Beijing Welcomes You

If I was ever going to drive before leaving Beijing, I would have to do it over the National Day holiday break, the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, before my final Olympic visa expired. I called the BOCOG one-stop center to make sure it was still in business. It was. The swooping headquarters building by Chaoyang Bridge had been attached to its next-door companion, now unscaffolded and almost in use, by a glassed-in umbilical cord or corpus callosum.

The Olympic driver’s-license clerk remembered me. We paged back in the ledger of licenses to find my name, the first entry in the book. Had he seen any of the Olympics? He said he had spent the whole time in the press center, eight a.m. to ten p.m., seven days a week. Before BOCOG, he said, he had been working at Fesco, the employment agency for foreign companies. Maybe he’d go back afterward.

As I was finishing up, it occurred to me that I still didn’t know any of the city’s actual traffic rules. The license clerk handed over a copy of “Traffic Safety Handbook for Drivers from Abroad,” with the Beijing 2008 logo on the cover. Outside, up the street, a poster displayed cartoons to discourage such behavior as littering or illegal stopping in traffic. “May we remind you: Please be self-restraint and be a good tourist to mold a well-mannered imagination,” the English translation read, next to a cartoon policeman scribbling in some sort of ticket book.

We could take a day trip, nothing too strenuous. Now I had to get a car. For months, I had had my eye on an Avis office just inside the Second Ring, right by Dongzhimen Bridge. Calling Avis, I reached an agent in Shanghai, who gave me the number for the rental office down the street. Could I reserve a car for tomorrow? Yes, I did have a Chinese driver’s license. A small car? How small? I pictured us out on the open road, my wife and child crammed into the back of a Volkswagen Polo, or something even more developing-world and tinier. But Avis in China, it turned out, was speaking the same language as rental-car companies back in the United States, where “compact” means “normal-sized”: she meant a Volkswagen Bora—the sedan known as a Jetta to twenty-first-century Americans. I could handle a Bora. The Bora would be fine. The Bora would be great. I would take it first thing in the morning and bring it back at night.

Oh, she said. But there was a special holiday policy. I would have to rent the car for at least four days. I contemplated stretching out my car-driving status beyond the one road trip and clear through the weekend—popping out on errands . . . cruising around the city’s byways . . . struggling up the crowded on-ramps . . . searching helplessly for parking . . . pushing my luck. The gleaming Bora receded into the distance.

The last time I’d brought up my intention to do some driving, Big Mack had mentioned that I might be able to rent something from the guy who fixes his Jeep. I was in luck: when he checked, the guy had something available. A four-liter Jeep Cherokee. I barely listened to the specifics. The Jeep guy had a Jeep! It was 400 yuan, or about sixty bucks, and I could pick it up in the morning. He promised to give it a mechanical checkup, which was less reassuring, not more.

That left only the question of where to go. We’d already been to the Great Wall, though not by our own driving. But farther out, beyond the municipal boundary in Hebei Province, there were the Qing Tombs—divided, thanks to some ancient argument over usurpation, into one set on either side of the city. The Western Qing Tombs sounded more bucolic, and seemed like an easy but substantial drive, the sort of thing you would gladly do if you had a car to yourself.

So I needed a road map of Hebei. I hailed a cab to the Wangfujing Bookstore downtown. Thick, white haze blanketed Chang’an Avenue. The store was overrun; people jostled in the aisles of the map section. The road atlases were shelved in no identifiable order: a batch on this side with the city maps, a whole section on the opposite side with the country atlases, some around on another aisle entirely. To simplify things, I just tried to find the Western Qing Tombs—if I couldn’t turn them up quickly, I probably had the wrong map for my needs. I squinted at tiny characters, trying to get the basics of provincial geography straight in my head.

That was probably when I should have felt expat frustration coming on. Or when two girls stopped dead at the foot of the escalator, blocking everything, because you could hardly expect anyone to understand how an escalator works or how to behave around one—or when the woman in the check-out line was too engrossed in her book to protect the space from the people crowding in from the sides—or when I popped by the children’s section, and the floor was covered everywhere with little ones sitting reading books, and bless their hearts, but you could really sprain an ankle.

But I made it outside, with the plastic flaps over the doorway hitting me in the face on the way, and then it was time to get a cab home. There were cabs all over the place—straight in front of the bookstore at the taxi stand, and more of them directly across the street. And the drivers, lounging against their cars or sitting inside, would not take me. A man with a supervisory aspect said to try across the street. Across the street, the drivers said I should try back across the street. The drivers pointed at their meter signs, which were switched from “vacant” to “pause,” begging the question. Why was everyone refusing to drive? “Lei le,” one said. I’m tired.

These were the people I had to depend on for transportation every day because I was living this stupid alien life without a car. These, and now this: a slickly dressed man sidled up and offered me a ride, suavely rolling a shiny cell phone around in his hand. “Bashi,” he said, dropping his finger and thumb into the inverted V of the character for “eight.” Meaning eighty. “Bashi?” I asked. He affirmed. Irresistibly—enough of this, enough with the language—I slid into English: “You’re fucking kidding.” If the man understood, he didn’t care. I told him it should be shiba, eighteen—not even haggling, just making the point.

Back home, I studied the driving manual I had picked up. A round blue sign with a big red X meant “No long or temporary stopping for vehicles is permitted.” I had dimly assumed that the X meant “Do not enter,” and that everyone was habitually ignoring it. The real “Do not enter” was a red circle with a white bar across the middle, a text-free version of the U.S. sign. Most of the rest was familiar, or at least unsurprising: road narrows, falling rocks, men working, no U-turn, bicycles only. The sign for “One way” pointed up, and it was blue and white. Then there was the round blue one, with a picture of a horn on it. “The sign in the picture means a honk is required when a motorized vehicle reaches this sign.”

The pollution disappeared overnight, leaving black smudges when I blew my nose and a bright, clear morning. I hailed a cab around seven-thirty on the alley; the cabbie was smoking, holding his cigarette low by the open window. I glimpsed the hills off to the west as we headed out Dongzhimen Avenue toward the Third Ring and up toward Mack’s neighborhood, in Wangjing. I tried to view the road like a driver: right turns meant swinging wide across the access lanes. I would have to pay attention to oncoming cyclists, even if no one else did.

Cell-phone numbers had been scrawled on a Fuwa billboard in Wangjing—the traditional advertising format for document forgers, another part of Beijing reasserting itself. One number was still showing; the rest were painted over with dripping gray bars. We found Big Mack in his own Jeep Cherokee at a wide, barren stretch of roadway. I got in, and we headed for the auto shop. As he drove, he declared that Beijing driving was much improved nowadays. Now, he said, it was 70 percent civilized—“in the city,” he added, as a warning about what I might face out in Hebei. We drove along the Fourth Ring Road, passed under a red inflated arch near the Siyuan Bridge, and wended our way into a complex of alleys lined with auto-repair and parts shops. This was the market that had been shut down for the Olympics, now back in business.

There was, Mack said, one problem. The particular four-liter Jeep we’d talked about was missing. The shop owner had lent it to one of the managers of the auto-repair park, and the borrower hadn’t brought it back last night as agreed. But a substitute vehicle would be waiting.

And so it was. Next to the door of the repair bay stood a hulking, dark-blue Great Wall–brand SUV: battered, dented, and covered with a thick coat of dust. The left rear fender was mashed and fraying fiberglass; the spare-tire cover was a mismatched electric blue, its metallic paint crazed and peeling to show chrome underneath. The hood ornament—an oval around the stylized outline of a Great Wall watchtower—drooped toward the passenger side.

Well, it was about the size of a Cherokee, Mack said. We would test drive it. Visibly concerned about my lack of local driving experience, he offered to take the wheel. I clambered up into the passenger seat—a long way up—and cautiously we backed out of the parking space and worked our way out of the complex. The morning sun, striking the dirt on the windshield, reduced the view out front to a blurry glare. The side windows, where the dirt was overlaid on the customary Chinese tint job, were nearly opaque. The needle on the gas gauge was on E. Mack honked. “The horn works,” he said.

We took a big loop through the neighborhood—past liquid-natural-gas storage tanks, along a weedy asphalt lane, out onto the wide dusty boulevards, and back around to the edge of the Fourth Ring. Somewhere on the last leg, a red warning light came on. We pulled into the car-repair bazaar again and raised the subject with the Jeep-shop crew. They lifted the hood and frowned at the engine. Someone cranked the ignition, and the whole motor lurched in its frame as it jumped to life. One of the shop guys peered into the car to check the light, then studied the engine again. It just needs a little more oil for the brake pump, he told Mack.

Who would I call if the thing broke down on the road? Mack said I should call him, and he’d get someone to help—or, better yet: “You take my Jeep,” he said. He would take the Great Wall for the day. I waved him off. He persisted. No, no. I could not deprive him of his car. The lead repairman, a young guy in a striped long-sleeved T-shirt, dribbled a little oil into a reservoir and gave it a thump. He checked the dash, then stared at the engine with a look of grave suspicion or concern. Then, after a long pause: “Keyi le!” he said. It’s okay! He dropped the hood. It bounced up, ajar. He slammed it down again. It popped up. He tried again. The hood jiggled to a rest, still not shut, the Great Wall hood ornament heeling over even further. He went into the shop, got some lubricant, worked on the latch for a while. It closed.

Mack was chuckling, somewhere between alarm and amusement. Every few minutes, he revised his estimate. On closer inspection, the Great Wall was maybe a little bigger than his usual Jeep. No, it was considerably bigger. “The whole thing is just . . . rough,” he said. “It’s a rough machine. But they think it’s a good car.”

We took it out again, and the warning light stayed off. Halfway through the lap, we stopped, and I switched over to the driver’s seat. The walnut-toned plastic on the door handle was chipped, and there was something gritty and sticky on the steering wheel, and when I looked over my shoulder for traffic, I could see nothing but the truck itself, the rear window half covered by the spare tire. Years before, I had driven, as a repair-shop loaner for my aged Honda Civic, an elderly Olds-mobile Delta 88—a vehicle like a rectangular midwestern county on wheels, its corners somewhere far off in the lonesome distance. But I never had had to steer the Delta 88 down an alleyway crowded with microvans and motor-tricycles and people carrying their breakfast.

Still, the Great Wall drove okay. The clutch point was tough—about an eighth of an inch above the floor mat—and the thing never seemed happy in second gear. I’d driven worse. (Hadn’t I? Yes, a twenty-four-foot U-Haul with bum steering and an uninsulated engine cowling. Definitely worse.) I’d take it.

Now gas, and a car wash. There was a station just outside the gate, with a one-lane car-wash canopy in front of the pumps. The fill-up overflowed the tank—evidently the gauge was wrong and it hadn’t really been empty. A four-man car-wash crew scrambled over it, the team leader climbing up the frame of the canopy to work the Great Wall over with a pressure hose. A gray BMW pulled up and honked to get us out of the way, so the driver could sit and wait for his car wash ten feet closer than he was currently sitting and waiting. It was important for me to remember to use the horn, Mack said. “Do use it,” he said. “A light touch. Get their attention. Otherwise, they’ll ignore you.”

The crew waved the Great Wall out, for a wipedown and interior cleaning. The BMW owner sauntered around, clutching a little black man-purse. The surface had a shine to it now, so that the scratches and dents stood out. The hood ornament still drooped. A lot of drivers, Mack said, swapped out the Great Wall emblem for a Toyota one, since the Great Wall was a Toyota knockoff.

The steering wheel was unsticky. I flipped on the air conditioner, and a puff of dust came out. Big Mack volunteered to lead the way back to Outer Dongzhimen Side Street. As he turned out of the gas station, two buses were coming. I hit the horn and gunned the Great Wall out in front of them. A few turns later, Mack changed lanes and a red Volkswagen Santana tried to force its way between us. I nudged the Great Wall over to cut it off, drawing an impotent fit of honking. At a stoplight, I caught myself gazing wistfully at a trim silver Mazda 6, but the Great Wall had its own vehicular logic and in Beijing traffic that logic was persuasive. I tried the radio. It was dead.

I parked in the biggest space I could find, down the block and around the corner, by the gates of a mental hospital. Mack supervised the parking. “This is a monster car,” he said. Then, in a mock-stentorian instructor’s voice: “You passed the test. You can drive in China!”

But not to the Western Qing Tombs. Just getting the truck had used up most of the morning, and Little Mack was in no state to hit the open road without lunch. By the middle of lunch, he was sleepily rubbing his eyes. So while he went down for a nap, we searched the maps for an easier destination, something in the near outskirts of Beijing. Maybe we could just go out to the Fragrant Hills, northwest of the Fifth Ring. We had seen something on television about the changing leaves there. Or right before Fragrant Hills Park, the Summer Palace. I still had never been to the Summer Palace.

Car!” little Mack said, from the backseat. “Car! Car! Car!” The cars he was seeing were moving, for the most part. Traffic was light as we worked our way north and west from top of the Second Ring. My notebook sat on the passenger seat. At the top of the page was a scrawled “Legal??”—the question had come up as I followed a line of traffic making a left turn through the gap where a lane divider opened for a crosswalk. We followed the Third Ring around to the Badaling Expressway, out to the Fifth Ring. The mountains were solid-looking and green, wrapping around us on two sides. The baby whooped with glee. We passed a disabled car in the middle of the road, a truckload of scrap, another truck piled high with old quilts. I cut off a black Audi. A different black Audi, with a warning buzzer-siren, passed us on the right shoulder. There was a sign for the Summer Palace exit. It seemed a pity to stop so soon, and so short of the mountains. We passed the Summer Palace and headed for the Fragrant Hills.

As soon as we took the exit for Fragrant Hills Park, the open road closed up again, with creeping traffic and hordes of pedestrians. We crawled past the Beijing Botanical Gardens, with a rare joint display of Huanhuan and Lele accompanying the sign, and the gift shop of the Bee Research Institute. Pedestrians flowed into the roadway, around the slowly passing cars. There were tourist shops, and vendors selling candied fruit on sticks. Bullhorns squawked.

A flagman waved us into a parking-lot entrance, and a young man in a red visor and leatherette jacket, shirtless underneath, led the way to a parking field of stubbly brown grass, evidently a former farming plot. Once there, the leatherette man made a pitch: for 100 yuan, plus the ticket price, we could drive to the gate of the park and go right in. He hopped in and guided us up an even more crowded uphill lane, through a left turn, and into a parking space in front of a conversion van that was even bigger than the Great Wall.

The first fragrance that the Fragrant Hills presented was that of urine. We had parked just outside a public toilet. The man in the jacket, who said his name was Yang, produced two adult tickets, led us through the park entrance, and murmured something to the ticket-taker as he passed. We thanked him and rolled the baby’s stroller on into the park. Paths split off upslope, leading to stairways for hiking up the mountain, and downslope, to the cable-car station. We headed for the cable car.

The paths were swarmed; a constant chatter filled the air. Except for a tint of yellow here or there, the foliage was all in summer green. A family with two babies in strollers passed us in the opposite direction. The babies were covered in some sort of penny-sized sores—dark and weeping sores on one baby, paler and crusty sores on the other. The family’s holiday mood seemed intact.

The cable car was a chairlift, with open two-person benches. We bought tickets, left the stroller at the base station, and lined up for the ride. Fortunately, little Mack was in the mood to be held. I clutched him tight and let the car scoop us up from behind.

Behind us, the city stretched east across the plain, looking white in the afternoon light. We could see the spire of the old CCTV broadcast tower on the west side, and the loop of the new CCTV building all the way over on the east. The ridges of the mountain enfolded us. We rose over the treetops. Someone had dropped an empty box of Pocky candied pretzel sticks into the upper branches. The stairs up the mountain ran close by the cable car route, and we could see hikers below us, looking ever wearier as we went higher. Where the steps paused at observation platforms, there was a rim of litter below, like what’s left by high tide.

A soaring bird passed below the chair. There was haze far off to the east. We rose higher and higher, and then the chair deposited us on the mountaintop, back in the thick of the human element. People clogged the paths and clambered over the rocks between; they swarmed souvenir stands to buy red leaves, presumably left over from the previous autumn, pressed in laminated sheets. The air was dense with babble and cigarette smoke.

Then we saw the line for the cable car back down the mountain—not just all the passengers who’d already ridden up, naturally, but an uncountable number of people who’d hiked up and wanted a ride back down. The line doubled and trebled back on itself, then stretched off down a long path. We wouldn’t be off the mountain for an hour.

Just as the predicament was sinking in, I looked up and saw Yang, in his leatherette jacket, lurking by the cable-car line. He had a van available for a ride down the mountain, he said. It would be 60 yuan per person, down to the north gate of the park. We only had to wait until he could round up enough passengers.

Within five or ten minutes he had assembled about a dozen. He passed the group off to another young man in a red shirt, and we set off south along the mountaintop, then down one of the stepped pathways. Looking down the hill and off to the right, we could see a strip of roadway through the trees with some vans or minibuses parked on it. Getting to there didn’t look too bad. But instead of angling along the slope to the right, we kept going straight downhill, and for much longer than I’d thought we would. Our van was not one of those vans. Then the pathway made a sharp turn along a ridgeline. On the right-hand side ran a wall, eight or ten feet high. Our guide walked ahead for a while, then stopped, seemingly nowhere in particular. Another man was sitting on top of the wall, waiting. In a minute, the guide explained, they would have the ladder.

It was a bamboo ladder, in the old-fashioned Chinese style, wider at the bottom than the top. The men handed it down over the wall and braced it at an angle. I would go first, because I had the baby. Holding Mack in one arm, I climbed up to the top. Another ladder led down the other side. Somehow I got from one to the other and down without losing the child. I was standing on a narrow unpaved path along the outside of the wall, with a yellowish thicket pressing in on it. The growth was too tall to see over.

The others followed. There was a pair of plump boys, somewhere around ten years old. “Hao war!” one of them said, going over the wall. Fun! Tiny dates were growing wild, and people began to pick them and hand them around. When the last passenger was over, we set off through the thicket, following the blind windings of the path out—at last!—to the edge of a roadway, where a rattletrap van was waiting. The padding in the seats had been beaten flat, and the inside reeked of fuel. An argument broke out about crowding—the guides wanted to make the plump boys sit in their parents’ laps, because they were only half price, and to go find more passengers to fill the van. The driver didn’t want to add any more weight. Maybe because he was the one who had to get the van down the mountain, his view prevailed, and we were off.

We passed more men climbing over the wall, loading bundles of trash from the park onto blue three-wheeled Jin Bei minitrucks. The roadway was pale concrete, a long series of curves and switchbacks with a sharp drop on the outside. Not only was there no rail, but the edge of the concrete was beveled, as if to help ease any errant wheel over the side. Before long, we found ourselves face-to-face with a Santana coming uphill, with no room to pass. The driver slipped the van into reverse and retreated to the most recent hairpin turn, where there was extra room for the car to slip by. “Scary! Scary!” the little boys yelled from the back, as if they were on an amusement ride. I still had a date pit in my mouth and was slowly grinding it to crumbs.

On and down we went, through curves banked like skateboarding half-pipes, with the children screaming. Eventually we reached an arched tunnel that looked barely wider than the van. By the roadside was a bulldozer, abandoned and overgrown with vines. The driver pulled up to the arch, backed off, and then somehow shot the gap. As soon as we were through, he announced that it was time to switch to another van. The new van—new to us, but emphatically not a new van—was waiting by the roadside, with a new driver. It had blackout-tinted windows and it smelled like skunk inside. I was not sure what in the Beijing mountains would make a smell like skunk. The original driver said that the switch was necessary because his van needed a rest from driving. No sooner had he explained this and gotten us settled in the other van than we looked out the window to see him turning the empty van around and zipping back uphill through the tunnel.

The new driver was wearing a neat yellow shirt and seemed more mild-mannered than the rest of the crew. He cranked the ignition and nothing happened. We sat there in the skunk-smelling dimness. Would the cable car really have been so bad? Resignedly, the driver dug out a tool kit and reached behind his seat to take the cover off the battery, which happened to be where our feet were, directly below the baby. He fiddled with it, and a spark popped. Then he tightened something with a wrench. The van started.

This lower stretch of road had concrete posts along the downhill side, and a less menacing aspect all around. The boys behind us started talking about what they wanted to eat for dinner. “Curry noodles!” We guessed that the other van was working the uphill leg because it had better brakes. Just as we were getting used to the new one, the driver stopped. This was it. We would be walking the rest of the way to the park gate. It would take only about ten minutes, the driver said.

The roadway was still a steep grade for walking down, especially while carrying a twenty-two-pound baby. The evening was getting cool. The stroller—the stroller, we had realized, was still at the base station for the cable car, where we’d left it. We walked past rural lanes and courtyards. There was a small hill’s worth of coal, then a grazing nanny goat. Turds lay on the pavement. One of our traveling companions saw the baby sucking his thumb and launched into a lecture: He had to pull it out. If we let him do it, he’d need to do it to fall asleep. Well, yes, he would.

Twenty minutes later, we reached the bottom. The stroller was still where we’d left it, and the park hadn’t quite closed for the day. Dusk was falling fast. The Great Wall was also where we’d left it. I swung it out of the space and tried to remember how I had gotten to the parking lot. A right turn to start with, for certain. I crept down the darkening street, through the people massing around the storefronts. The smell of cooking meat skewers was on the air. The parking lots along the way were emptying; we were in a thickening line of traffic, slowly oozing downhill. The next turn was a mystery to me. When in Beijing, do as the masses do: At the next intersection most of the cars were turning south; I followed.

By now it was thoroughly dark. We were on a two-lane road, under deep-suburban, if not rural, lighting conditions. Somewhere, up ahead, we would definitely meet up with an expressway if we kept going. This was a familiar thought pattern for the part of my brain that does the driving. The darkness, the traffic on the narrow country road—this was how I always felt looking for the highway in Pennsylvania.

And Pennsylvania was the next-closest thing to home. My wife and son were asleep in the car. The lights got brighter; we passed a set of the Golden Arches. At a stoplight, I checked the atlas under the dome light. The Fourth Ring should be coming up soon. I only had to be in the right lane. I swung the incontestable bulk of the Great Wall over, drawing impotent honking.

The rest was automatic, as if I’d been doing it forever. The Great Wall looped around the North Fourth Ring. This was not suburban Philadelphia, after all: now waves of colored light accompanied us, floodlights and patterned LEDs along the bridges and retaining walls. “One World, One Dream,” was spelled out in green. Then, in characters, “Huanying Ni Lai Dao Beijing.” Welcome to Beijing. Illuminated yellow hoops adorned the guardrails. The plain streetlights, even, looked like some decoration strung out on the road ahead. I passed the Ikea, took Jingshun Road, found the signs (in Chinese) for the Sanyuan Bridge. Then would come Xindong Road, and the right-left jog onto Outer Dongzhimen Side Street. I was driving on memory, making no wrong turns, automatically heading for something like home.