Winter is the quietest season in Sancha. There are no crops; apart from some
pruning, there is little work in the orchards. The villagers often remain in
bed until midmorning, and they eat two meals a day instead of three. Everything
slows down.
Wei Jia stayed home from school most of that winter. For two months, he hardly
left the house, and his parents were careful with his meals. The doctors gave
him a month’s worth of steroids. There was a brief period during which
Wei Jia whined and cried easily—his parents said that he had learned to
act this way from his neighbor in the hospital, the city boy with kidney problems.
Whenever Wei Jia cried, his parents mocked him for looking ridiculous, and soon
he stopped. Over the winter he gained nine pounds. His father taught him how
to write some simple Chinese characters, and together they listened to English-language
tapes.
Wei Ziqi kept busy that winter. He enlarged his front porch and part of his
home, to prepare for summer tourists, and he made up a new business card. The
name changed from A Small Post on the Great Wall to A Post on the Great Wall.
Wei Ziqi acquired a cell phone; it didn’t work in the village, because
the mountains were too high, but he could use it in Huairou, where he increasingly
spent time on business—meeting people, buying construction materials.
For thirty yuan, he purchased a pair of black leather shoes that he reserved
strictly for trips to the city. At home, he kept the shoebox in good condition.
A brand name had been printed on the box: “Italy.” Later that year,
the government agreed to pay the subsidy for the Idiot.
Over the winter, I made a trip back to America, where a friend asked me if I
planned to have Wei Jia tested for H.I.V. I knew that I would never suggest
such a test, because I didn’t trust the hospitals, and the parents would
find the request strange. With every step that I took—from the United
States to Beijing, from Beijing to the village—familiar rules slipped
away. Like everyone else, in a crisis I simply reacted. But after the emergency
had passed I sometimes felt an emptiness that reminded me that I was far from
home, and that it was not my village, not my child.
Mimi and I returned to Sancha for Qing Ming, the Day of Clear Brightness. It
was the first week of April and the apricot trees had just begun to bloom; a
thin pink color was brushed across the lower hills. Qing Ming is the Chinese
holiday for the dead and is celebrated by tending the tombs of ancestors. In
the countryside, it also marks the start of the busy season. In Sancha, only
the adult men perform the tomb-sweeping. We awoke at dawn and hiked into the
hills behind the village.
Each tomb is nothing more than a mound of dirt, and the villagers cover the
piles with fresh earth. Mimi took photographs—because she was an outsider,
it was fine for her to come along. The tombs were arranged in neat rows, according
to generation, and Wei Ziqi started with a single mound at the back. “This
is the Laozu,” he said as he shovelled dirt onto the pile. The word means
“Old Ancestor.” When I asked about the dead man’s name, Wei
Ziqi shrugged. “I’ve never heard it,” he said. “But
he was the first one to be buried here.”
The next line of tombs was the generation of his great-grandparents, and then
he heaped dirt onto his grandparents’ grave. The men chatted idly while
they worked. It was communal: a man took particular care with the tombs of his
own ancestors, but everybody added a little dirt to every tomb. After the shovelling,
they burned money for the dead to use in the afterlife. The bills looked like
official Chinese currency, but they were labelled, in English, “The Bank
of Heaven Company, Ltd.”
The cemetery had run out of space for Wei Ziqi’s parents’ generation.
We hiked down the mountain to his parents’ grave site, which was next
to a small plot of farmland. Wei Ziqi paused to examine a tangle of fur that
was strewn across the path. “Rabbit,” he said. “A hawk got
it, probably.”
As we walked, I asked him what his father had been like.
“He was a peasant,” Wei Ziqi said simply.
I pressed him, asking what he remembered most about his father.
“He liked to play cards,” Wei Ziqi said. We continued down the hill.
A moment later, he said, “I remember that my father had a bad temper.”
That evening, I was finishing dinner with the Weis when a neighbor stopped by
and said that his grandson was running a fever. He wanted to go down to the
valley to Shayu, twenty minutes away, where there is a small clinic.
I agreed to drive, and we piled into the car that I had rented for the week.
Wei Jia sat on his father’s lap in the front seat. The sick child, a four-year-old
named Huang Hongyu, sat in the back with his grandparents.
At the clinic, a doctor examined the child. He said that the problem wasn’t
serious, and he prepared to give the boy an injection.
“I have an idea,” I said to Wei Jia, pulling him outside. “Do
you want to drive the car?”
I put him on my lap, behind the wheel. We pulled away just as the child in the
clinic started screaming.
“I don’t cry when I get a shot,” Wei Jia said.
We made a loop around the village. By the time we returned, the rest of them
were ready to leave. Huang Hongyu had calmed down, and the grandparents seemed
relieved at the doctor’s words. Halfway back to Sancha, I allowed Wei
Jia to sit on my lap again. He held the wheel tightly as we took the switchbacks
up the mountain. The boy in the back was carsick and began to vomit.
“Do you want me to stop?” I asked.
“It’s not necessary,” the grandfather said. He had come prepared
with plastic bags.
I rolled down the window and kept driving. We came to the lower village, and
Wei Jia leaned forward in order to see more clearly. Electric lights glowed
a soft orange against the brick of the homes, and then, high above, there was
a dark line where the mountains gave way to stars and the great emptiness. The
boy in the back had stopped throwing up. I kept telling myself that the children
were fine and we were almost home.