Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (37 page)

The dealer had parked the car in front of his garage. The red Xiali dated to October of 1998; the plates were fully legal. Technically the vehicle still belonged to a tourism firm called the Beijing Shanqili Guest Services Company, but that organization had gone bankrupt and now existed only in paperwork that fit neatly inside the glove compartment. The car was unwashed. Like everything else, it was sprinkled with cement dust; the dealer used a dirty rag to wipe off the windshield. The first thing he showed Wei Ziqi was the trunk: a spare and a jack, no extra charge! “It’s never had an accident,” the dealer said. But there was a scar across the hood and dimpled dents covered the lower body like smallpox. The dealer said we could do a test-drive, and he handed the keys to Wei Ziqi, who looked at me.

I knew he had no business driving. The last time I’d allowed him to operate a vehicle unattended, he destroyed the bumper of my rented Jetta, but something about today’s situation made me reluctant to take the keys. Mostly it was
mianzi
, or face—this was an important moment for Wei Ziqi, the first automobile in his life, the fledgling businessman dealing with established entrepreneurs. Every foreigner who lives in China learns about the cultural importance of
mianzi
, and the fear of losing it; but sometimes the outsider overcompensates. In fact Wei Ziqi had an intense awareness of his own limitations, like many rural Chinese. He was a proud man but he wasn’t stupid, and now he wanted me to drive. But I misinterpreted his glance, and I failed to take the keys.

With a nervous expression, Wei Ziqi settled into the driver’s seat. He asked the dealer which gear was reverse—not a good sign—and then he turned the ignition. The rest of us stood nearby, watching. He popped the emergency brake, put it into gear, slammed the gas to the floor, and opened the clutch. He didn’t want to stall the thing but he had no idea it would move so fast. The engine roared and the tires spun; it sped backward through a huge puddle of dirty water, spraying a cement-colored arc of crap across the lot; and then the car headed directly toward a telephone pole. By this point Wei Ziqi wasn’t even attempting to look where he was going. He had his head down, studying the floor, searching desperately for the foot brake. At the last possible moment he found it—the car stopped less than three feet from the pole. My heart pounded in my chest; my
mianzi
must have been white. Once my voice returned, I said, “OK, I’ll drive.”

I went for a test run with Wei Ziqi in the passenger’s seat. I wasn’t sure how to evaluate this vehicle, or where to set expectations—it was, after all, a Chinese version of a South Korean subcompact called the Charade. The last time I had been involved in the purchase of a used automobile, I was a high school student in Missouri, where I bought a 1974 Dodge Dart for seven hundred bucks. In many ways the Xiali reminded me of that Dart. There was very little power and the brakes were soft. The body looked like hell. But the engine sounded decent—no pings, no knocks. There was even a spare tire and jack. After driving with Wei Ziqi for a few miles, I said the same thing my father had said about the Dart back in 1986: “I think it’s OK.”

At the garage Wei Ziqi handed out a round of Red Plum Blossoms. The cigarettes put the dealer in a magnanimous mood, and he said he’d throw in the sweat-stained bamboo seat covers for free. “Usually I’d sell this car for sixteen thousand yuan,” the man said. “But I’ll sell it for fifteen because you’re a friend of Yuan’s.”

“Could you go cheaper?” Wei Ziqi said. “Maybe two hundred yuan cheaper?”

The man agreed: twenty-five dollars less. “Is there anything else you’d look at?” Wei Ziqi said to me.

“What’s the mileage?” I asked.

“You can check,” the dealer said with a shrug. I poked my head inside: 14,255 kilometers. The odometer only had five digits, and there was no telling how many times it had rolled over: the total could have been 14,255 kilometers or 114,255 kilometers or 1,014,255 kilometers. There was no repair history, no mechanic’s approval. We knew nothing about how the Xiali had been used, or what role it had played in the demise of the Beijing Shanqili Guest Services Company. The dealer wouldn’t even write out a contract. “My calligraphy is bad,” he said. “Let Mr. Yuan write it.”

He gave Mr. Yuan a preprinted form with the heading “Contract.” Mr. Yuan began filling out blanks—buyer, seller, date—and stopped. “My calligraphy is bad, too,” he said. Finally Wei Ziqi wrote the whole thing. The dealer convinced him to leave out the price. (“It’s simpler that way.”) The dealer also refused to sign his name. (“You can write it for me. My calligraphy’s really bad!”) Wei Ziqi hesitated but eventually signed both names. After it was over, and the cash had changed hands, the dealer handed out Red Gold Dragons, as a way of marking the end of the transaction.

I drove the Xiali back to the city. We had to stop at the gas station down the street, because the owner had made sure the car’s tank was dry as a bone when it left his hands. I asked Wei Ziqi why the dealer had been so reluctant to sign the contract.

“I don’t know,” Wei Ziqi said. “It seemed a little strange.”

“What will you do if there’s a problem?”

“I’ll talk to Mr. Yuan,” he said.

Another friend helped him drive from Beijing back to Sancha. Later that afternoon I rented a Jetta and headed out to the village. When I arrived, Wei Ziqi was in the village lot, wiping down the Xiali. He had parked beneath the only shade tree, and the pockmarked hood was so clean it almost shone. Wei Ziqi was beaming, too—it was the happiest he’d looked in a long time. When I saw Cao Chunmei, I asked her what she thought of the Xiali. She shook her head and said, “What a terrible car!”

FROM THE BEGINNING CAO
Chunmei had opposed the purchase. She said they didn’t need a car, and it was too expensive; the family still had loans at the bank and with relatives. But the real reason for Cao Chunmei’s opposition was that an automobile represented freedom. “He already does whatever he wants,” she told me. “He goes into Huairou, he goes drinking with his friends. If he has a car, then it’ll be even easier for him to do that.” She reacted in a similar way to the village rumors that Wei Ziqi should run for Party Secretary. “I don’t want him to become Party Secretary,” Cao Chunmei told me bluntly. “I think it’ll turn into a big hassle. I see how busy the current Party Secretary is. If Wei Ziqi gets busier dealing with the village affairs, then he won’t have time to take care of things around here.”

Despite Cao Chunmei’s distaste for local politics, she had decided that she wanted to join the Party herself. In some ways it was surprising—her Buddhist beliefs seemed incompatible with the Communists, who had always scorned religion. But Cao Chunmei’s interests in the Party weren’t philosophical, or even political: she simply wanted to be part of a group, and she wanted to go places. “They get to take a good trip every summer,” she said. “They get gifts and things like that. It just seems like it would be interesting to join.” For Cao Chunmei, success had become profoundly isolating; she was responsible for much of the business’s drudge work, and even the solace of Buddhism was something she experienced alone. It was the opposite of Wei Ziqi, whose every step led to more
guanxi
, more power within the village, more contact with the outside world.

He also demanded more authority in the family. When Cao Chunmei began to talk about joining the Party, Wei Ziqi flatly refused. “There’s no need,” he told her, and left it at that. He rarely felt the urge to explain his decisions to his wife, and he kept his plans to himself. Whenever I asked Cao Chunmei about the village’s political rumors, she claimed that she didn’t know any more than I did. “Wei Ziqi won’t tell me anything,” she said. “He’ll do what he wants. I don’t control
him.” That was her typical response to conflicts:
Wo bu guan
. I don’t control it. Her dream of Party membership, like the plan to start her own business, was abandoned quietly.

LATER THAT YEAR, AFTER
Wei Ziqi had become more comfortable with the car, he drove to Huairou and acquired a new name for his son. Like virtually all of Wei Ziqi’s projects, it wasn’t mentioned until it was finished. One Friday afternoon he picked up Wei Jia from school and informed the boy that from now on he would be known as Wei Xiaosong.

In China it isn’t unusual for a name to be changed, especially if the person is a child or a young adult. Wei Ziqi had done this himself: originally he had been called Wei Zongguo. It’s the kind of patriotic name that was common in the countryside for babies born during the Cultural Revolution—
guo
means “nation.” In 1993, when Wei Ziqi was living in the city, he changed the name as part of his early attempt to become something other than a peasant. Back then, he read a book called
Name and Life
, which explained that a person called “ziqi” is likely to enjoy a career that’s “stable and developed.”

Sometimes a child’s name change occurs for more serious reasons. Parents believe that an inauspicious name brings bad fortune, and a child who is chronically ill might benefit from a new title. When I taught in Sichuan, one of my colleagues had a daughter who suffered from childhood cancer, and after years of treatment the parents finally gave her a new name. Around the same time, they were granted permission to have another baby by the local Planned Birth authorities, who sometimes make an exception if the couple’s first kid has serious medical problems. The sick daughter was school-age—old enough to understand exactly what it means when your name is changed and your mother becomes pregnant. Later that year the poor girl died, and I always thought it was awful that she spent her last months with an unfamiliar name. It seemed terrible to leave the world as somebody else.

Wei Jia’s given name is simple: the character
jia
means “good.” But it requires fourteen strokes of the pen, an unlucky number in China,
and the boy’s health had never been strong. He no longer suffered from blood problems, but he often complained of stomachaches and he had a tendency to catch colds. In the early years I blamed it on boarding at school; dormitory conditions were poor and he didn’t like the cafeteria meals. But recently junk food and inactivity had become bigger threats. The parents were strict about his studies; during weekends they made sure that he stayed on the
kang
, doing his homework. Their respect for education was admirable, but the boy never got any exercise, and certain traditional ideas about health were counterproductive. Given Wei Jia’s chronic colds, I recommended that he eat oranges, but his mother believed that a person should avoid too much fruit during winter—it’s bad for the qi, she said. Like most people in China, Wei Jia rarely drank water. The Chinese have countless obscure beliefs about which times of day are bad for fluids, and the end result is that most people simply don’t drink much. Once, Cao Chunmei and I took Wei Jia to Huairou for a routine checkup, and the doctor couldn’t run the urine test—the boy was so dehydrated that he had blood in his sample. But I couldn’t convince the parents to make sure he drank more, ate vegetables and fruits, and got more exercise. It was typical that the father responded to the boy’s health problems by changing his name. Sometimes they seemed to grasp instinctively at the worst of both worlds: the worst modern habits, the worst traditional beliefs.

The longer I lived in China, the more I worried about how people responded to rapid change. This wasn’t an issue of modernization, at least not in the absolute sense; I never opposed progress. I understood why people were eager to escape poverty, and I had a deep respect for their willingness to work and adapt. But there were costs when this process happened so fast. Often the problems were subtle—this was hard to recognize as an outsider. In the West, newspaper stories about China tended to focus on the dramatic and the political, and they emphasized the risk of instability, especially the localized protests that often occurred in the countryside. But from what I saw, the nation’s greatest turmoil was more personal and internal. Many people were searching; they longed for some kind of religious or philosophical truth, and they wanted a meaningful connection with others. They had trouble applying
past experiences to current challenges. Parents and children occupied different worlds, and marriages were complicated—rarely did I know a Chinese couple who seemed happy together. It was all but impossible for people to keep their bearings in a country that changed so fast.

Wei Jia’s new name had been selected by computer. This detail was important to Wei Ziqi—he told me that computerized name analysis was becoming more common in the cities. A man in Huairou specialized in the service, which he usually performed for a fee of fifty yuan, or about six dollars. But he waived it for Wei Ziqi, because they had friends and
guanxi
in common. He gave Wei Ziqi a one-page computer printout with extensive analysis of the new name and its future prospects. As Wei Xiaosong, the boy could expect to enjoy good fortune and longevity, as well as wealth and honor. His personality would be self-restrained and generous. The machine spat out character traits that ran down the page like listings on a stock ticker: “Strong affections. Moderate. Chaste. Graceful.”

The computer also examined the boy’s birth date and concluded that of the five traditional elements, water was the one most lacking. I didn’t need a machine to tell me that—pretty much everybody I knew in China was dehydrated. In any case, the computerized solution was to give the boy the character
Song
, which is the name of a river near Shanghai.
Xiao
means “little.” That was his new name: Little Song River.

Cao Chunmei’s response was to wash her hands of the whole affair. “
Wo bu guan
,” she said. “I don’t control that. I don’t much like the name, but it’s not my business. It’s Wei Ziqi’s business.”

We had dinner together on the weekend of the name change. It was Sunday night, and Wei Ziqi had driven down to the valley with another Party member for some mysterious meeting. It had something to do with the upcoming elections—often they met away from the village to avoid drawing attention. Wei Jia had finished his homework, and in the afternoon he read a book about dinosaurs. He was a fourth-grader now, and his reading was good; he still excelled at school. But every time somebody mentioned the new name he became very quiet. I had to ask about it several times before he answered.