Country Driving [20]
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 handed 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