Traffic Jam
You’ve probably heard that the driving scene in China is somewhat chaotic. You have no idea. If you’ve never seen it with your own eyes, you can only imagine and your imagination – if you have spent the majority of your life in a Western country – isn’t equipped to create scenarios like the ones I see every morning and afternoon. It is said that traffic lights are a suggestion and that painting lane lines on the road is a waste of paint and time. When negotiating the streets as a pedestrian you’ve got to play both offense and defense. If you are passive, waiting for the kindness of a passing car to pause or for a break in the line of cars, you’re going to wait all day. However, if you don’t watch out for your own wellbeing, you’ll be a pancake causing a huge traffic jam and no one will feel sorry for YOUR incompetence.
We’ve got a driver. His name is Don. He’s a huge silent type who speaks no more English than “Bye”. His “Hello” is usually a nod. He doesn’t smile when you try and speak Chinese with him and he won’t humor your attempts at conversation. He wears spotless aviators, has a thick neck and picks his way through the streets of Wuhan like a professional.
Every morning around 7:30 am, Don drives up in the school’s 10-passenger van. We pile in (seven of us bound for the main campus and the other three heading to the 2nd branch school) and the adventure begins. A couple of weekends ago, we got into a little bit of trouble for being too loud here at our apartment. We were out on the roof having a pot luck dinner party and at one point we all started singing our favorite songs a cappella. We were loud. We were out of tune too, so it wasn’t like we were entertaining the rest of the neighborhood with our renditions. On Monday morning, when Don picked us up, the usually silent van was rocking thanks to a compilation CD of late eighties – early nineties rock favorites. It brought a tear to my eye to reminisce with music I’d listened to when I wasn’t much older than my students are now. We think Don was playing a joke on us. Whatever sparked the music, he’s been blasting disco music and dance music and Chinese pop music at us ever since. Thank goodness for MP3 players!
I think I’ve mentioned that the main street, the one our branch school (and our apartment) is just off of, used to be a runway for the old airport 10-15 years ago. If there were lane lines painted on the thing, I believe it would be an eight-lane street. Right now, there is severe construction occurring at a few key points along the road. In the morning, Don leaves our street and takes a left into on-coming traffic, usually sticking to the far left side of the road – managing to steer clear of the head-on collisions that look inevitable. Taxis and mopeds fly by the left and right of us while buses come careening along, barely missing taking off the paint on the right side of the van. Don crawls along, as if going slowly helps any. He stays on this side of the street because his next move is an immediate left and it would be even more traumatic if he tried to take that left from the right side of the giant road with construction crews and potholes and all of us holding our “go-cups” of coffee or tea.
From this point until we reach the next big road, it is a lovely sprint along a dated street full of pool tables in front of non-descript storefronts. Men and women and children lounge idly in the early morning cool. Children sit at small makeshift desks, eating their morning noodles or dumplings. Men smoke in their pajama pants and dress shoes and stretch their shirtless bellies. Women squat in front of buckets of water, brushing teeth or washing hair or clothes. The bustle of morning routine is always fascinating and I love the morning drives. When it is cool outside and seems like it will rain, this street is filled with small garbage fires. It is also overrun with all kinds of dogs. Big dogs, skinny dogs, longhair dogs, shorthair dogs, clean dogs, puppies, scruffy dogs, old, dirty dogs. I think I’ve seen every kind of mutt-variety that exists. I’d love to play with these little guys but most of them are followed by swarms of flies and I figure I shouldn’t push it with just getting over a pretty icky sickness.
One of the more entertaining portions of the morning drive occurs at the next large street. When we come out to this street, the sign says “right turn only” and of course we need to be going left. The first day, Don pulled a u-ey (sp?) right after turning right. The next morning, he went a little further before making the u-turn. Then, one morning, traffic was so bad that Don obeyed the law and did what he was supposed to do: he drove the 150 meters or so in the opposite direction, followed the loop-the-loop and headed in the right direction. Don is an impatient man and tries to pull the u-turn as quickly and as often as possible. One morning, he brazenly took a left at the “right turn only” sign and in front of a traffic cop. As we’ve noticed before, the traffic cop barely raised an eyebrow much less a hand. Usually, when Don’s coming home in the evening, we take a turn that puts us in front of a traffic police enforcement facility. I’ve never seen any incident stopped or dealt with by one of these enforcement officers. I wonder what they do in that pretty building of theirs.
One thing we have witnessed, though, was an altercation between a traffic cop and some “real” officers of the law. One especially clogged morning, we were not more than three turns from the school and running at least ten minutes late. Traffic was at a complete standstill and Don was stuck in the middle of it. Usually, he determines that there is the potential for being trapped and he’ll pick an alternate route, but not this morning.
We were sitting almost in the middle of the road, when we noticed a very perturbed traffic cop huff up to the vehicle that was actually smack dab in the center of the intersection and rap on the driver’s window in a threatening manner. The window rolled down partway and a policeman sneered in the traffic cop’s face. The policeman, with his blurry eyes and scraggly hair and his unbuttoned below-the-neck shirt, was a harrowed foil for the properly attired and mannered traffic cop. The traffic cop was perfection with his white gloves, pressed trousers, shiny shoes, and squarely placed cap. No shadow of a beard rested on his face, though I don’t believe he was old enough to have ever tried growing one out.
Words were exchanged and then the traffic cop was on a cell phone trying to save face, probably realizing his mistake in picking a squabble with a vanload of tired yet keyed-up policemen. As soon as he was on the phone, the driver tried to move away and out of the intersection. The traffic cop wasn’t having any of it and stood in front of the van so that the policeman would have had to drive over him to get through the road. Next thing you know, policemen have thrown open the sliding door of the van and three or four men are shouting and spitting in the traffic cop’s face, most likely telling him to let go of his battle as he’s probably going to be fired by lunch time. I don’t know what came of the argument as Don had made his way through the intersection by this point and was making a hasty turn onto Ziyang Lu.
The other day, Don rolled around the loop-the-loop alongside a funeral procession. My first thought was that the bereaved shouldn’t have to negotiate traffic along with the rest of us. Then I wondered if the deceased had been involved in a traffic accident. Morbid, yes, but if I think about how many “near-misses” I’ve passively participated in in the backs of taxis or Don’s van, it is a valid thought. We were wondering aloud the other day whether or not the blatant ignoring of traffic laws makes for better or worse road conditions. Not safety, mind you, but efficiency. In other words, would things be worse if everyone drove like we do in Seattle?
As if reminding me that with Yin there must be Yang, the next morning, after the funeral procession, we witnessed the beginning of many, many, MANY wedding processions. Apparently, the time to wed in China is during the National Holiday. And the way in which you celebrate is ordering several shiny, black cars and decorating them with frilly pink and purple ribbons and cardboard banners and small scaled-down replicas of the bride and groom. One particularly gaudy procession announced the bride and groom with dolls grasping hands in real wedding clothes, stuck onto the hood of a black Audi with tinted windows. Talk about hood ornaments. I tried taking a picture of the car but it was parked in front of the traffic police enforcement facility and I was sure I’d get written up for “hazardous behavior intended to cause an accident” if my flash went off, so my picture is quite blurry.
I am fully expecting many more fascinating visuals on the way to and from school – especially since I realized the other day that the drive reminds me of Richard Scary’s Busy World – but I’ll end with this one: we saw a truck full of animal carcasses and skins. It was an unusually quiet morning. Most of us were lost in the music of our MP3 players, while those who’d forgotten them at home or haven’t purchased one yet were struggling with their thoughts and Don’s music combined, when I noticed it first. A truck was several cars ahead of us and the contents in the truck’s bed seemed to be jiggling. And then I realized the contents were freshly harvested animal skins. And they were still in the shapes of the animals they’d come off of, more or less. I could see what looked like a horse, several cows, a bull, maybe. But the creepy part was the way they were just jiggling around with every bump. And then, we drove right up and around the truck. The back held skins; the front of the truck bed was full of animal parts, skinned animal parts. I shuddered. The hair on my head stood straight up and my skin felt tight and my teeth felt sore in my gums. I thought I’d throw up right there in the van and so I looked away. I can honestly say that that truck of death was the most gruesome thing I’ve ever laid eyes on.
And so, I’ve seen it all: weddings, funerals, animal parts, arguments between different factions of the same cause, and all the while, I’ve had a soundtrack. And Don knows it’s a tough world out there because he never cracks a smile, even with Chinese Disco-chipmunks singing a Britney song backwards.
