Country Driving [74]
Each man began by tending the tomb of his most immediate relatives: parents, grandparents, uncles. Sometimes they left special gifts, like small bottles of alcohol or packs of cigarettes that had been enjoyed by the departed. Then they worked their way down the generations, carefully weeding the mounds and shoveling dirt, and as they moved back in time they became less certain of identities. Wei Ziqi thought that one mound belonged to his great-grandfather, but he wasn’t sure—it might have been another uncle. On the last rows, the work became communal: everybody pitched in for every mound, and nobody knew who was buried where. The final pile of dirt was isolated in its own row. I asked Wei Ziqi who it belonged to.
“Lao Zu,” he said. “The Ancestor.” There was no other name for the original settler, whose details had been lost with the jiapu.
In the afternoon, Mimi and I gave Wei Minghe a ride home. The old man said that nowadays he rarely returned to Sancha; apart from the occasional holiday, there wasn’t much reason to go back. He lived in a suburb of Huairou, where a row of brick houses had been laid out beside the road to Beijing. When peasants move to cities, they often end up in neighborhoods like this: dozens of identical buildings, cheaply built and poorly planned, lined up with all the imagination of a factory floor. But I remembered what Wei Minghe had said about shoveling dirt before dawn—tile roofs versus grass roofs. The ancestors are abstract, but today’s choices are tangible, and the old man had made his decision. One thing he said about Huairou was that now he finally had good heat.
ON THE FIRST DAY of school, Wei Jia wore new khaki trousers and a red T-shirt. The clothes looked stiff and foreign—all summer the boy had played around the village wearing nothing but a dirty tank top and a pair of underpants. For school, I had given him a Mickey Mouse backpack, and his mother had put a new pencil box in one of the pockets. Inside the box was a single pencil, freshly sharpened.
The boy still wasn’t saying much, and he walked in silence to the road. Mimi had borrowed her parents’ Volkswagen Santana for the weekend, and all of us climbed into the car. I sat in front with Wei Jia on my lap; his parents took the backseat. Between them sat the Idiot.
Once, I asked Cao Chunmei what the Idiot’s real name is, but she didn’t know. He is Wei Ziqi’s oldest brother, born in 1948—the year before the Communists came to power, when the civil war still raged across northern China. Those were difficult times, and poverty probably caused the Idiot’s disability. Most likely it was a lack of iodine: if a pregnant woman doesn’t consume enough, she runs the risk of bearing a mentally disabled child. Nowadays the government ensures that iodized salt is widely distributed in the countryside, and such birth defects have become rare. But there is still an older generation of disabled people, a reminder of China’s recent poverty, and I often encountered them on my drive across China. Many villages have one or two residents with mental disabilities, and locals typically call them Shazi: “Idiot.”
In Sancha, the Idiot lived with the Weis, who made sure that he was clothed and fed. They gave him simple chores: