Country Driving [33]
“What if the police see us?” I said. “He doesn’t have a Chinese license.”
“There aren’t any police around here,” one engineer said. “Even if there were, they’d understand what we’re doing.”
The three engineers were all in their early twenties, dressed in blue company jumpsuits, and they watched intently, hoping to pick up tips from the American test driver. Dinkel embarked on another series of maneuvers, shifting fast and then braking; he switched lanes rapidly. The three engineers clutched at the ceiling. Outside, we zipped past a truck loaded with construction materials, and finally one of the Chery employees asked me to relay a request: “Do you think we could go to a place without any other cars?”
He suggested that we head north, where Wuhu was in the process of building a new factory zone. The construction crews were still at work, and Dinkel dodged materials along the way; he swerved around an earthmover and he steered between piles of bricks. A big construction truck made a left turn across our lane without signaling. “That in America would be called an idiot,” Dinkel muttered, and I left that remark untranslated. He drove by a complex of half-built apartment blocks, their frames skeletal in the misty morning. He said, “Tell them the gearbox is very notchy from second to third, and from fourth to fifth.”
Dinkel was sixty years old, and he lived in Orange County. When I asked where he was originally from, he said, “What’s it to you?” which meant Long Island. He was alert, good-humored, and small-framed—he weighed only 140 pounds. He told me that as a graduate student at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, back in the late 1960s, he was the only guy in the emissions laboratory who could fit into the driver’s seat of a Mazda Cosmo. He had never had any particular interest in becoming an engineer. When I asked him why he’d originally taken that path, he said, “I didn’t have a very bright guidance counselor.” Dinkel had graduated from high school in 1962, during the heat of the space race and the boom years of American industry, when people believed that anybody with good math scores should automatically become an engineer. He worked briefly at Chrysler and then switched to journalism. He was at Road & Track for twenty years, including two as editor in chief. “I’ve tested cars for thirty years,” he said. “I’ve driven practically every car that’s ever been on the road.” He told me that Wuhu’s empty streets reminded him of the old days in California, when they could still test cars in the beanfields of Orange County.
Wuhu is located on the banks of the Yangtze River, about five hours from Shanghai, and it’s one of the new frontiers of the southern economic boom. When we drove through the city’s industrial zone, it was still in the early stages: roads had curbs, sidewalks, and even street signs, but few people were outside. Most factories were still half-built shells behind high walls and impressive gates, all of them waiting for the machinery to be installed. In an odd way, it reminded me of the villages I’d driven through in northern China. In places like Smash the Hu and Slaughter the Hu, everything had been surrounded by massive fortifications, but most residents had already left. Here in the development zone it felt similar: big walls and gates, lots of structures, few people. If you were transported directly from a northern village to a fledgling factory strip, you’d wonder, Where is everybody? But that’s the nature of a country in transition: something is always being abandoned while something else is always being built. The people are in constant motion—they’re on trains, in buses, on boats. They stand beside rural roads, petting the invisible dog, looking for a ride south. In half a year this Wuhu factory strip