Country Driving [37]
In hushed voices, Goettig and I conferred and decided to start at fifty yuan. He took the bill out of his wallet—the equivalent of about six dollars. He handed it to the shopkeeper, who accepted it without a word. All the way across the parking lot I expected to feel a hand on my shoulder. I started the City Special, spun the tires, and roared back onto Highway 110. I was still shaking when we reached the city of Zhangjiakou. We pulled over at a truck stop for lunch; I guzzled tea to calm my nerves. The waitress became excited when she learned we were Americans.
“Our boss has been to America!” she said. “I’ll go get her!”
The boss was in her fifties, with dyed hair the color of shoeblack. She came to our table and presented a business card with a flourish. One side of the card was Chinese, the other English:
United Sources of America, Inc.
Jin Fang Liu
Deputy Director of Operations
China
Embossed in gold was a knockoff of the Presidential Seal of the United States. It looked a lot like the original, except the eagle was fatter: the Zhangjiakou breed had pudgy wings, a thick neck, and round legs like drumsticks. Even if it dropped the shield and arrows, I doubted this bird would be capable of flight. The corner of the card said, in small print:
President Gerald R. Ford
Honorary Chairman
“What kind of company is this?” I asked
“We’re in the restaurant business here in Zhangjiakou,” Ms. Jin said. She told me her daughter ran another restaurant in Roanoke, Virginia. I pointed at the name in the corner of the business card. “Do you know who that is?”
“FuTe,” Ms. Jin said proudly. “He used to be president of the United States!”
“What does he have to do with your company?”
“It’s just an honorary position,” Ms. Jin said. She waved her hand in a way that suggested: No need to tell Mr. Fu Te about our little truck stop in Zhangjiakou! She gave us a discount and told us to come back any time. A couple hours later, near the Inner Mongolian border, I pulled over on the side of the road and got the City Special stuck in snow. It took us a while to find a farmer with a tractor that could pull us out, and by now I wondered if I’d ever make it back to the Great Wall. The snow was falling harder, and things were getting Stranger; that evening, in the town of Jining, we checked into a hotel called the Ulanqab that had a bowling alley in the lobby. We registered at the front desk, surrounded by the crash of balls and pins.
Early the next morning we set off determined to make it to Hohhot. At the entrance to Highway 110, the local government had erected a sign with changeable numbers, like the scoreboard at Fenway Park:
AS OF THIS MONTH,
THIS STRETCH OF ROAD
HAS HAD 65 ACCIDENTS AND 31 FATALITIES
The snow had stopped falling, but the temperature was brutally cold. From Jining to Hohhot there was nothing but empty steppe—low snow-covered hills huddled beneath the howling north wind. We passed Liberation trucks that were stopped dead on the road; their fuel lines had frozen, probably because of water in their tanks. After fifteen miles we crested a hill and saw a line of hundreds of vehicles stretching all the way to the horizon—Jeeps, Jettas, Santanas, Liberation trucks. Nobody was moving, and everybody was honking; an orchestra of horns blared into the wind. Never had I imagined that a traffic jam could occur in such a desolate place.
We parked the City Special and continued on foot to the gridlock, where drivers explained what had happened. It all started with a few trucks whose fuel lines had frozen. The trucks stalled, and then other vehicles began to pass them on the two-lane road. While passing, they occasionally encountered an oncoming car whose driver didn’t want to budge. People faced off, honking angrily while more vehicles backed up; eventually it became impossible to move in any direction. Potential escape routes along the shoulder were quickly jammed by curb-sneaking drivers. A couple of motorists with Jeep Cherokees had taken advantage of their rear-wheel