I stopped at a barbershop and paid somebody to wash my hair. Every small town in China has at least one barbershop, and a standard service is the wash and head massage, usually for about a dollar. At noon I often pulled off the road to take a nap. I never drove at night. Fatigue is such a factor on Chinese roads that it appears on the driver’s exam:
133. If you drive for four hours, you must stop the car and take a mandatory rest of at least
a) 10 minutes.
b) 20 minutes.
c) 15 minutes.
The correct answer is B—if you rest for a quarter hour, you’re still five minutes short of legal. Chinese driving is a physical endeavor, or at least that’s how it’s portrayed in the rulebook. According to law, a truck driver must be at least 155 centimeters tall, whereas the driver of a passenger car has to be 150 (four feet eleven inches). In order to get a license, you need to have at least three normal fingers on each hand. Thumbs are nonnegotiable. Each ear must be capable of distinguishing the sound of a tuning fork at a distance of fifty centimeters. You can’t be red-green color-blind. You can’t suffer from epilepsy, congenital heart disease, vertigo, or Ménière’s syndrome. The law explicitly forbids any driver stricken by “hysteria.” If your legs happen to be of different lengths, and the difference exceeds five centimeters, you are legally banned from operating a standard transmission vehicle.
The driving law spells out such physical requirements in detail, as if sound health and body are critical to road safety, which clearly is not the case. The issue isn’t traffic volume, either—in 2001, when I drove across the north, China had about one-fifth the number of cars and buses as the United States. But there were more than twice as many traffic fatalities, and the government reported a total of 750,000 road accidents. It was a nation of new drivers, most of them negotiating new cities, and the combination was lethal. People might have done better if surroundings had remained familiar—in Beijing, drivers tended to be brilliant in old parts of town. Traditionally, Beijing is composed of hutong neighborhoods, networks of narrow brick-walled alleyways that had originally been laid out in the thirteenth century. Every time I drove into a hutong, the walls pressed close and I broke out in a sweat, but everybody else seemed unfazed. They were patient and they were skilled: a Beijing hutong driver could dodge an oncoming Santana, cruise cleanly through a pack of schoolchildren, and park his car within inches of a Ming-dynasty brick wall. If the nation’s road system somehow could have channeled the hutong mentality, maybe all of us would have been fine.
But people didn’t respond as well to the open space of a new road. Some of it was poor planning: by 2001, Beijing had suddenly become home to over one million vehicles, and the city’s infrastructure struggled to catch up. South of the hutong where I lived, old neighborhoods had been cleared out for bigger roads, but traffic rules were often bizarre. At one major intersection, some genius urban planner had located the left turn lane on the far right side of the road, which meant that anybody heading in that direction had to cut across five lanes of traffic. If he successfully made the turn and continued straight for another mile, he reached another intersection where the traffic signals had been mistimed so badly that lights were green in all directions for a good five seconds. Elsewhere in the city, entire districts were under construction. Roads were half built; signs were poorly planned; unmarked ramps led to mystery thoroughfares. Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher:
Even today, when some of the road problems have been improved, city driving is an adventure. And trouble is inevitable in a place where most drivers are rookies. In China, the transition has been so abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life—people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he’s about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and they’ll approach a roundabout in reverse direction if it seems faster. If they miss an exit on a highway, they simply pull onto the shoulder, shift into reverse, and get it right the second time. They curb-sneak in traffic jams, the same way Chinese people do in ticket lines. Tollbooths can be hazardous, because a history of long queues has conditioned people into quickly evaluating options and making snap decisions. When approaching a toll, drivers like to switch lanes at the last possible instant; it’s common to see an accident right in front of a booth. Drivers rarely check their rearview mirrors. Windshield wipers are considered a distraction, and so are headlights.
In fact, the use of headlights was banned in Beijing until the late 1970s, when the nation’s leaders began going overseas in increasing numbers. During the early Reform years, these trips were encouraged by governments in Europe and the United States, who hoped that glimpses of democracy would convince Chinese officials to rethink their policies. In 1983 Chen Xitong, the mayor of Beijing, made one such visit to New York. On the way to and from his meetings with Mayor Ed Koch and other dignitaries, Chen made a crucial road observation: Manhattan drivers turn on their lights at night. When Chen returned to China, he decreed that Beijing motorists do the same. It’s unclear what conclusions he drew from his encounters with American democracy (eventually he ended up in prison for corruption), but at least he did his part for traffic safety.
Nevertheless, Chinese drivers haven’t grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it’s pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions—in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don’t mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. But if you switch on your lights during a rainstorm, approaching drivers will invariably flash their brights in annoyance.
For the most part, though, they’re unflappable, and it’s hard to imagine another place where people take such joy in driving so badly. On the open road it feels like everybody has just been unleashed from a hutong—there’s a sudden rush of speed and competition, and the greatest thrill comes from passing other motorists. People pass on hills; they pass on turns; they pass in tunnels. If they get passed themselves, they immediately try to pass the other vehicle back, as if it were a game. From what I can tell, that’s the only question on the written driver’s exam with three correct answers:
77. When overtaking another car, a driver should pass
a) on the left.
b) on the right.
c) wherever, depending on the situation.
On the exam, questions are taken directly from government-published study materials, and the Public Safety License Bureau provided me with a booklet that contained 429 multiple-choice questions and 256 true-false queries. Often these questions capture the spirit of the road (“True/False: In a taxi, it’s fine to carry a small amount of explosive material”), but it’s less obvious how they prepare people for driving in China. In fact the trick is to study the wrong answers. They describe common traffic maneuvers with such vividness that you can practically see the faces behind the wheel:
81. After passing another vehicle, you should
a) wait until there is a safe distance between the two vehicles, make a right-turn signal, and return to the original lane.
b) cut in front of the other car as quickly as possible.
