Country Driving [49]
“Part of it is money,” he said. “If you don’t have much money, it’s hard to get married. But the main reason is that I believe people should be more united, and marriage has a way of breaking that up. Right now I have good friends and we get together to eat and drink and talk. It’s a little like the times I remember in the military. But once you marry you can’t do that anymore. You spend all your time with your family. That sense of togetherness is gone, and I don’t want that to happen.”
I asked if he had any hobbies apart from walking alone across the Tengger.
“I really like driving,” he said. “That’s my favorite thing to do. I can’t wait to get my license.”
He had nearly finished a driving course, and eventually he hoped to become a cabbie. If possible, he would buy his own car, but in the meantime he practiced with friends every chance he got. He asked me when I had learned to drive—it amazed him that I had started at sixteen, like many Americans. In China, the minimum driving age is eighteen, but the important issue is financial. By the time people are able to pay for a driving course, and consider buying a car, they’re often already in their thirties.
“Is driving this Jeep much different from a Santana?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s five speeds, basically the same. It’s easy. If you can drive a Santana, you can drive this Jeep.”
“I’ve never driven a Jeep before,” he said. “That’s something I’d really like to do.” He was silent for a moment, watching the desert flash by. Somewhere to our left, the Great Wall was lost amid the dunes. Zhen said, “Would you let me drive a little bit?”
I pulled to the side of the road, got out, and walked around the front of the City Special. Zhen slid over and settled behind the steering wheel. He pointed at the pedals. “This is the gas, right?” he said. “And aren’t those the brake and the clutch?” I had no idea why I let him drive; maybe it had something to do with the long desert days, the vacant roads and the landscapes that seemed unreal. I put on the safety belt. It was the first time I had ever sat in the passenger seat of the City Special.
He started the engine, ran it in neutral for a few seconds, and began to drive. He leaned forward, peering intently through the windshield, his knuckles white around the wheel. Whenever an oncoming car approached, he slowed dramatically. This happened five times in half an hour. Otherwise the road was vacant and it ran straight as an arrow; there was wasteland in all directions. After Zhen began to feel more comfortable, he accelerated to forty miles an hour, and a look of bliss appeared behind the miswritten mustache. There were no turns along the way, but he tried the blinkers, just to see how they worked. Right, left, right, left. He switched on the lights. He fiddled with the windshield wipers. He pressed the horn, twice, and the sound was swallowed by the empty road.
LATER THAT DAY, AFTER dropping off Zhen at a truck stop, I got Sinomapped onto sand. The Great Wall was still marked clearly on my atlas, a neat line of crenellations that ran westward across the desert, but roads in this region were sparse. I tried an anonymous capillary that ran to the north of the ruins; the surface was paved, but periodically it disappeared beneath wind-blown sand. Every once in a while I had to accelerate and slide through a bad patch, and finally the City Special hit a big dune and spun to a halt, wheels buried to the hubcaps. I tried unsuccessfully to dig it out, and I was about to release air from the tires to get more traction when a man showed up in a four-wheel-drive Jeep. He gave me a tow, and I turned back—it was hopeless to continue along this road.
The day was growing late, and I came to an unmarked intersection. There was nobody around to ask for directions, so I relied on the compass and just headed south. Thirty miles later the road passed a small memorial tablet. Sand had piled against the base, but the inscription was still clear:
AUGUST 1991
ALL OF THE FACTORY’S