Country Driving Quotes

“In China it's common for people in restaurants to complain about food. The Chinese can be passive about many things, but food is not one of them; I suppose this is one reason they've ended up with a first-rate cuisine and a long history of political disasters.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“Everything still revolves around memorization and repetition, the old cornerstones of Chinese education.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“In modern China, road building has often been a strategy for dealing with poverty or crisis.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“I began to see motorcyclists who had attached computer discs to their back mudflaps, because they made good reflectors. In a place called Xingwuying, locals climbed the Great Wall whenever they wanted to receive a cell phone signal.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“I once spent a night at a truck stop in Shandong Province, on the east coast, asking drivers about what they carried. Two men had a truck full of bamboo whisk brooms; they had just dropped off a shipment of non-ferrous metal... Others had gone from chemical materials to radiators, from tennis shoes to dynamos. They were the alchemists of the new economy, at the center of every mysterious exchange that occurs along the Chinese road system.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“MIMI HAD ARRANGED A spot for Wei Jia in the children’s ward of the Peking University Health Center Number Three,”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“In the countryside, traditional parents avoid flattery, and the mother’s responses were automatic—it was like knocking her knee with a rubber hammer. She didn’t want to spoil the child, but there was also the Chinese superstition that pride attracts misfortune.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

“Sometimes they seemed to grasp instinctively at the worst of both worlds: the worst modern habits, the worst traditional beliefs.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“For a Politeness Monitor, these responses seemed awfully terse and uncommunicative, but who was I to judge?”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“The decorating scheme of Big World is simple in theme but complicated in execution. The theme is: things that shine and things that make noise. There are mirrors and glass railings and columns of polished steel; there are beeping lights and blaring loudspeakers; there are more reflective surfaces here than on a disco ball.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“Whenever somebody turned his head, he shouted, "Stop looking behind you!: There was a strict rule against head turns. When reversing, you were supposed to rely on mirrors only; the blind spot didn't exist, at least not in Coach Tang's eyes. Nobody ever wore a seat belt. I never saw a turn signal flash on the parking range at the Public Safety Driving School.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“Nevertheless, Chinese drivers haven't grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it's pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions - in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don't mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. But if you switch on your lights during a rainstorm, approaching drivers will invariably flash their brights in annoyance.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“In China, the transition has been to abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life - people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he's about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and they'll approach a roundabout in reverse direction if it seems faster. If they miss an exit on a highway, they simply pull onto the shoulder, shift into reverse, and get it right the second time. They curb-sneak in traffic jams, the same way Chinese people do in ticket lines. Tollbooths can be hazardous, because a history of long queues has conditioned people into quickly evaluation options and making snap decisions. When approaching a toll, drivers like to switch lanes at the last possible instant: it's common to see an accident right in front of a booth. Drivers rarely check their rearview mirrors. Windshield wipers are considered a distraction, and so are headlights.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“Beijing maps featured cloverleaf exchanges that could have been designed by M. C. Escher.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“In 1923, National Geographic Magazine claimed that the Great Wall is visible to the human eye from the moon. (In truth, nobody on the moon could see it in 1923, and they sill can't.) For a while, Chinese intellectuals tried to resist such exaggerations, believing rightly that the foreigners had confused both history and geography. But eventually the myths proved appealing to nationalists like Mao Zedong, who used the Great Wall in propaganda, recognizing the symbolic value of a unified barrier. In any case, it was hard to set the record straight in a country with no academic tradition of studying the ancient structures. Finally it was as if the Chinese threw up their hands and accepted the foreign notion.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

“The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.”
― Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory