Country Driving [90]
II
WINTER IS THE QUIETEST SEASON IN SANCHA. THERE ARE no crops, and almost no work in the orchards, apart from occasional pruning and grafting. The men gather firewood, and sometimes they follow game trails into the mountains, where they set loop snares in hopes of catching a badger or a feral pig. Mostly, though, people stay indoors. Snowfall is rare, because of the dryness, but the temperature is usually below freezing. At home the kang is the only source of heat. Much of daily life takes place atop those large brick beds, and if you walk into a home at nine in the morning there’s a good chance that people will still be huddled under the covers. They eat less—in winter they have two daily meals instead of three. They sleep nine or ten hours a night, and they often doze away the afternoon. Mornings are silent. On a cold day in the village, the place is so still that it seems as if the residents are in hibernation.
After Wei Jia returned from the hospital, in November of 2002, he stayed home from kindergarten. For two months he hardly left the house, and his parents gave him a course of steroids that had been prescribed by the doctors. There was a brief period during which the boy whined and cried easily—he had learned this behavior from his roommate in the hospital, the pudgy city child. Whenever Wei Jia cried, his parents mocked him relentlessly. “You look like a monkey,” his father would say, laughing at the kid’s tears. “Cry, monkey, cry!” His mother joined in the fun, and soon the child abandoned that routine. Over the winter he gained nine pounds. His father taught him how to write some simple Chinese characters, and together they listened to English-language tapes.
Winter became one of my favorite times to visit the countryside. Without the summer brush, trails were clear, and sometimes I hiked for hours along the Great Wall. The mountains were peaceful and there was a sleepy openness to the village; at night the peasants often gathered in somebody’s house to drink baijiu and play cards. One evening that winter, Wei Ziqi and I had dinner with his nephew Wei Quanyou, and the men began to talk about automobiles. Wei Ziqi hoped to get a license someday—that was a plan he often mentioned.
“Ho Wei is a good driver,” Wei Ziqi said.
“I’m average,” I said.
“No, you’re not. How long have you been driving?”
“Since I was sixteen. Many Americans start when they’re sixteen.”
“Almost twenty years!”
“Not quite.”
“You should have seen what it was like when Wei Jia was sick,” Wei Ziqi said, and he told the story of our drive into Beijing. Wei Quanyou listened attentively, although I was certain that he had already heard the tale. The story had become a familiar one in the village, where there is a tradition of helping neighbors with medical problems. If somebody in Sancha goes to the hospital, other villagers stop by the home with cash donations—in a nation without rural health insurance, this is how the villagers protect each other against medical expenses. Recovery always means that the grateful family hosts a banquet. Wei Jia’s illness represented the first time that Mimi and I were truly involved in village life—we responded in ways that were recognizable to locals, and now they greeted us more warmly than in the past. And the experiences of the last year had made me feel differently about Sancha. In the beginning I had seen the village as an escape, a place where I could hike and write in peace; but now I went there for different reasons. In China it was the closest I ever came to home.
That evening, Wei Quanyou had invited me to dinner, as a way of showing gratitude. He was a tiny man, not much taller than five feet, and he had the sweetest smile in the village. He never said much—at dinners he always seemed to be listening to other people’s stories. He lived in a rough-built house whose walls had been covered with old newspapers, and the only decoration was a cheap paper map of China. Across the map, various