Read Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory Online
Authors: Peter Hessler
Tags: #Travel, #Asia, #China
In 1987, after finishing the tenth grade, Wei Ziqi followed most of
his classmates and left Sancha. He found a factory job on the outskirts of Beijing, where he worked on the assembly line, turning out electrical capacitors for televisions. After a year he switched to another plant that manufactured cardboard boxes. But he never liked factory work, and he didn’t see a future to the jobs. “It was the same thing every day,” he told me once. “If you’re in a factory, you’re always on the same place in the assembly line, and nothing changes.” Wei Ziqi was naturally intelligent, but his formal education was limited, and there are few options for a rural man with such a background. If he had been a woman, he might have actually found better opportunities—smart Chinese women with little education often become accountants or secretaries, and from these positions they can rise in the factory world. But uneducated men have fewer alternatives to the assembly line; usually they work on construction crews or they become security guards. Eventually, Wei Ziqi found a job as a guard at another factory, but after a couple of years he decided the work was leading him nowhere.
Probably he was also limited by his physical appearance. In the Chinese work world, looks matter greatly, especially for jobs with little educational requirement. It’s common for job listings to request applicants to be of a certain height: security guards at good companies often have to be at least five foot eight inches tall. Wei Ziqi stands less than five and a half feet, and he has the rough complexion of a farmer. He’s barrel-chested, with squat, powerful legs; his hands are scarred from fieldwork. He looks like somebody who belongs in Sancha, and finally that’s where he returned. In 1996, after nine years of city work, he came back to the village, where he acquired the rights to farmland that had been left behind by other migrants. He tended nearly two hundred walnut and chestnut trees, and his apricot groves were scattered among the high peaks. He lived with his wife and son, and he also cared for his oldest brother, who was mentally disabled. Their income was modest: less than two thousand dollars a year for four people. The arrival of Mimi and me didn’t represent a windfall, because our rent money went to the nephew in the city.
Nearly all of Wei Ziqi’s peers were gone. The local school that he
once attended had been shut down, and of his eleven former classmates, only three still lived in the village. His able-bodied siblings—two older brothers, two older sisters—had all left. His path was unusual, but he refused to see it as a retreat; in his mind, the village wasn’t doomed. He was convinced that someday there would be an advantage to staying behind, and he dreamed of doing something other than farming. Every time he visited relatives who had moved to Huairou, the nearest city, he kept an eye out for business ideas.
Such possibilities can be found everywhere in a small city like Huairou, where many entrepreneurs have originally come from the countryside. On the streets people pass out pamphlets for direct-marketing schemes, and buildings are plastered with ads for training courses, door-to-door products, and get-rich-quick scams. Even television offers ideas. Whenever Wei Ziqi visited Huairou, he stayed with relatives who had cable, and he liked watching China Central Television Channel 7. Some programs cater to viewers who are making the transition from farming to business, and they often feature successful rural entrepreneurs. One evening in Huairou, Wei Ziqi happened to watch a Channel 7 program about leeches. The host interviewed farmers in Hebei Province who raised leeches to be sold to manufacturers of traditional Chinese medicine used to treat numbness and paralysis. Some of these leech entrepreneurs supposedly earned nearly three thousand dollars a year, and after the show was over, Wei Ziqi called the television station for more information.
In 2002, that became his first attempt at business. He visited three successful leech farmers in the Huairou region, and then he raised investment money from his nephew and a neighbor. Together the three men collected five hundred and fifty dollars. Wei Ziqi used some of the cash to build a small cement pool beside his house, and then he traveled alone to Tangxian County. The journey represented the farthest he had ever been from Sancha: four hours by bus. Tangxian is home to a major leech farm, and Wei Ziqi visited the place and picked up two thousand young leeches for two hundred fifty dollars. He stocked them in a pair of water-filled barrels for the long bus ride home.
That month, whenever I visited the village, Wei Ziqi was busy with leech maintenance. He fiddled with the cement pool; he stirred the waters; he inspected the tiny creatures. They were so small they looked like the squiggles of a calligrapher’s brush, and in the beginning they swarmed across the pool’s surface. Every day, Wei Ziqi fed them the fresh blood of chickens, sheep, and pigs. He told me that he planned to eventually sell them to a medicine factory in Anguo County. But after two weeks the squiggles in Wei Ziqi’s pool began to diminish. He wasn’t sure why: maybe the temperature was too cold, or perhaps the pool was too deep. But soon all the creatures had died, and the investment money was gone; and that was the end of Wei Ziqi’s career as a leech farmer.
The leeches were followed by Amway. The company was becoming popular in China, especially in smaller cities, and somebody in Huairou gave Wei Ziqi some pamphlets. For a spell he thought seriously about it, but then he decided that the village was too small for direct marketing. Briefly he became interested in a Chinese company that called itself Worldnet. Wei Ziqi picked up a flyer in the city, and he showed me a copy and asked what I thought. I told him the truth: it looked like a classic pyramid scheme.
Increasingly, though, he talked about tourism. He knew that Beijing car owners didn’t spend much time in the countryside, but occasionally they visited tourist sections of the Great Wall, like Badaling and Mutianyu. He believed that eventually, as the drivers fanned out and began to explore, they’d find their way to more remote places like Sancha. In his opinion, the village needed to develop some sort of identity, so in his spare time he took notes on possibilities. He collected these writings in an exercise book that he called his
Xiaoxi
, or “Information.” The Information featured key data, like altitude and range of temperatures, and it listed local landmarks: Dragon’s Head Mountain, Eagle-beak Cliff. Wei Ziqi sketched simple maps of the Great Wall and local trails. I rarely met Chinese who were so intent on tracking their surroundings, especially in the countryside; the only other time I’d met a mapmaker was near the Shanxi border, where the old man named Chen researched the local Great Wall. But Wei Ziqi was interested in business, not history. He filled one page with potential names for a guesthouse:
The list was followed by a rough outline of a business plan:
If each family invests a little money we can receive the tourists in our yards, and if the big developers invest in our project then we can turn our village into a paradise where tourists can go sightseeing, appreciate the wild scenery, climb the Great Wall, enjoy peasant family meals, and pick wild mountain fruits and vegetables.
But it seemed unlikely that Wei Ziqi would find business partners in Sancha. Nobody else was as motivated; most people with aspirations had left the village long ago. There was something lonely about his ambition, and I could tell that he was thrilled when Mimi and I began visiting from the big city. He liked the fact that we were involved in writing and photography, and his questions about the outside world had a depth that was rare in the village. Even a common subject, like the time zones in America, became more interesting when Wei Ziqi brought it up. Once he kept asking me detailed questions about the time in America, and finally I told him that if you flew directly from Beijing to Los Angeles, you would arrive earlier than your departure, because of the international date line. For a minute the man was completely silent. He sketched some vertical lines on a piece of paper, and drew another trail intersecting them; he studied the thing hard until his face lit up. After that, I often heard him explaining the Beijing to L.A. flight to other villagers. None of them seemed to understand—they simply nodded, a dazed look in their eyes.
Wei Ziqi was also the most literate person in Sancha. In 1998, after returning to the village, he’d taken a correspondence course in law, and he had a collection of more than thirty books, mostly legal guides to the Reform era:
Economic Law, International Law, A Survey of the Chinese Constitution, Compilation of Laws and Regulations in Common Use.
These were new books, but they reflected an old tradition in rural China. Even as far back as the seventeenth century, printed books could be found in villages, where literate peasants often kept guides that showed them how to write up simple legal agreements. When Mimi and I first arranged to rent the Sancha house, Wei Ziqi consulted a book called
Modern Economic Contracts
. It was a cheap paperback with a cover photo that featured the EU flag superimposed atop the Hong Kong skyline. Using the book as a guide, Wei Ziqi produced a handwritten agreement with eleven clauses, all of which were written in formal language: “Party A offers Party B private rooms which are located at Shuiquan Valley of Sancha Village of Bohai Township of Huairou County (the rooms include a kitchen).” The contract noted that our agreement was “based on the mutual benefit principle.” Clause number six specified that we could not use the house to “store contraband inflammable objects or explosives.”
FEW PEOPLE IN THE
village had traveled as much as Wei Ziqi. It was hard to go anywhere; there wasn’t any bus service to Sancha, and the mountain roads are too steep for bicycling. If locals needed to go to the city, they hiked down to Dongtai, three miles away, where minibuses stopped. From there it was forty-five minutes to Huairou, and then another hour to Beijing. But some villagers had never even seen the capital. A couple of local women still had bound feet—members of that unfortunate last generation who had had their feet broken as children. Once, Mimi and I stopped by to visit with one of the bound-foot women. She was eighty-two years old, and she lay on her
kang
with her shoes off. She wore thin nylon socks and her deformed feet were visible, toes clenched tight against the soles like angry little fists. She said that in eight decades she had never been to Beijing. I asked her if she’d like to go, and she nodded.
“But I can’t,” she said. “You know why? Because I get carsick!”
Recently she had taken motion sickness pills and made the journey to Huairou, to visit family. That was her first trip to a settlement of any size, and I asked her what she thought. “Not bad,” the woman said, and left it at that. She had grown up in a village across one of the mountain passes, a long day’s walk from Sancha. When I asked what Sancha had been like in the old days, she spoke bluntly. “There’s nothing interesting about this place,” she said. “Living in these mountains, at the bottom of a deep gorge—what can possibly happen here?” The only topic of conversation that interested the woman involved her children and their shortcomings. They had left Sancha for the city, and they rarely returned; young people are like that nowadays! They’re all so selfish! Nobody cares about old people! These complaints seemed to make the woman happy—stretched out on the
kang
, resting her crumpled feet, her face became peaceful as she decried the thoughtlessness of the young.
People in Sancha sometimes still traveled long distances by foot or donkey, especially if they headed north. The village name means “Three Forks,” because the main settlement is located at the junction of a trio of valleys that fan northward. Each valley contains a footpath that leads to a high pass: one trail to the village of Chashikou, another to Haizikou, the third to the Huanghua Zhen road. All of these routes cross an old section of wall made of dry fieldstone. This part of the ancient Chinese defense network wasn’t built with brick and mortar, and the date of construction is unknown; texts from the late Ming dynasty simply refer to it as
lao changcheng
, “the old Great Wall.” A couple of miles north of the fortified passes, in the valleys of Haizikou and Chashikou, there is yet another stone barrier. This region was heavily fortified—the distance between these three parallel lines of Great Wall is only five miles. Sancha lies in the middle, with one Great Wall to the south, and two more to the north.
Wei Ziqi had relatives in Chashikou, beyond the second barrier, and sometimes he set off in the morning and hiked across the pass. If he had to carry a lot, he saddled up a donkey. In the afternoons, when I was finished writing for the day, I went for long hikes along these routes. They were rocky trails, winding through the orchards, and they passed the
ruins of remote settlements that had been abandoned. Along the path to Haizikou, there was a place where people had been gone for more than a decade, and the stone foundations of their homes had already been overgrown by young walnut trees. Grindstones lay in the weeds beside the trail—the last relics of the labor that once shaped this terrain.
There was still one man living on the route that led toward the Huanghua Zhen pass. Of all the trails, that was the least traveled, and the pass could be hard to find during summer months, when the brush came up. Until the 1990s, this valley was home to two small communities of houses. They were named after the families that lived there: one settlement is known as the Land of the Mas, and the other is the Land of the Lis. By the time I moved to Sancha, the Land of the Lis was completely abandoned—a half dozen buildings stood empty, their paper windows torn and flapping in the breeze. But an elderly man named Ma Yufa remained in the other enclave. Local officials had offered him a room in a retirement home down in the valley, but Ma refused to go. He still farmed, despite his age. He told the officials that whenever he became too old to work, he would simply lie down on his
kang
and wait for death.