Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  An hour west of Jingbian, I stopped to visit the Great Wall near the village of Ansi. This region had been a major defense point for the Ming, and people told me that there were particularly impressive ruins near Ansi. The name means “Temple of Peace,” and when I pulled over in the village I saw only one adult. He was disabled, with a pair of rough-hewn wooden crutches, and he was minding a flock of children. In rural China, that’s become an archetypal scene: little kids dancing around somebody who can hardly walk.

  The old man told me that the Wall wasn’t far away, but his directions weren’t clear. Finally he pointed at the oldest boy. “Just take him,” the man said. “He knows the way.”

  In a flash, the child was inside the City Special. Before he could close the door, four others piled in. They successfully slammed the door in the face of a nine-year-old girl, who stood forlornly in the dust, her face a taut little frown between pigtails. I looked at the old man, expecting him to call the children back out, but he didn’t say a word. He wore the slightly dazed expression that you find among people who have lived through war and revolution and famine and now, in their twilight years, have been assigned the task of raising young children.

  “OK,” I said. “If all of you are coming, she gets to come, too.”

  Sighing, one of the boys opened the door and the girl clambered in. We drove west along a loose dirt track; periodically I had to accelerate in order to plow through a patch of drifted sand. I heard the children whispering, and then I realized that I had told the old man virtually nothing about myself. They didn’t know where I was from, or what I was doing; all I had asked for were directions to the ruins. I pulled over and faced the children.

  “I drove here from Beijing,” I said. “That’s where I live. But I’m an American. I’m visiting a lot of areas with the Great Wall, and that’s why I came here.”

  The children listened intently. In the front seat there was a boy and a girl, and three more boys sat in the back. The oldest boy was twelve and in his lap he carried a two-year-old girl. All six were extremely serious, especially the baby—a look of worry creased her pudgy face. It occurred to me that this was a situation for chocolate. I divided and distributed three Dove bars, and then we headed off for the Great Wall. I felt like the Pied Piper—for all I knew, these kids represented the entire future of Temple of Peace.

  Here in the southern Ordos, the elevation was nearly five thousand feet, and hills of sand had crept to the very edge of town. The Great Wall ran through the dunes, ten feet tall and made of tamped earth. “You could walk along it for a year and still not reach Beijing!” one of the boys announced as he jumped out of the City Special. The children scampered across a dune and I followed, great sheets of sand sliding away beneath our feet. The wall led to a fort—it was square in shape and also made of tamped earth; there were turrets at every corner and a massive signal tower in the center. The tower was shaped like a pyramid, with a tiny hole at the base, like the entrance to some pharaoh’s tomb. One by one the boys vanished inside.

  Following them, I crawled on hands and knees. The tunnel turned to the left; pale walls disappeared into darkness. I groped forward, scrambling across the dirt, and then a spot of light appeared. It opened into a shaft—a narrow chimney that rose straight up for fifty feet. In Ming times, soldiers would have used a ladder here, but the boys simply wedged their legs across the shaft and shimmied up. Grit rained down below; I covered my eyes. “Maybe you shouldn’t climb up here!” I shouted. “It’s too dangerous!”

  “It’s fine!” one of them sang out. “We’ve done it before!”

  I backtracked through the tunnel and rejoined the girl, who had been left holding the baby. By the time I emerged, the boys were already at the top, whooping triumphantly. After they descended I noticed that one of them had a filthy plaster cast on his arm. He told me that he had broken the bone at school, playing leapfrog. The youngest boy, who was seven, had an ugly bruise on his head from some other misadventure. If this was indeed the last generation of countryside children, at least these boys were making the most of it. Three of them were brothers, look-alikes with crew-cut heads. I never saw kids like this in Beijing—in the capital, nearly everybody is an only child, coddled and spoiled from birth.

  When we returned to Temple of Peace, the old man on crutches was waiting patiently. I learned that he was the grandfather of the three brothers; he told me that in this particular region the planned birth policy hadn’t been strictly enforced. “People just pay a fine and have more kids,” he said with a smile. He still wasn’t the slightest bit concerned about who I was or what I was doing. In northern villages, people were rarely suspicious, and it was standard for them to invite me in for tea or a meal. I had no illusions about the toughness of rural life, and my time in the Peace Corps had taught me not to romanticize poverty. But nevertheless there was something poignant about driving through the dying villages. These were last glimpses—the end of small towns and rural childhoods; perhaps even the end of families with siblings. And rural traditions of honesty and trust wouldn’t survive the shift to city life. There aren’t many parts of the world where a stranger is welcomed without question, and entrusted with children, and it made me sad to drive away from Temple of Peace.

  FOR A WEEK I followed the Great Wall until I reached the far edge of the Ordos, and then the earthen barriers headed northwest into the Tengger Desert. The Tengger is known for the fineness of its sand, which leaves the dunes gracefully shaped, their tops curved like the arabesques of the Sahara. This is desert, pure and simple: not even nomads live in the heart of the Tengger. In the evenings I pulled over and pitched my tent in the dunes. There’s no better sleeping surface than sand, at least on a calm night, and I was lucky with the spring weather. Skies were clear and the dunes glowed pale beneath the light of the moon.

  Whenever I passed a town of any size, I stopped for a meal and a hair-washing. These were odd, forgotten places, so remote that they received only the scattered leavings of China’s economic boom. I began to see motorcyclists who had attached computer discs to their back mudflaps, because they made good reflectors. In a place called Xingwuying, locals climbed the Great Wall whenever they wanted to receive a cell phone signal. Xingwuying means “Prosperous Military Camp,” because the Ming had built huge fortifications in this place; now the village was poor and remote, but the people still made use of the wall. They stood along the ramparts, phones pressed to their faces, sentries of the digital age. What does it mean when the Great Wall becomes a cell phone accessory? Or when computer discs are most useful because they bounce light? Everything was tangled in these parts; there was no distinction between progress and improvisation.

  In the town of Yanchi, I got my hair washed and went for a stroll along the main street. It was another dry, forgotten place, located six miles within the wall; the name means “Salt Pool.” While I was walking, a motorcyclist drove past slowly, and then he hit a curb and pitched forward into the dust. A few people gathered and at first the man didn’t move. “He’s drunk,” somebody said. They stood there staring, until finally the motorcyclist rolled over—he was so intoxicated he couldn’t speak. Somebody helped him stand, and the drunk man tried to make his way to the bike. “You shouldn’t ride,” the bystander said gently, holding him back. But the motorcyclist kept trying to push past, and soon thirty people had collected around him.

  Chinese crowds behave in unpredictable ways, especially in remote places like Yanchi. There isn’t much to do, and even a minor incident in the street draws attention. Most onlookers are passive, at least in the beginning—they simply want to see what’s happening. But as more people show up, and the crowd swells, it can develop its own momentum. They might encourage a disagreement to develop into a full-fledged fight, or they might turn suddenly against an individual. The final direction is never easy to anticipate, because it depends largely on whether some dominant personality emerges within the group. A single outspoken person can sway an entire incident, insp
iring the crowd to action.

  In Yanchi, if a strong-willed individual had stepped forward and criticized the motorcyclist for being so drunk, or warned him shrilly against causing an accident, the others probably would have followed suit. But in this particular crowd the most powerful force happened to be the drunk man’s desire to mount his motorcycle. Every fiber of his being was directed at that bike—he was mute, and he couldn’t stand without assistance, but he angrily tried to push past anybody who held him back. After a while, his sheer willpower seemed to earn the crowd’s respect, and the bystanders stopped resisting. At last they even helped. One person guided the drunk man onto the bike; somebody else got the starter going. A third person gave a push. The motorcyclist wobbled off and abruptly made a U-turn—gasps from the onlookers—but somehow he maintained balance and disappeared into the night. The crowd waited for half a minute, listening intently, faces eager. But that was it—no crash. At last the people dispersed, chattering happily as they wandered off to find some other entertainment in Yanchi.

  The desert had a way of sharpening scenes: everything stood out against this blurred background. One afternoon, driving through a desolate stretch of sand dunes along the border between Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Province, I saw a solitary figure walking beside the road. I pulled over and called out: “Where are you going?”

  “Where are you going?” the man said.

  Both questions were moot: this road had no turnoffs for forty miles. I asked if he wanted a ride, and he shrugged and got in. He was twenty-five years old, with a thin crooked mustache that crossed his lip like a calligrapher’s mistake. He was dressed neatly, in a blue button-down shirt, and he said he lived in Yinchuan, the provincial capital. I asked if he had had some kind of trouble on the road.

  “No,” he said. “I come here every month, just to walk. There are three daily buses that follow this road. Nine thirty, twelve thirty, and two thirty. The early one drops me off and then I walk for a while. I usually catch one of the other two back to Yinchuan.”

  He had a strange, spasmodic way of speaking—words piled fast in jerky sentences, like he was trying to fill all the space that surrounded us. He wouldn’t tell me his full name; all he said was that his family name was Zhen. But he answered at length when I asked why he came to the Tengger Desert.

  “I used to be in the military,” Zhen said. “I was a soldier in the 1990s, and I was stationed in Shaanxi, in the Qinling Mountains. Every day we were in the wilderness, and now sometimes I miss it. I don’t know exactly how to say it, but that was a very happy time. It was difficult, of course, but there was honor and pride to the job. And it didn’t have anything to do with me—everything was about the squadron. The group was more important than the person. That’s what I really liked about it. We got to know each other and depend on each other, and eventually it’s like your individual self isn’t so significant anymore. That’s why I come here every month. It’s very empty in the desert and it reminds me of the way I used to feel.”

  Zhen told me frankly that he didn’t like the United States—in particular he blamed the Americans for NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. After completing his military service, he had received a government-assigned job in a grain company in Yinchuan. He was single, and he intended to never marry.

  “Part of it is money,” he said. “If you don’t have much money, it’s hard to get married. But the main reason is that I believe people should be more united, and marriage has a way of breaking that up. Right now I have good friends and we get together to eat and drink and talk. It’s a little like the times I remember in the military. But once you marry you can’t do that anymore. You spend all your time with your family. That sense of togetherness is gone, and I don’t want that to happen.”

  I asked if he had any hobbies apart from walking alone across the Tengger.

  “I really like driving,” he said. “That’s my favorite thing to do. I can’t wait to get my license.”

  He had nearly finished a driving course, and eventually he hoped to become a cabbie. If possible, he would buy his own car, but in the meantime he practiced with friends every chance he got. He asked me when I had learned to drive—it amazed him that I had started at sixteen, like many Americans. In China, the minimum driving age is eighteen, but the important issue is financial. By the time people are able to pay for a driving course, and consider buying a car, they’re often already in their thirties.

  “Is driving this Jeep much different from a Santana?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “It’s five speeds, basically the same. It’s easy. If you can drive a Santana, you can drive this Jeep.”

  “I’ve never driven a Jeep before,” he said. “That’s something I’d really like to do.” He was silent for a moment, watching the desert flash by. Somewhere to our left, the Great Wall was lost amid the dunes. Zhen said, “Would you let me drive a little bit?”

  I pulled to the side of the road, got out, and walked around the front of the City Special. Zhen slid over and settled behind the steering wheel. He pointed at the pedals. “This is the gas, right?” he said. “And aren’t those the brake and the clutch?” I had no idea why I let him drive; maybe it had something to do with the long desert days, the vacant roads and the landscapes that seemed unreal. I put on the safety belt. It was the first time I had ever sat in the passenger seat of the City Special.

  He started the engine, ran it in neutral for a few seconds, and began to drive. He leaned forward, peering intently through the windshield, his knuckles white around the wheel. Whenever an oncoming car approached, he slowed dramatically. This happened five times in half an hour. Otherwise the road was vacant and it ran straight as an arrow; there was wasteland in all directions. After Zhen began to feel more comfortable, he accelerated to forty miles an hour, and a look of bliss appeared behind the miswritten mustache. There were no turns along the way, but he tried the blinkers, just to see how they worked. Right, left, right, left. He switched on the lights. He fiddled with the windshield wipers. He pressed the horn, twice, and the sound was swallowed by the empty road.

  LATER THAT DAY, AFTER dropping off Zhen at a truck stop, I got Sinomapped onto sand. The Great Wall was still marked clearly on my atlas, a neat line of crenellations that ran westward across the desert, but roads in this region were sparse. I tried an anonymous capillary that ran to the north of the ruins; the surface was paved, but periodically it disappeared beneath wind-blown sand. Every once in a while I had to accelerate and slide through a bad patch, and finally the City Special hit a big dune and spun to a halt, wheels buried to the hubcaps. I tried unsuccessfully to dig it out, and I was about to release air from the tires to get more traction when a man showed up in a four-wheel-drive Jeep. He gave me a tow, and I turned back—it was hopeless to continue along this road.

  The day was growing late, and I came to an unmarked intersection. There was nobody around to ask for directions, so I relied on the compass and just headed south. Thirty miles later the road passed a small memorial tablet. Sand had piled against the base, but the inscription was still clear:

  AUGUST 1991

  ALL OF THE FACTORY’S WORKERS WON’T FORGET YOU

  There were no other details on this odd monument. What factory? Which workers? Who wasn’t being forgotten? A few miles later I pulled off onto a dirt track, drove for a few minutes, and pitched my tent in the dunes. I enjoyed an Ordos dinner—Oreo cookies, Dove bars, and Gatorade. The sky was calm and I slept with the tent open, looking up at the Milky Way.

  By that point in the journey I was accustomed to falling asleep without knowing where I was. In the morning I could usually figure it out, and I stocked plenty of water in case the City Special broke down. For the most part I had good cell phone coverage—the Chinese system consists of a handful of state-owned companies, and they’ve installed towers with amazing thoroughness. The government also controls the fuel industry, which means that even in remote areas you can find a gas station. I nev
er came close to running out, and price controls kept gas cheap: in the spring of 2002, I paid the same amount all across China, the equivalent of $1.20 per gallon. There were no self-service stations. In over three thousand miles of driving across western China, from Inner Mongolia to the Tibetan plateau, the City Special’s fuel cap was hardly touched by a man. Pumping gas was women’s work, at least in the west, where stations were staffed by young girls who had recently left their home villages. Usually these migrants were in their teens, with brand-new uniforms, neat haircuts, and makeup—small-town sophisticates taking their first step on the road to success.

  The gas-station girls were attentive, polite, and friendly, but they were hopeless when it came to directions. This was a common problem—I spent an enormous amount of time trying to find people who could give reliable information. Dialects were sometimes hard to understand, but the biggest problem was simply that few Chinese had traveled. Even fewer had driven. They knew little about roads, even around their homes, and they were terrible at explaining how to get someplace. It was best to structure any query as a yes/no proposition: “Is this the road to Zhongwei?” The absolute worst thing that a driver could do was open a map. It was like handing over a puzzle to a child—people’s faces went from confusion to fascination as they turned the map this way and that, tracing lines across the page. One of the first things I learned on the road was to keep the Sinomaps out of sight while asking directions.