Country Driving [57]
“What does she do upstairs?”
His companion laughed and said, “She’s a prostitute!”
Oh God, I said to myself. If there was anything more depressing than a four-bed room in a Gansu truckers’ dorm, it was the knowledge that a Russian woman was turning tricks upstairs.
“Do you want to go see her?” the man said.
“No,” I said. “I’m tired. I just drove for five hours without stopping.”
“Come on, let’s go! She’s a foreigner, too. You guys can talk!”
I’m sure she had a story—probably some terrifying post-Soviet version of Sister Carrie that began in Vladivostok and ended in the Hexi Corridor. But I couldn’t bring myself to hear it, or gawk at the woman; and finally the Sichuanese truckers gave up. Sometimes all you want from a two-dollar bed is a little sleep.
I RAN OUT OF Gatorade in Gansu Province. I had finished the last Dove bar in Ningxia, and all my Coke was long gone; in these small towns you couldn’t find such foreign products. I restocked my soda supply with syrupy Feichang Cola, whose slogan—“China’s Own Cola!”—was both boast and warning. For weeks I had buzzed westward on a cloud of sugar and caffeine, but here in the Hexi Corridor the fatigue brought me back to earth. Mornings were ragged; at night I fought to keep my eyes open. I was filthy—even the most thorough hair washing didn’t seem to take anymore. The City Special’s starter had been replaced; the interior was full of sand; there was a huge stain on the carpet from the All-Powerful King’s oil pump. I couldn’t blame hitchers for keeping their backs off the seat—the car was becoming a wreck.
The Great Wall was still there, right outside the window, and it still looked stunning. The farther I drove, the more the structures impressed me, as much for their beauty as for their persistence. They had a remarkable chameleon quality—the walls always followed the lines of the landscape, clinging atop ridges, and they even acquired the earth’s color, because of age and the use of local building materials. In Hebei the structures had been steep and jagged, like local mountains, and sometimes on a hill you could hardly distinguish between native rock and Ming brick. On the loess plateau, where mountains fell away into terraced gullies, the Great Wall forts were as angular as the rest of the broken landscape. On the edge of the Ordos the barriers looked like piled sand. Here in the Hexi Corridor the Ming wall sprawled pale in the sunshine like a springtime snake. If its construction had originally damaged the environment, the passage of centuries had blunted that edge, until now it looked almost natural. It was amazing that people once believed the Great Wall was visible from the moon—I had never seen another man-made object that fit so subtly within its natural surroundings. There were places where you could stand atop the thing and not even know it.
The Great Wall’s meaning is also chameleon-like, and interpretations have a way of shifting across time and perspective. Early in the twentieth century, the revolutionary and nationalist Sun Yat-sen celebrated it as the greatest engineering feat in Chinese history. Mao portrayed it as a forerunner of modern national defense. For Lu Xun, the great author of the 1920s and 1930s, the wall represented everything bad about Chinese culture. He described it as “a wonder and a curse,” writing, “I have always felt hemmed in on all sides by the Great Wall; that wall of ancient bricks which is constantly being reinforced. The old and the new conspire to confine us all.” When the Japanese occupied the north during World War II, the invaders photographed their soldiers beside the wall, in an attempt to gain credibility for their territorial claim. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story about the Great Wall, as did Franz Kafka. To foreign writers, it usually represents xenophobia, whereas Chinese see it as evidence of cultural greatness. The government-run journal China Today even portrayed it as a symbol of multiethnic unity—“more like a river than a barrier.” The significance of the Great Wall is so fluid that it can mean virtually