to parents and grandparents. When I asked about their packages, they said: “Gifts.”
They were curious about the City Special—they couldn’t imagine why a solitary traveler needed such a big vehicle. Sometimes a woman told me shyly that she was hoping to learn to drive herself. Near a place called Clifftop Temple, I gave a ride to a pretty young woman who had just visited her parents. She wore a red silk dress and matching lipstick, and she filled the Jeep with a cloud of sickly-sweet perfume. After picking up so many hitchers, I had come to associate that scent with the steppes: Eau de Inner Mongolia.
The young woman worked in a restaurant in a small city called Clearwater River. The farthest she had ever been was the provincial capital of Baotou, but she told me that she dreamed of buying a car of her own. “If you could go anywhere in the world,” I asked, “where would you go?” The woman smiled at the thought, and said: “Beijing.” When I asked about her hometown, she shook her head. “Most people in the village raise sheep,” she said. “It’s too dry for good corn and potatoes and millet, but they still try. What else can they do?”
She was right: What were the options? People either fought the land or they left, and in this part of the country it was hard to imagine why any young person would stay. Only the Sinomaps still reflected the optimism of the past: I drove through places with names like Yellow Dragon Spring, Three-Forks River, and the Well of the Yang. But the landscape had turned brittle and now these names were nothing but ironies scattered across the steppes. White Orchid Valley bloomed with dust; Fountain Village was dry as a bone. A place called Defeat the Hu might have won the battle, but it had lost the war. In these regions there was often more wall than road—my maps were crisscrossed with crenellations, but the red capillaries grew fewer with every mile.
Sometimes they disappeared entirely. My atlases became less reliable, until two or three times a day I’d find myself Sinomapped: Sinomapped onto dead ends, Sinomapped onto washouts, Sinomapped onto grass tracks that led nowhere. In Inner Mongolia, lulled by a pastoralsounding place called the Village of Chives, I got Sinomapped onto a creekbed. In the book it looked promising, a thin red line that paralleled the Ming wall, but after a few miles the dirt surface became nothing more than the jumbled rocks of a dry stream. I tried to follow the riverbed, which braided across the valley floor; I took a few turns and then I was lost. Other freelance drivers had left tracks in all directions, and the familiar form of the Great Wall was no longer in sight. When I stopped to ask directions at a village of cave homes, the people just gaped at me, because their dialect was so far removed from Mandarin. The day was growing late; I was exhausted; I feared that a tire would blow any minute. Finally, bouncing over the rocks, I turned a corner and saw a hitchhiker.
She could have been a mirage: high heels, short skirt, pale tights. The City Special must have looked the same way to her, because she started petting the invisible dog, waving like crazy for me to stop. I rolled down the window.
“Where are you going?” she said.
“I want to go to North Fortress and then Fountain Village,” I said. “Is this the right way?” The name of Fountain Village represented another sad irony in this desolate valley, but the woman told me I was still on the right track. “I’m going to North Fortress,” she said. “Can I get a ride?”
“Sure.” She put one foot in the Jeep, ducked her head, and for the first time got a good look at me. She froze and finally said, “Where did you come from?”
“Beijing.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you here?” she asked.
“Wanr,” I said. In Chinese the phrase is so common that it comes out automatically: For fun. But it’s probably the wrong thing to say on a creekbed in Inner Mongolia. The woman removed her foot from the car.
“I think I’ll wait,” she said. And that was where I left her, standing on the broken rocks—the only hitcher I met who turned down the City Special.
IN CHINA, IT’S NOT such a terrible thing to be lost, because nobody else knows exactly where they’re going, either. In the summer of 1996, when I first arrived in the country as a Peace Corps volunteer, I was immediately impressed by my own ignorance. Language, customs, history—all of it had to be learned, and the task seemed insurmountable. From my perspective, everybody else had a head start of three thousand years, and I felt desperate to catch up.
Over time my learning curve never really flattened out. China is the kind of country where you constantly discover something new, and revelations occur on a daily basis. One of the most important discoveries is the fact that the Chinese share this sensation. The place changes too fast; nobody can afford to be overconfident in his knowledge, and there’s always some new situation to figure out. How does a peasant leave the farm and find a factory job? Who teaches people how to start businesses? Where do they learn how to make cars, and how do they figure out how to drive them? Who shows the small-town sophisticates how to dress and put on makeup? It was appropriate that they hitched rides on a City Special driven by an American with a book of Sinomaps. We were all out of place; nobody has today’s China figured out.
Most learning is informal, although there are plenty of private courses. Young Chinese often enroll in classes for English, typing, computers, accounting; in factory towns they sometimes pay for specialized courses that teach them how to behave like educated urbanites. And there are driving classes—that’s one type of training that’s regulated by the government. National law requires every Chinese driver to enroll in a certified course, at his own expense, for a total of fifty-eight hours of practice. In China, you can’t just go to a parking lot with your father and learn how to drive. Anyway, there aren’t many parking lots yet, and most fathers don’t have licenses.
One month I observed a driving course in Lishui, a small city in southeastern China. It’s located in the factory belt, where the boom economy produces a lot of new motorists. The institution was called the Public Safety Driving School, and I sat in on a course taught by Coach Tang. In China, all driving instructors are addressed as Jiaolian, “Coach.” It’s the same word you use for a basketball coach or a drill instructor, and it carries connotations of a training regimen. That’s the essence of Chinese driving—a physical endeavor.
The course began with the most basic kinds of touch. On the first day, Coach Tang raised the hood of a red Volkswagen Santana, and six students huddled close. He pointed out the engine, the radiator, the fan belt. They walked around to the back, where he opened the trunk. He showed them how to unscrew the gas cap. The next step involved the driver’s door. “Pull it like this,” he said, and then each student practiced opening and closing the door. Next, Coach Tang identified the panel instruments, as well as the clutch, the brake, and the gas pedal. After an hour the students finally entered the vehicle. Each took turns sitting in the driver’s seat, where they practiced shifting from first to fifth gear. The motor wasn’t on, but they worked the clutch and moved the gearshift. Watching this made me wince, and finally I had to say something. “Isn’t that bad for the car?”
“No,” Coach Tang said. “It’s fine.”
“I think it might be bad if the motor’s off,” I said.
“It’s completely fine,” Coach Tang said. “We do it all the time.” In China, instructors are traditionally respected without question, and Coach Tang had been kind enough to allow me to observe his class, so I decided to hold my tongue. But it wasn’t always easy. For the next step, they learned to use the clutch by setting the parking brake, starting the engine, shifting into first gear, and then releasing the clutch while flooring the accelerator. The motor whined against the force of the brake; the hood
