姜小白对《Country Driving》的笔记(5)

“Another time I hit a dog while driving in the countryside north of Beijing. The animal darted out from behind a house and lunged at the front of my Jetta; I swerved, but it was too late. That was a common problem—Chinese dogs, like everybody else in the country, weren’t quite accustomed to having automobiles around. When I returned the car, Mr. Wang seemed pleased to see that the plastic cover for the right signal light had been smashed. He asked me what I had hit.

“A dog,” I said.

“Gou mei wenti?” he said. “The dog didn’t have a problem, did it?”

“The dog had a problem,” I said. “It died.”

Mr. Wang’s smile got bigger. “Did you eat it?”

“It wasn’t that kind of dog,” I said. “It was one of those tiny little dogs.”

“Well, sometimes if a driver hits a big dog,” Mr. Wang said, “he just throws it in the trunk, takes it home, and cooks it.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking; he was a dog owner himself, but in China that doesn’t necessarily involve dietary restrictions. He charged me twelve bucks for the light cover—the same price as a midsize dent.”

“Where are you going?” the man said.

Both questions were moot: this road had no turnoffs for forty miles. I asked if he wanted a ride, and he shrugged and got in. He was twenty-five years old, with a thin crooked mustache that crossed his lip like a calligrapher’s mistake. He was dressed neatly, in a blue button-down shirt, and he said he lived in Yinchuan, the provincial capital. I asked if he had had some kind of trouble on the road.

“No,” he said. “I come here every month, just to walk. There are three daily buses that follow this road. Nine thirty, twelve thirty, and two thirty. The early one drops me off and then I walk for a while. I usually catch one of the other two back to Yinchuan.”

He had a strange, spasmodic way of speaking—words piled fast in jerky sentences, like he was trying to fill all the space that surrounded us.

“He wouldn’t tell me his full name; all he said was that his family name was Zhen. But he answered at length when I asked why he came to the Tengger Desert.

“I used to be in the military,” Zhen said. “I was a soldier in the 1990s, and I was stationed in Shaanxi, in the Qinling Mountains. Every day we were in the wilderness, and now sometimes I miss it. I don’t know exactly how to say it, but that was a very happy time. It was difficult, of course, but there was honor and pride to the job. And it didn’t have anything to do with me—everything was about the squadron. The group was more important than the person. That’s what I really liked about it. We got to know each other and depend on each other, and eventually it’s like your individual self isn’t so significant anymore. That’s why I come here every month. It’s very“empty in the desert and it reminds me of the way I used to feel.”

Zhen told me frankly that he didn’t like the United States—in particular he blamed the Americans for NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. After completing his military service, he had received a government-assigned job in a grain company in Yinchuan. He was single, and he intended to never marry.

“Part of it is money,” he said. “If you don’t have much money, it’s hard to get married. But the main reason is that I believe people should be more united, and marriage has a way of breaking that up. Right now I have good friends and we get together to eat and drink and talk. It’s a little like the times I remember in the military. But once you marry you can’t do that anymore. You spend all your time with your family. That sense of togetherness is gone, and I don’t want that to happen.”

I asked if he had any hobbies apart from walking alone across the Tengger.

“I really like driving,” he said. “That’s my favorite thing to do. I can’t wait to get my license.”

He had nearly finished a driving course, and eventually he hoped to become a cabbie. If possible, he would buy his own car, but in the meantime he practiced with friends every chance he got. He asked me when I had learned to drive—it amazed him that I had started at sixteen, like many Americans. In China, the minimum driving age is eighteen, but the important issue is financial. By the time people are able to pay for a driving course, and consider buying a car, they’re often already in their thirties.”

“But the child refused to make eye contact. His mouth held stubborn until Wei Ziqi reached over and cuffed him sharply on the side of the head; all at once the boy collapsed into tears. “You need to listen to Teacher Yang!” Wei Ziqi shouted. “She says you walk around the classroom whenever you feel like it. You can’t do that! And she says you don’t eat all of your dinner in the dormitory.”

Cao Chunmei spoke up: “You know what will happen if you don’t eat well? You’ll get sick again. Do you want to go back to the hospital?”

“Suddenly Wei Ziqi reached over and pulled the boy’s trousers up to his knees, revealing his bare legs. “What if you get those bruises again?” Wei Ziqi shouted. “What are we going to do if that happens?”

Cao Chunmei rushed over to examine the boy. “You need to eat well or you’ll get sick! You don’t want to get sick again!”

The parents’ voices grew shrill, almost panicked. But there was a sudden tenderness to their touch; together they inspected the child’s legs, looking for bruises. It was as if all the unspoken fears from last year’s crisis had returned, and they gathered close on the kang. The boy wept—he threw back his head and wailed.”

“City guests had a tendency to bring packaged snacks on their trips to the countryside, and they often gave the leftovers to the family before driving back to Beijing. Soon junk food composed a good part of Wei Jia’s diet. Whenever he pleased, he helped himself to the stash of chips and instant noodles; at meals he was rarely hungry. “He likes anything that comes in a package,” his mother complained. “He’ll always prefer that to whatever I cook. I can’t get him to eat anything else.”

There was no concept of discipline with regard to consumption. In the recent past the village had been so poor that people ate whenever they could, and a parent’s main responsibility was to feed a child as much as possible. Fifteen years ago, it would have been unimaginable that any mother would deliberately withhold something from her son, but all of that had changed so fast that people couldn’t adjust. I tried to explain to Cao Chunmei and Wei Ziqi that this is a common problem in America, where a careful parent has to limit television and snacks. And given the boy’s history of health problems, it was particularly important to monitor his diet. But the village mindset ran too deep: a child eating was always a good thing, and there was no point in having a new television if you didn’t use it.

During vacations the boy changed almost before my eyes. At school he couldn’t get snacks, and the cafeteria food wasn’t so fattening, but at home he watched cartoons and ate chips. Soon he had a belly; his cheeks grew round and his legs got flabby. By the time he was nine years old, he was overweight. Sometimes I forced him out to the empty lot to play soccer, but he got winded after five minutes.”

“But the child refused to make eye contact. His mouth held stubborn until Wei Ziqi reached over and cuffed him sharply on the side of the head; all at once the boy collapsed into tears. “You need to listen to Teacher Yang!” Wei Ziqi shouted. “She says you walk around the classroom whenever you feel like it. You can’t do that! And she says you don’t eat all of your dinner in the dormitory.”

Cao Chunmei spoke up: “You know what will happen if you don’t eat well? You’ll get sick again. Do you want to go back to the hospital?”

“Suddenly Wei Ziqi reached over and pulled the boy’s trousers up to his knees, revealing his bare legs. “What if you get those bruises again?” Wei Ziqi shouted. “What are we going to do if that happens?”

Cao Chunmei rushed over to examine the boy. “You need to eat well or you’ll get sick! You don’t want to get sick again!”

The parents’ voices grew shrill, almost panicked. But there was a sudden tenderness to their touch; together they inspected the child’s legs, looking for bruises. It was as if all the unspoken fears from last year’s crisis had returned, and they gathered close on the kang. The boy wept—he threw back his head and wailed.”

“The actor who plays Chairman Mao is back there!” one of them said.

“Which row?”

“Twenty-five!”

He had the middle seat, wedged between two Wenzhou businessmen, who had conked out like nearly everybody else on the flight. But the actor who played Chairman Mao was completely alert. He wore a neat gray suit, a red tie, and stage makeup—his face glowed with unnatural brightness. His teeth gleamed, too, and his hair had been dyed black and brushed away from his forehead, the way Mao used to do it. He even had a prosthetic mole on the left side of his chin. Every time somebody walked past on their way to the bathroom, they did a double take: Mao Zedong, sitting in economy class, seat 25E.

After we landed in Wenzhou, a bus transferred all passengers from “the plane to the terminal. The bus was even more crowded than the plane, and I found myself pressed against Chairman Mao. I introduced myself and gave him a business card; he fished one of his own out of a pocket. It listed no fewer than seven official titles:

Jin Yang, The Actor Who Plays the Role of the Great Leader Mao Zedong

Director, Phoenix Cultural and Artistic Center

Director-General, China International Film Company, Ltd.

Vice-Manager, Beijing Strong and Prosperous International Martial Arts Cultural Development Company

Business Director, Beijing Film Research Institute

Honorary Director, Zhonghua Societal University Film“Institute

High-Level Advisor, China Red Dragonfly Group

Chief Inspector, China Red Dragonfly Business and Cultural Center

He was traveling to Wenzhou in order to film a miniseries for China Central Television. They planned to tell the story of an incident from the 1940s, when the Red Army clashed with Japanese invaders in Zhejiang. Jin Yang said that for the past decade he had played the Chairman in movies and television shows. He smiled when he read my business card.

“Oh, you’re a journalist,” he said. “There was a famous American journalist named Edgar Snow who was friends with Chairman Mao.”