Country Driving [91]
“Are these places you’ve traveled to?” I asked, after we had started eating.
“Of course not!” Wei Quanyou said. “The farthest I’ve been is Beijing.”
“So why did you write the numbers?”
“Those are the cities on the China Central Television weather forecast,” he said. He explained: every night on CCTV, the forecast appears in the same order, with Beijing first, then Shanghai, and then all the rest, with Macau last. Wei Quanyou had memorized the order and marked it on his map.
For a moment I was confused. “Is there a special reason you did that?”
“No reason.” He laughed as if to say, What else are you going to do in Sancha during January?
For Wei Ziqi, though, that was the first year the winter routines began to change. Six months earlier, in the summer of 2002, the government had paved the dirt road to the upper village, and then motorists began to find their way to the empty lot at the top of the hill. The capital’s car boom was gaining momentum—that year, Beijing residents purchased more than a quarter million new vehicles, the largest increase in the city’s history. More drivers were exploring the countryside, and during the summer Wei Ziqi and Cao Chunmei started serving simple meals in their home. They charged two and a half dollars a head, and business was good.
In the winter Wei Ziqi decided to expand into a real restaurant and guesthouse. While the rest of the village hibernated, he worked hard: he paved the threshing platform in front of his house, and he built a new kitchen. He made frequent trips to Huairou in order to buy cement and other supplies. He began carrying a cell phone that could be used in Huairou; there was still no reception in the village. In the past, he’d always dressed the same regardless of where he was going, but now he was careful to avoid peasant clothes on trips to town—he’d learned that from our visits to the hospital. He bought a set of nonmilitary clothes, as well as a pair of city shoes: black leather loafers that cost four dollars. The brand name was Yidali—“Italy”—and he kept the box displayed prominently in his house. In the village he still wore camouflaged sneakers, like everybody else, but he slipped on the Italy whenever it was time to go to Huairou.
Huairou lies halfway between Sancha and Beijing, and this midpoint is social as well as geographic. It’s hard to define exactly how the place feels: not quite a city, not quite a village. Fifteen years ago it was much closer to the village end of the spectrum. In 1995, when the Chinese government hosted the United Nations’ Fourth World Women’s Conference, they decided that they didn’t want Hillary Clinton and five thousand other politically oriented foreign women descending on the capital. So they sent them to Huairou instead—a type of banishment. At that time, most buildings were of the type that had already become outdated in the capital: squat, blocky structures of three or four stories, covered in white tile and blue glass. Streets were wide; cars were few. Huairou was a city of exile—there was no good reason to go there from Beijing.
But over time it became something different to those who arrive from the opposite direction. Huairou is situated at the northern edge of the Beijing Plain, where roads fan out into the mountains, and the city is a natural first destination for people who leave villages. Beijing is often too big and disorienting, but Huairou is manageable for a person from the countryside. In the decade after the Women’s Conference, it grew rapidly, and today the downtown population is nearly one hundred thousand. Neither city nor village, it’s actually both: a city of villagers. Few residents are more than a generation removed from farmwork, and local businesses depend heavily on people moving back and forth between the countryside.
Like so many new towns in China, Huairou has the feel of a training