Country Driving [78]
I learned all of this later from Wei Ziqi. He said his brother had been exhausted and frightened, but otherwise he was fine; nobody in the government had mistreated him. Wei Ziqi seemed satisfied with this chain of events: in his view, he had shown the cadres that he was serious. They had finally agreed to submit the request to the county government, a higher level of authority, and Wei Ziqi believed he had a good chance of receiving the subsidy. As far as he was concerned, this had been the best course of action. Officials are often inclined to ignore responsibility, and sometimes you have to act aggressively in order to push them.
I felt guilty about the incident, although I had no idea what I should have done differently. And I hadn’t fully understood the situation while it was unfolding. I often felt like that in China; the place had a way of making me feel slow-witted. Sometimes I benefited from this stupidity, especially as a writer. Over the years I had learned to be patient, and probably I was more open-minded than I had ever been in America. But my reactions could be slow and sometimes a situation developed before I could respond. In any case, life is complicated in China, and often there isn’t a good solution regardless of how quick you are. The people have a common expression for that: Mei banfa, they often say. Nothing can be done.
I had always liked the challenge of living in China, and there was something about the foreigner’s solitude that appealed to me. The villagers accepted this—they understood that I was different, and that I spent a great deal of time alone, and they didn’t judge me for that. They were curious only in the broadest sense: people often asked me what time it was in America, and they were always interested in how much something had cost. They asked detailed questions about the things I eat and don’t eat. But they never inquired about my writing or my personal life, which was one reason I felt so comfortable in Sancha. Often the villagers referred to Mimi as my laopo, or wife, and I didn’t bother to correct them. In fact we had dated briefly before finding the country home, but we rented the place as friends. Over time, each of us dated other people, and we continued to share the house; sometimes we brought new partners to Sancha. The villagers couldn’t have cared less—that was the distance between their world and ours.
A week after the incident with the Idiot, I went to Sancha for a few days. It was as if the man had been waiting for me: he stood at the top of the road, where he greeted me with a huge grin, pointing at my parked car. I had never seen him so animated; he kept grunting and gesturing toward the vehicle. I realized that he was telling the story of our drive into the valley. “I know,” I said. “I remember.” I wanted to apologize; I wished I could let him know that I hadn’t understood that situation until it was too late—Mei banfa. But there was no way to communicate my regret, and the Idiot continued his wild gestures. He seemed thrilled to see me again.
WEI JIA’S FIRST HOLIDAY was in October, for National Day. All Chinese schools had a week off, and the boy returned to the village. His teacher reported that he was still unaccustomed to the classroom; in her words, he had “a wild-eyed look.” Wei Jia had always had a penchant for roughhousing, and initially his parents weren’t concerned when they noticed a pattern of bruises across his back.
In the village, the corn harvest had just come in, and Wei Ziqi had gathered six hundred pounds of the crop. He stacked the corn alongside their house, and Wei Jia spent a morning climbing and sliding down the bright yellow pile. Afterward his mother noticed more bruises across the boy’s legs—angry smudges of purple that covered every few inches of skin. Wei Jia said he felt fine, but his face looked pale. Mimi and I had driven out to the village in her family’s car, and now I offered to take Wei Ziqi and the boy to the hospital in Huairou.
It was the afternoon of the holiday, the fifty-third anniversary