Country Driving [29]
“Where exactly?” he said.
“Hebei, Shanxi,” I said.
“That’s all?”
“Well, Shaanxi, too,” I said. “And Inner Mongolia. But not too far in Inner Mongolia. Mostly along the Shanxi border.”
“Waah!” Mr. Wang exclaimed. “Did you go by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know that you’re not supposed to leave Beijing?”
“I thought it would be OK as long as I was careful.”
“Did you stay on paved roads?”
“Most of the time.”
“You’re not supposed to drive off the pavement,” Mr. Wang said.
“I know,” I said. “But some parts of Inner Mongolia don’t have paved roads. I drove really slowly.”
Mr. Wang seemed nearly as thrilled as he did whenever I returned a damaged car. “That’s great!” he said, beaming. “All the way to Inner Mongolia!” He called over the other workers and showed them the mileage; everybody laughed and lit cigarettes in celebration. I picked up my deposit and headed to the door. They were still talking about it when I left: “All the way to Inner Mongolia!”
II
AFTER THAT FIRST LONG TRIP I NEVER WORRIED ABOUT where I took a car from Capital Motors. I usually rented Jettas or Santanas, and I made weekend jaunts all around the north—to the Eastern Qing tombs, to the old imperial summer resort at Chengde. A couple of times I drove the new expressway to the coast. It took less than two hours to reach the beach resort of Beidaihe, and there wasn’t much traffic. In China, city people were buying automobiles, but they still weren’t taking many long journeys, because tolls were high and drivers were inexperienced. The expressways were empty, and they were beautiful: four lanes, wide shoulders, perfect landscaping.
You could drive for hours without seeing a cop. It was strange, because police are prominent in other parts of Chinese life, and as a journalist I had been detained a number of times. And like any American from the Midwest, I hit an open road and instinctively kept an eye out for police. But China had yet to develop a functioning highway patrol, and the few cops I saw were simply on their way to some other destination. They always flashed their rack lights, probably because they’d seen it in American movies, but they weren’t patrolling and they weren’t in a hurry. In fact they tended to be among the slowest vehicles on the expressway. At first it felt strange to fly past a policeman flashing his lights, but after a while I learned to ignore them, like everybody else. The only drivers who had to worry were freight truckers. Cops sometimes stationed themselves at tollbooths, where they fined and extorted truck drivers who had overloaded their vehicles. But nobody paid any mind to passenger cars—it was the golden age of highway driving in China.
The only problem consisted of other motorists, but even amid the chaos of Chinese traffic there was a degree of predictability. Certain car models tended to attract certain character types, and on the road I learned to profile accordingly. The highest risks usually clustered at both ends of the spectrum. If somebody had a Mercedes or a top-end Buick, he was probably a businessman in the first flush of success; these people drove recklessly. And I was wary of the cheapest cars, the battered Xialis and Chang’ans whose drivers had nothing to lose. In the countryside, black Santanas with heavily tinted windows were trouble. They were cadre cars, usually from places where the local government was either too poor or too unskilled at embezzlement to afford an Audi. Black Santanas cruised around like small-town bullies: blaring their horns, passing on the right, cutting people off. In a big city like Beijing, corrupt cadres bought black Audi A6s and A8s, and those were also vehicles to avoid, especially if you were on a bike. Subcompacts like the Alto City Baby were scary for a different reason. They usually represented a first car for lower-middle-class people, who combined inexperience with extreme tentativeness. As for the Jeep Cherokee, there wasn’t a stereotype associated with the City Special. This was the problem for American