Country Driving [108]
Now I had to return a car without a front bumper. Wei Ziqi offered repeatedly to pay for it, but I told him not to worry; I should have known better than to let him drive in the first place. For the next two days the car sat in the village lot, bumperless, while I steeled myself for the journey back to the city. When it came time to leave, Wei Ziqi used some old wire to reattach the bumper so it hung off the front end. I went slow on the expressway, hoping that the thing wouldn’t fly off. Back in Beijing, when Mr. Wang saw the car, his eyes widened.
“Waah!” he said. “How did you do that?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “I let somebody else drive. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that.” I began to describe Wei Ziqi’s lack of experience with cars that had front ends, and Mr. Wang looked confused; the more I expanded on this topic, the blanker his expression became. I realized that if I continued with all the relevant details—the Liberation trucks, the Shunyi driving school regulations about starting in second gear, the Jetta-sized Great Wall in Sancha village—Mr. Wang’s head would probably explode. At last I abandoned the story and offered to pay for the bumper.
“Mei wenti!” Mr. Wang said, smiling. “No problem! We have insurance! You just need to write an accident report. Do you have your chop?”
In China, the chop is an official stamp, registered to a company. My formal registration was in the name of the New Yorker magazine’s Beijing office, although in fact this operation consisted of nothing more than me and a pile of paperwork. I almost never used the chop, and I told Mr. Wang that it was at home.
“Mei wenti!” he said. “Just bring it next time.” In the rental car office, he opened a drawer and pulled out a stack of papers. Each was blank except for a red stamp. Mr. Wang rifled through the pile, selected one, and laid it in front of me. The chop read: “U.S.-China Tractor Association.”
“What’s this?” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “They had an accident, but they didn’t have their chop, so they used somebody else’s. Then they brought this page to replace it. Now you can write your report on their page, and next time bring a piece of paper with your chop, so the next person can use it. Understand?”
I didn’t—he had to explain this arrangement three times. Finally it dawned on me that the wrecked bumper, which hadn’t been my fault, and in a sense had not been Wei Ziqi’s fault either, because of the unexpected front end, would now be blamed on the U.S.-China Tractor Association. “But you shouldn’t say it happened in the countryside,” Mr. Wang instructed. “That’s too complicated. Just say you had an accident in our parking lot.”
I followed his advice—the report left out everything about the countryside and the Liberation trucks and the fake Great Wall. Instead it said that, driving on behalf of the U.S.-China Tractor Association, I had wrecked the Jetta’s bumper in the parking lot of Capital Motors. I signed my Chinese name across the tractor chop. Mr. Wang beamed and lit another cigarette, and that was where I left him, sitting beneath the company sign:
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION RATING: 90%
EFFICIENCY RATING: 97%
APPROPRIATE SERVICE DICTION RATING: 98%
SERVICE ATTITUDE RATING: 99%
AFTER FOUR YEARS, SANCHA felt as familiar as any place I had known during adulthood. Much of my last decade had been spent traveling; it was a nomad’s life, and for the most part I enjoyed it. But in Sancha I came to know something different. I had routines—I knew what to expect from every season, every day. At dawn I awoke with the propaganda