Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  He gave me a laminated name card. The front featured a picture of two hands clasped in a businessman’s shake, along with the words:

  Zhang Baolong

  Feng Shui Master

  Services for the Entire Length of the Dragon,

  From Beginning to End

  Traditionally, feng shui masters evaluate the relationship between buildings and landscapes, trying to create harmony between what is natural and what is manmade. In ancient times, these beliefs often influenced military and political affairs. Northwest of Beijing, the Ming dynasty avoided building the Great Wall along a twenty-mile-long ridge because of its proximity to the imperial tombs. From a strategic point of view, the ridge was perfect for defenseworks, but feng shui masters believed it represented a longmai, or “dragon vein.” Any construction that violated the vein could bring bad fortune to the Ming, and so the ridge was left alone. The emperor went to the trouble of building walls farther to the north, where the terrain was less defensible and required more extensive fortifications.

  After the Communists came to power in 1949, they attacked many cultural traditions as superstitious, including religion, fortune-telling, and feng shui analysis. Even when the reforms of Deng Xiaoping introduced greater tolerance, some practices never recovered—Taoism, for example, attracts few believers in today’s China. But faith in feng shui has proven to be resilient, largely because it’s connected to business. Good feng shui means good fortune, and people are willing to pay for expert analysis. Zhang Baolong was one of the new masters—he negotiated the market economy as skillfully as he did the geography. His business card listed twenty-seven separate services, ranging from “selecting marriage partners” to “choosing grave sites”—this was the “length of the dragon, from beginning to end.” He also offered to install wood beams for houses, determine locations for mining, and treat “unusual diseases.” He built coffins. (“You must supply your own wood.”) He assisted in the carrying of wedding sedans. On the card, service number twenty-one involved moving bones to a new grave site—a common task in a nation undergoing a construction boom.

  “I chose this site!” Zhang said proudly, pointing at the patch of recently dug earth. In front of the tomb, mourners took turns kowtowing: each person knelt, burned a stack of paper grave money, and wailed as he knocked his head against the ground. Nobody seemed to mind my presence. In northern China, I had learned that funerals are almost always welcoming, in part because people rarely see foreigners. Nevertheless, I dropped my voice to a whisper: “Who’s the funeral for?”

  But Zhang Baolong didn’t seem to hear my question; he was still talking about feng shui. “It’s arranged east-west,” he continued, pointing at the patch of earth. “The head faces west, and the feet are to the east. And that tree I planted is a poplar. We plant poplars for men and willows for women; the purpose is to tell the soul where the grave is. This particular place is good for a lot of reasons. The position of that signal tower is very important, for example. You see, this place is good because it’s high, and there’s water in that stream to the east. And you have the signal tower above, which serves to protect the tomb. A person buried in this location will have many wealthy descendants, who will rise to high civil, military, and scholarly positions.”

  The men had finished kowtowing and now it was the women’s turn: one by one, they touched their heads to the ground. The women were louder and their cries echoed across the valley.

  “My father and grandfather were both feng shui masters,” Zhang continued. “We’ve always done this in my family. And everybody in my family lives for a long time! My father lived to be ninety-five, and my mother was ninety-eight when she died. My grandmother lived to be ninety-nine!”

  The keening rose another pitch. I wondered if a conversation about longevity might be more appropriate at another time, but Zhang kept talking. “I have three sons and three daughters,” he said. “My sons are feng shui masters, too! And one of my daughters”—he beamed, perhaps at the thought of security in this world and the next—“is a nurse!”

  THE WEATHER HELD PERFECT across Hebei and Shanxi—cool, crisp mornings, the sunlight falling sharp across terraced fields. Usually I awoke early, but there was never any schedule or plan. I tried to keep the Great Wall in sight, and I stopped whenever something interested me. I figured out the route as I went; on many days I traveled less than one hundred miles. Rural driving tended to be slow, because often something was happening in the street—a crop threshing, a sheep crossing, a funeral procession. The roads themselves were completely unpredictable. A thin red line on my Sinomap might represent a brand-new asphalt road, but it could also be a dirt track or even a dry creekbed. Quite often the routes were in the process of being improved. Beginning in 1998, the government had invested heavily in rural roads, partly as a response to the Asian financial crisis, and this project was still under way when I took my journey.

  In modern China, road building has often been a strategy for dealing with poverty or crisis. The first major construction campaign of motor roads began in 1920, when a drought resulted in a terrible famine across the north. It was hard to transport food to people who were starving—China’s road system, which dated to imperial times, had been designed for horse-drawn carts. The American Red Cross sponsored a project to build modern roads suitable for trucks and automobiles, and in October of 1920 they began construction in Shandong Province. They hired local farmers, many of whom had been close to starvation, and the new roads allowed relief trucks to arrive. Oliver J. Todd, an American engineer who directed the Shandong project, estimated that it provided food and fuel, directly or indirectly, to half a million people.

  The Red Cross eventually built roads in four northern provinces, and their work was so successful that Todd was hired by the Chinese government. He stayed for eighteen years, supervising highway construction all across the country. On a single road-building project in 1928, he had a crew of two hundred thousand laborers—more people than were employed by the entire U.S. road system at that time. The number of passenger cars in China remained low—in 1922, Beijing had approximately 1,500—but interest was intense. Chinese cities held car shows; the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao ran a weekly “Automobile Supplement.” By 1935, China had fifty thousand miles of good earthen motor roads, and it seemed only a matter of time before the nation would experience an auto boom.

  In the end, that boom was postponed for more than half a century. The Japanese invaded northern China in 1937, and the war crippled the young auto market. After Mao came to power, decades of Communist economics made it impossible for people to buy cars. The road system of rural China languished, and it wasn’t until the Reform years that the government could improve such infrastructure on a major scale. In 1998, the Asian financial crisis provided motivation, somewhat like the famines of old. The government wanted to offset the economic threat, and it also saw an opportunity to finally inspire the long-delayed auto boom. History was being repeated: this was China’s second wave of car pioneers, and they were essentially starting over. In 2001, the year that I got my license, the country had a population of over 1.2 billion, but there were fewer than ten million passenger vehicles. The ratio was 128 people for every vehicle, similar to the United States in 1911.

  For my road trip, I rented a Chinese-made Jeep Cherokee from a Beijing company called Capital Motors. It was a new industry—even five years earlier, almost nobody would have thought of renting a car for a weekend trip. But now the business had started to develop, and my local Capital Motors branch had a fleet of about fifty vehicles, mostly Chinese-made Volkswagen Santanas and Jettas. They were small sedans, built on the same basic model as the VW Fox that was once sold in the States. At Capital Motors, I often rented Jettas for weekend trips, and there was an elaborate ritual to these transactions. First, I paid my twenty-five dollars per day and filled out a mountain of paperwork. Next, the head mechanic opened the trunk to prove that there was a spare tire and a jack. Finally we toured the Jett
a’s exterior, recording dents and scratches onto a diagram that represented the shape of a car. This often took a while—Beijing traffic is not gentle, and it was my responsibility to sketch every door ding and bumper dent. After we documented the prenuptial damage, the mechanic turned the ignition and showed me the gas gauge. Sometimes it was half full; sometimes there was a quarter tank. Occasionally he studied it and announced: “Three-eighths.” It was my responsibility to return the car with exactly the same amount of fuel. Week to week, it was never the same, and one day I decided to make my own contribution to the fledgling industry.

  “You know,” I said, “you should rent out all the cars with a full tank, and then require the customer to bring it back full. That’s how rental companies do it in America. It’s much simpler.”

  “That would never work here,” said Mr. Wang, who usually handled my paperwork. He was the friendliest of the three men who sat in the Capital Motors front office, where they smoked cigarettes like it was a competition. Behind their veil of smoke, a company evaluation sign hung on the wall:

  CUSTOMER SATISFACTION RATING: 90%

  EFFICIENCY RATING: 97%

  APPROPRIATE SERVICE DICTION RATING: 98%

  SERVICE ATTITUDE RATING: 99%

  “That might work in America, but it wouldn’t work here,” Mr. Wang continued. “People in China would return the car empty.”

  “Then you charge them a lot extra to refill it,” I explained. “Make it a standard rule. Charge extra if people don’t obey and they’ll learn to follow it.”

  “Chinese people would never do that!”

  “I’m sure they would,” I said.

  “You don’t understand Chinese people!” Mr. Wang said, laughing, and the other men nodded their heads in agreement. As a foreigner, I often heard that, and it had a way of ending discussion. The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility. We had a couple more conversations about this, but finally I dropped the subject. It was impossible to argue with somebody as friendly as Mr. Wang.

  He seemed especially cheerful whenever I returned a freshly damaged car. In the States, I had never had an accident, but Beijing was a different story. When I first came to the capital and walked around, I was impressed by the physicality of pedestrians—I was constantly getting bumped and pushed. In a city of thirteen million you learn to expect contact, and after I got my license I realized that driving works the same way. The first couple of times I dented a Jetta, I felt terrible; after the fourth or fifth time, it became routine. I bumped other cars; other cars bumped me. If there was a dent, we settled it in the street, the way everybody does in China.

  Once, a driver backed into my rental car near the Lama Temple in downtown Beijing. I got out to inspect the dent; the other motorist, by way of introduction, immediately said, “One hundred yuan.” It was the equivalent of about twelve dollars, which was generally the starting point for a midsize Beijing dent. When this offer was relayed by telephone to Mr. Wang, his response was also immediate: “Ask for two hundred.” I bargained for five minutes, until the other driver finally agreed to one hundred and fifty. Mr. Wang was satisfied; he knew you never get what you ask for. And every accident had a silver lining—dents were good business. There wasn’t any paperwork for these exchanges, and I suspected that the desk men at Capital Motors sometimes kept the cash.

  Another time I hit a dog while driving in the countryside north of Beijing. The animal darted out from behind a house and lunged at the front of my Jetta; I swerved, but it was too late. That was a common problem—Chinese dogs, like everybody else in the country, weren’t quite accustomed to having automobiles around. When I returned the car, Mr. Wang seemed pleased to see that the plastic cover for the right signal light had been smashed. He asked me what I had hit.

  “A dog,” I said.

  “Gou mei wenti?” he said. “The dog didn’t have a problem, did it?”

  “The dog had a problem,” I said. “It died.”

  Mr. Wang’s smile got bigger. “Did you eat it?”

  “It wasn’t that kind of dog,” I said. “It was one of those tiny little dogs.”

  “Well, sometimes if a driver hits a big dog,” Mr. Wang said, “he just throws it in the trunk, takes it home, and cooks it.” I couldn’t tell if he was joking; he was a dog owner himself, but in China that doesn’t necessarily involve dietary restrictions. He charged me twelve bucks for the light cover—the same price as a midsize dent.

  They never asked where I was taking the Jeep Cherokee. The rental contract specifically forbade drivers from leaving the Beijing region, but I decided to ignore this rule—they wouldn’t figure it out until I returned the Jeep with a loaded odometer. In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission. The Jeep was the biggest vehicle on the lot, a Cherokee 7250, and they gave me a special price of thirty dollars a day. It was white, with purple detailing along the sides; the doors were decorated with the English words “City Special.” The name was accurate—the thing would be worthless in rough terrain, because it was strictly rear-wheel drive. I was certain that at some point on my journey I’d get stuck in mud or sand or snow, but there was no point in worrying about that now, because Capital Motors had nothing better to offer. At any rate, if things got bad in the west I could always call Mr. Zhang, the feng shui master. On his business card he offered to “tow cars and trucks”—service number twenty-two, listed between “collecting bones” and “playing horns and drums.”

  DRIVING WEST, I HAD climbed steadily, until now in northern Shanxi the elevation was over four thousand feet. This was a dry, dusty landscape, with low brown peaks scarred by creekbeds that had burrowed into their flanks. It was as if the mountains had been bled of all brightness, the color running down the hillsides and pooling in fields where farmers harvested sweet oats. Only these valleys were vivid: the deep green of the crops, the dark shimmer of irrigation channels, the bright blue of the cotton jackets that were still common among elderly Chinese in the countryside. But the landscape had a stark, simple beauty, and for the first time it felt open—a foreshadowing of the great steppes of Central Asia.

  Everywhere the valley floor was broken by the remnants of signal towers. They were made of tamped earth, the same dusty brown color as the hills, and they rose more than twenty feet tall. Some villages were entirely surrounded by ancient defenseworks. To the north, Inner Mongolia lay less than twenty miles away, and on my map this provincial boundary was marked by a familiar symbol: .

  I pulled over at the last village before the border. The place was called Ninglu Bu—many town names in this region include the character bu, which means “fortress,” because they’re located on the sites of former Ming-dynasty garrisons. In Ninglu an old fort stood in the middle of town, and the village was surrounded by walls of packed earth. These fortifications completely dwarfed the simple homes of today’s residents, who numbered only one hundred and twenty.

  When I stopped in villages with ancient ruins, I often asked locals if anybody knew the history. In Ninglu, a group of elderly people in the village square responded immediately. “Talk to Old Chen,” somebody said, and another man shuffled off to find him. Five minutes later, Chen Zhen appeared. He was fifty-three years old, with sun-lined skin and gray hair that had been cropped close. He wore dark policeman’s pants, a green shirt that bore the gold buttons of the People’s Liberation Army, and a blue military jacket with epaulets on the shoulders and stripes across the cuffs. In the Chinese countryside, men often wear surplus army and police gear, because the cheap garments are practical. Invariably the
se clothes are mismatched and oversized; Old Chen’s sleeves hung to his fingertips. He looked as if he had inherited the outfit, much as Ninglu had inherited its earthen walls—all of it, from the baggy jackets to the crumbling fortifications, could have been the castoffs of some defeated army that had abandoned everything and fled south.

  He stood ramrod straight while I introduced myself. I explained that I had come from Beijing and was interested in the Great Wall; I asked if he knew anything about the history of this village. Old Chen listened carefully and then he cleared his throat. “Come with me,” he said. “I have information.”

  I followed him down a dirt path that led to a series of mud-walled houses. At the largest one, he opened the door. Most of the room was occupied by the kang, the brick bed that’s traditionally used in northern China. During winter a kang can be heated from beneath with a wood fire, but in Ninglu it was still autumn, and Old Chen was saving his fuel. The room was cold; he poured me a cup of tea to warm my hands. He opened a drawer in a cabinet, removed a sheaf of thin rice paper, and proudly handed it over. The front cover featured a handwritten title:

  The Annals of Ninglu Bu

  Research Established January 22, 1992

  On page one, Old Chen’s careful script read: “The town wall was built in the 22nd year of the Jiajing emperor (in 1543), and encased in kiln-fired brick in the first year of the Wanli emperor (in 1573).” I flipped through the book—dozens of pages, hundreds of dates. There were maps: one page had been labeled “Great Wall,” and it was crisscrossed with thick blue lines and circles.

  “There are thirty-three signal towers in this region,” Old Chen explained, pointing at the circles on the map. “Those are from the Ming. The Ming wall is along the Inner Mongolian border. But there are other walls also going through this region, from other dynasties.”

  He opened a second drawer and took out a gray shard of pottery. When he handed it over, the hardened clay felt cool in my palm. “What dynasty do you think this is from?” he asked.