Country Driving [82]
For two years the young couple lived in Huairou, where Cao Chunmei worked as a cook. But she never felt comfortable in the city. “Too many people,” she told me once. “It makes me nervous. In the village, if you want to go somewhere, it’s easier to get around. And it’s quiet and peaceful. If you’re done with your work, you can relax in peace, or you can go for a walk.”
Wei Ziqi held a similar opinion of city life, and after Cao Chunmei became pregnant they moved back across the Great Wall to Sancha. They lived with Wei Ziqi’s parents, whose house still had dirt floors and walls made of mud mixed with sorghum stalks. The conditions were far worse than what Cao Chunmei was accustomed to, but this didn’t particularly bother her. She liked the quietness of the village, and initially she was happy to live in a place that seemed poor but peaceful.
Over time, though, her feelings about Sancha changed. In 1997, she gave birth to Wei Jia, and then both her in-laws died within the span of a year. Cao Chunmei became friends with other village women, most of whom had also married in from the outside, and she began to hear stories. At first they were hard to believe—the kind of tales that were told in whispers. She learned that one local woman had been involved in a decades-long affair with a relative of her husband. They even had a child together, although everybody pretended that it was the husband’s son. Another woman had borne three children to three different men. She had done it through migration—often this is the best way to avoid the planned-birth policy. Periodically the Sancha woman found work in a new city, where she invariably found a new partner and had a baby. Her legal husband remained in the village, where he conducted an ongoing affair with a neighbor’s wife. It was another open secret: whenever the neighbor went to work in the fields, the other man crept over to his house.
“There’s a lot of this sort of thing in Sancha,” Cao Chunmei told me, after we’d known each other for a long time. She said there were a number of village affairs, and even some rumors of incest. “It has something to do with the local environment,” she said. “Somehow it became more accepted because this place is so remote. This sort of thing doesn’t happen so often in my village. But in my village there are more than two hundred families, and here there are so few.
“When I first came here,” she continued, “I thought that everything was fine, that it was a normal place. But then in my second year I began to learn about all the affairs and the wrong things that people did. Wei Ziqi never talked to me about these things. Many people here are from his family, so he can’t speak openly about it.” She told me that sometimes an affair leads to violence, and inevitably the woman is the target. “Sometimes the man will beat his wife,” she said. “But there’s never a fight between the two men involved.”
In her first decade at Sancha, Cao Chunmei never visited the Great Wall above the village. For her, the ruins belong strictly to childhood, when she used to hike to her grandmother’s house, and she sees no point in making the two-hour trek in her new home. She is a heavyset woman with a round face, and her hair is white—it started to turn when she was only a teenager. Nowadays she dyes it black, but the roots still show pale. Her left eye is blue, her right eye brown. She has a quick, gentle smile, and she always seems happiest with Wei Jia; but there is a distinct sadness behind the woman’s mismatched eyes. She’s seen the peacefulness of the countryside dissolve like a mirage, and she knows there’s nothing easy about raising the last child in a village.
I PARKED AT THE top of the dead-end road. Inside the Weis’ house, the boy lay on the kang. His face was pale and flecks of blood had dried dark around his nose. He didn’t say anything when I touched