Country Driving [60]
“I’m just driving around. Tourism.”
“How did you learn Chinese?”
“I’ve lived here for years.”
“You must be a spy!” he said. The others picked up the refrain, laughing. “He’s a spy! He’s driving around, he speaks Chinese—he must be a spy! A spy! A spy!”
Shaking with laughter, the cop returned both my licenses. It took me a while to find my voice. “Is it OK if I continue?” I said.
“Of course!”
Driving away, looking through the rearview mirror, I could see them roughhousing on the side of the road. The cops punched each other and laughed, “A spy! A spy!”
IT TOOK MORE THAN an hour to reach Subei. There was nothing along the way but white herdsman tents, home to Mongol and Kazakh nomads, and the town itself was a low line of buildings that ran across a dry valley. I stopped at a public toilet; when I exited, a man was waiting for me. He said one word: “Identification.”
He was short, dark-skinned, and wore a sparse mustache—ethnic Mongolian, I guessed. His request took me by surprise, and when I hesitated he flashed a badge: Public Security. He inspected my passport and put it in his pocket. “This district isn’t open to foreigners,” he said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” I said. “Nobody told me that.”
“It doesn’t matter whether somebody tells you. It’s not open.”
“I’m just traveling,” I said. “I’ll be happy to leave right now. I don’t want to cause any problem.”
“You’ve already caused a problem,” he said. “We have to go to the station now.”
We left the City Special parked beside the road. I had a sinking feeling that the car would be impounded—I knew this had happened to other foreigners who had driven illegally into restricted areas. But there’s never any way to predict the outcome of a Chinese detention, which depends entirely on the place and the people you happen to be dealing with.
At the station a woman officer was waiting, and they seated me behind a desk. The male cop mentioned that recently they had detained another foreigner. “He came here on a bus,” he said.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He was punished according to law.”
“How was he punished?”
The cop ignored the question. The two of them rooted through file cabinets, pulling out papers; they moved efficiently, like this was a familiar routine. I decided to make one last play for leniency. “There were policemen at the highway turnoff,” I said. “They checked all my documents. They didn’t tell me Subei was closed, and they said it’s fine to come here.”
“Of course they did!” the Mongolian cop retorted. “What do those guys know about anything? They’re just road police! They’re worthless!”
It was hard to argue with that. The police began the interrogation: the Mongolian cop asked questions, and the woman wrote. Where did you come from today? Is this your correct passport? Residence card? Is this your current address in Beijing? How long have you lived there? What’s your education level? Do you have a receipt for renting the car? How much was it? Where is the rental company? Where did you stay last night? How much did it cost? Did you register? What’s the name of your work unit? Is this the correct way to write it? Do you have a doctorate?
For some reason they kept returning to my education level. It baffled me—what exactly was the link between degree status and wandering into a closed town on the edge of the Tibetan plateau? But then it dawned on me that they were simply filling out forms. There were dozens of blanks, and many of them overlapped; sometimes I answered the same question three times. The queries were so specific and detailed that they essentially prevented effective interrogation. Neither officer seemed the least bit suspicious, and they never asked any open-ended questions, like where I planned to go or what I was doing so far from home. They didn’t so much as glance at the City Special. It was strictly a matter of paperwork, and afterward they sat back, looking relieved.
“You’ve broken our national