Plankton on the move: Scootering Through Central China – Xinxiang City, Henan Province, China

Plankton on the move: Scootering through Central China
Xinxiang City, Henan Province, China

Scooter

A few kilometers north of Xinxiang City, in central China, I realize I am driving my scooter along the only road I meant to avoid. Last week on this road, I sat in the back seat of a city bus and snugly watched the clouds of dust, ramshackle tractors, the black smoke from towering, boxy construction machines slip past with a mixture of disbelief and fascination. I pitied the bicyclers swallowing exhaust and covering their faces when our mammoth bus flew past. Our driver weaved between the two lanes, wailing on his horn as the approaching vehicles did the same. From behind that square window, Road #40 looked like documentary footage.

But now, facing the prospects of being in that scene, I pull over to consult a regional map for an alternate route. The smooth lines and half-familiar characters offer nothing. A dump truck lumbers by spilling bits of coal behind it, the tarp meant to cover the load flapping in the wind. I pull down the visor on my helmet and sigh, deciding to give Road #40 another chance. Luckily, after a few more minutes of driving on this late Sunday morning, the traffic looks to be manageably thin.

I bought my Chaoying petrol-powered scooter second-hand from a friend of a friend. After the test drive, I asked about any problems the machine had had in the past.

“It has only been driven by a girl,” he assured evasively, dismissing me with his hand.

However gently used, the scooter has all the quirks and rust of a second-hand vehicle. Of the two main storage compartments, one doesn’t open and the other doesn’t close. The gas gauge mysteriously registers the fuel amount from the day before. And now, in my masculine hands, a minor spill has claimed one the mirrors and bent the kickstand. On colder days, it often takes two-dozen attempts before I can kick-start it to life. If I’m in the city, a crowd of old men usually gather to watch my efforts as I whisper words of encouragement toward the handlebars.

Buzzing along at 20-25 kilometers/hour is not the ideal way to cover a lot of ground fast. On Road #40, this speed lands me somewhere in between the gliding electric bicycles and the brick-hauling pug-nosed tractors on the transportation food chain: walkers-bicycles-pedal carts-electric bicycles-scooters-tractors-three-wheeled haulers-motorcycles-cars-vans-buses-semis/large trucks. I factor in speed and size for all this, but the fundamental show of dominance along Road #40 is the ability for one vehicle to make itself known to another, its ability to communicate “I’m coming, get out of the way!” or “I’m coming, stay where you are!” depending on the conditions. With only occasional dividing lines on the road, no signs, no lights or no posted speed limit, vehicles push their way through traffic with their brashness and their horns.

Being about the equivalent of plankton in this system, I get told ‘get out of the way/stay where you are’ a lot. Within the first half an hour of this drive, I can already discern the horns I hear from behind and can guess the vehicle before it overtakes me on the left. From a scooter seat on Road #40, you have to listen for what comes from behind rather than concentrate on what appears ahead. I’ve begun to match the buses with their high-pitched elephant explosions and the motorcycles with their raspy, airy, sharp horn tones. The semi-trucks’ low-pitched blasts rattle the back of my skull. And amidst these mastodon calls, my pesky beeps at bike-riders are usually ignored altogether and I have to slow down and move around them.

Road #40 doesn’t offer any quaint, winding sections, nor dramatic vistas. It is a relatively straight transport road, connecting Puyang to Xinxiang, its topography flattened by 5,000 years of Chinese agriculture. Up ahead, construction narrows Road #40 to a lane and a half. The road is being expanded to a full six lanes: four for motorized vehicles, two for bicycles. This kind of exponential development is standard fare in China these days. In Xinxiang City, where I’m living and teaching, wide, eight-lane, street-lamped boulevards lead from the heart of downtown toward my college on the fringe of the sprawl. They run perfectly straight along the featureless plain, as far as the eye can see. At night they look like airport runways.

But many of these vast thoroughfares don’t lead anywhere, not yet at least. I’ve taken my scooter around the outskirts of Xinxiang, luxuriously weaving across the perfectly smoothed pavement all to myself. I’ve cruised past cornfields, crumbling brick buildings and shepherds holding whips above their herds of goats, only to discover…nothing, merely the end of the road. There were no buildings, no connecting roads, nothing. There was nothing to do but turn around.

But, of course there will be buildings along these streets very soon. Driving around my campus in Xinxiang, I see the 22 new, identical, six-story brick housing complexes that were erected in a mere 11 months. I’ve gauged the progress on the new dormitory building south of campus, whose skeleton frame has been almost completely fleshed out in one month. In fact, when I ask my friends, third-year students, about the campus when they first arrived, they laugh.

“It was a field of grass.”

Along Road #40 – Out of Gas

Yet, along Road #40 there’s not the same kind of construction and development mania seen in the big city. The road is expanding, but the blocky, two-story concrete stores and faded shop signs look as if they haven’t changed in twenty years, and that they will hold out another twenty. When the time eventually comes, and Road #40 becomes a major artery connecting two international, bustling metropolises, I imagine this road with spacious lanes lined with florescent street lamps, tollbooths and off ramps. And perhaps as the towns and cities sprawl and run up against each other, Road #40 may even, one day, become a mere city street, dotted with high-end restaurants and glitzy high-rise hotels.

Now though, my allotted space is all of three feet on the far right side of the lane. I have to concentrate not to teeter off the edge of the shoulder. The tires feel unsteady driving over the loose dirt. Tiny villages, such as Houhe, Liyuantun, Pangzhai are announced by simple white characters on blue signs. Their ‘big’ buildings cling to the edges of Road #40: a white-tiled Bank of China, a two-story China Mobile phone store, a new police station with shiny windows. But the farming inhabitants of these places live down dirt paths, past cornfields in unadorned, heavy concrete houses. There are littered, foul-smelling canals cutting toward these residences. It takes about two minutes to drive past it all, two minutes until I can look behind me and see the same white characters on blue announcing the village from the opposite side.

But despite being a relative bottom-feeder and being occasionally bullied to far side of the road, the scooter has carved out its niche with luxuries available to no one else. At 25 km/hr, I have time to search for recognizable Chinese characters on the shop signs and fruit stand umbrellas on either side. It’s slow enough to study the passing details, but fast enough to feel the wind pass through my t-shirt. Sitting about four feet off the ground, on two 12 inch wheels allows me to see underneath the fluff of willow trees, through the thin branches toward the cornfields beyond, something I missed from my elevated bus seat last weekend. I can readily daydream at 25 km/hr, which the jumpy motorcyclists don’t have time for. And, unlike the bicyclists, I can ride all day without a fear of being too tired to make the return journey home. I can distinguish the color of butterflies before they zip past. When friendly motorists pull up beside me, smiling to ask where I’m from, I don’t have to adjust my speed, though we do have to shout our conversation over the growl of our motors. But, perhaps the most intoxicating thing about moving across the Chinese countryside at 25 km/hr is that I have enough time to notice and be noticed, and then move on. Even though I gather stares along the way, there’s no time to cause a scene or draw any real attention to myself. I can simply keep driving if I choose. And I can also stop when I choose.

And the choice of what to see and how to see it is, of course, the crown jewel of having one’s own transportation, especially in places unknown. Any fancy, any sudden urge can be acted upon. It’s as simple as turning the handlebars. And the consequences of these decisions, however small, have a tremendous personal value attached to them. The freedom of movement allows for serendipity and simple kindness.

One of my urges leads me down a back-alley toward two blue compact trucks transporting red and white papier-mâché horses as floats for a Mid-Autumn festival. When I stop and ask a friendly, elderly village woman about them, she explains and abruptly invites me to her home for lunch. Further up the road, I run out of gas and begin walking, plastic juice bottle in hand, searching for petrol. I ask a young, rail-thin man digging a ditch if he knows how far the petrol station is. He shakes his head, but lays down his shovel and gestures for me to follow. We pass three dirty geese and my acquaintance suddenly grabs me by the arm and starts running down the road. As if on cue, the largest goose starts after us, flapping and honking wildly. The chase only lasts a few moments and when things calm down, we both laugh, no words exchanged. We walk a few more minutes to a dark shed, which has steel watering cans scattered around the dirt floor. A bald, round man pours me some from his supply. I pay and wave thank you and good-bye.

Friendly Lady North of Xinxiang

There is nothing particularly adventurous or special about these episodes taken individually, but assembled, they compose the richly human moments of traveling. I am puttering along Road #40 to fill my days with these kinds of encounters. Certainly, traveling at 25 km/hr, scooter driving urges me to follow my whims; it encourages diversions precisely because of its inefficiency in covering distances. If the destination were paramount, I would take a bus, train or taxi.

Beyond the small city, Weihui, there are workers in the cornfields gathering, bagging and transporting the harvest on trucks and tractors. Minutes up the road, I see the harvested corn being shucked and laid across the cement of an abandoned gas station. Husks form a pile next to the golden ears spread thin to dry. It’s pleasant driving in the afternoon sun with the construction behind me and the other vehicles few and far between. I blow my nose to clear the dust and exhaust; the air immediately tastes sweeter. Women sell yellow apples on grassy patches, and beyond them, the corn and wheat fields stretch out on both sides. I sing to myself above the steady timbre of the engine, feeling the vibrations in the handgrips.