Ted Conover
Page 28
The lack of infrastructure for touring drivers is one reason that these organized self-driving tours are so popular. Besides having planned in advance (through arrangements with local travel agents) where we would stop to eat and sleep every day, Zhao had an expert mechanic, Dai, in his four-by-four: repair garages were few and far between, and one of the Beijingers’ main fears was breaking down out in the sticks, with nobody familiar nearby to help.
The national roads, while more interesting to drive than the expressways, were also more nerve-racking. There were considerable numbers of people on bicycles, on foot, and on small tractors; there were crossroads; and there were countless tollbooths. The tolls were often modest—10 yuan (US $1.40) for a car—but sometimes a tollbooth would come only five or ten miles after the last, and after a while it added up. Over our CB radio, the grumbling grew: according to law there had to be at least 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) separating provincial tollbooths, so some of these were clearly illegal. “We should go to the newspapers with this!” complained one driver. I was impressed to hear that people thought that might work.
Perhaps least expected by me, there were many places where I had to swerve toward the middle of the road because farmers had appropriated a strip of pavement along the edge for drying their grain, usually corn. Sometimes the grain was laid out on blue tarps; other times the drying zone was outlined by rocks or boards; more than once, traffic slowed because of it. I had heard of Chinese farmers sometimes laying their wheat across the road so that passing vehicles would thresh it for them. But there was something aggressive about this appropriation of the highway.
The suggestion of rural hostility toward traffic put me in mind of the famous “BMW Case,” which had received a lot of media attention two years before. A rich woman in a BMW, probably traveling on a people-filled road like this, was bumped by a farmer transporting his onion cart to market. Enraged, she hit him with the car and then revved it up and drove into the crowd. The peasant’s wife was killed, but despite widespread outrage, the woman received only a suspended sentence.
BMWs seemed to be a sort of class-divide lightning rod. Recently, the number of kidnappings for ransom has shot up in China: the government reported 3,863 abductions in 2004, higher than the 3,000 a year reported on average in Colombia, the previous world leader. “In one case,” according to The Chicago Tribune, “police searching the apartment of kidnappers in Guangdong Province found a list of all BMW owners in the city that appeared to have come from state vehicle registration rolls.”
To needle Zhu a bit, I asked him, if he was so rich, why didn’t he have a BMW?
“Bad value,” he said, explaining that unlike the foreign cars made in China under co-ventures and sold at a reasonable price, BMWs were imported, with huge taxes added on. Tariffs and taxes add about 50 percent to the price of imported cars, making them high-status items. If you wanted to be really ostentatious, you did what rich coal-mine owners (and others) from Shaanxi province increasingly did and came into the city to buy a Hummer, which cost more than $200,000. But Zhu thought that was ridiculous. The Volkswagen Passat he bought for his wife to drive was made in China—“like my Hyundai,” Zhu said proudly, putting his cigarette in his mouth so he could pat the dashboard. “Made in Beijing.”
Not long after lunch, we started seeing signs for the Three Gorges Dam and accessed the site through tunnels along an expensively built mountainside road. Security was tight, with numerous guard posts, cameras, and warning signs, and I was happy to swap seats with Zhu after we pulled into a roadside waiting area—just before an official came by to collect every driver’s license. A guide boarded our leader’s car and, over the radio, began a running commentary for all the cars in the group. Between her remarks, I asked Zhu what he thought of my driving.
“He says you are a good driver, but he has some advice,” Li Lu reported. “He says to improve, you must be more brave!”
Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest construction projects in history, seemed a fitting first attraction for our trip, evoking superlatives in this land of superlatives. It had cost an estimated $75 billion so far; it will ultimately require that more than a million people be relocated; it will generate more hydroelectric power than any dam ever has; it spans the Yangtze, the third-longest river in the world; and it presents a huge military target.
Like so much in China, the scale is almost too large to fathom. The thirty-odd people in our group parked and then boarded buses that took us up to a visitor center above the dam. We peeked at a model dam indoors and then, like scores of others, scrambled around the viewpoint, taking lots of pictures. Fan turned out to have a serious interest in photography: his daughter posed, posed, and posed again as her father assumed an exaggerated wide stance with his heavy Nikon digital camera. Others focused on the astonishing dam, proudly making sure I got a good look. From our vantage, we could see directly across the top of the massive structure. Cranes were still in place because construction was ongoing. To our right was the new lake, which began filling in 2003 and will be full in 2012. We could barely see across it. To our left, below the dam, was a view of the river as perhaps it had looked before, except for the spray from five or six discharge ports high on the dam’s face. These shot huge jets of water high into the air, where it diffused and arced into mist. The spray was backlit by afternoon sun, to spectacular effect. I joined my tripmates in taking in the sight, a larger work of humankind than I’d ever seen. In childhood I was taught little about the Chinese apart from their Communism and their numbers. Now I was seeing something altogether different: here were Zhu and Zhao, the Chens and the Wangs, Li Lu and Fan Li, proud witnesses to this monumental construction and the change it implied who were themselves, as driving Chinese, touring Chinese, Chinese out to see the world, harbingers of a change larger than any of us could fathom.
Zhao, our group leader, and interpreter Li Lu at the Three Gorges Dam
Zhu was back at the wheel the next day as we drove from the Three Gorges area to Hongping, a town deep in Hubei province and the jumping-off point for visits to Shennongjia, the forest reserve where everyone hoped to see a yeti.
His Hyundai had a six-CD changer in the dash, and among the titles in it was The Relax Music of Automobiles, which turned out to be instrumental versions of the love songs of Deng Lijun, the Taiwanese pop singer of the 1970s. What Zhu really loved, however, was the old-time music on The Red Sun: A Collection of Military Songs, Volume II. He played the CD again and again. The soaring, triumphalist music evoked bygone days, and I expressed surprise that a modern businessman like him loved the old socialist music. Zhu responded that it was the music he grew up with. He had worked on a farm, he said. His grandfather had been rich, but the Communists took it all away.
“Don’t you dislike Mao for that?” I asked. He looked at me full on when Li Lu translated the question and then, at 60 miles per hour, turned sideways in his seat to show me the pin on his left lapel. It was a dime-size brass relief bust of the Great Helmsman himself. Steering with his knees, he put his chin to his chest, unpinned it, and handed it to me as a gift.
“Many people still admire Mao very much,” Li Lu said. “They know he made mistakes, but they also think he did much good. He got rid of the Kuomintang. He brought China together. He is still a very big hero, like a god to some.”
Fan, the television producer, I had noticed, was also in the worshipful camp. He had the leader’s portrait, in Lucite, affixed to the top of the dashboard of his Volvo so that he could not see anything through the windshield without Mao appearing in his peripheral vision. After I asked about that and complimented him on the DVD screens built into the back of the front seats (for rear-seat passengers), Fan invited me into the Volvo for the better part of a morning’s drive. Longyin, his daughter, took a seat in the back, along with Jia Lin, the reporter, and offered some background on her father. “My parents both suffered a lot in the Cultural Revolution,” she began. Fan interrupted impatiently.
“Oh!”
Longyin said. “My father is saying: ‘There is no such thing as a perfect person. Everybody makes mistakes. Mao saved many people, but to do it he had to sacrifice his son, his wife, his whole family—everything. Now he’s gone, but I want to go back to that time, when people shared everything.’”
But do you really want to share everything? I asked Fan. Wouldn’t sharing equally mean that a privileged few wouldn’t be able to own new Volvos?
“I think now is a necessary period,” Fan said, as his daughter translated. “We have to advance.”
“Capitalism is something we’ve been waiting to try for a long time,” Longyin said. She added, “Personally, I hate the whole Mao thing. I think it’s weird. I don’t miss the sound of those old days at all.” She did miss France, however, and her French boyfriend. She said she hoped to play a part in the growth of the Chinese film industry, perhaps by becoming an actors’ agent. And some time in the next two or three months, she hoped to get a driver’s license.
I was pleased to get to Hongping. The mountain hamlet was shrouded in mist, and the air was cool. Steep hillsides covered with deciduous trees rose on either side, and a creek ran through town, both reminiscent of Vermont. We arrived at our hotel early in the afternoon, a nice change. It had three stars, and was clean and basic. But it did not have a restaurant, an elevator, or easy parking, so soon we were checking out. “Beijingers are very picky,” Li Lu told me. They didn’t like the hotel, and so Zhao had to find another. The new place he selected seemed only incrementally better to me, but others were satisfied by the change. At dinner, Zhao was back to apologizing profusely for his poor judgment. But the matter seemed quickly forgotten, dinnertime having become one of the trip’s great attractions.
This night we ate upstairs in a rustic wooden building, each room big enough for only one of the round tables favored by Chinese, where everyone uses chopsticks to share dishes placed on a lazy Susan in the middle. At my table sat Li Lu; Zhou, the urbane lawyer; the Chens and their daughter; single Ms. Jia Lin; and Dai, the club’s mechanic. Dai quickly produced a flask of strong spirits that made its way around the table—the men drank, the women did not—while we waited for our waitress to bring beers. Drinking here was something that men tended to do while women watched; Li Lu advised me not to get caught up in it (“Some of these men are very good at drinking!”), advice that I tried but usually failed to follow. As the trip went on and people got to know each other, the drinking often advanced to contests such as the counting game, where each person around the table would count (one, two, three) except that you had to skip any multiple of seven (seven, fourteen), or a number with a seven in it (seventeen, twenty-seven). If you messed up you had to take a drink.
On this night, however, Chen gallantly toasted all the women on the trip. The tall and elegant Zhou, already a bit red in the cheeks, followed this by toasting only Chen’s wife, to raucous laughter.
The high spirits continued after dinner. Vendors were still on the sidewalk when all of us rolled out of the restaurant, and Fan made us—and even them—laugh with his uncanny shrill imitation of an older woman who had been hawking a melon. Zhou and others had heard there was a “cultural promotion,” a show featuring local ethnic talent, on the edge of town and proposed we attend en masse. Zhu demurred, asserting that a strip club would be more fun, if only one could be found. We walked there without him, arriving early and securing a row of seats in the front.
Though Zhou spoke almost no English, I very much enjoyed his company. He was witty and sophisticated and, after a drink, warm and outgoing; every time he opened his mouth, it seemed, he made Li Lu break into laughter. The show, with lots of singing and dancing, was fun even though we had to give up our good seats at the front when a large group of local Communist Party officials arrived at the last minute.
The absent Zhu had his good side as well. He bubbled with energy and always seemed to be in a good mood. He kept a hot thermos bottle of high-quality green tea in the front seat, and gladly shared it with me and Li Lu—as he did the contents of a large box of yellow Asian pears from his home district, stored in the back of the SUV. They were some of the best pears I’d ever had, crunchy like apples and mouthwateringly sweet.
Along with being Zhu’s passenger, however, I was also his roommate, a difficult proposition. He smoked heavily, whether while sitting naked after a shower, braying into the phone at his wife, or watching TV in bed, his head propped up by pillows. Often I knew he was awake in the morning by the click of his lighter and the smoke wafting over my bed. He snored raucously. He didn’t believe in lifting the toilet seat. And always he fell asleep with the television on. This wasn’t such a bad thing: usually I just reached over to the night table and clicked it off with the remote.
But that night in Hongping, there was a snag. When I came back from the cultural show, Zhu was lying in bed on top of his sheets, watching a famous black-and-white movie from 1956, Railroad Guerrilla, about Chinese peasant fighters throwing off the yoke of their Japanese imperialist occupiers. The guerrillas were just entering the imperial administrator’s quarters when I came out of the bathroom: an extended storm of hacking machetes ensued, the Japanese falling left and right. Zhu murmured appreciatively and soon drifted off. I watched Japanese get cut down until I couldn’t believe any could be left alive on the planet and then, over Zhu’s rising snores, looked for the remote. It was nowhere to be found. The television itself had no on-off button, and its plug was hidden behind a heavy dresser; I needed to find the remote itself. Finally I spotted it, poking out from underneath Zhu’s butt. I turned him over and extracted it, switched off the TV, put in my earplugs, and went to sleep.
The next morning, Li Lu sympathized with my desire to switch roommates. Zhou had said he would happily share with me. But she declared it was an impossibility: Zhu would lose face if I abandoned him. “And there is nothing worse for a man like him than losing face,” she said.
Zhu asleep (notice television remote under his elbow, smoking paraphernalia on night table)
The next day we hiked through the misty, craggy hills of Shennongjia. The area, known as “the Roof of Central China,” is a UNESCO biosphere reserve of 272 square miles, with six peaks measuring up to 10,190 feet above sea level. Among our group, it was equally famous as the home of China’s Bigfoot. This creature, in the local lore, lumbered through the mists with a big-bosomed mate; an artist’s rendition of the hairy couple appeared in the corner of a billboard advertising the reserve. But though the trails were beautiful and mysterious and we could imagine an ape-man happy there, none were spotted.
The police were directing traffic at the park entrance, and as we left, one officer noticed me in Zhu’s passenger seat and waved us over. Foreigners are not permitted to travel in the direction we were headed, he declared, pointing to a sign. Zhu pulled over and summoned Zhao on the radio. Our entire group stopped, and major discussion ensued, which resulted, some twenty minutes later, in the policeman consenting to my passage. Zhao could be very persuasive.
“What was that all about?” I asked Li Lu.
“There are army bases in the mountains ahead,” she said. “It is thought there are missiles there, to protect the Three Gorges Dam. You can’t see them from the road, but the army is afraid of spies.”
“But times are changing, right?” I asked. She looked uncertain, and I wasn’t sure the answer was yes.
We drove for more than an hour, stopping for lunch in another little mountain town, Muyu. Halfway through the meal, a policeman looked in the room where we were eating. Uh-oh, I thought. As we left, a different policeman spotted me and uttered something grave. Zhao was summoned again. Other policemen arrived. My passport was requested, a phone call was made. Word came down: I had to go back. The old China was still around.
Zhao took me aside reassuringly and pressed a roll of yuan bills into my hand. Li Lu and I were to take a taxi back to Hongping, he said, while he figured out an alternate plan. We would call his cell phone from there.
The solution appeared arduous: either we would have to take a taxi, train, and another taxi, meeting up with the group the next night, or we could take one long and expensive taxi ride, meeting up with them the next afternoon, but missing the Wudang Mountains and their monasteries, which are famous for martial arts. As we waited for a driver, a call came in from the group up ahead: the cops in Muyu went home at dusk, they had heard. After dark, we should be able to blow through without any trouble. We consulted with some locals, and they concurred. And so it was decided.
We zoomed through Muyu without a hitch and, around midnight, passed as well through a couple of checkpoints staffed by sleepy soldiers; they raised the red-and-white-striped boom arms across the road with a wave at the driver. I entered my hotel room in Wudang around two a.m. Naked on his bed, Zhu was sawing loudly, the television was blaring, and the lights were all on. It was good to be back.
The next morning found us standing in line for gleaming cable cars to a cloud-shrouded monastery atop the Wudang Mountains. It was possible to hike, and I would have liked to, but nobody else was game. This area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was a traditional home to Chinese wushu, or kung fu; for centuries, Taoist monasteries had nurtured martial arts in conjunction with meditation, natural medicine, and agriculture. The view from the gondola reminded me of classical Chinese landscapes on rice paper scrolls: the peaks were high but rounded, covered with small trees and shrubs, dotted with small wooden houses wherever they weren’t too steep. The monastery consisted of several gorgeous stone buildings with sloping, green-tiled roofs set off by red-painted walls; all were connected by stone paths and staircases. The steeper drops had chains across them to keep people from falling. For years it had been in vogue in China for young couples to buy a padlock and affix it to the chain, thereby pledging their bond to each other. The practice had stopped here, but hundreds or thousands of rusting padlocks remained.