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By Root 4037 0

probably would have felt differently if they were served a bowl of elm-bark noodles. In fact they usually ate rainbow trout that originally came from Swiss stock. In recent years the foreign breed was introduced to the big fish farms down in the valley, and it became the standard meal for weekend visitors: practically every rural family that opened a restaurant had a sign that said “Rainbow Trout.” The new Chinese cuisine is full of such transplants and fabrications. In Beijing, the upper classes enjoy going to restaurants that serve “authentic” dishes from various parts of the country: there are Yunnan restaurants, Hakka restaurants, and Guizhou restaurants; and if you take these dishes back to their supposed regions of origin, the natives will be puzzled. The capital’s Sichuanese restaurants serve meals that I never ate in two years of living in Sichuan. But it’s natural in a country where living standards have risen so fast: the market demands new traditions, even ones of rural simplicity. As a child Wei Ziqi never saw a rainbow trout, and the fish is as local as a cuckoo clock.

Trucks carried live trout into the hills, where they were delivered to small entrepreneurs like Wei Ziqi. He built his own holding pool, cement-lined and fed with springwater, and the trout did infinitely better than the leeches of old. Usually he grilled the fish for a price of roughly four dollars. In the new kitchen, Cao Chunmei worked over a massive wok, preparing dishes: scrambled eggs with tomato, fried pork and peppers, wheat pancakes. She was an excellent cook, and the customers often returned.

In 2003, from farming and business, the family earned over 3,800 dollars. The income represented a 50 percent increase over the previous year, and it seemed that business should only improve; by midsummer they were already having repeat customers. But Cao Chunmei looked exhausted and Wei Ziqi seemed troubled. In the beginning, he lit up Red Plum Blossoms sporadically, whenever he met a new contact or greeted a guest, but now he chain-smoked to relieve stress. At night he often stayed up late drinking baijiu. Sometimes it seemed as if all the tension that the city folk discarded on their weekend trips went straight to the man’s heart. “Too much pressure,” he often said, when I asked him what was wrong. “It makes me nervous all the time.”

I told him to be happy—for years he had dreamed of having his own business, and now it was off to a great start. But he worried endlessly about money. He had borrowed from family: the equivalent of over sixteen hundred American dollars from his relatives, and another thousand from Cao Chunmei’s older sister. I had agreed to pay several years’ rent in advance, for long-term security on my house, but that wasn’t technically his money. The house belonged to his nephew, so that was the equivalent of another family loan: nearly twenty-five hundred dollars. He had already spent all of the money on the renovations, and he prepared to apply for a bank loan, in order to build a guesthouse for next year.

In China, there isn’t a tradition of credit for private individuals, and debt makes people uncomfortable. Credit cards are still rare, and so are bank loans. In 2003, the vast majority of those new car owners paid cash: fewer than one in five used a loan. Most Chinese save for years before making a major purchase, and if they have to raise capital they depend on family. It results in yet another type of guanxi, and Wei Ziqi was juggling them all: the political issues of the village, the new territory of Huairou business, the complexities of family loans. A year earlier, when his son’s life was in danger, Wei Ziqi had seemed completely calm. But he had been prepared for that experience: in Sancha, where everybody grew up poor, they know what it means to struggle with sickness and death. Success is the hard part—as an entrepreneur, Wei Ziqi stepped into uncharted territory.

WEI JIA TURNED SIX years old that summer. For his birthday, his parents served him a special meal of instant noodles topped with a fried egg. The