Country Driving [23]
One month I observed a driving course in Lishui, a small city in southeastern China. It’s located in the factory belt, where the boom economy produces a lot of new motorists. The institution was called the Public Safety Driving School, and I sat in on a course taught by Coach Tang. In China, all driving instructors are addressed as Jiaolian, “Coach.” It’s the same word you use for a basketball coach or a drill instructor, and it carries connotations of a training regimen. That’s the essence of Chinese driving—a physical endeavor.
The course began with the most basic kinds of touch. On the first day, Coach Tang raised the hood of a red Volkswagen Santana, and six students huddled close. He pointed out the engine, the radiator, the fan belt. They walked around to the back, where he opened the trunk. He showed them how to unscrew the gas cap. The next step involved the driver’s door. “Pull it like this,” he said, and then each student practiced opening and closing the door. Next, Coach Tang identified the panel instruments, as well as the clutch, the brake, and the gas pedal. After an hour the students finally entered the vehicle. Each took turns sitting in the driver’s seat, where they practiced shifting from first to fifth gear. The motor wasn’t on, but they worked the clutch and moved the gearshift. Watching this made me wince, and finally I had to say something. “Isn’t that bad for the car?”
“No,” Coach Tang said. “It’s fine.”
“I think it might be bad if the motor’s off,” I said.
“It’s completely fine,” Coach Tang said. “We do it all the time.” In China, instructors are traditionally respected without question, and Coach Tang had been kind enough to allow me to observe his class, so I decided to hold my tongue. But it wasn’t always easy. For the next step, they learned to use the clutch by setting the parking brake, starting the engine, shifting into first gear, and then releasing the clutch while flooring the accelerator. The motor whined against the force of the brake; the hood kowtowed with torque. One by one, students entered the driver’s seat, gunning the engine and going nowhere. By the end of the day you could have fried an egg on the Santana’s hood, and my palms broke into a sweat every time another driver hit the gas. I could practically hear my father’s voice—he’s a good amateur mechanic, and few things anger him more than mindless abuse of an automobile.
Nobody was allowed to move a car until the second day of class. From the beginning, the students had circled the Santana warily, like the blind men and the elephant: they peered in the hood, they worked the doors, they fiddled with the gas cap. There were four men and two women, all of them under the age of forty. Each had paid over three hundred dollars for the course, which was a lot of money in a city where the monthly minimum wage was roughly seventy-five dollars. Only one person came from a household that currently owned an automobile. The others told me that someday they might buy one, and the college students—there were four of them—believed that a driver’s license looked good on a résumé. “It’s something you should be able to do, like swimming,” one young man named Wang Yanheng said. He was a college senior majoring in information technology. “In the future, so many people in China are going to have cars,” Wang said. “It’s going to be important to know how to drive.” The only student from a home with automobiles was a nineteen-year-old sociology major named Liang Yanfang. Her father owned a plastics factory, and he had three cars. When I asked what kind of plastics the family factory produced, the woman ran her finger along the rubber lining of the Santana’s window. “This is one of the things we make,” she said.
The first ten days of class focused on what they called the “parking range,” and during that time they performed exactly three movements. They practiced a ninety-degree turn into a parking space, moving forward,