on the Santana’s hood, and my palms broke into a sweat every time another driver hit the gas. I could practically hear my father’s voice—he’s a good amateur mechanic, and few things anger him more than mindless abuse of an automobile.
Nobody was allowed to move a car until the second day of class. From the beginning, the students had circled the Santana warily, like the blind men and the elephant: they peered in the hood, they worked the doors, they fiddled with the gas cap. There were four men and two women, all of them under the age of forty. Each had paid over three hundred dollars for the course, which was a lot of money in a city where the monthly minimum wage was roughly seventy-five dollars. Only one person came from a household that currently owned an automobile. The others told me that someday they might buy one, and the college students—there were four of them—believed that a driver’s license looked good on a résumé. “It’s something you should be able to do, like swimming,” one young man named Wang Yanheng said. He was a college senior majoring in information technology. “In the future, so many people in China are going to have cars,” Wang said. “It’s going to be important to know how to drive.” The only student from a home with automobiles was a nineteen-year-old sociology major named Liang Yanfang. Her father owned a plastics factory, and he had three cars. When I asked what kind of plastics the family factory produced, the woman ran her finger along the rubber lining of the Santana’s window. “This is one of the things we make,” she said.
The first ten days of class focused on what they called the “parking range,” and during that time they performed exactly three movements.They practiced a ninety-degree turn into a parking space, moving forward, and then they did the same thing in reverse.The third skill was parallel parking. Every day, for a total of six hours, they performed these three movements repeatedly. Like any good Chinese instructor, Coach Tang was strict. “What are you doing?” he said, when one student brushed a pole during the reverse parking. “You must have forgotten your brain today!” “Don’t hold the gearshift loosely like that!” he yelled at another man. “If you do, your father will curse you!” Sometimes he slapped a student’s hand. Whenever somebody turned his head, he shouted, “Stop looking behind you!” There was a strict rule against head turns. When reversing, you were supposed to rely on the mirrors only; the blind spot didn’t exist, at least not in Coach Tang’s eyes. Nobody ever wore a seat belt. I never saw a turn signal flash on the parking range at the Public Safety Driving School.
The next step was the “driving range,” where students practiced an obstacle course of tight turns and learned how to stop within twentyfive centimeters of a painted line. The most challenging skill was known as the “single-plank bridge.” This consisted of a long concrete riser, slightly wider than a tire; students had to aim the car perfectly so that two wheels perched atop the riser. First they did the left tires, then the right; if a wheel slipped, they failed the exam. Students told me that they spent the majority of their road range time practicing the singleplank bridge. I asked the coach why it was so important.
“Because it’s very difficult,” he said.
That’s the underlying philosophy of Chinese driving courses: if something is technically difficult, then it must be useful. But the details of this challenge shift from place to place, coach to coach. There isn’t much standardization, apart from the required fifty-eight hours; sometimes a school emphasizes the single-plank bridge and sometimes they’ve developed some other obstacle. In this sense, coaches are like the martial-arts masters of old, developing individual regimens. Times have changed—instead of journeying to a mountaintop monastery, where a student might punch a tree a thousand times a day, he now joins the Public Safety Driving School and spends two weeks trying to park a Santana onto a single-plank bridge.
The Lishui courses concluded with a week and a half on the road, and I accompanied one group on their final day before the exam. With the coach in the passenger seat, students took turns driving a Santana along a two-lane rural road, where they performed set movements. They shifted from first to fifth; they downshifted back to first; they stopped within twenty-five centimeters of a marker. They made a U-turn and braked at an imitation traffic light. The course was three kilometers long and it had not changed at all during the ten days of practice; there were no intersections and very little traffic. Students had been instructed to honk when pulling out, as well as before performing turns. They honked whenever they encountered anything in the road—a car, a tractor, a donkey cart. They honked at every pedestrian. Sometimes they passed another car from the driving school, and then both vehicles honked happily, as if recognizing an old friend. At noon, the class took a break for lunch at a local restaurant, where everybody drank beer, including the coach. They told me that a day earlier they had gotten so drunk that they canceled afternoon class.
Later that day, the students returned to the road range for more practice, and one of them begged me to let him drive my rental car along the way. In a moment of extremely poor judgment, I decided to see what he had learned in a month of training. The moment the driver hit the open road, he became obsessed with passing other vehicles, but he had no idea how this was done; twice I had to yell to keep him from swinging wide on blind turns. Another time I grabbed the wheel to prevent him from veering into another car that was pulling up on our left. He never checked the rearview or side mirrors; he had no idea that there’s a blind spot. He honked at everything that moved. The complete absence of turn signals was the least of our problems. He came within inches of hitting a parked tractor, and he almost nailed a cement wall. When we finally made it to the driving range, I felt like falling on my knees to kiss the single-plank bridge.
Foreigners in Beijing often said to me, I can’t believe you’re driving in this country. To which I responded: I can’t believe you get into cabs and buses driven by graduates of Chinese driving courses. Out on the road, everybody was lost—une génération perdue—but it felt a little better to be the one behind the wheel.
IN NORTHWESTERN SHANXI PROVINCE, sections of Great Wall run alongside the Yellow River, and for nearly one hundred miles I followed the high loess banks. The driving here was easy, because the government infrastructure campaign had recently improved local roads. Propaganda signs celebrated the construction: “A Smooth Road Brings Prosperity and Drives Away Poverty”; “To Protect the Road Brings Prosperity, To Destroy the Road Brings Shame.” In rural China there was still so little traffic that private advertisers had yet to sponsor billboards, which meant that a driver wasn’t bombarded with images of things to eat or drink or buy. Instead there were government slogans, whose language had distinctive qualities: simple but forceful, direct but strangely obscure. “ People Embrace Soldiers”—a sign like that on an empty road gave my imagination somewhere to roam. In rural Shanxi I passed a billboard that simply said: “Self-Reliance, Struggle, Persistence, Unreserved Devotion.” There were no further details—and in the end, what more could you ask for? In Inner Mongolia, a local power plant slogan was so charged with wordplay that I had to pull over to figure it out: “Everybody Use Electricity; Use Electricity Well; Electricity Is Good to Use.” (My delayed response: “Yes!”) Often I passed billboards dedicated to the planned-birth policy, whose catchphrases ranged from tautology (“Daughters Also Count as Descendants”) to unsolicited advice (“Marry Late and Have Children Late”) to outright lies (“Having a Son or a Daughter Is Exactly the Same”). As I drove west, the messages became bigger, until barren hillsides were covered with slogans, as if words had swelled to fill the empty steppes. “Everybody Work to Make the Green Mountain Greener”—this in forty-foot-tall characters across an Inner Mongolian mountain that was neither green nor the site of a single working person. Across another particularly desolate stretch of wasteland, a poem had been spelled out in painted rocks:
Plant grass and trees here in the mountains,
Build flourishing agriculture,
Build homes, raise sheep,
Create a beautiful land of mountains and rivers.
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