Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip by Peter Hessler

Author:Peter Hessler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Travel, China, Essays & Travelogues, Asia
ISBN: 9781847679017
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2010-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

“Do you remember the last person you penalized?”

“No.”

For a Politeness Monitor, these responses seemed awfully terse and uncommunicative, but who was I to judge? I was one of the few people who wasn’t asked to criticize Wei Jia on a regular basis. In any case, a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture. It’s truly the foundation—everything begins in places like Shayu Elementary School. The classroom reflects the way people behave in the streets, the way village governments function, even the way the Communist Party structures its power. Sometimes it depressed me, but I had to admit that the education was extremely functional. Wei Jia wasn’t necessarily learning the skills that I valued, but there was no question that he was being prepared for Chinese society.

It was also true that he enjoyed school. He was comfortable with his classmates, and he excelled in his studies; he almost never complained. He liked his stark dorm room—bars on the window, eight mattresses on steel frames, a rusty radiator that stayed rock-cold until November 15. (Heat, like everything else at school, followed a strict timetable.) A child can adapt to anything, and there’s always a spark of the individual, even amid the most intense collectivization. Wei Jia’s Young Pioneer scarf never looked quite right; he knotted it at an odd angle and the edges were frayed and torn. His favorite subject was English—he seemed to like the fact that he had studied it earlier than the other children and could pronounce words better. He said that when he grew up he wanted to be either a professional driver or a computer technician.

On Friday afternoons I often picked him up from school and drove him back to Sancha. In the upper village there was never any traffic, and usually I let him sit on my lap and steer the car through the switchbacks. On Monday mornings he guided us back down the hill. I never noticed much difference in his demeanor; he was just as happy to return to school as he was to leave every weekend. One Friday, when I stopped in the dorm to pick him up, he asked if I wanted to see something. He glanced around, made sure nobody was looking, and lifted the corner of his mattress. There were treasures hidden beneath: a trading card of the cartoon character Ultraman, a toy gun made from elaborately folded paper. A creased photograph featured Wei Jia in a red martial-arts costume, standing at attention, on a day when he had been chosen to represent the school at the visit of a Japanese dignitary to the Great Wall. After we studied these treasures, and Wei Jia told me their stories, he glanced around and replaced the mattress. That was his secret—it remained safe every weekend, hidden in the dormitory, while he followed the long winding road back to the village.

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