Country Driving. Peter Hessler
his knowledge, and there’s always some new situation to figure out. How does a peasant leave the farm and find a factory job? Who teaches people how to start businesses? Where do they learn how to make cars, and how do they figure out how to drive them? Who shows the small-town sophisticates how to dress and put on makeup? It was appropriate that they hitched rides on a City Special driven by an American with a book of Sinomaps. We were all out of place; nobody has today’s China figured out.
Most learning is informal, although there are plenty of private courses. Young Chinese often enroll in classes for English, typing, computers, accounting; in factory towns they sometimes pay for specialized courses that teach them how to behave like educated urbanites. And there are driving classes—that’s one type of training that’s regulated by the government. National law requires every Chinese driver to enroll in a certified course, at his own expense, for a total of fifty-eight hours of practice. In China, you can’t just go to a parking lot with your father and learn how to drive. Anyway, there aren’t many parking lots yet, and most fathers don’t have licenses.
One month I observed a driving course in Lishui, a small city in southeastern China. It’s located in the factory belt, where the boom economy produces a lot of new motorists. The institution was called the Public Safety Driving School, and I sat in on a course taught by Coach Tang. In China, all driving instructors are addressed as Jiaolian, “Coach.” It’s the same word you use for a basketball coach or a drill instructor, and it carries connotations of a training regimen. That’s the essence of Chinese driving—a physical endeavor.
The course began with the most basic kinds of touch. On the first day, Coach Tang raised the hood of a red Volkswagen Santana, and six students huddled close. He pointed out the engine, the radiator, the fan belt. They walked around to the back, where he opened the trunk. He showed them how to unscrew the gas cap. The next step involved the driver’s door. “Pull it like this,” he said, and then each student practiced opening and closing the door. Next, Coach Tang identified the panel instruments, as well as the clutch, the brake, and the gas pedal. After an hour the students finally entered the vehicle. Each took turns sitting in the driver’s seat, where they practiced shifting from first to fifth gear. The motor wasn’t on, but they worked the clutch and moved the gearshift. Watching this made me wince, and finally I had to say something. “Isn’t that bad for the car?”
“No,” Coach Tang said. “It’s fine.”
“I think it might be bad if the motor’s off,” I said.
“It’s completely fine,” Coach Tang said. “We do it all the time.” In China, instructors are traditionally respected without question, and Coach Tang had been kind enough to allow me to observe his class, so I decided to hold my tongue. But it wasn’t always easy. For the next step, they learned to use the clutch by setting the parking brake, starting the engine, shifting into first gear, and then releasing the clutch while flooring the accelerator. The motor whined against the force of the brake; the hood kowtowed with torque. One by one, students entered the driver’s seat, gunning the engine and going nowhere. By the end of the day you could have fried an egg on the Santana’s hood, and my palms broke into a sweat every time another driver hit the gas. I could practically hear my father’s voice—he’s a good amateur mechanic, and few things anger him more than mindless abuse of an automobile.
Nobody was allowed to move a car until the second day of class. From the beginning, the students had circled the Santana warily, like the blind men and the elephant: they peered in the hood, they worked the doors, they fiddled with the gas cap. There were four men and two women, all of them under the age of forty. Each had paid over three hundred dollars for the course, which was a lot of money in a city where the monthly minimum wage was roughly seventy-five dollars. Only one person came from a household that currently owned an automobile. The others told me that someday they might buy one, and the college students—there were four of them—believed that a driver’s license looked good on a résumé. “It’s something you should be able to do, like swimming,” one young man named Wang Yanheng said. He was a college senior majoring in information technology. “In the future, so many people in China are going to have cars,” Wang said. “It’s going to be important to know how to drive.” The only student from a home with automobiles was a nineteen-year-old sociology major named Liang Yanfang. Her father owned a plastics factory, and he had three cars. When I asked what kind of plastics the family factory produced, the woman ran her finger along the rubber lining of the Santana’s window. “This is one of the things we make,” she said.
The first ten days of class focused on what they called the “parking range,” and during that time they performed exactly three movements.They practiced a ninety-degree turn into a parking space, moving forward, and then they did the same thing in reverse.The third skill was parallel parking. Every day, for a total of six hours, they performed these three movements repeatedly. Like any good Chinese instructor, Coach Tang was strict. “What are you doing?” he said, when one student brushed a pole during the reverse parking. “You must have forgotten your brain today!” “Don’t hold the gearshift loosely like that!” he yelled at another man. “If you do, your father will curse you!” Sometimes he slapped a student’s hand. Whenever somebody turned his head, he shouted, “Stop looking behind you!” There was a strict rule against head turns. When reversing, you were supposed to rely on the mirrors only; the blind spot didn’t exist, at least not in Coach Tang’s eyes. Nobody ever wore a seat belt. I never saw a turn signal flash on the parking range at the Public Safety Driving School.
The next step was the “driving range,” where students practiced an obstacle course of tight turns and learned how to stop within twentyfive centimeters of a painted line. The most challenging skill was known as the “single-plank bridge.” This consisted of a long concrete riser, slightly wider than a tire; students had to aim the car perfectly so that two wheels perched atop the riser. First they did the left tires, then the right; if a wheel slipped, they failed the exam. Students told me that they spent the majority of their road range time practicing the singleplank bridge. I asked the coach why it was so important.
“Because it’s very difficult,” he said.
That’s the underlying philosophy of Chinese driving courses: if something is technically difficult, then it must be useful. But the details of this challenge shift from place to place, coach to coach. There isn’t much standardization, apart from the required fifty-eight hours; sometimes a school emphasizes the single-plank bridge and sometimes they’ve developed some other obstacle. In this sense, coaches are like the martial-arts masters of old, developing individual regimens. Times have changed—instead of journeying to a mountaintop monastery, where a student might punch a tree a thousand times a day, he now joins the Public Safety Driving School and spends two weeks trying to park a Santana onto a single-plank bridge.
The Lishui courses concluded with a week and a half on the road, and I accompanied one group on their final day before the exam. With the coach in the passenger seat, students took turns driving a Santana along a two-lane rural road, where they performed set movements. They shifted from first to fifth; they downshifted back to first; they stopped within twenty-five centimeters of a marker. They made a U-turn and braked at an imitation traffic light. The course was three kilometers long and it had not changed at all during the ten days of practice; there were no intersections and very little traffic. Students had been instructed to honk when pulling out, as well as before performing turns. They honked whenever they encountered anything in the road—a car, a tractor, a donkey cart. They honked at every pedestrian. Sometimes they passed another car from the driving school, and then both vehicles honked happily, as if recognizing an old friend. At noon, the class took a break for lunch at a local restaurant, where everybody drank beer, including the coach. They told me that a day earlier they had gotten so drunk that they canceled afternoon class.
Later that day, the students returned to the road range for more practice, and one of them begged me to let him drive my rental car along the way. In a moment of extremely poor judgment, I decided to see what he had learned in a month of training. The moment the driver hit the open road, he became obsessed with passing other vehicles, but he had no idea how this was done; twice I had to yell to keep him from swinging wide on blind turns. Another time I grabbed the wheel to prevent