His mother followed him. The other children looked up and then lost interest. The classroom was dirty, and there was a hole in the ceiling. The blackboard was chipped and scarred. Twenty children sat at their desks; each of them played with a pile of Lego-like blocks. There were only three girls. Bohai isn’t strictly a one-child township—like many parts of China that are mountainous and less populated, this area allows peasants in some villages to have a second child if the first is a girl. But it’s not unusual in China for people to bribe doctors for ultrasound information, which is restricted by law. Locals told me that the majority of babies born in Xingying are boys.

Outside, Wei Jia stood in the dust beside the car, crying. He struggled against anybody who tried to lead him back into the school. Usually, Wei Ziqi is strict with his son, but he seemed to sympathize with this fear, and now he tried to reason with him. “Everybody goes to school,” Wei Ziqi said patiently. “I did, and so did your mother. Aunt Mimi went to school, and so did Uncle Monster.”

The schoolyard’s loudspeakers crackled, and music came on for the flag-raising. The older children, wearing the red kerchiefs of the Young Pioneers, marched in place while the national anthem played. Wei Jia’s face was creased with panic. Until now, he had never seen more than a handful of children together at once.

It took nearly forty-five minutes to calm him down. His father carried him into the classroom; his mother sat him down behind a desk. After ten minutes, he made another move for the door, but this time they caught him. He cried again, another hard burst, and then he calmed down. Resignation furrowed his forehead.

We left as quietly as we could. I asked Wei Ziqi where the bathroom was, and he told me just to use the schoolyard fence on the way out. I could hear the children’s voices—talking, laughing, chanting lessons—while I pissed in the weeds. We had been at the school for almost an hour. The car seemed empty on the way home.

That day, the Idiot escaped twice from the government office. The first time, the cadres caught him just outside the gate. The second time, he made it into Bohai Township. It took a while for them to find him.

The officials telephoned Wei Ziqi and told him to pick up his brother; Wei Ziqi requested the subsidy. Neither side would budge, and finally, late in the afternoon, the cadres put the Idiot in a car and drove into the mountains. They dropped him off two miles outside Sancha. It was a steep climb, and the Idiot was not accustomed to such distances; he was fortunate to find his way back.

I heard all of this later, from Wei Ziqi, who was more or less satisfied with the exchange. The county government—a higher level than the township—had agreed to review the issue of the subsidy.

The next time I visited Sancha, the Idiot greeted me with an enormous grin and pointed at my parked automobile. He kept grunting and gesturing. I realized that he was telling the story of our trip into the valley. “I know,” I said. “I remember.” I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t understood that situation until it was too late—mei banfa. But there was no way to communicate my regret, and the Idiot continued his gestures. He seemed thrilled to see me again.

During the National Day school holiday, Wei Jia returned home with a series of purple bruises across his legs and back. It was the first week of October, and the corn had come into season; the Weis had piled their harvested crop on the porch. Wei Jia spent an afternoon playing on it. Afterward, his parents noticed that the bruises had darkened. They decided that the boy should see a doctor.

Mimi and I had come to Sancha for the holiday, and I offered to drive Wei Jia and his father down to Huairou, the nearest city. From the mountains, Huairou is roughly halfway to Beijing, and in recent years it has grown from a small town into a satellite city of the capital. At the hospital, a nurse performed a blood test and told us that the boy’s xuexiaoban count was low. I was unfamiliar with the term, and I didn’t have my dictionary.

“His count is only seventeen thousand,” the nurse said. “It should be more than a hundred and fifty thousand.” She recommended that we immediately go to the Children’s Hospital in Beijing for further tests.

Wei Jia had been born at a hospital in the capital, but this was his first time back. He was quiet during the drive to Beijing, as if sensing that something important was happening. Once we arrived at the hospital, I felt as if everybody was staring at us—the obvious foreigner, the obvious peasants. Wei Ziqi wore a surplus security-guard-uniform vest—it’s a common garment for men in the countryside—and the boy was dressed in a filthy green sweatshirt. His cloth shoes had holes in the toes.

We joined a line for another blood test. There were about thirty other children, and all of them looked like city kids—pampered products of China’s urban one-child policy, which, along with rising living standards, has undermined the traditional strictness in child-rearing. At the hospital, most children were accompanied by both parents, and often at least two grandparents as well. The adults bickered and shoved in the queue; the children whined and cried. Near my feet, a small child vomited on the floor. Inside the lab area, a little girl slipped out of the line to tinker with a tray of test tubes and slides. “Stop that!” a nurse shouted, slapping the child’s hand. A sign on the wall proclaimed, “With Your Coöperation and Our Experience, We Will Take Good Care of Your Precious.”

When Wei Jia’s turn finally came, his face twisted as if he were going to cry. “Be laoshi!” Wei Ziqi said firmly, and the boy calmed down. But he was shaking after the blood test was finished.

The doctor on duty—dressed in a dirty white coat, with a look of exhaustion on his face—recommended Vitamin C and said that the boy just needed to rest at home. It wasn’t until almost a day and a half later, after I had taken them back to Sancha and then returned to my apartment in Beijing, that I was able to look up xuexiaoban in the dictionary: “platelet.”

I went online and searched for childhood diseases with low platelet counts and bruising. Leukemia kept coming up. In a panic, I sent e-mails to three doctor friends in the United States, copying Wei Jia’s blood-test printout.

The e-mails arrived early the next morning. All three doctors said that leukemia seemed unlikely; independently, they all guessed that it was a condition known as ITP—immune thrombocytopenic purpura. ITP is a disease with unknown causes which is rarely chronic in children; generally, if the patient rests and eats well, it resolves itself within two months. But Wei Jia’s platelet count was so dangerously low that there was a risk of bleeding in the brain. “I’d give him steroids or immune globulin,” one doctor wrote. My friend Eileen Kavanagh, who was then finishing medical school in New Jersey, responded, “The thing that bothers me the most is that they didn’t put him in the hospital to figure all of this out.”

I telephoned Sancha, and Cao Chunmei answered. “He’s been fine,” she said. “But for the last half hour he’s had a nosebleed that won’t stop.”

She put her husband on the phone.

“He’s O.K. as long as he’s lying down,” Wei Ziqi said. “But if he sits up it starts bleeding again.”

“He should be in the hospital,” I said. “The doctor made a mistake.”

I had already called Mimi, who was contacting friends in order to find a better hospital in Beijing. But the only transport available in Sancha was the Weis’ motorbike, which was too rough for the boy’s condition. I told Wei Ziqi that I’d borrow Mimi’s car and drive out to the village.

Wei Ziqi and I had been born exactly two weeks apart, in June of 1969—the Year of the Rooster. One evening in Sancha, we discussed our educational experiences through junior high school, which represented the end of Wei Ziqi’s formal education. After comparing the years that we had entered various grades, Wei Ziqi looked at me shrewdly. “Did you flunk?” he asked.

Back in 1974, my parents had referred to it as “being held back,” and they had always stressed that I had been undersized rather than stupid—at the age of five, I weighed only thirty-five pounds. But there was no such euphemism in the Chinese spoken by the peasants of Sancha.

“Yes,” I said. “I Åunked nursery school.”

“I figured you must have flunked a year,” Wei Ziqi said with a grin.

He was different from the other villagers. His mind was quicker, and he seemed to be the only one who realized that the path of progress might eventually return to Sancha, which stands at the terminus of a dead-end road. Back when Wei Ziqi was born, the road had been nothing more than a dirt track that passed beneath a magnificent entrance gate to the Great Wall. The villagers tore down the gate in the nineteen-seventies, because they wanted to use the stones to build a road out. Not long after they Änished the road, people started

to leave. Nowadays, a number of houses are uninhabited, and many residents are elderly people who never had the option of going elsewhere. There are still two women, in their eighties, with bound feet.

Even the history of the village seems to have slipped away. There are no official ancient written records in Sancha, although one can find a few lonely paragraphs carved in stone high in the mountains. Along the peaks, which are too remote for villagers to forage in for stones, the Wall is mostly intact. If you follow it eastward, you eventually come to a cracked stone stele lying amid the rubble. The inscription notes that this section of the Wall was completed in the forty-third year of the reign of the Ming-dynasty emperor Wanli—in 1615. But there is no mention of the village, and nobody in Sancha knows for certain when it was first settled.

In the lower section of Sancha, where most residents are named Yan, the early-morning sunlight comes through a gap in the mountains and shines on the last remaining corner of the ruined entrance gate. Our part of the village is situated on a higher shelf—because of the mountains the sun doesn’t reach us until late morning. Nearly everybody here is named Wei. Wei Ziqi believes that his ancestors settled here during the nineteenth century, possibly after Åeeing a famine in the northern province of Shanxi, but he isn’t certain. All he knows is that he is the fifth generation of his family to live in Sancha.

Wei Ziqi is short and barrel-chested, and he rarely talks about the past; his few sentimental streaks run in other directions. He appreciates Sancha’s natural beauty; he says that’s one reason that he hasn’t moved to the city. If I ask about a hike in the mountains, his directions reflect how much of his world is botanical—turn left at the big pine, take a right at the walnut grove. Once, he told me that he wished the villagers hadn’t torn down the entrance gate, because it might have attracted visitors. Wei Ziqi is one of the few Sancha residents who collect books; he has more than thirty volumes, many of which are college texts for courses in Chinese law. For somebody like Wei Ziqi—pragmatic as well as literate—law is a natural subject of interest. When Mimi and I first rented the house, Wei Ziqi used one of his books, “Modern Economic Contracts,” to draw up a three-page handwritten agreement. He proudly explained the eleven clauses, one of which prohibited the use of the house to “store contraband explosives.” The rent was the equivalent of forty dollars a month.

Wei Ziqi farms about an acre of land, and when I first came to know him the Wei family earned about five hundred dollars in the average year. By local standards, their situation was good—they owned a motorbike, a telephone, and a black-and-white TV. But they weren’t necessarily satisfied, and Wei Ziqi kept an old blue notebook that he referred to as his “Information.” The Information consisted of simple sketched maps, as well as statistics on local altitudes and seasonal temperatures. On one page, he had written ten potential names for a tourist business that he hoped to start in Sancha. They included Mountain Peace and Happiness Village and Sweet Water Farmyard Villa (Sancha is known for having good springwater). Other pages contained long drafts of potential advertisements: “If each household uses a small amount of money and big developers invest, we can change our village into a paradise where tourists can appreciate the plants, climb the Great Wall, and enjoy peasant family meals.”

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