Country Driving [48]
In Yanchi, if a strong-willed individual had stepped forward and criticized the motorcyclist for being so drunk, or warned him shrilly against causing an accident, the others probably would have followed suit. But in this particular crowd the most powerful force happened to be the drunk man’s desire to mount his motorcycle. Every fiber of his being was directed at that bike—he was mute, and he couldn’t stand without assistance, but he angrily tried to push past anybody who held him back. After a while, his sheer willpower seemed to earn the crowd’s respect, and the bystanders stopped resisting. At last they even helped. One person guided the drunk man onto the bike; somebody else got the starter going. A third person gave a push. The motorcyclist wobbled off and abruptly made a U-turn—gasps from the onlookers—but somehow he maintained balance and disappeared into the night. The crowd waited for half a minute, listening intently, faces eager. But that was it—no crash. At last the people dispersed, chattering happily as they wandered off to find some other entertainment in Yanchi.
The desert had a way of sharpening scenes: everything stood out against this blurred background. One afternoon, driving through a desolate stretch of sand dunes along the border between Inner Mongolia and Ningxia Province, I saw a solitary figure walking beside the road. I pulled over and called out: “Where are you going?”
“Where are you going?” the man said.
Both questions were moot: this road had no turnoffs for forty miles. I asked if he wanted a ride, and he shrugged and got in. He was twenty-five years old, with a thin crooked mustache that crossed his lip like a calligrapher’s mistake. He was dressed neatly, in a blue button-down shirt, and he said he lived in Yinchuan, the provincial capital. I asked if he had had some kind of trouble on the road.
“No,” he said. “I come here every month, just to walk. There are three daily buses that follow this road. Nine thirty, twelve thirty, and two thirty. The early one drops me off and then I walk for a while. I usually catch one of the other two back to Yinchuan.”
He had a strange, spasmodic way of speaking—words piled fast in jerky sentences, like he was trying to fill all the space that surrounded us. He wouldn’t tell me his full name; all he said was that his family name was Zhen. But he answered at length when I asked why he came to the Tengger Desert.
“I used to be in the military,” Zhen said. “I was a soldier in the 1990s, and I was stationed in Shaanxi, in the Qinling Mountains. Every day we were in the wilderness, and now sometimes I miss it. I don’t know exactly how to say it, but that was a very happy time. It was difficult, of course, but there was honor and pride to the job. And it didn’t have anything to do with me—everything was about the squadron. The group was more important than the person. That’s what I really liked about it. We got to know each other and depend on each other, and eventually it’s like your individual self isn’t so significant anymore. That’s why I come here every month. It’s very empty in the desert and it reminds me of the way I used to feel.”
Zhen told me frankly that he didn’t like the United States—in particular he blamed the Americans for NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. After completing his military service, he had received a government-assigned job in a grain company