"Country Driving"

[fiefoe]

My favorite part of the book is the mid-section in which the author made friends with the Jias in Sancha, a village near Huairou.

• .. an old tradition in rural China. Even as far back as the seventeenth century, printed books could be found in villages, where literate peasants often kept guides that showed them how to write up simple legal agreements.
• laoshi.. the term 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.
• Nearly fifteen years after Cao Chunmei's wedding.. (she could) still note every financial detail in perfect order. The banquet cost six hundred and ninety yuan... When Cao Chunmei talked about the event, she recited these numbers like an accountant.
• There was a brief period during which the boy whined and cried easily - he had learned this behavior from his roommate in the hospital, the pudgy city child. Whenever Wei Jia cried, his parents mocked him relentlessly.
• Every Friday evening, back in Sancha, it was a complete mystery what would emerge from within the bowels of the Mickey Mouse backpack. Wei Jia opened the bad like a magician: anything could come out, and the trick was that even the boy had no idea.
• And then - I had been in China too long; the question was all but automatic - I asked how much the statues had cost. Cao Chunmei's tone was friendly but she set me straight. "We don't say that we 'bought something like this," she said. "We say that we 'invited' the statues to come here.
• He absolutely loved taxis. From his perspective, it was a miracle of city life: if you wave your hand, pretty much any red car will stop immediately. By the second day I learned to watch him because he like to call cabs on his own. We'd be on foot, a block from my apartment, and his little arm would pop up;
• <Wei Jia's treasures under his mattress at school>
• When the road was still dirt and I could sit at my desk and hear nothing but the wind in the walnut trees. That had been 2001: the last year of silence.
• With everybody working, the calmness of the forest is shattered all at once, and there's beauty to the shifting sound and light: the whistling sticks, the fresh leaves floating through the air, the walnuts thudding heavily into the dirt. After it's over the trees seem to sigh - branches hum softly, still vibrating with the memory of the assault.
• Forty feet high in the tree, Wei Ziqi was invisible, but his voice recited a familiar litany: "He doesn't like eggs, either. He won't eat meat on the bone. He doesn't like bean paste..."

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