BOOK OF THE DAY: Country Driving By Peter Hessler Canongate, 438pp, £14.99
OF ALL the terrifying experiences of travelling in the east, there are few to beat the long-distance high- altitude bus journey in rural China. Peter Hessler, in his lucid and intelligent road trip of China, explains why: bus drivers never own their buses, and pay depends upon a percentage of ticket sales. This incentive, combined with speed, often results in terrible accidents. Truckers, meanwhile, own their trucks and rarely take risks. In spite of these hazards, Hessler bravely acquires his Chinese driver’s licence in 2001 and embarks on seven years of sporadic travelling in China.
Clearly, the last decade was one in which the Chinese turned from bicycle to car in staggering numbers. National law requires every Chinese driver to enrol in a certified course involving almost 60 hours of practice. Observing one driving school where students along with their teacher wash down lunch with a few beers, Hessler discovers that the previous day they had all got so drunk they cancelled afternoon classes! But then, Chinese students might be amused that in Ireland you can fail your driving test and drive off into the sunset.
Fully qualified, Hessler sets out to explore the Great Wall during autumn and spring. On the way, he picks up hitchhikers and anyone who requires a lift, and since he speaks excellent Mandarin, he hears stories and fragments of stories that illuminate. Charting the wall remains elusive, not helped by poor Sinomaps, which happen to be the best on the market.
Despite the fact the Chinese have an impressive ancient history of cartography, maps or map-reading aren’t a part of modern Chinese culture. Hessler lays to rest the myth that the Great Wall is visible from the moon, a claim he traces back to the National Geographic in 1923. Just as nobody could see the wall from the moon then, they still can’t. He hooks up with a few experts on the wall, including one who gets annoyed with its symbolism; it’s become an easy metaphor, and it’s unfair to use a wall to explain something as complex as Chinese civilisation. However, this didn’t stop Borges or Kafka writing about it, Hessler notes. This journey ends in the far west where the wall peters out and the Tibetan plateau rises, and Hessler turns back to Beijing.
In the second part of the book, Hessler seeks a rural idyll or escape from Beijing and finds it in the form of a simple house in the village of Sancha. The village has few facilities and a diminishing population beneath its portion of the Great Wall. He rents a house there and slowly builds up trust with the local community, and in particular with one family. Hessler’s empathy and interaction with the locals makes him a humane recorder. He becomes cartographer of the village from its more basic and simple stage to becoming obsessed with materialism and modern progress, which in turn is a microcosm of modern China.
In the final section, Hessler heads to southeast China and the heart of the Chinese industrial revolution, to determine what life is like for factory owners and workers. Tagging along with one group of entrepreneurs, he witnesses them pull up to a stretch of wasteland and draw up the plans of an entire factory on a piece of crumpled paper, including dormitories for the workers, in the space of an hour. The plan is then handed over to a builder and a price is requested the same day. Soon the factory is up and running: such is the pace of change in China.
Joseph Woods is a poet who has travelled widely in China