Country Driving [47]
When we returned to Temple of Peace, the old man on crutches was waiting patiently. I learned that he was the grandfather of the three brothers; he told me that in this particular region the planned birth policy hadn’t been strictly enforced. “People just pay a fine and have more kids,” he said with a smile. He still wasn’t the slightest bit concerned about who I was or what I was doing. In northern villages, people were rarely suspicious, and it was standard for them to invite me in for tea or a meal. I had no illusions about the toughness of rural life, and my time in the Peace Corps had taught me not to romanticize poverty. But nevertheless there was something poignant about driving through the dying villages. These were last glimpses—the end of small towns and rural childhoods; perhaps even the end of families with siblings. And rural traditions of honesty and trust wouldn’t survive the shift to city life. There aren’t many parts of the world where a stranger is welcomed without question, and entrusted with children, and it made me sad to drive away from Temple of Peace.
FOR A WEEK I followed the Great Wall until I reached the far edge of the Ordos, and then the earthen barriers headed northwest into the Tengger Desert. The Tengger is known for the fineness of its sand, which leaves the dunes gracefully shaped, their tops curved like the arabesques of the Sahara. This is desert, pure and simple: not even nomads live in the heart of the Tengger. In the evenings I pulled over and pitched my tent in the dunes. There’s no better sleeping surface than sand, at least on a calm night, and I was lucky with the spring weather. Skies were clear and the dunes glowed pale beneath the light of the moon.
Whenever I passed a town of any size, I stopped for a meal and a hair-washing. These were odd, forgotten places, so remote that they received only the scattered leavings of China’s economic boom. I began to see motorcyclists who had attached computer discs to their back mudflaps, because they made good reflectors. In a place called Xingwuying, locals climbed the Great Wall whenever they wanted to receive a cell phone signal. Xingwuying means “Prosperous Military Camp,” because the Ming had built huge fortifications in this place; now the village was poor and remote, but the people still made use of the wall. They stood along the ramparts, phones pressed to their faces, sentries of the digital age. What does it mean when the Great Wall becomes a cell phone accessory? Or when computer discs are most useful because they bounce light? Everything was tangled in these parts; there was no distinction between progress and improvisation.
In the town of Yanchi, I got my hair washed and went for a stroll along the main street. It was another dry, forgotten place, located six miles within the wall; the name means “Salt Pool.” While I was walking, a motorcyclist drove past slowly, and then he hit a curb and pitched forward into the dust. A few people gathered and at first the man didn’t move. “He’s drunk,” somebody said. They stood there staring, until finally the motorcyclist rolled over—he was so intoxicated he couldn’t speak. Somebody helped him stand, and the drunk man tried to make his way to the bike. “You shouldn’t ride,” the bystander said gently, holding him back. But the motorcyclist kept trying to push past, and soon thirty people had collected around him.
Chinese crowds behave in