Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler Page B

company.”
    After the test-drive, I asked Qi Haibo what he had learned from John Dinkel. Qi said the T-11 had a slight problem with driveshaft length, which meant that the outside wheel slipped on tight turns. The rear end of the B-14 floated a bit at high speeds. In particular Qi admired Dinkel’s skills behind the wheel. The Chinese engineer, whose job involved quality control and test-driving, had received his license only one month earlier.
     
    DRIVING IN CHINA OFTEN made me feel old. So much of the nation’s energy comes from the very young, the recent migrants and the fresh-faced college grads, and new companies like Chery constantly shift the economic landscape. On the road, most people are in their thirties or forties—anybody much older encounters legal restrictions. By law, an applicant for a truck or bus driver’s license must be younger than fifty. Nobody over the age of seventy can operate a passenger car. Only the young have the fortitude for Chinese traffic, and time seems to accelerate once you begin to drive. After I got my license, I understood how fast roads are being built, and the flood of new car models caught my eye. That’s part of the rush of the open road—a sense that the crowds are close behind.
    I liked Beijing’s Capital Motors for the opposite reason, because the rental company felt slow. It was still state-owned, a throwback to the old Communist economy, and its corporate culture was a world apart from a place like Chery. At Capital Motors most workers were middle-aged men who sat around smoking cigarettes and reading newspapers. Despite having been among the first to enter a promising market, they did virtually nothing to take advantage of their position. Eventually, Avis and others set up shop in Beijing, but my local Capital Motors branch never responded to the new competition. They didn’t upgrade their fleet of cars, and they didn’t streamline the paperwork. They didn’t get rid ofthe Jeep Cherokee, which nobody ever rented, and which sat sulking in the lot like a retired racehorse whose record is too bad to stud. Capital Motors never improved the gas-refill policy or bothered to enforce even the most basic rental guidelines. Their Appropriate Service Diction Rating held steady at 98 percent. And I kept coming back—I couldn’t imagine renting from anybody else in Beijing.
    Six months after my first drive across the north, I returned to Capital Motors and put down a deposit on the City Special. The mechanic showed me the spare, marked the gas gauge, and toured the exterior. There weren’t any new dents; the odometer had hardly budged since I dropped off the Jeep last autumn. In the office, Mr. Wang signed off on the papers with a smile and wished me good luck. He didn’t ask where I was going. The man was so unfailingly kind and polite that it seemed a form of discretion—as far as he was concerned, it was my own private business what I decided to do with a vehicle from Capital Motors.
    This time I intended to drive all the way to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. The last lines of the Great Wall are located in the high desert of Gansu Province, along the ancient Silk Road, and I hoped to get there in a month. I scheduled the trip for late April, when the weather is usually good; I stocked the City Special full of Coke, Gatorade, Oreos, and Dove chocolate bars. In Beijing I picked up a foreign hitchhiker: Mike Goettig, a friend from my Peace Corps days who was looking for a ride to the capital of Inner Mongolia. I figured it would take us a day at the most, and then I’d resume last year’s route along the trail of the Great Wall.
    On the morning of departure, a storm swept south from Siberia and cold rain pounded the capital. Downtown traffic slowed to a crawl; it took nearly an hour to escape the city. I headed northwest on Highway 110, a worn two-lane road that would soon be obsolete, because an expressway was being built. Bulldozers and cement mixers had been