Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (33 page)

One of the Party’s goals in rural regions was to give people some contact with the outside. Each summer the Sancha members were taken on a free vacation, and in 2005 they traveled to the beach resort of Beidaihe. It was the first time Wei Ziqi had ever seen the ocean, and he talked about the experience for weeks. Increasingly he spent time in Huairou, both for business and for the Party. His clothing continued to change—he upgraded his city shoes, and he bought a new pair of blue jeans and a black jacket made of artificial leather. He carried different cigarette brands for town and country. In the village he smoked Red Plum Blossom, the white packs, which cost less than forty cents. But in Huairou, where it was important not to look like a peasant, he made sure to carry the more expensive red or yellow packs. Sometimes a wealthy person stayed at the guesthouse and left a box of high-end smokes, which Wei Ziqi hoarded for crucial business situations.

For a Chinese male, nothing captures the texture of
guanxi
better than cigarettes. They’re a kind of semaphore—in a world where much is left unsaid, every gesture with a cigarette means something. You offer a smoke at certain moments, and you receive them at others; the give-and-take establishes a level of communication. And sometimes the absence of an exchange marks boundaries. A city person has little to say to a peasant and naturally he will not accept his cigarettes. Even between two businessmen, one person might refuse a smoke as a way of establishing superiority, especially if he carries a better brand. All told there are more than four hundred different types of Chinese cigarettes, each with a distinct identity and meaning. Around Beijing, peasants smoke Red Plum Blossom whites. Red Pagoda Mountain can be found in the pockets of average city folk. Middle-class entrepreneurs like Zhongnanhai Lights. Businessmen with a flair for the foreign sport State Express 555. A nouveau riche tosses out Chunghwa like it’s rice. Pandas are the rarest beast of all. That was Deng Xiaoping’s favorite brand, and government quotas
make them hard to find; a single pack costs more than twelve dollars. If you carry Panda, you’re probably just being pretentious.

Most men don’t worry that cigarettes are bad for their health. In the southern city of Wenzhou, I once met a businessman in his thirties who described smoking as a career move. When I asked if he wanted to quit, the man looked at me like I was crazy. “No way!” he said. “I know it’s not good for you, but I’m young so I don’t feel any effect. And it’s important for business. If you’re trying to pull
guanxi
with somebody, you have to take him out to dinner, and you need to smoke and drink with him.”

The Chinese government operates under similar logic. All tobacco companies are state-owned, and the industry provides significant revenue; it also directly employs more than half a million people. From the government’s perspective, smoking is important to stability, both economic and social. Some cigarettes are even subsidized—the cheapest brands cost as little as thirty cents a pack, because officials fear that farmers will become unhappy if they can’t afford to smoke. And the issue of health is essentially separate. In 2000, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention commissioned a study that showed that the health-related costs of smoking outweigh the revenue benefits. But that’s not the key calculus: all that matters is who pays what. Until now, there has been no nationwide health insurance, so the government has collected its cigarette profits without paying for the damage. Each year, over one million Chinese people die from smoking-related illness, and that figure is expected to double by the year 2025. Now that the government is trying to establish some form of universal health coverage, perhaps their attitude toward the tobacco industry will change, but for the time being it remains a source of revenue.

Wei Ziqi put away more than a pack a day. He knew it was bad for him, and on several occasions he tried to quit. But the status was far more addictive than the nicotine. Once he told a story about a recent trip to the city. “I had dinner with a number of people I know in Huairou,” he said. “Some of them were government officials, and some were Party members from other villages. I had a pack of Chunghwa cigarettes that had been given to me by a customer. That made me feel good, to
have cigarettes like that. There was one man at the table who had Red Pagoda Mountain, and another had State Express 555. But I was the one with the most expensive brand.

“They were all important people,” he continued, smiling at the memory. “You could say that each one had some possible use to me. I’m thinking about installing a solar water heater for the guesthouse, and there’s a government program that pays for things like that in the countryside. One of the men at the dinner deals with that program. So it might be possible for me to install it for free.”

AT HARVEST TIME THE
old routines always return. The Party doesn’t hold rural meetings during that season, and farmers like Wei Ziqi put aside their Huairou trips; everything is aimed at bringing in the crops. By far the most important task is gathering walnuts, which ripen so quickly that villagers have to work in groups. That’s the only local harvest whose labor is still communal—a band of eight or nine will work together, starting with one person’s trees and then moving on to the next. The profits stay with each individual owner, but the labor is shared and so are the meals. Each evening, the group eats in the home of the owner of that day’s trees. Over the course of two weeks, they move steadily through the village, by day and by night—orchard to orchard, home to home.

In September of 2005, I joined Wei Ziqi’s crew on the first day they harvested his trees. There were nine other people, mostly close relatives; they had already been working together for a week. We started at seven-thirty in the morning, and by nine o’clock it was already hot. The mid-September sunshine was still strong, filtering through the leaves of the orchard, covering the ground with a quilt of mottled shadows. The trees grew on terraced tracts, bordered by walls of stone, and already a scattering of fresh walnuts had fallen to the forest floor.

There is only one tool for this kind of work: a thin lilac stick, ten feet long and tapered at the end. For smaller trees, a person can stand on the ground and use the pole to reach most branches. The harvest always begins this way: the crew circles a tree, eyes trained upward, beating the
branches like children at a piñata party. When somebody makes good contact, the stick emits a loud
thwack
, and three or four walnuts thud to the ground. There are leaves as well—bits of branches that catch the sunlight as they flutter down. With everybody working, the calmness of the forest is shattered all at once, and there’s a beauty to the shifting sound and light: the whistling sticks, the fresh leaves floating through the air, the walnuts thudding heavily into the dirt. After it’s over the trees seem to sigh—branches hum softly, still vibrating with the memory of the assault.

Bigger trees grow as tall as fifty feet, and harvesters have to climb onto the limbs. For Wei Ziqi, it’s easy: he wedges his fingers into the crevices of the bark and pulls himself up. Amid the branches he can move without relying on his hands. He wears soft-soled military sneakers, the kind he avoids for Huairou trips, and he curls the toes around limbs for balance. He edges out onto thicker branches, step by step, carrying his pole in both hands. If there’s a convenient limb at his back, he leans against it, but often he relies on nothing but balance. There’s no ladder, no ropes, no harness—no safety equipment of any kind. But high in the trees he moves easily, and his build is perfect for such work: short-limbed and efficiently muscled, with the right combination of strength and balance.

On the day of the harvest, I watched Wei Ziqi climb into the branches of the first big tree, and then he lowered himself to the ground. I asked if he had ever fallen, and he shook his head.

“Does anybody ever fall?”

“Almost never,” he said. “A couple of years ago one of the neighbors fell and broke his shoulder.”

We continued to the next tree, and once more he reached the top in a flash. I realized that in the past I had so often seen him out of his element—in the Beijing hospitals, in the shops of Huairou, in the driver’s seat of an unfamiliar car. Over the years I had witnessed his transition from farming to business, country to city; but I had rarely seen him work in the orchards. Here in the trees he was completely at home.

The Sancha harvest is overwhelmingly male. The only woman who climbs the trees is the Party Secretary; she’s strong enough to handle even
the most demanding labor. Other wives do lighter work, like collecting walnuts on the ground and shelling the harvested crop. In the evenings, they cook meals for the work crews. This agricultural divide has shaped local culture, which is extremely male-dominated, even by rural Chinese standards. Apart from the anomaly of the Party Secretary, men wield the most power, and some local traditions, like grave-sweeping, are restricted to males only. In the southwest, where I once lived, the gender divide never seems quite so broad. But in those regions the main crop is rice, which requires a great deal of work but little strength, and women spend as much time in the paddies as men do.

Our harvest-day group of ten included only two women. They stayed on the ground, along with me and Cao Chunmei’s father, who had come from out of town to help. Each of us had some excuse to avoid climbing—gender or age or foreignness—and it was our job to collect the walnuts that fell from the high branches. They rolled down rocky slopes, and into bushes, and through thick weeds. Soon my arms began to itch, and my back ached; my hands turned black from the walnuts. Everybody else chatted idly, as if this were a social occasion. They talked about food and money, and they discussed the price of walnuts. Villagers usually sold to buyers who traveled around the countryside during autumn, and in past years the prices remained stable throughout a season. But nowadays rates changed rapidly—sometimes as much as 10 percent in the span of a single day. It was all because of the new roads: buyers could more easily reach the villages, and more people did this kind of business; their competition led to price wars. Villagers had to decide the best time to sell, and this was a common line of conversation while we chased walnuts through the undergrowth.

When they weren’t talking about food or prices, or the price of food, they ate. Sometimes a walnut shattered on its way down, and the harvesters finished it off. They ate an amazing amount—the sounds of chewing were as common as the rustle of branches. When Cao Chunmei’s father offered me one, I politely refused. The last thing I wanted on a hot day of hard labor was a fresh walnut.

“Ho Wei doesn’t like walnuts,” he said.

“Why doesn’t he like walnuts?”

“Foreigners eat different things.”

Forty feet high in the tree, Wei Ziqi was invisible, but his voice recited a familiar litany: “He doesn’t like eggs, either. He won’t eat meat on the bone. He doesn’t like bean paste…”

The feel of the walnuts—the cool rough texture and the fresh scent on my hands—brought back childhood memories. The trees had been common in my Missouri hometown, where most people saw the crop as a nuisance; walnuts clogged up lawnmowers and rolled into streets. Kids liked to throw them at cars. One year my mother heard about a business in the nearby town of Booneville that bought walnuts in bulk. For a week, my sisters and I composed a small but determined peasant work crew, ringing doorbells to ask for permission to fill garbage bags with the harvest. We packed them into the family’s AMC Hornet and drove to Booneville, where a man emptied the walnuts into an automatic desheller and grinder. The black pulp that came out was so condensed that it fit into a single supermarket-sized bag. The man placed it on a scale, consulted a fee book, and wrote a check for one dollar and seventy cents. For months the Hornet stank of walnuts, and it wasn’t for many years that I understood why my mother couldn’t help laughing when the man handed us the check.

In the Sancha orchards I told the story to Wei Ziqi. He was impressed that Americans leave walnuts to rot in the street—he picked up a big one and remarked that it was worth one
jiao
, or one and a quarter American cents. That year the walnut market was good, and it was getting better—every couple of days the dealers raised their prices.

After night fell, all of us ate dinner in the Weis’ home. Cao Chunmei had spent the afternoon cooking: potatoes and tofu and pork, fresh-picked beans and fried corn cakes. She barbecued trout from the family pond. But she didn’t sit down to eat with the men: Sancha meals are often segregated. Even the two women who had labored alongside me were relegated to a smaller table in the back room.

The men gathered around the main table, where they argued briefly about the place of honor. Finally Cao Chunmei’s father agreed
to accept—at fifty-eight he was the oldest harvester. He was seated at the table’s head, directly below the Denver skyline. The digital readout on the portrait said that it was twenty degrees Celsius.

One harvester was named Wei Congfa. He is Wei Ziqi’s cousin, and he’s slightly deaf. The man had never seen the Denver photograph before, and now he looked at it quizzically. “Is that the temperature in that city?” he asked.

“It’s the temperature in this room,” somebody explained.

But Wei Congfa couldn’t hear. “It’s the temperature where?”

“IT’S—THE—TEMPERATURE—IN—THIS—ROOM!”

“Here in the house?”

“IN—THIS—ROOM!”

“So what’s that city for?”

I sat next to Yan Kejun, a man in his thirties who lived in the lower part of Sancha. He was one of the brightest people in the village, the kind of man who liked watching the news, and he always had questions about America. For the past month he had been focused on the news of Hurricane Katrina. A couple of days earlier, at another harvest dinner, we had a conversation about the events in New Orleans.

“You know,” he said, “when something like that happens in America, it actually matters. The population is so low that you have to worry about losing a few hundred or even a thousand people.”