Country Driving [5]
But Zhang Baolong didn’t seem to hear my question; he was still talking about feng shui. “It’s arranged east-west,” he continued, pointing at the patch of earth. “The head faces west, and the feet are to the east. And that tree I planted is a poplar. We plant poplars for men and willows for women; the purpose is to tell the soul where the grave is. This particular place is good for a lot of reasons. The position of that signal tower is very important, for example. You see, this place is good because it’s high, and there’s water in that stream to the east. And you have the signal tower above, which serves to protect the tomb. A person buried in this location will have many wealthy descendants, who will rise to high civil, military, and scholarly positions.”
The men had finished kowtowing and now it was the women’s turn: one by one, they touched their heads to the ground. The women were louder and their cries echoed across the valley.
“My father and grandfather were both feng shui masters,” Zhang continued. “We’ve always done this in my family. And everybody in my family lives for a long time! My father lived to be ninety-five, and my mother was ninety-eight when she died. My grandmother lived to be ninety-nine!”
The keening rose another pitch. I wondered if a conversation about longevity might be more appropriate at another time, but Zhang kept talking. “I have three sons and three daughters,” he said. “My sons are feng shui masters, too! And one of my daughters”—he beamed, perhaps at the thought of security in this world and the next—“is a nurse!”
THE WEATHER HELD PERFECT across Hebei and Shanxi—cool, crisp mornings, the sunlight falling sharp across terraced fields. Usually I awoke early, but there was never any schedule or plan. I tried to keep the Great Wall in sight, and I stopped whenever something interested me. I figured out the route as I went; on many days I traveled less than one hundred miles. Rural driving tended to be slow, because often something was happening in the street—a crop threshing, a sheep crossing, a funeral procession. The roads themselves were completely unpredictable. A thin red line on my Sinomap might represent a brand-new asphalt road, but it could also be a dirt track or even a dry creekbed. Quite often the routes were in the process of being improved. Beginning in 1998, the government had invested heavily in rural roads, partly as a response to the Asian financial crisis, and this project was still under way when I took my journey.
In modern China, road building has often been a strategy for dealing with poverty or crisis. The first major construction campaign of motor roads began in 1920, when a drought resulted in a terrible famine across the north. It was hard to transport food to people who were starving—China’s road system, which dated to imperial times, had been designed for horse-drawn carts. The American Red Cross sponsored a project to build modern roads suitable for trucks and automobiles, and in October of 1920 they began construction in Shandong Province. They hired local farmers, many of whom had been close to starvation, and the new roads allowed relief trucks to arrive. Oliver J. Todd, an American engineer who directed the Shandong project, estimated that it provided food and fuel, directly or indirectly, to half a million people.
The Red Cross eventually built roads in four northern provinces, and their work was so successful that Todd was hired by the Chinese government. He stayed for eighteen years, supervising highway construction all across the country. On a single road-building project in 1928, he had a crew of two hundred thousand laborers—more people than were employed by the entire U.S. road system at that time. The number of passenger cars in China remained low—in 1922, Beijing had approximately 1,500—but interest was intense. Chinese cities held car shows; the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao ran a weekly “Automobile Supplement.” By 1935, China had fifty thousand miles of good earthen motor roads, and it