Country Driving [81]
“Now his nose won’t stop bleeding,” Cao Chunmei said. She put her husband on the line. “It’s OK as long as he’s lying down,” Wei Ziqi said. “But if he sits up it starts bleeding again.”
“He should be in the hospital,” I said. “The doctor made a mistake. Just keep him lying down and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I ran to Mimi’s apartment to get the car keys; she was already telephoning people, searching for a different hospital. I started the Santana and headed north, cursing the Beijing traffic. If I was lucky I’d make it there in less than two hours.
CAO CHUNMEI GREW UP on the opposite side of the brick-and-stone Great Wall. Her home village is located down in the valley, where conditions are better than in Sancha, and her family wasn’t as poor as Wei Ziqi’s. But life was simple during her childhood, and she paid for school supplies with eggs—money was rarely used in those days. Every weekend, along with her brother and sister, she hiked the five miles to her grandmother’s house. Their route took them across the high pass at Jiankou, one of the most spectacularly steep sections of the Great Wall. The impressive brick fortifications were completed around the turn of the seventeenth century, near the end of the Ming dynasty, but none of that history mattered to Cao Chunmei as a girl. From her perspective, the Great Wall simply defined the two worlds of her childhood. It was the barrier between school and family, weekdays and weekends, and countless times she crossed the threshold of crumbling bricks.
After finishing the eighth grade, Cao Chunmei left school and began working at a nearby garment factory where her older sister already had a job. The plant produced military clothes: standard-issue shirts and jackets, the kind of gear that’s also worn by peasants. On the assembly line, Cao Chunmei started by making collars; then she moved to cuffs, finally to button-sewing. She lived at home with her parents. By bicycle it was only a half hour ride, and her family was prosperous enough to allow her to keep her earnings. Later she recalled these years as some of the happiest of her life.
On the assembly line, Cao Chunmei worked with a young woman from Sancha. One day, the woman asked if Cao Chunmei had a boyfriend, and she answered yes. But the woman didn’t seem to listen. “You should meet my uncle,” she said. She told Cao Chunmei that the uncle was only a little older than her, and he wasn’t married.
“I decided to do it,” Cao Chunmei remembered, years later. “I thought my boyfriend at the time was too young, and he was from a place very close to my hometown. I’m not sure why I felt that way, but for some reason I didn’t want to marry somebody close to home.”
The coworker, it turned out, was the daughter of the Shitkicker. The man and Wei Ziqi are distant cousins—they share the same great-great-grandfather—and the daughter arranged a meeting between Cao Chunmei and Wei Ziqi. In the countryside, evaluations of potential partners tend to be swift and brutal, and the passage of time does not necessarily soften them with gauzy nostalgia. More than a decade after they met, Cao Chunmei still recalled her exact impressions. “I thought he was very short and very black,” she said. “His skin was so dark! But when he spoke, I thought he was funny. He had a good sense of humor. He didn’t talk in the way that most people do; he was more interesting, and he said things that might not have been appropriate. I thought he seemed fun.”
Eight months later, on New Year’s Day of 1993, they were married. They held the wedding at a restaurant in the small town of Miaocheng. Nearly fifteen years after Cao Chunmei’s wedding, she could not recall the name of the restaurant, the dishes that were served, or the guest list—the sort of details that, for an American woman, would be etched across memory for all time. But Cao Chunmei could still note every financial detail in perfect order. The banquet cost six hundred and ninety yuan—around eighty-five dollars. Gifts were cash, as is traditional at Chinese weddings, and the most the