Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  It’s also good at banquets, which was how my tour ended. We ate in a private room at a local restaurant, and the courses appeared, one after another: pork, chicken, fish, Shanxi-style noodles. A half dozen officials accompanied me, and they drank baijiu, clear grain alcohol. One by one, they raised their glasses.

  “I’m sorry, but I have to drink tea today,” I said. “I’m driving this afternoon, so I can’t drink baijiu.”

  “How about beer?”

  That was actually the subject of a trick question on the driver’s exam:

  212. Before driving, a person can

  a) drink a little alcohol.

  b) not drink alcohol.

  c) drink beer but not other types of alcohol.

  “I can’t drink beer, either,” I said. “I can’t drink any alcohol if I’m driving.”

  “Certainly you can drink a little bit!”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  “Sure you can—just a glass or two!”

  The cadres weren’t nearly as persistent as others I met on my journey. When it came to drinking-and-driving peer pressure, weddings were the worst occasions, followed closely by funerals. That was another challenge of being on the road—if I attended any kind of banquet during the day, I had to find a way to be polite but firm, and accepting one drink only opened the floodgates. In America it’s enough to say, “I’m driving”—after that, the subject is closed. In China, though, that statement simply opens new avenues of logic, some of which are hard to refute. On my journey, the first reason to drink was usually the fait accompli. “You have to drink it now,” people said, holding up a full glass. “It’s already been poured. You can’t turn it down.” The second reason was that I had come so far and must be tired. The third reason was that after the banquet I could drive very slowly. They also pointed out that Americans use the right side of the road, so Chinese driving is natural; a couple of drinks won’t matter. Anyway—reason number five—the glass had already been poured. Sometimes people said the police would be so shocked to see a foreigner behind the wheel that they’d never think of arresting me for driving while intoxicated. Once, a banquet host asked, “When did you first learn how to drive?”

  “About twenty years ago.”

  “See? Most people here have only been driving for a year or two. With so much experience, of course you can drink something!”

  His logic made sense: I couldn’t imagine how much I’d have to drink before feeling inspired to go backward down the on-ramp of an expressway. In Youyu, though, the cadres were on their best behavior, and I was able to fend off the baijiu and beer. After the banquet I thanked them for the tour and drove out of town. Two miles later, I turned around, skirted the city center, and headed back toward the line of signal towers. I was curious to see if villagers said the same things when I arrived in a City Special instead of a chauffeured Santana. Near the Ming fort, I saw a group of people high on a mountainside, working with shovels, and I followed a dirt track to the site.

  There were ten men and women digging crescent-shaped holes into the loess. All of them wore surplus army jackets, and they gathered around my Jeep. They lived in a nearby village called Dingjia; like most settlements in this area, it was composed of cave homes. When I said that I was a journalist, they gathered closer.

  “They’ve been doing this kind of thing since I was young,” one man said. “In the past it wasn’t the World Bank, but there have been other campaigns. You see all of these holes? They’re empty. For two or three generations people have been digging these holes, and you still don’t see any trees here. Why not? Because our labor is free, but they’d have to pay money for the trees. It doesn’t cost anything to have us dig. They do it so that when the leaders come past, they see the holes and they believe that trees are being planted. The local officials embezzle the money instead.”

  He was only twenty-eight years old, but the others in the group seem to defer to him as a spokesman. In the countryside, I sometimes met ranters—people who couldn’t stop complaining angrily about government corruption. But this man was soft-spoken; he chose his words carefully, and there was a certain sadness in his eyes. He wore an especially big military jacket—another member of rural China’s great castoff army. I asked how much they were paid for the digging.

  “We get five bowls of instant noodles every day,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe that I’d heard correctly, so I asked him to repeat it. “Five bowls,” he said. “If you stick around, you’ll see them deliver it.”

  “Why do you do the work?”

  “Otherwise we don’t get government relief,” he said. “We’ve had a drought, and this year it was too dry for corn. We didn’t even plant it. All we have this autumn are potatoes. The government gives us corn for relief, but they won’t give it unless we do the digging.” He continued: “Most people in our village are opposed to this project, because we’ve lost three-fourths of our land. We’d like to graze animals in places like this, but the government says they need to protect it. Protect, protect, protect—that’s all we hear, a bunch of slogans.”

  The others murmured in agreement. “You know the saying: The mountains are high and the emperor is far away,” the young farmer said. “The country’s leaders are sitting in a high place, and they have no idea what’s really going on. And the people don’t know what the country’s leaders really say. Local leaders are the biggest problem—the county officials are the ones who embezzle everything.” He pointed at the Ming fort, with its World Bank slogan. “We see the World Bank officials in their cars, when they have inspections, but we can’t talk to them. The county leaders don’t let us. Actually, I don’t even know what ‘World Bank’ means. All I know is that it has something to do with investment. They come by in their cars, and we’ve tried to get them to stop, but they never do. They just tell us slogans: Protect the Land, Turn the Land into Forest.”

  The phrase he used—Shan gao huangdi yuan, The mountains are high, the emperor far away—is common in rural China. People invariably believe that problems are local, and that higher-ranked leaders are honest and decent; it’s rare to meet somebody who is cynical about the system to its core. And it’s hard for them to grasp the inevitability of bad geography. For a village like Dingjia, the mountains are high and the factories far away—there was no way they could compete with the coastal economy, and even the best-run tree-planting campaign would have a limited impact on a place like this. The man told me that when he was a child, Dingjia had a population of two hundred; now there were only eighty people left. I’d heard the same thing at all the stops along my drive—every village had a declining population. “I should go out to look for work, too,” the farmer said. “But I have a small child and both my parents are still in the village. I’ll probably go eventually, but I’d rather be able to stay a little longer.”

  I told him that I’d been escorted to other villages where people praised the World Bank project.

  “Maybe there are some places where they get the money and they plant the trees and things improve,” he said. “But not around here. Look at this hillside—nothing good is going to grow here, because they already removed most of the topsoil. They put it in places near the road, so they can plant things there and it will look good. It’s just for show.”

  While we were talking, a two-stroke engine echoed from down in the valley. The puttering grew louder, and then a tiny blue tractor appeared on the road. It looked like a cartoon vehicle hacking and coughing its way up the steep hillside. When it finally gasped to a stop I saw that the back was loaded with bags of instant noodles. Silently the driver distributed five packages to every worker. In China, people often eat instant noodles dry, as a snack, and the workers tore open their packages. The brand name said “Islamic Beef Noodles.”

  “Are you Islamic?” I asked.

  “No,” the young farmer said, laughing. “But these are the cheapest brand—no pork. A nickel each!”

  He opened a bag and hand
ed it to me. That was even worse than the poured drink: the last thing I wanted to do on this hillside was eat dry halal instant noodles that represented one-fifth of a laborer’s day wage. After some polite arguing, I convinced him to keep it, along with a pack of Oreos from my stash in the City Special. Later, when I contacted a World Bank official, he insisted that the farmers were wrong, and he noted that the bank’s projects on the loess plateau had already benefited over one million people. But it was just another statistic: the only thing I knew for certain was that those million beneficiaries did not include the individuals I had spoken with. And I had always been wary of development work that was administered from the capital, with little local contact. The mountains are high, the NGOs far away—that was how you ended up with people digging holes in exchange for Islamic Beef Noodles. It also seemed like a bad idea to paint World Bank slogans onto Ming dynasty ruins. But the Great Wall had already survived countless invasions, and undoubtedly it would still be there, high on the ridgeline, whenever this latest wave of barbarians disappeared.

  FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED miles I followed the border between Shanxi and Inner Mongolia. The Ming wall remained the boundary, and the fortifications were still impressive; but these regions were poor and the roads deteriorated fast. At the village of Shirenwan, I saw a peasant following a camel that had been hitched to a plow. Nothing about that scene looked promising: the animal had stopped dead in its tracks; the peasant was shouting; the soil had the hard yellow color of clay brick. An hour later I stopped for two young women who were hitchhiking. They insisted on sitting together in the backseat, and when I asked questions they responded in voices so quiet that they were almost whispers. After ten minutes they told me that I was the first foreigner they had ever seen.

  There were more hitchers now, and picking up passengers became part of my typical routine. Motor traffic was light, but it wasn’t uncommon to see somebody beside the road, making the Chinese hitchhiking gesture: arm extended, palm down, hand bouncing as if petting an invisible dog. To me, this was new—Beijing pedestrians don’t flag down random rides, and nobody had asked me to stop in Hebei. The driver’s exam provides little guidance with regard to passengers, apart from a single question:

  356. If you give somebody a ride and realize that he left something in your car, you should

  a) keep it for yourself.

  b) return it to the person or his place of work as quickly as possible.

  c) call him and offer to return it for a reward.

  I rarely saw a farmer looking for a ride. Locals typically didn’t travel much, apart from trips to market centers where they knew the regular transport schedule. Most people I picked up were women who looked almost as out of place as I did. They tended to be of a distinct type: small-town sophisticates, girls who had left the village and were on their way to becoming something else. They were well dressed, often in skirts and heels, and their hair was dyed unsubtle shades of red. They wore lots of makeup and cheap perfume. They sat stiffly, backs not touching the seat, as if riding in the City Special were a formal experience. They rarely made eye contact. They were unfailingly polite, and they answered all my questions, but they were reluctant to initiate conversation. Once I picked up three young people, two women and a man, and we chatted for half an hour; during that time they didn’t ask me a single question. Often it took ten minutes before a passenger inquired where I was from. This was strange, because usually it’s the first order of business in a Chinese conversation—people always wanted to know my nationality. But something about the interaction changed when the foreigner sat in the driver’s seat. People tried to be courteous, and they weren’t sure what to make of me. Several asked if I were Chinese, which had never happened anywhere else in the country. A couple of passengers guessed that I was Uighur, a Turkic minority from the west; others thought I might be Hui, a Muslim Chinese. One woman, after watching me battle a rutted road for ten miles, finally said, “Are you Mongolian?”

  Invariably they were migrants on a home visit. They worked in factories, in restaurants, in hair salons, and they didn’t say much about these jobs. At first, I couldn’t figure out why there were so many women, because in fact the majority of Chinese migrants are male. But this wasn’t a peak travel season—in China, most migrants go home only once a year, during the Spring Festival, and this is especially true for those who find jobs far away. The people I met generally worked closer to home, in provincial cities or good-sized townships. For them, village trips were feasible, and women were more likely to make the effort, because they were attentive 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 pastoral-sounding 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 s
aid, “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.