Country Driving [22]
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 said, “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.
Most learning is informal, although there are plenty of private courses. Young Chinese often enroll in classes for English, typing, computers, accounting; in factory towns they sometimes pay for specialized courses that teach them how to behave like educated urbanites. And there are driving classes—that’s one type of training that’s regulated by the government. National law requires every Chinese driver to enroll in a certified course, at his own expense, for a total of fifty-eight hours of practice. In China, you can’t just go to a parking