has survived by virtue of remoteness—from the village it takes more than two hours of hard hiking to reach that spot. The inscription notes that in AD 1615, a crew of 2,400 soldiers built a section of Great Wall that is exactly fifty-eight zhang and five cun long. The tablet reflects the precision of Ming bureaucratic records: the cun is a unit of measurement shorter than an inch. All told, the length of this 1615 construction project was 638 feet, and it required a full three months of labor. The soldiers came from the eastern province of Shandong.
Some villagers believe themselves to be the descendants of these soldiers. Others tell a different story: during the early Qing dynasty, there was a failed plot to assassinate an emperor, and a band of wanted men fled to the mountains. They settled at a fork in three valleys, founding the village that eventually became Sancha. Yet another tale involves an empress named Yan. Desiring to see the countryside, Empress Yan was borne north from the Forbidden City on a sedan chair. Upon reaching the mountains, she was so pleased by the journey that she granted the land to her bearers. In her honor they adopted the same family name, and to this day the lower village is home to a large number of Yans.
All of these tales sound suspiciously familiar—they have an awful lot in common with the historical soap operas that villagers like watching on television. Such shows feature imperial courts and elaborate plots, and nowadays this is how many rural Chinese learn history. It seems natural that the people in Sancha would apply such tales to their own village, although I doubt that in fact the place was settled by failed assassins or sedan-chair bearers. It’s also unlikely that the builders of the Great Wall founded Sancha. During the Ming dynasty, soldiers typically returned to their homes after construction projects.
Wei Ziqi has another theory about his family origins that sounds more reasonable.