【10.02.28 纽约时报】Red Highways

青蛙小王子

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/books/review/Becker-t.html


If China’s first urban planners had persevered, Peter Hessler’s road trip from east of Beijing to the Gobi Desert would have taken place on top of the Great Wall instead of alongside it. Never mind that the Great Wall is actually many walls and that it extends for more than 5,000 miles. Thinking big was both the curse and the blessing of 20th-century China, and that hasn’t changed in the 21st. The Great Wall road may never have materialized, but plenty of others are being carved through the countryside to accommodate what Hessler calls “the largest migration in human history,” with nearly one-tenth of the nation’s billion-plus people moving from rural areas to cities and factory zones. Despite its late entry into the car culture, China aims within the next decade to have more highway miles than the United States. And almost everybody on the road will be a rookie driver.





“It’s hard to imagine another place where people take such joy in driving so badly,” Hessler writes. Beijingers drive the way they used to walk — in packs and without signaling. “They don’t mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right or drive on the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. . . . People pass on hills; they pass on turns; they pass in tunnels.” In other words, driving requires improvisation and creative flouting of the law — which is also a pretty apt description of the average citizen’s technique for maneuvering through the warp-speed transitions of Chinese society.
Hessler has been observing these changes since he arrived in Sichuan in 1996 for the Peace Corps stint described in his first book, “River Town.” In his next, “Oracle Bones,” he kept track of some of his students from Fuling Teachers College, intercutting glimpses of their fledgling careers with accounts of a Uighur trader’s emigration to America and a Chinese scholar’s fatal devotion to tradition. Now, in the three long narratives of “Country Driving,” adroitly expanded from his reporting for The New Yorker and National Geographic, he shows the effects China’s ever expanding network of roads exerts on individual lives.
The opening act is an excursion through the northwestern heartland that’s being emptied for the industrial zones of the south and east. In a sedan stocked with Oreos, Dove bars and Coke, and with the blessing of a Beijing rental agency unfazed — even delighted — by burned-out engines, missing bumpers and off-the-charts odometer readings, Hessler sets out with some suspect maps and a great deal of bravado. The authorities eventually discover his unauthorized meanderings, but not before he’s spent time with dozens of lively characters. At one stop, an elderly peasant historian placidly translates grisly place names (Kill the Foreigners, Slaughter the Hu). Elsewhere, a feng shui master demonstrates his adaptability by flourishing a business card listing 27 services, from selecting marriage partners to choosing grave sites. At the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan (a bogus museum with a tomb but no corpse), a drunken female guide is crushed to discover that Hessler isn’t a spy.
The next road takes him to the down-and-out village of Sancha, a few hours north of Beijing, where he rents a weekend retreat, complete with outhouse, rats and mud walls papered with old copies of The People’s Daily. In the years he spends driving out from the city, the village’s fortunes change — as do those of Wei Ziqi, the only young man to remain there and raise a family. Their friendship allows Hessler to follow Wei’s progress into the middle class as his guesthouse/catering enterprise helps transform the village into a tourist destination. Hessler tags along when Wei buys a car and watches Wei’s wife devote herself to Falun Gong and then Buddhism. And when their 5-year-old son comes down with a serious blood disease, Hessler shares their experience of a medical bureaucracy that dismisses families from farming villages as ignorant peasants, bullying them into making cash payments before lifesaving procedures can be scheduled.
Hessler’s account of life in Sancha is the heart of his book, and when, in the final section, he takes to the road again — exploring the industrial zones along a highway in the southeast — it takes a while for him to fix on some equally engaging characters. But among all the niche manufacturing enterprises (drinking straws, trouser linings, bicycle bells), he finds a factory making nylon-coated rings for brassieres — and the story of a migrant worker with a remarkable memory who has recreated complex machinery blueprints and sold them to a succession of bosses. The bosses Hessler meets are typical proponents of the local development model: “low investment, low-quality products, low profit margins. Low education, too.” But their marginally literate employees are hardly pushovers. Especially the underage girl with no experience who talks herself — along with her father and sister — into a job. Tao Yufeng and her family turn out to be just as enterprising, and as interesting, as Wei Ziqi and his clan.
“Revelations occur on a daily basis” in the People’s Republic, Hessler confides. But “one of the most important discoveries is the fact that the Chinese share this sensation. The place changes too fast; nobody can afford to be overconfident in his knowledge, and there’s always some new situation to figure out.” “Country Driving” is being billed as the concluding volume in a trilogy, but given Hessler’s irresistible urge to follow a story, it’s hard to believe he can stop at that. In the final pages, after moving back to the United States, he visits Beijing and just happens to renew his Chinese driver’s license. It’s good until 2013.

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