“Kindergarten”
Peter Hessler.
New Yorker Magazine, April 5, 2004.
The night before his Ärst day of kindergarten, Wei Jia refused to talk about
it. He was five years old, and he had spent the summer playing in Sancha, wearing
nothing but a dirty tank top and a pair of underpants. Sancha is a small village
in the mountains north of Beijing, and, along with a Chinese-American friend
named Mimi Kuo, I rent a weekend house there from Wei Jia’s relatives.
The village is home to around a hundred and fifty peasants, who make their living
primarily from orchards. That Sunday evening, while we were eating dinner, I
asked Wei Jia if he was excited about going to school the next day. He ignored
the question.
Earlier in the day, Mimi and I had made the two-hour drive from Beijing. It
was the first week of September, and the walnuts had come into season; peasants
carried long sticks that they used to knock the nuts onto the ground. Along
the road we saw dozens of men, some on bicycles, their sticks poised as if for
a joust. We also passed a topless elderly woman. Her silver hair was well groomed,
and she walked at a determined pace. I pulled over to the side of the road.
“Leave me alone!” the woman shouted when Mimi stepped out of the
car. “There’s nothing wrong!” Tears shined on her cheeks;
she clutched her shirt in one hand. When the woman stormed past, we could see
fresh bruises across her back.
We drove a bit farther and tried again. She began screaming the moment Mimi
opened the door. “I’m not going back there!” the woman shouted.
“I’m not going back!” She veered out into the road, causing
an oncoming car to slow down. Perhaps in the next village there would be somebody
who knew her and would help. It was only two miles; surely she would make it
that far. This kind of thing happens in the countryside, and sometimes an outsider’s
attempt to help only does more harm. “Mei banfa,” the Chinese say—nothing
can be done.
At seven o’clock the following morning, we left for school. Wei Jia wore
khaki trousers and a red T-shirt. I had given him a new Mickey Mouse backpack,
and his mother had put a pencil box in one of the pockets. Inside the box was
a single pencil. The pencil was newly sharpened; the trousers still had a crease.
It was the first time I had ever seen Wei Jia in clean clothes.
I’d known the boy’s family since 2001, when Mimi and I began spending
time in Sancha. I went to the village because it was quiet—there were
no restaurants, no shops, no bus service. When I sat at my desk to write, I
usually heard only the sounds of rural life: the bray of a mule, the wind in
the walnut trees. Three or four times a week, a flatbed truck rumbled up the
hill to sell basic groceries. Twice a day, in the morning and just before sunset,
the government propaganda speakers on the telephone poles screeched to life.
Village announcements, national news, Communist Party slogans—all of it
echoed off the valley’s high rock walls. But rarely in Sancha did I hear
the sound of children playing. The local elementary school closed years ago,
because young families tended to move away; all across China, peasants have
been leaving rural areas for the economic opportunity of the cities. The few
families that remained in Sancha were small, because of the government’s
planned-birth policies, and the children attended schools in the more heavily
populated villages down in the valley, ten miles away, where they either boarded
or lived with relatives.
That year, Wei Jia was the only kindergartner from Sancha. He was going to live
with his grandparents in Xingying, a village with an elementary school. On the
morning of his first day, Mimi drove the car and the boy sat on my lap, in the
front seat. Wei Ziqi, his father, and Cao Chunmei, his mother, rode in the back.
Between them sat Wei Ziqi’s older brother—the Idiot.
Once, I asked Cao Chunmei what the Idiot’s real name was, but she didn’t
know. Everybody simply called him the shazi, which means “idiot.”
He was in his forties. Most villages in China seem to have a shazi or two from
that generation, because in the past the peasant diet often lacked iodine. A
pregnant woman who does not consume enough iodine runs the risk of bearing a
mentally handicapped child. Nowadays, the widespread distribution of iodized
salt has dramatically reduced such birth defects in rural China.
Generally, the Idiot seemed as happy as anybody in Sancha. He ate well, and
he spent his days on the Weis’ front porch, high on the mountain. From
the porch one could see for miles: the tile-roofed village, the winding road,
the ruined traces of the Great Wall atop the mountain peaks. These were the
boundaries of the Idiot’s world. He couldn’t do much work in the
fields, and he couldn’t talk. Whenever he wanted to say something, he
contorted his face with such passion that it seemed as if the power of speech
had Åed precisely at that moment and he was just beginning to grapple with its
loss. But in fact he had never spoken. The villagers ignored his attempts to
communicate.
This was the first time I had seen the Idiot leave Sancha, and I asked Wei Ziqi
why he was coming with us. “We have a little problem to take care of at
the government office,” he said.
Wei Jia leaned forward with both hands on the dashboard as we drove out of the
village. He rarely got to ride in an automobile, and the experience for him
was anything but passive. At every turn, I felt him edging toward the windshield,
trying to see what was around the bend. He lurched forward whenever we reached
the crest of a hill. I have never seen a child’s car seat in China, and
I was keenly aware of the fact that I should put Wei Jia in the back; but it
would have broken his heart. And so I held him tightly.
We came down from the mountains, past the freshly cut stalks of wheat and corn
in the valley. The men with sticks were going at the walnuts; husks crunched
beneath our tires. Children walked along the road. “See, they have backpacks,
too,” Cao Chunmei said. “They’re going to school just like
you.” Wei Jia’s arms were stiff against the dash.
As we approached Bohai Township, Wei Ziqi asked Mimi to stop at the government
office. Then he explained why the Idiot had come along.
“The government is supposed to pay a monthly fee to help us take care
of him,” he said. “That’s the law. I’ve asked the Party
Secretary in Sancha about it, but she hasn’t helped. So the only thing
to do is to come here ourselves. I’ll ask them to pay the fee now, and
if they don’t, then I’ll leave the Idiot until they’re willing
to pay it. It’s their responsibility.”
“You’re going to leave him at the government office?” Mimi
asked.
“Yes,” Wei Ziqi said. “It’s the only way to get their
attention.”
Mimi asked how much the monthly fee should be.
“Fifty yuan at the very least,” Wei Ziqi said. It was the equivalent
of about six dollars.
We parked outside the government compound. In front, there was a sculpture consisting
of a shiny steel ball and an enormous twisted rod. Many of the local townships
had recently erected sculptures in a similar style, accompanied by slogans intended
to inspire images of modernity and prosperity. The Bohai Township slogan was
“The Star of the Century.” The sculpture was hideous. Wei Ziqi walked
through the gate, followed by his brother. The Idiot’s face had been blank
all morning.
Wei Jia kept his hands on the dash. Five minutes later, his father returned.
He was alone. We kept driving.
Wei Jia was the smallest five-year-old I have ever known. His mother often worried
about his health; he was a finicky eater, and he weighed only thirty pounds.
Four-year-olds towered over him; a child of three was often nearly as big. Wei
Jia’s mind was sharp, but he had a speech impediment, and even his parents
had difficulty understanding him. Yet he had a wiry strength, and his sense
of balance was remarkable.
For the last year, he had been allowed to roam free in the village, and he moved
easily along the mountain paths above his home. It was impossible to wear him
out. He almost never cried. His capacity for roughhousing was infinite: it was
as if the toughness and dexterity of a nine-year-old had been squeezed into
a three-year-old’s body. Over time, he came to call me Mogui Shushu (Uncle
Monster), a play on the traditional term of respect used by Chinese children
for adults. I was the first foreigner he had ever met.
Wei Jia’s face was a perfect oval. His hair was cropped short, and his
eyes glowed with mischief. But his parents could set him straight at a moment’s
notice. They avoided praising him—like traditional Chinese parents, they
had a deep fear of flattery. Partly it was modesty, but there was also the superstition
that pride would attract misfortune.
Occasionally, if I wanted to annoy Mimi with my Western ways, I would relentlessly
praise the boy to Cao Chunmei: “Wei Jia is so good-looking.”
“He’s ugly,” his mother would say immediately.
“He’s so smart.”
“He’s stupid. Not a bit smart.”
“What a nice child.”
“Cut it out,” Mimi said, in English.
“He’s a bad boy,” the mother said.
The only praise that I ever heard the parents give Wei Jia was a single adjective:
laoshi. The dictionary defines it as “honest,” but the term is difficult
to translate. It also means obedient, as well as having a certain sense of propriety
that is characteristic of people in the countryside. “Wei Jia is laoshi,”
his parents would say, and that was the closest they came to pride.
We parked by the back gate of the Xingying Elementary School. A teacher greeted
us and led us inside. Wei Jia’s face was blank. He walked into the classroom,
stopped dead, and announced, loudly, “This place is no good!”
His parents tried to grab him, but he squirmed free and ran out the door. He
was crying now, rushing back through the gate to the car. “I’m going
home!” he said. “I don’t want to be here!”