Country Driving [93]
Return to the Simple Nature of the Past
THE COUNTRYSIDE IS ONE of the few places that make urban Chinese feel nostalgic. In cities, the rush to modernity is headlong, and most old neighborhoods and landmarks have been razed. Residents have little time to think about the past, and history usually feels either irrelevant, like the ancient dynasties and the Great Wall, or extremely painful, like the campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. But there’s a distance with rural life that makes people more comfortable. They’ve left it behind—most urban Chinese have some distant family history in the countryside, but it’s not something they have to think about every day. As middle-class people become more prosperous, buying cars and having enough money for tourism, they realize how pleasant it is to go back to the countryside periodically. For a city person, it’s one aspect of the past that feels easy to control—they can drive there, spend a night, and then return to the modern world.
But in truth there’s no other part of China that is so trapped by history, at least when it comes to policies. In Sancha, people rarely talk about the past, but their relationship to the farmland is still fundamentally troubled in ways that it has been for more than a century. Some villagers, like Wei Ziqi, still have a few scattered documents that track this history. He’s lost access to the family genealogy, but he keeps a collection of tattered land contracts that were passed down through the generations. During the Cultural Revolution, Wei Ziqi’s father hid these papers inside the ceiling of the family home. Wei Ziqi himself is less careful—he folds them up, wraps them in a dirty red cloth, and leaves them at the bottom of a drawer.
The oldest document dates to the Qing dynasty, in the thirteenth year of the reign of the Guangxu Emperor. That was 1887, and the handwritten contract describes the leasing of a piece of land to a man named Yu Manjiang. No money changes hands—the agreed annual payment is only one dou of grain every year, a total of about two and a half gallons. Farming must have gone badly for Yu Manjiang, because the next contract shows that he pawned his land “due to lack of money.” This agreement is from 1906, and it marks the first known legal appearance of a Wei ancestor: Wei Yongliang, the great-grandfather of Wei Ziqi. He agrees to pay 150 diao for the use of the land. Four years later, he buys it outright, for a total of 356 diao.
A diao is a string of copper coins, and the amounts documented on the Wei family contracts are tiny. Sometimes land is leased or pawned, which was common in those days. In imperial China, big landowners tended to dominate villages, and in Sancha the wealthiest family was named Yan. Poorer residents leased fields from the Yans, and even a family that was able to buy its own land often struggled to support itself. A couple of the Wei contracts describe how fields are divided between siblings; one document specifies that two sons will split the funeral costs when their father dies. In every case these agreements are written out by proxies, often poorly, and the farmers who sign them are clearly illiterate.
The Qing dynasty collapsed in 1912, giving way to the Republic of China, but little changed in the countryside. During the war decades of the 1930s and 1940s, conditions became particularly bad in the north, and this is reflected by the Wei contracts. Of all the agreements, the worst written is from 1946, and it’s signed by Wei Mingyue, the Shitkicker’s father. Because of financial problems, he agrees to pawn a plot of land to a cousin in exchange for thirteen gallons of corn. The contract states: “Next year, when the early-spring grains arrive, pay back the price and the land will be returned.” The cousin who takes the land is Wei Youtan, the grandfather of Wei Ziqi. In the village, tensions between neighbors often have deep roots, although many details have been lost in the haze of the unwritten past. Wei Ziqi can’t read the classical Chinese of the