Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  “It is a Chinese license,” I said. “I couldn’t drive here if I only had an American license.”

  “Do you have your American license?”

  I handed it over, and the cops passed it around—undoubtedly the first time that a Missouri driver’s license had ever been inspected in Gansu Province. “So why are you here?” one officer said.

  “I’m just driving around. Tourism.”

  “How did you learn Chinese?”

  “I’ve lived here for years.”

  “You must be a spy!” he said. The others picked up the refrain, laughing. “He’s a spy! He’s driving around, he speaks Chinese—he must be a spy! A spy! A spy!”

  Shaking with laughter, the cop returned both my licenses. It took me a while to find my voice. “Is it OK if I continue?” I said.

  “Of course!”

  Driving away, looking through the rearview mirror, I could see them roughhousing on the side of the road. The cops punched each other and laughed, “A spy! A spy!”

  IT TOOK MORE THAN an hour to reach Subei. There was nothing along the way but white herdsman tents, home to Mongol and Kazakh nomads, and the town itself was a low line of buildings that ran across a dry valley. I stopped at a public toilet; when I exited, a man was waiting for me. He said one word: “Identification.”

  He was short, dark-skinned, and wore a sparse mustache—ethnic Mongolian, I guessed. His request took me by surprise, and when I hesitated he flashed a badge: Public Security. He inspected my passport and put it in his pocket. “This district isn’t open to foreigners,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” I said. “Nobody told me that.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether somebody tells you. It’s not open.”

  “I’m just traveling,” I said. “I’ll be happy to leave right now. I don’t want to cause any problem.”

  “You’ve already caused a problem,” he said. “We have to go to the station now.”

  We left the City Special parked beside the road. I had a sinking feeling that the car would be impounded—I knew this had happened to other foreigners who had driven illegally into restricted areas. But there’s never any way to predict the outcome of a Chinese detention, which depends entirely on the place and the people you happen to be dealing with.

  At the station a woman officer was waiting, and they seated me behind a desk. The male cop mentioned that recently they had detained another foreigner. “He came here on a bus,” he said.

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “He was punished according to law.”

  “How was he punished?”

  The cop ignored the question. The two of them rooted through file cabinets, pulling out papers; they moved efficiently, like this was a familiar routine. I decided to make one last play for leniency. “There were policemen at the highway turnoff,” I said. “They checked all my documents. They didn’t tell me Subei was closed, and they said it’s fine to come here.”

  “Of course they did!” the Mongolian cop retorted. “What do those guys know about anything? They’re just road police! They’re worthless!”

  It was hard to argue with that. The police began the interrogation: the Mongolian cop asked questions, and the woman wrote. Where did you come from today? Is this your correct passport? Residence card? Is this your current address in Beijing? How long have you lived there? What’s your education level? Do you have a receipt for renting the car? How much was it? Where is the rental company? Where did you stay last night? How much did it cost? Did you register? What’s the name of your work unit? Is this the correct way to write it? Do you have a doctorate?

  For some reason they kept returning to my education level. It baffled me—what exactly was the link between degree status and wandering into a closed town on the edge of the Tibetan plateau? But then it dawned on me that they were simply filling out forms. There were dozens of blanks, and many of them overlapped; sometimes I answered the same question three times. The queries were so specific and detailed that they essentially prevented effective interrogation. Neither officer seemed the least bit suspicious, and they never asked any open-ended questions, like where I planned to go or what I was doing so far from home. They didn’t so much as glance at the City Special. It was strictly a matter of paperwork, and afterward they sat back, looking relieved.

  “You’ve broken our national law regarding aliens in China,” the female cop announced. She pulled out a rule book and pointed to number forty-six. “We have to punish you.”

  “What’s the punishment?”

  “You will be fined,” the male cop said, and both of them suddenly grinned. It was a certain Chinese smile that masks embarrassment, and I found myself grinning, too.

  “By law, we can fine you five hundred,” she said. “But since this is your first time, we’ll only fine you one hundred.”

  It was the equivalent of twelve dollars. “Thanks,” I said, and put the money on the table. The moment they saw the bill they became nervous, and neither would touch it. “I’m going to have to call our supervisor,” the female cop said, and she left the room. A few minutes later she returned: “We can’t take cash.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of corruption. If it’s cash, there’s no proof of the amount. So you’re going to have to mail it.”

  Periodically, anticorruption campaigns sweep through the Communist Party; invariably they fail to make much difference. But in this forgotten part of Gansu the cops were taking it seriously. The woman escorted me outside, and we crossed the street to the Agricultural Bank of China. It was Sunday, so she contacted a manager, who opened the place especially for us. I filled out a form with the address of the police station, wrote the woman’s name, and handed over the money. The bank manager said, “It’ll arrive by Tuesday.” He seemed pleased by the efficiency—it would take only two days for the money to reach the woman who stood immediately beside me. She was happy too; on the street she shook my hand and wished me a good journey. I started the City Special, turned around, and drove back to the checkpoint. The road cops were still there, goofing around in their baggy uniforms, and they shouted happily when I cruised past.

  FOR FORTY MILES I followed a small road into the Gobi. This was the blankest Sinomap yet: only ten place-names marked the page. One was Yumenguan, the Jade Gate, a military structure that had been built by the Han dynasty, and that was where the pavement ended.

  A rough dirt track continued farther into the desert. I was off the map now, in unmarked territory; the City Special bounced over low rocky hills. After ten miles the track terminated at the ruins of Hecangcheng. It’s an ancient fortified granary, built over two thousand years ago to serve the Han soldiers who were stationed here. In this part of the desert, on the western edge of the empire, the Chinese had constructed forts instead of a wall. The land is so flat and barren that I could see the next one in the distance, three miles away. I had reached the end of the line—the stream of continuous walls had given way to scattered forts, like final drops from a spigot that had been shut off.

  There was nobody else at Hecangcheng. The government planned to build a paved road to the site, but the modern construction had yet to begin and the place remained isolated. The old granary was massive, more than two hundred feet long, with ten-foot walls that rose stark above the scrubland. There were pillars of tamped earth, and gaping holes that showed the sky; in the mud walls I could see the matted straw that had been used for construction. This part of Gansu is so dry that the straw still looked fresh; in truth it had been here for more than twenty centuries. This granary, like all the forts in the region, was surveyed in the early 1900s by Aurel Stein, the great Hungarian-British explorer and archaeologist. He made two trips here, spending months with camel trains in the desert. On his second journey he literally retraced his steps. At one point he stumbled upon two sets of tracks, the prints of a man accompanied by a dog, and he realized they were his own—seven years earlier he had wandered here with h
is faithful dog Dash II. He wrote, “Time seems to have lost all power of destruction on this ever-dry ground which knows no drift sand nor erosion.”

  I pitched my tent in the shadow of the fort. A small stream ran in the distance, surrounded by marshland, like a thin ribbon of green tied taut across this parched landscape. The sky was restless—fugitive clouds scattering across a dome of blue. At midnight the gusting wind shook me awake. It hummed across the Gobi, and whistled through the ruins, and I lay there listening to the same song that stirred soldiers in the days of the Han.

  AFTER HECANGCHENG I TURNED for home. Highway 215 heads south out of Gansu, and I followed the road to the border of Qinghai Province. At the boundary, a pass stood at an elevation of twelve thousand feet, and after that I was in the high country of the Tibetan Plateau. There were no more forts, no more signal towers, no more Great Wall—all of it had been left behind.

  The road was newly built. It consisted of two lanes, surrounded by high desert landscapes of rock and dirt, and periodically the monotony was broken by a sign: “Danger! On This Slope It’s Easy to Fall Asleep!” At one location the government had suspended a small sedan above the highway. It was smashed almost beyond recognition; the front end was crumpled flat and the remains of a door dangled in strips of steel. Painted across the back end were the words: “Four People Died.” The whole thing had been erected on spindly poles, fifteen feet off the ground, like some gruesome version of a children’s treat: a Carsicle.

  At the next bend in the road, a sign noted that fifty-three people had died here. A billboard presented the speed limit like options on a menu:

  40 KM/HR IS THE SAFEST

  80 KM/HR IS DANGEROUS

  100 KM/HR IS BOUND FOR THE HOSPITAL

  Along that road I saw two truckers who had broken down. Both stood beside All-Powerful Kings, waiting for their partners to return, and both refused a ride. One trucker had already been there for two days. He asked if I had any food or water, and I gave him two bottles and the last Oreos from my stash. Other than that the road was empty. To the west, snow-covered peaks rose to over eighteen thousand feet.

  For one hundred and fifty miles I saw almost no signs of human habitation. There weren’t any gas stations or shops; the landscape was so barren that nobody had bothered to carve propaganda into the mountains. The first town I passed had been recently razed. It had the look of a former military installation; the buildings were arranged in neat rows, and at one point there must have been a couple hundred people living there. But now it was abandoned—roofless walls stood stark on the plateau, lonely as the traces of some lost empire. Not far beyond that, a pair of empty dirt roads branched off the highway. One headed east, the other west; a signpost gave the names of military-sounding destinations. A left turn led to a place called “Build.” A right turn went to “Unite.” I took a deep breath and drove straight through.

  BOOK II

  THE VILLAGE

  I

  THE YEAR THAT I RECEIVED MY DRIVER’S LICENSE, I BEGAN searching for a second home in the countryside north of Beijing. Empty houses weren’t hard to find—occasionally I came across whole villages that had been abandoned. They were scattered across the front range of the Jundu Mountains, in the shadow of the Great Wall, where the farming had always been tough and the lure of migration was all but irresistible. Sometimes it felt as though people had left in a rush. Millstones lay toppled over; trash was strewn across dirt floors; house frames stood with the numb silence of tombstones. Mud walls had already begun to crumble—these buildings were even more broken-down than the Ming fortifications. Whenever I saw an empty village, I thought: Too late.

  I hoped to find a place where people still farmed, their lives tuned to the rhythms of the fields. I had a vague idea of a writer’s retreat—somewhere I could escape the city and work in silence. For a while I searched near the Hebei border, on the far side of the Miyun reservoir, where the roads were still dirt and most vehicles were two-stroke tractors. Sometimes I traveled by car, sometimes by foot; I carried my tent and sleeping bag. I used the Sinomaps to track roads that ran alongside the crenellated symbol of the Great Wall.

  One day in early spring of 2002, I went for a drive with Mimi Kuo-Deemer, an American friend who was also looking for a place in the countryside. We passed through Huairou, a small city at the northern edge of the Beijing plain, and then we entered the foothills of the Jundu Mountains. On a rural road we picked up a hitchhiker. The old man wore an army surplus jacket, and he was headed home from market. He didn’t hesitate when we asked what was the most beautiful stretch of wall in these parts.

  “Tianhua Cave,” he said. “That’s where you should go.”

  The region had been named after a fissure in the limestone cliffs. Locals had turned it into a shrine—there were two statues of Buddha, a quiver of burned-out incense, and a plate of rotting fruit offerings. Above the cave, a section of the Great Wall led to a massive tower atop the ridgeline’s highest peak. This was the first row of mountains north of Beijing, rising more than three thousand feet above the plains, and the view from the tower was stunning: the mist-covered fields on one side, the blue-gray peaks on the other. But it was a tiny cluster of buildings to the northwest that caught our eyes. They perched high on a hillside, in complete isolation—there were no other settlements for miles.

  We climbed down from the wall, got back in the car, and found the village at the end of a dirt road. The place was called Sancha, and within an hour some locals had shown us two empty houses; by the end of that month we had signed a lease for one of them. The home had three rooms, a wood-fired kang, and mud walls that had been papered with old copies of the People’s Daily. There was an outhouse nearby. We had electricity and a phone line; water came straight from a spring in the mountains. Rent was three hundred and sixty yuan a month—for each of us, a twenty-dollar time-share. From the front door, where a broad dirt platform had been laid out for threshing crops, I could see the Great Wall. The brick towers rose from the valley floor, snaked their way along the folded peaks, and disappeared over the western horizon—headed toward the loess plateau, the Ordos Desert, the Hexi Corridor. In the past, a glimpse of the Great Wall had always made me think about traveling, but when I saw it from Sancha I said to myself: This is where I’ll stay.

  SANCHA HAD ALWAYS BEEN a small village, and in recent years it had become even smaller. In the 1970s the population had been around three hundred; now there were fewer than one hundred fifty people left. Most of them lived in the lower part of the village, although there was another cluster of homes up in the hills, at the end of a winding dirt road, which was where we found our house. The government called this upper settlement Spring Valley, but to locals it was all Sancha—they made no distinction between the two parts. And the whole place had been fading for decades. The local Buddhist temple had been demolished during the Cultural Revolution, along with smaller shrines that were scattered throughout the hills, and nobody had bothered to rebuild them. The school shut down in the early 1990s. None of the villagers owned a car; nobody had a cell phone. There were no restaurants, no shops—not a single place where a person could spend money. Three or four times a week, a peddler’s flatbed truck puttered up from the valley, loaded with rice, noodles, meat, and simple household goods. During autumn other trucks appeared to buy the villagers’ harvested crops. In the upper settlement, all vehicles parked at the top of the dead-end road, where the dirt surface had been widened. That patch of earth represented the full range of local commerce—it was a parking-lot economy.

  The average resident’s annual income was around two hundred and fifty dollars. Almost all of it came from orchards: walnuts, chestnuts, and apricot seeds that were grown high in the mountains. They sold most of these nuts, but everything else was raised for food. They kept chickens and pigs, and they grew corn, soybeans, and vegetables. It was far too dry for rice; even wheat grew poorly in these parts. Occasionally, if a villager was lucky, he trapped a badger or a pheasan
t in the hills. There were feral pigs, too—wild animals with big tusks and matted hair.

  Beijing wasn’t too far away, only a couple of hours by car, but back then it was still unusual for city residents to visit the countryside. The auto boom was already growing—in 2001, Beijing issued over three hundred thousand new driver’s licenses, a 50 percent increase over the previous year. But people rarely took long road trips for pleasure. Occasionally an adventurous driver found his way to Sancha, and sometimes a group of serious hikers came to climb the unrestored Great Wall. But on most weekends Mimi and I were the only outsiders in the village. Locals didn’t know what to make of us—they knew I was a writer who had lived in China for years, and Mimi was a Chinese-American photographer; but there was no precedent for young city people spending time in rural conditions. Neighbors often wandered over to get a better look, and like anybody in the Chinese countryside, they didn’t bother to knock before entering our house. They inspected our threshing platform, and peered into the windows, and fiddled with our belongings. Sometimes I walked to the dirt lot and found two or three villagers huddled around the rental car that I had driven out from the city. They stared with a sort of benign intensity: faces calm, hands clasped behind the back, heads bowed as if in prayer—homage to a Jetta.

  Once I went to the village alone, and while writing at my desk I had the sensation that I was being watched. I turned around and almost yelped—a man was standing in the middle of the room. He was one of the neighbors, a white-haired man in his sixties; his cloth shoes hadn’t made a sound when he entered. He was smiling softly, with the blank-eyed expression of somebody watching television—he hardly blinked when I turned around. That was the saving grace of Chinese staring: people never glanced away in embarrassment when you caught them looking, and it was hard not to respect such open curiosity. For a few seconds neither of us spoke.