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"FacebookPinterest\n\n1. (YOU CAN'T HANDLE) THE GYNECOLOGICAL TRUTH\n\nOur first morning in China, we got rushed to the hospital. We were whisked up elevators and hurried down hallways as if we were part of some massive emergency. Eventually, we came to rest at a nurses' station, where patients received a steady stream of bananas as good-bye gifts. That's when a nurse hijacked my arm and jerked me straight into gynecology. It said so in Chinese and English above the door. GYNECOLOGY.\n\nWhy were we in a hospital at all? That was but one of a dozen questions I had. And what was up with those bananas?\n\nAnother smiling nurse entered bearing a tuning fork. Not quite twelve hours in-country and I was going to become the poster boy for unspeakable Chinese human-rights malfeasance. Saying yes to this insane-sounding road trip had been my original sin; now came the punishment.\n\n\"My first gynecological exam,\" I said. \"And I am not psyched about the tuning fork.\"\n\nMy bodyguard, who was fluent in Mandarin, asserted himself. The smiling nurse, wearing badge 0308, explained that yes, the office sign read GYNECOLOGY, but this would be a hearing test, and then there would be a vision test... and then: bananas.\n\nSo Number 0308 sat me down, struck the tuning fork on a rubber mat (which actually silenced the thing), and held it up to one of my ears from behind. Nothing. Sensing my panic, my bodyguard wriggled into my line of sight and grabbed his right earlobe. I lifted the forefinger of my right hand to indicate that I could hear the vibrations, clear as a bell.\n\nThe eye test went the same way, vanquished with solid American teamwork. Soon we had attained the perfect scores reserved for rare superior beings, ourselves.\n\nMr. Yang, our dour, overcaffeinated fir, herded us into a van and informed us that we were next being taken to a written test. Was it history, economics, literature? Would there be an essay section? I love geography\u2014would there be a map?\n\nNo, no, Mr. Yang informed us, this was a driving test, for the Fast Car...the one that waited for us right now in front of the St. Regis Hotel in Beijing. \"You may not drive in the People's Republic of China without official Chinese license,\" he said gravely.\n\nInside the DMV, we were each handed a pink study pamphlet. We had five minutes to prepare, Mr. Yang said, then the test would begin.\n\nThe pamphlet was an eight-panel double-sided foldout with one hundred sample questions, a thicket of arcana, and an answer key in the back. A third of the questions had to do with the meaning of certain traffic signs, some of them familiar, some of them not at all, with possible answers describing this or that odd sign as \"Children's play world\" or \"Hump-shaped road.\"\n\nOne question read:\n\nTRAFFIC POLICEMEN MAY MAKE A DECISION ABOUT FINE AND ISSUE THE ADMINISTRATIVE PUNISHMENT SLIP FOR FINES BLOW (INCLUSIVE) OR WARNING.\n\nA. RMB 200.00\n\nB. RMB 100.00\n\nC. RMB 50.00\n\nMy personal choice, d.: Whatever \"fines blow\" traffic policemen wants. Or this one:\n\nWHAT OBLIGATION DO THE PERSONS INVOLVED IN A TRAFFIC ACCIDENT UNDERTAKE WHEN THE ACCIDENT IS BEING INVESTIGATED?\n\nA. MAKING UP A STORY ABOUT THE ACCIDENT.\n\nB. COMPLAINING OF THE FAULT OF THE OTHER PARTY.\n\nC. MAKING A TRUE STATEMENT OF THE ACCIDENT WITHOUT CONCEALING THE TRUTH.\n\nNow, with c. being blatantly ridiculous, I would have marked b. or a., as they were really both one and the same. A fully democratized, litigious, capitalist society would seize on b./a. as the only answer, and therefore the question would never be asked in the first place.\n\nToo soon I was summoned to sit before a computer that displayed the questions, and suddenly I was 16 again, back at the Connecticut DMV, sweaty-palmed, throwing guesses. Back then if you failed, you couldn't take the test again for another month. Here...who knew what the consequences would be? Some time in the hoosegow? Next plane home? I tried to consider traffic rules in an openhearted, honest, and wholly un-American way. Miraculously, when I arrived at the eighteenth question, I had statistically locked it up. There was no big celebration, just the thing I like to do when I achieve victory in public: For the two blank-faced DMV bureaucrats, I gave a little tap to the heart and pointed up to heaven.\n\n2. THE MOST URGENT QUESTION ASKED BY ALL GOOD-SMELLING ITALIANS\n\nHere's how i got here : I was sitting at my desk five days ago, watching the bubbles rise in my Coke, when Headquarters called. The line was fuzzy, details were sketchy, but I picked up snatches: dream assignment...Ferrari...road trip...China...answer by tomorrow.\n\nIt sounded perfectly wrong. \"Whatever it is you just said,\" said I, \"count me in.\"\n\nLike everyone, I'd been seduced and made paranoid by the onslaught of headlines on China: how they were planning to buy oil fields in Nigeria and market cars in the United States; how the military was on a relentless buildup and how the economy was soon to crack the top four, with no end in sight to its rise. Like most Americans, I, too, was convinced that the Red Dragon had its own sinister plot to take over the world. And that we needed to save ourselves by taking it to them, to convert them, on a mission just like this one.\n\nNow here we were, in the restaurant at the St. Regis, pumping hands with a bunch of Italians, who, as a group, were so...so...good-smelling. Because details had been scant Stateside, I'd entertained visions of a real road trip, one that would begin with the simple exchange of a set of keys, maybe a phone number to call in case of mechanical problems, basically a rental-car kind of hello and good-bye. And then I would light out into the great unknown in search of the real face of China, some mysterious place behind the headlines that would reveal the evil plot that seeks to undo us\u2014a vision, too, that would show us the future. It would require a bodyguard.\n\nBut oddly, there was this small herd of Italians, some who'd arrived from their Headquarters, in Italy, as well as others who were apparently here to join us on the road. Now, memory served that there'd been mention of a \"Chinese minder\" and a \"support vehicle.\" But here I learned that this was going to be more like a military operation. Besides two Ferrari 612 Scagliettis (one driven by us Americanos, the other by two French operatives), there would be a camouflaged Chinese humvee and two vans, occupied by six Chinese operatives, while the Italians, five in all, would ride in two Fiat wagons...along with four photographers.\n\nJeez. Did you really need that many people along to order a Happy Meal?\n\nI was introduced to the convoy leader and head mechanic, a man named Gigi, who reminded me of a younger, light-haired De Niro, with that same wincing smile. Dressed in a red shirt with a golden dragon on its back, he spoke in the most moving way about the cars. He referred to the 612 as a Magic Car, as if it were a Faberg\u00E9 egg or a fresco by Fra Angelico.\n\nAmong the assembled Italians, though, one man emerged as supreme commander: Mr. Ghini (pronounced guinea). That was his name. He was a most tall, thin, and elegant man, the kind who pulls off bald big-time, wearing a dark sport coat and a disarming smile that beamed a surface joviality to all corners of the room.\n\nDinner was important to Mr. Ghini. He was Italian, after all. The previous evening, my bodyguard and I had waded into the twilight translations of the Chinese menu: \"stinkbug king in mashed garlic,\" \"stewed the halfy weever and weever rolls,\" \"braised swim bladder with shrimp eggs.\" (The best translation, however, still belongs to a dish that was served during R. Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China, a dish that enthralled his wife, a piece of meat identified in one press report as \"lady's quivering buttock.\")\n\nBut Mr. Ghini didn't want a menu. He collared the waiter and ordered two different pastas: marinara and carbonara for the entire table. This caused great confusion. Lo mein? Yes. Pasta? No. When the waiter insisted it couldn't be done, Mr. Ghini rose in his chair. \"Oh, no, no, no!\" he said. \"Impossible! Get me the chef. Or I'll go back there and make it myself if I have to.\" No one doubted that, in a moment, Mr. Ghini would be back in the kitchen, aproned, boiling water. The waiter retreated, fearing a massive loss of face, and soon returned with the good news: Yes, the chef would try pasta! \"Not try,\" admonished Mr. Ghini. \"Give us your very best!\"\n\nMr. Ghini seemed agitated now. \"Everyone thinks we're mad,\" he declared, paused for confirmation, and when he got none, continued. \"This is mad. To dream of driving these cars across China. It's never been done. We've been brought to this point after months of negotiation with the Chinese. Tomorrow we open our dealership in Beijing, our eighth in China.\" His voice fell to a conspiratorial hush. \"The wealth here is fantastic,\" he said. \"But how do you get them to buy?\"\n\n3. DRAGONS, DRAGONS, DRAGONS. AND, OH YEAH...SEX!\n\nThe next day revealed the difficulties of the question. At the dealership opening, it was all pomp and circumstance: colorful flowers and balloons and a dragon puppet-thing manned by several Chinese men. A line of wasp-waisted young Chinese women decorated in golden dragon shirts and ripped designer jeans served as eye candy for the passing throngs, most of them male and apparently jobless in Beijing at 10:30 A.M. on a Monday.\n\nMr. Ghini drifted by, battle-hardened by these cursed openings, and gestured at the flowers. \"I feel like I'm at a funeral,\" he muttered. Then he nodded at the dragon. \"Everywhere it's the same: dragons, dragons, dragons!\"\n\nThe owner of the Beijing dealership was one Mr. Cheng, a billionaire with dyed jet-black hair, made wealthy by his controlling interest in the country's largest jewelry company. One of his underlings stood up now and nervously intoned: \"We'd like to welcome the consumers to support us!\" But the consumers, at least the ones here on the street, seemed to be waiting silently for the big dragon finale before going back to their begging stations.\n\nThat evening Mr. Cheng threw a celebratory fashion show, peopled by an array of models and a crowd of the country's glitterati. Entering, you passed the red and silver 612 Scagliettis, each with a dragon emblazoned on its hood. On a huge pilated screen inside, there were words to capture the night's theme: PERFECT NEVER TOO FAR. The dry ice started up, trancey music floated on jasmined air. Mr. Cheng occupied the emperor's seat of honor as models oozed past, indefatigable apparitions wearing clothes that seemed straight out of a Long Island prom-dress store. One sweetheart wore a strange constellated necklace with a golden orb hovering just beyond her mouth, which she kept pretending to fellate. The crowd was mesmerized.\n\nI didn't understand the complexity of the tie-in\u2014the models, the jewelry, and the cars\u2014or the fetishizing power that beautiful things inspired, especially here in China, where beautiful things were still making their introductions to the new elite and middle classes, until after the show. My bodyguard and I stood by the cars, watching the crowd watching the cars as they'd just watched the models, when Gigi, the head mechanic, approached.\n\n\"Tomorrow we begin, eh? The French will have the silver,\" he said, \"and you Americanos will command the red.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said I, trying to sound manly and gung ho. \"We're ready!\"\n\nSomething in the way I said it, he took as a threat. \"You may be ready, but I'm in charge,\" he said. \"Always. Anyone passes me on the road, it's over!\" He made a throat-slashing motion.\n\n\"Sure,\" said I. \"Whatever you say.\"\n\nGigi reached over and squeezed my shoulder tenderly. \"You understand, driving this Magic Car is...is...very special. I have driven around the world. In the desert, at night, playing 'Hotel California.\" Fantastic! Very special. It's a relationship. It's something indescribable...sexual. Let's just say when you need a friend, the Ferrari is a very good friend.\"\n\nI nodded\u2014there was something overzealous and almost bipolar about this hombre. \"This feeling,\" said Gigi, \"is what we want to bring to China.\"\n\nLooking on the faces looking hungrily upon the cars, it seemed like the feeling was already here.\n\n4. THE TIANANMEN TWO-STEP\n\nI began by riding shotgun to gigi, who drove the red car, the one that bore two flags on its hindquarters, Italian and American, as well as Chinese lettering, or ideograms. In the silver car, with its Italian and French flags, rode the French themselves, their most likable inspector-writer, St\u00E9phane, and their existentially inclined photographer, Dominique, both from their nation's premier Automotive Magazine. We were an MDU (mobile diplomatic unit), shot from the capital to spread peace and understanding, not to mention lust, envy, greed, and low self-esteem.\n\nAs we pulled out of the St. Regis parking lot, Gigi wanted to show me a few things about the vehicle. I gave him my most studious expression as he described this or that button\u2014and then I promptly forgot everything. Meanwhile, the convoy made an impressive spectacle of horsepower. People froze on the sidewalk, cabbies bore expressions of wonder, bikers wobbled and fell in prostrated piles, and a mere mortal driving a sad wreck called a Santana gave a thumbs-up and a big smile, suddenly levitating. Gigi commanded all of this, barking orders on his walkie-talkie.\n\n\"To Tiananmen,\" he snapped briskly, referring to the vast, symbolic square-cum-massacre-site, the virtual heart of China, from which power (that of the emperors and, most recently, the Communist Party) has long radiated out over the country.\n\nSoon we slowed to a crawl. In the early rush hour of Beijing, the air held a yellowish fog. Not fog at all, really, but smog. Noxious-smelling. A bath of nitrogen dioxide. A couple of million cars at a standstill and only the occasional merry peasant on a bike. An inverse portrait of ten years ago.\n\n\"Tiananmen Square!\" Gigi ordered again. His voice was powerful. \"For photograph of cars!\"\n\nThere was a long silence over the walkie-talkie\u2014and then a strange, flat, staticky voice came through: \"No Tiananmen.\"\n\n\"Tiananmen,\" Gigi barked. \"Now!\"\n\nAgain, silence. Then the voice from the Chinese humvee: \"No Tiananmen.\"\n\nIt went on like an old vaudevillian routine\u2014Tiananmen, no Tiananmen...Tiananmen, no Tiananmen\u2014until Gigi's face reddened; he laid down the walkie-talkie and, staring almost dreamily through the windshield, murmured, \"Fungool!\" Then he whimpered for a moment in Italian, picked up the walkie-talkie, and yelled, \"Then drive forward!\"\n\nSo this would be the Dance, the Italians trying to brand their Magic Cars, not just on the people here but by appropriating the country's most significant landmarks. And the Chinese, naives that they were, resisting, as if they didn't want to be branded at all. And once the old Communist censoring instinct kicked in, it was never clear what indeed could be photographed. As I understood it, there was grave worry about shooting factories and \"the peasantry\" and bridges, which was still an act punishable by twenty years in prison. When we later encountered the Great Wall just north of Beijing, at a place called Badaling\u2014an awesome sight snaking up and down steep mountains, thousands of tourists teeming over it, scaling its steep stairs, amazed to be riding its back\u2014our Red operatives at first wouldn't allow pictures to be taken at all, then relented, but only from our spot on the highway.\n\nThe photographers were incensed. They took as many pictures as were takeable from our little patch, then paced the shoulder, kicking dirt, cursing.\n\n\"Zees ees insane!\" wailed Dominique. \"Zee Wall ees up zare, and we are like little creatures down 'ere.\"\n\nALL THIS, FOR JUST $400,000\n\nA GEEKED-OUT LOOK UNDER THE HOOD OF THE FERRARI 612 SCAGLIETTI...\n\nVEHICLE TYPE\n\nFront-mid-engine rear-wheel-drive four-passenger two-door sedan\n\nPRICE $300,000 and up\n\nENGINE TYPE V-12\n\nDISPLACEMENT 5,748 cc\n\n0-60 MPH 4.2 sec.\n\nTOP SPEED 199 mph\n\nLENGTH 193 in.\n\nWIDTH 77 in.\n\nHEIGHT 52.9 in.\n\nWHEELBASE 116.1 in.\n\nCURB WEIGHT 4,056 lb, 40% lighter than other vehicles of similar dimensions\n\nFUEL CAPACITY 28.53 gal.\n\nHORSEPOWER 540 bhp @ 7,250 rpm\n\nTORQUE 434 ft-lb @ 5,250 rpm\n\nTRANSMISSION Six-speed F1A paddle-shift manual\n\nFRAME The first all-aluminum Ferrari V-12\n\nTRUNK: 8.5 cf, big enough for two golf bags or a specially made six-piece Ferrari luggage set\n\n5. THE MAGIC CAR\n\nMy bodyguard is an insidious cuss. He's a buddy from home who happens to speak fluent Mandarin. With the shared acknowledgment that, left to my own devices on such a trip, I'd end up eating dog or getting killed or something, he signed on to act as my bodyguard/translator/photographer. And by the end of the first day, he was completely embedded. Yes, he was given to slight sartorial gaffes\u2014beach shorts and open-toe footwear while the others wore safari vests and heavy boots\u2014but at least he was smooth and believable, bandoliered by no less than five cameras. A swashbuckler. Like Frito Bandito. He forged relationships with Gabriela, an Italian photographer, who was on board to make \"another coffee-table book,\" and Dominique, who just wanted his photos to look \"beautiful,\" so that when St\u00E9phane wrote beautiful words about the beautiful car, their \"package\" would be so overwhelmingly beautiful that it would all be un peu triste, like an Edith Piaf song, and snare the French consumer unawares, with tears in his eyes.\n\nMy bodyguard's ace in the hole was his flawless Mandarin, which meant that everyone\u2014the Italians, the Chinese, the French, me\u2014went to him for advice and guidance. Soon he held forth like a Confucian sage when asked to elucidate menu choices or ideograms on a highway map, or when summoned to broker misunderstandings between driving parties.\n\nI, on the other hand, had done nothing to legitimize myself. I'd come here in the perceived role as driver or, if you will, automotive journalist, or perhaps, car tester. All things I knew nothing about. When the talk turned to high-end automobiles, as it often did with this crowd, I heard fancy names but nothing registered. I quickly figured out how to talk the talk, though, repeating the make and model of the car under discussion and adding an ambiguous question mark.\n\n\"What's the best car you've ever driven?\" might say I, playing offense.\n\n\"The Bugatti Veyron 16.4,\" might say the French operative after much earnest thought.\n\n\"The Bugatti Veyron 16.4?\" might say I, ambiguously.\n\n\"You don't like the Bugatti Veyron 16.4?\"\n\n\"Well, isn't it a bit...,\" might say I, letting the sentence trail off.\n\n\"That or the Gallardo Spyder. Which I drove in the desert. Death Valley. Fantastique!\"\n\n\"The Gallardo Spyder?\"\n\n\"It's a very fine car,\" might say the French operative defensively.\n\n\"Oh yeah,\" might say I, \"who doesn't love that car.\" And then to qualify: \"In the desert.\"\n\nOnce away from Beijing, Gigi switched cars, leaving me in charge of the Red Rocket, with my bodyguard riding shotgun and one of the mechanics in the backseat. About the car. Let's just say that every transcendent thing civilization had dreamed up from the Renaissance on was in evidence. A device used to pick up invisible air signals and convert them to noise called a Radio? Check. Wondrous titanium blowers that tornadoed out hot and cold air on demand, in perfect opposition to the weather outside, called Heater/Air Conditioner? Oh yeah. Overhead light that miraculously illumined when the door opened? Uh-huh. But there was more: The buckskin of the Magic Car, its Corinthian leather, was so soft and yummy it made one want to disrobe and snuggle. The wheel between one's hands was the size of the perfect personal pizza, and there was something about it\u2014that sturdy sense of magisterial power, that hunger sated\u2014you never wanted to let go of.\n\nAnd yes, it was true: This car just flew. It was like being in a spaceship. One that read your mind. When you asked it to go, it already was. Accelerating effortlessly, eating up road like greyhound on rabbit. The g's pushed you back in your Corinthian leather, like the big, soft hand of the Maker holding you, the pebble, in the velvet saddle of His slingshot, drawing you back, launching you forth. There were things you could imagine doing in this car that were impossible in other cars, and once you'd imagined them you suddenly found yourself doing them. Little wormholes between fast-moving trucks through which you could tunnel, stunts ecuted on the shoulders of the highway\u2014or the High Speed Road, as it was known in China\u2014that were unimaginable anywhere else in the world but, say, among highway suicides in Massachusetts.\n\nOne of my very first moves behind the wheel was meant as proof of my competency. A little Top Gun message sent to those in our convoy. On the other side of the guardrail, the lanes leading into Beijing were at a standstill for up to five miles. A logjam of trucks, each one piled like the Grinch's sled with every imaginable thing: hay and coal, goats and mattresses, jackfruit and tires, rusted metal tanks and toxic barrels. On our side of the guardrail, the traffic moved smoothly, and I was running a comfortable fifth in our convoy, fighting the Itchy Foot, remembering, repeating, chanting Gigi's throat-slashing admonition: Anyone passes and it's over! We needed to make time to our first night's stop\u2014300 miles to a town called Hohhot\u2014and someone ahead began to speed up. Before long we were weaving in and out of traffic at seventy, eighty, ninety miles per hour. And I was only in third gear.\n\nThis was fun! Like go-karts. Soon I would be crushing my own golden land-speed record, set in college, of 105 mph. But now I just tried to keep up as the line of our convoy lengthened, and suddenly, screened by big trucks out in the second lane, I lost sight of the Fiat in front, and my Foot, with a mind of its own, kept tapping on the accelerator, waiting for Brain to give an all-green. My Foot then prodded the Magic Car, which zoomed cleanly up to the bumper of a big truck and veered to the inside lane in order to pass. But there was another truck there, this time one tilting along much more slowly. We were probably doing eighty-something, heading for a rear-ender with only one option: a vanishing Scaglietti-sized hole, between the truck in the second lane and the one in the slow lane. My Foot said, \"Go!\" The car took off with an acceleration and velocity like nothing I've felt before, no plane, no steep ski grade, no roller coaster. And I'm going to tell you the truth: I saw the hole vanishing and closed my eyes, gripping the wheel with ghost knuckles, Foot punching the pedal.\n\nThat's when my bodyguard looked up, as we nearly slipped under the back end of the truck in front of us\u2014its metal bumper at beheading level\u2014then somehow, miraculously, popped out into the passing lane as the second truck closed the gap to nothing. I felt that chill of near-death, cold blood draining through fingers, arms, legs. The Foot twitched happily, maniacally.\n\nMy bodyguard showed nothing, looked down at one of his cameras, then at me, raising an eyebrow. \"Dude,\" he said, \"next time you try to kill us, at least let me get a picture of it.\"\n\n6. Through a Windshield, Darkly\n\nThe Italians had advertised our drive as running through the famous grasslands of Inner Mongolia. According to my guidebook, this region held out the promise of a mythical \"grass sea,\" brimming with endless wildflowers, huge Wonderland mushrooms, and a frightening abundance of black toads.\n\nAnd yet we'd been at it for hours now, traversing an overbrowned, lifeless, power-lined high plain stretching northwest from Beijing that included secret military installations, coal and power plants, dirty villages full of ash heaps and smokestacks, and abandoned cement-worker quarters called danwei, the remnants of Mao's old economy, of the noble peasantry slaving for marbles.\n\nIn the days to come, we would pass grottoes and temples, tombs and museums, a host of important, probably magnificent sites bearing witness to China's rich history. We passed an actual in-progress Buddhist funeral, the impression of which was so fleeting and beautiful (the sound of mournful horns fading, colored flags fluttering in the rearview, a crowd bent around a body before cremation) that I nearly broke rank just to pay proper respect. Another time, at night, we passed a figure on a bridge piling, looking down into the river below. Was he aiming to jump? We never found out. We adiosed everyone at eighty miles an hour with no intention of ever stopping, except when someone thought it would look good in a coffee-table book. Gigi, the Generalissimo, showed no flicker of interest in any of it. \"Andiamo,\" he kept yelling into the walkie-talkie. \"Go!\"\n\nWhen we did pull over, usually at a gas station, our greeting parties followed the same routine: A dusty crowd would gather around the convoy, converging a bit tentatively at first. They would observe in awe as the Italians emerged in their red-dragon shirts, would notice the Chinese team members in theirs, and then witness the photographers and two mighty drivers, St\u00E9phane the Frenchman and moi, the Americano, confidently striding across the parking lot to the man-potty. Slowly, the crowds would tighten around the Magic Cars. A few did indeed recognize the Prancing Horse\u2014\"Ah, Fah-la-lee,\" is how they said it\u2014but most just gawked because that's what the others did. And then we were off again, vanished in our own cloud of inscrutable dust.\n\nWhatever our outward appearance, relations in the convoy had become pre-Nixonian, the opposite of d\u00E9tente. Skirmishes were general. If this were an experiment in a bell jar or an MTV pilot\u2014to see if four nationalities could coexist on a road trip across Inner Mongolia\u2014the results were a mess. People were muttering under their breath, cussing. Gigi, whose personality shift to Great Dictator had left him isolated even from the Italians, became a favorite target.\n\nIn my case, when I'd signed on for fun and high jinks, I hadn't expected to be yelled at all day over a walkie-talkie: \"Stay close, Americano! Go right! Attenzione, rocks! Go straight...straight!!\" I also thought we might stop once in a while for lunch or sustenance of some kind, but food didn't matter to Gigi. When we did stop, the photographers swarmed to get their shots, in which I starred as driver. Thus, I often found myself alone in the car, starving, parked before some mound of ash, talking myself out of doing something stupid, like gunning the car and precipitating a little chase. At one point, after I tarried a second too long to buy a candy bar, Gigi said, \"You Americanos are very strange.\"\n\nAt least I had it better than the French operative, St\u00E9phane, who had been denied the wheel of the silver car, as no one had informed him about the need for a Chinese driver's license, and so he'd missed the gynecological odyssey necessary to procure one. Here he was, his country's preeminent automotive provocateur, and he sat glumly, riding shotgun, as a smiling Gigi, tumescent with pleasure, took over his lover with a gentle hand.\n\nMeanwhile, the photographers were in a swivet about Gigi's authoritative streak, one blurting in a confusion of broken English and bulging veins that he was tired of \"eating ass.\"\n\nPart of the tension stemmed from the dangers of the High Speed Road that had put Gigi on edge. It was brand-new, baby-yak-bottom smooth, an asphalt carpet that when fully completed\u2014in the next months, according to \"plans\"\u2014would traverse China from the east to the west. On that day, it would surely be an amazing ride, a boon of badly needed infrastructure. It would allow for the transportation of missiles from silo to silo in preparation of subduing the Enemy, as well as the ferrying those $25 DVDs you buy at Target, half the world's laptops, and those glowing swizzle-stick things everyone loves on the Fourth of July.\n\nAs yet, however, the road remained an unfinished masterpiece. And beyond its badly translated traffic signs\u2014NO REAR-END COLLUSION, DO NOT TRY FATIGUE DRIVING\u2014it was full of unexpected surprises. Like, you might be driving along, gunning the Magic Car, and the highway would terminate in a huge pile of sand, suggesting another possible question for the honorable driver's test:\n\nWHEN SUDDENLY CONFRONTED AT EIGHTY MILES PER HOUR WITH HUGE SAND BUNKERS, DRIVER SHOULD:\n\nA. GLADLY ACCEPT FATE AND THELMA-AND-LOUISE IT.\n\nB. DEMAND \"FINES BLOW\" 200 RMB AFTER SIX-MONTH HOSPITAL RECOVERY.\n\nC. LISTEN FOR KIND WORDS OF ITALIAN GENERALISSIMO ON WALKIE-TALKIE: \"FUNGOOL!AMERICANO...SLOW DOWN!!!\"\n\nSadly, the High Speed Road wasn't taken seriously by everyone. People, including nice families, sometimes lazily crossed the road as if it were a meadow, and truckers might pull half on the shoulder, park, and then eat lunch beneath their rig. We were constantly passing blue-jumpsuited highway sweepers, bent figures bearing the bamboo tool of their trade, usually stationed near the meridian, often with their posteriors dangerously jutting out in the passing lane, just daring you to take a whack.\n\nPart of the problem also lay with the Communist team, whose apparatchik spokesperson was named Sheno (pronounced in its Anglicized form as shay-no), and who, as guide and translator, had the most contact with the Western contingent. His was the unenviable task of carrying all the bad news to Gigi. Soon my bodyguard and I had nicknamed him Say No. His proficiency at saying no always came in that flat radio monotone, though in person he was youthful and slightly stooped, with a hangdog expression, as if the weight of being the Party's mouthpiece had become a physical affliction.\n\nAt the end of the day, our convoy had run into darkness just east of Hohhot, that night's stopping point. The Chinese team had gone ahead, \"scouting,\" but there'd been no radio contact for an hour or so, and now they couldn't be raised by walkie-talkie at all. (Perhaps they were \"eating.\") Gigi ordered the rest of our convoy to the side of the road, and after a time Gabriele, the most gentle of the Italian operatives, approached our car, cell phone in hand, apoplectic. The Chinese were giving him a good pile of yak crap for not knowing where he was in their damned country when all he knew was that we were sitting on the shoulder of the lightless High Speed Road, with its randomness akin to a game of Russian roulette, one in which 100,000 road fatalities had occurred last year alone.\n\nMy bodyguard took the phone. It was Sheno, in that slow, deliberate English, tinged this time with slight disdain. \"Ahhhh, so where are yew?\" he said. He was the sorority sister larding it on a pledge. Chinese English being an adaptation, notes change from word to word\u2014and syllable to syllable\u2014so that if the question starts fair enough with \"where,\" it then suddenly lilts up, almost as if the question mark ends at \"are,\" only to be followed by a flat, uninflected \"yew,\" as if the speaker has given up.\n\n\"We are at marker five-six-six,\" said my bodyguard slowly, inadvertently mimicking Sheno's inflections to be better understood.\n\n\"Let us check map,\" said Sheno. \"We call back in five minutes.\"\n\nFive minutes later, the phone rang. Sheno again. \"Yes, we see exactly where yew are.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said my bodyguard, trying to move the conversation to a plan of action. \"And where are...yew?\"\n\nThere was a pause on the other end of the line. Then some whispering and the sound of the map shu\u00B1ing. \"Yes,\" said Sheno finally, \"we do not know where we are.\"\n\n7. The Most Beautiful Woman in China\n\nBeing in mutton territory brought with it certain privileges, like eating at Malaqin, this Hohhot mutton joint. My bodyguard and I had left the team behind, all lobotomized at the desultory hotel restaurant, dreaming of never seeing each other again. And here we were, sucking meat off the bone, a bit chewy but well spiced, washed down with good Chinese beer. The mutton people at the mutton place were friendly and let us stay even as they were trying to close.\n\n\"What was that all about?\" said I.\n\n\"What?\" said my bodyguard.\n\n\"Today,\" said I. \"Everyone bossing everyone around. And all the photographs. Nine hundred pictures of a car. Car on highway. Car near ash heap. Car passing rickshaw. It's car porn. This isn't a road trip, it's an extended advertisement for the leisure class.\"\n\nMy bodyguard registered surprise, not so much at the idea but rather at my na\u00EFvet\u00E9. \"It's like Spinal Tap,\" he said. \"And anyway, everything is an ad.\"\n\nYes, sitting there, I partially represented the Patagonia\u00AE company, Levi's\u00AE jeans, and Merrell\u00AE footwear. But what was happening on our most manly trip across China seemed more insidious. Oh, where was the purity? Where were the little black toads wriggling beneath our bare feet? Where were the vast open grasslands? Where were the welcoming yurts and the little human moments? We could not touch you, China, from inside our space-rocket cage! Nor glean your immense sinister plan!\n\nThe new Cultural Revolution, unsanctioned by the Communists, was this gimmick, stunt, operation, junket, coffee-table book, madness, whatever you wanted to call it, aimed at smashing the old paradigm. These Magic Cars\u2014all of this extravagance\u2014was meant to leave an indelible imprint, a permanent mark, the size of a giant's hand on one's forehead. It was meant to unleash desire, ratify desire, and then supply that desire. As in: You like the finger-lickin' way that KFC tastes, Chang? It's okay to like chicken; here's 300 more buckets. Or: You dig that sexy car, Lin? It's okay to be sexy, and it will only cost you, with import tas, $445K at our new Beijing dealership.\n\nYes, the Magic Cars moving across Inner Mongolia were a metaphor for this not-so-new Western capitalist invasion but also, and more potently, they were like an aspirational apparition, the beautiful but unreal woman on the runway who looks once at you hungrily, reflecting back your own image.\n\nAfter mutton, my bodyguard and I went to a club called New York, New York, a sad disco with the ol' Tommy Hilfiger red-white-and-blue painted on the ceiling and immense, inexplicable pterodactyls hanging overhead. The DJ led the crowd, wearing an aerobic instructor's cordless head mike. He kept shrieking at them to do this or that, get their hands up or whatever, as if everyone needed instruction. Which apparently they did. Except the man who danced shirtless, stage right. He was a ferociously awkward boogie machine. And was everyone here secretly dancing beneath the American flag in New York, New York because they thought of this as Inner Mongolia's closest approximation to America?\n\nWhen we went to bar number two, we had our first taste of just how hard Inner Mongolia really rocks. It was an open room broken into quadrants hung with silver beads. In the center was a DJ booth, but here the DJ just played a killer menu of trance, dance, and Western disco remis. Again the shirtless men were present, this time maybe twenty of them, over in one section, all dancing together, kind of shuffling and hoofing like wild horses, some with fearsome tiger tattoos traced over the lengths of their backs, all wearing black slacks. Pitchers of Chivas were being inhaled. The bartenders would empty an entire bottle into a pitcher and then do the same, again and again, every time it got returned. Other men soon took off their shirts and danced with each other. There were women here\u2014and some of them danced, too. With guys. On tabletops. Really gyrating to the music. But it was curiously a man's show. Behind the bar, two young bartenders were flipping bottles \u00E0 la Tom Cruise in Cocktail, while a bartendress, a pretty, slender woman with a mod haircut, shimmied between them.\n\nAfter a few drinks, we began asking questions of the bar squad. Because the music was so loud, my bodyguard had to lean in close and yell in their ears, while I drifted at a remove.\n\nFirst question: Was this not a gay bar?\n\nAnswer: Of course not. [Homosexuality is a Western vice.]\n\nNext question: Then why are all those guys dancing together with their shirts off?\n\nAnswer: Because they're friends.\n\nQ: Okay, so is this what \"friends\" do here in Inner Mongolia? Drink pitchers of Chivas and strip down?\n\nA: [laughter]\n\nQ: So what's with the tattoos?\n\nA: What tattoos?\n\nQ: You know, the huge tigers on their backs.\n\nA: Oh, those. I hadn't noticed.\n\nIt went on like this. And soon more and more of our questions went to the dancing woman, who may have been all of 20, with exquisitely shaped eyes painted with liner. She really seemed to have no task other than to dance. And after the onslaught of our questions, she had one for us.\n\nQ: Are you guys two gay-bar entrepreneurs from the States?\n\nShe revealed that she was studying design, that she wanted to get out of Hohhot, out of China, because frankly, it was kind of backward and boring. A bit too feudal despite all the hoopla about development. But here she was, stuck behind the bar, dancing in Hohhot. She admitted that the guys over there in the huddle were part of the local Black Society. And that they could be dangerous.\n\nIt was almost three in the morning, departure time. I was a bit intoxicated, but that wasn't it. The woman, who was real and not an apparition, pushed back from my bodyguard and started dancing, but amid the pulsing bass lines and fumbling male dancers, I realized that it was really just a halfhearted pantomime of dancing that she'd been doing all along. To make it seem as if she was full-heartedly dancing while she was killing time, waiting for something to happen. It was the dancing of thwarted desire, and I wondered if inevitable disappointment, instead of the inanimate objects of capitalism, would turn out to be her very special friend.\n\n\"Before we leave,\" shouted I to my bodyguard over the music, \"tell her that based on empirical evidence, with research conducted in Shanghai and Beijing, we're giving her the crown for Most Beautiful Woman in China.\" I had this inspired notion, however misguided, to leave something, even if it was verbal\u2014an invisible crown, for instance\u2014that didn't demand anything in return.\n\nMy bodyguard, whose purpose it was to keep me from getting killed, took one look at me and then the members of the Black Society across the way, and said, \"You're gonna get killed talking like that.\" I insisted; he declined. So on my behalf, the sentiment was never passed on.\n\nWhen we returned to the hotel, the revolving door had been left on automatic, spinning maniacally. It was impossible to enter.\n\n8. Wise Man Once Say:\n\n Only Car Porn Can Save World!\n\nThe next day dawned with an urgent e-mail from Mr. Ghini. \"Dear Friends,\" he began from his computer back at the bunker in Italy, \"we all knew that the China Tour would have encountered many difficulties.\"\n\nObviously, a mole had reported yesterday's strife, especially as it related to the anarchist photographers and their not wanting to eat any more ass. \"In order to obtain [Chinese] authorisation to the Tour, Ferrari had to agree that the image of the Country would not be represented in a distorted or negative way by this exceptional experience, which is...a raid with two Ferrari cars and therefore has to be read in a touristy and an automotive key.\"\n\nHe went on: \"I know we had some misunderstandings in the last days, but I think they were useful....What we ask for now, is for you to be aware of the delicacy of the moment and to understand that a camera can highlight, some times in an exaggerated manner, difficult or negative situations that, please bear in mind, would not even save Italy, France or the States.\"\n\nThe e-mail was handed out at breakfast. What I wanted to know was what \"raid\" in history\u2014from Genghis Khan's rampage through China itself to Sir Francis Drake's surprise attack on the Spanish Armada\u2014had ever been \"touristy\" and \"automotive\"? And try as I might to escape the fog of my hangover, I still couldn't figure out the line about saving Italy, France, and the States. I read it, like, twenty times. Was it code? Was Mr. Ghini serious? Could unflattering photos of a Fast Car\u2014whatever those might look like\u2014really doom our world order? By the same token, could happy, incredibly sexy pictures of that same car really save us all?\n\nIt was pretty to think so.\n\nThe landscape this day was more desolate and barren than the day before: fields of burned, untasseled cornstalks giving way to bleak highlands of silt, the edge of the Gobi desert. We passed a crickety overnight bus coming from Mongolia on bald tires with live pigs stuck in sacks on the roof, saw mutton grazing on what must have been pebbles, and then a strange billboard in all of that oblivion advertising a golf course that was soon to be built.\n\nMy bodyguard and I were granted sole ownership of the Red Rocket. We had blue skies, reggae on the car stereo, bonhomie. The Frenchmen were behind us in the silver car, St\u00E9phane having magically secured a license. Meanwhile, the Communist operatives had drifted ahead to scout the road for sand piles. Sheno's voice robotically called back on the radio, talking to Gigi: \"I am waiting fer yew a-head. Up a-head yew will see me at a corner waiting fer yew.\"\n\nThe recurring leitmotif of our trip\u2014besides coal and power plants\u2014were the brick factories. Scarcely five miles passed along the entire route where we weren't confronted by another one, people working over the berm of the road, down in carved-out quarries and dugouts, handcrafting bricks. Without a doubt, they were experts at it here. Witness the 4,500 miles of the Great Wall.\n\nBut the scary thing\u2014if you really wanted to get scary about it\u2014was that someday all these brick factories of Inner Mongolia, full of these hungry people who were sick of being paid in marbles, would become microchip factories, and the chip factories would become R&amp;amp;D facilities, and then, instead of being factory floor to the world, China would begin to invent, create, and export the next generation of technology to the world. Devices we didn't know of yet but that would irrevocably change our lives: That was China's future.\n\nOddly, the Communist operatives allowed us to stop at one brick factory for a photo op. There were a dozen men dressed in rags, working on a pile of dirt, umbrellaed from the sun by black tattered tarps. A hundred yards away was a surreal, pyramidlike structure, the kiln. A motorized Mad Max trike carried the raw mud patties from the pile to the kiln, where they were fired and then removed to sit in the sun. Off to the side of a tar pit was a cement block danwei with primitive living quarters and laundry on a string. It appeared that this place was inhabited by a group of families with maybe a half dozen dusty, half-naked children between them.\n\nDominique emerged from one of the Fiats, firing his camera. He worked with the intensity of someone at war. Whenever he could\u2014at tolls, in city traffic\u2014he'd leap out and start shooting away at the Magic Cars like a trigger-happy legionnaire. And now he and the others were waving me, as driver of the Red Rocket, to a spot in front of the dirt mound with its ragged workers. A little right, a little left. No! Turn the wheel! (Grimaces of dissatisfaction.) Roll up the window! (Okay signs being flashed.) Parfait! I sat there dumbly while all the photographers\u2014including my bodyguard\u2014had a field day. The red of the car set off by the dark dirt and the besmudged workers.\n\nThis was before we ferried the car over to the kiln and took more pictures, before the little children with their naked bum-bums got so touchingly excited about having visitors, and Gigi, like a GI in Vietnam, committed the coup d'insensitivity: He pulled out some hard candy and squatted down and gave it to them while the press pool went berserk. As if Nixon were shaking Mao's hand or something. Only Dominique straddled the line between existential regret and elation. \"Zees is perfect...and a pity, no?\"\n\nSuddenly, I didn't care about sinister Sino-plots, glaring trade deficits, and our precious Western standard of living. I didn't care about Mr. Ghini's Churchillian plea via e-mail, urging the team to rescue itself from its own excesses. I just wanted to save these people.\n\nFrom Us.\n\n9. Dreams and Nothingness\n\nWe drove deeper and deeper into nowhere, out on the vast, arid Loess Plateau, made of that same fine, brick-making silt. For a short time one afternoon, I rode with Gigi. He told me how he'd come to be the Generalissimo. He'd started by working on fighter jets, then found a company that shared his love of speed. He spoke about all the cars he'd driven, about trips taken in Ferraris through the desert and the tundra, from Moscow to Riga, Latvia, or through Africa. One trip had involved taking two Ferraris around the world. Always testing the cars: cold tests, heat tests. And making coffee-table books.\n\nHe lit up like a child remembering it all. It reminded me of something that one of the photographers had told me earlier about the Italians and their Magic Cars. \"They're creating a myth that they believe in.\" It sounded like nation-building.\n\nBut then, when it came to myth-making, he took a dim view of his children's generation. They'd already been given everything; there was nothing left to sustain them. \"What are your dreams?\" he kept asking his college-age son, and his son had no answer. \"Not one dream,\" said Gigi now. \"Impossible!\" He recalled his grandfather, leaving Italy for Germany during a time of economic hardship\u2014and his grandfather working for five years in German factories until the end of World War II made the German mark worthless. \"Five years,\" he said. \"For nothing. My father worked hard so that I could dream\u2014and now my children don't have dreams at all.\"\n\nI hadn't thought of Gigi as more than a yelling voice on the radio, the reason for my headache, the Egregious Giver of Candy, but now I found us connecting. And here, in a few sentences, hadn't he captured the parallel dangers of both the highly evolved capitalist system and the developing one? People's dreams were either completely sacrificed or replaced by ones constructed for them. \"We've forgotten that just a little while ago Italy was like China, too,\" he said, gesturing beyond our windshield.\n\nLater in the day, I was gunning west, feeling that old American dominance again. What a driver I was! (Or this car made me.) So virile and powerful! So damn sexy! I do believe hair was suddenly growing back on the top of my head. I'd threaded impossible needles between lumbering trucks and braked harshly, in an almost skidding, Steve McQueen way, for sand piles. I'd dodged the posteriors of a dozen highway sweepers and, on one golden straightaway, crushed my land-speed record by jacking it to 125 miles per hour. Therefore, when we stopped by the fabled Yellow River for the most dramatic photo op yet, I was shocked when Gigi took my keys.\n\n\"Americano, you don't mind do you?\" he said, with that De Niro wince-smile. They were setting up a photo shoot that would require some driving skill, and I was being relegated to spectator.\n\nThe idea was to drive the 612s down an unpaved track along the river, one that had been previously scouted by the Italians. The cars would drive in a line, kicking up a spray of dirt for the cameras. It would be, as Gigi triumphantly phrased it later, \"sauvage,\" a moment that would live forever on the coffee tables of kings and sheiks and wannabes everywhere.\n\nIt wasn't enough that I'd posed in the car in front of ash heaps and brick factories teeming with peasantry, driven with quasi precision on the open road to the frenzied palsy of the shutterbug horde, or that I'd completely buckled under and pimped myself in whatever way I'd been directed, face frozen in a rictus of agreeable cool for the cameras, to achieve the Money Shot. So now, suddenly, I was no longer Car Porn material.\n\nI accepted my indignity. In fact, I accepted it gratefully. Taoistically. As karmic punishment. For signing on to this junket with all of my various illusions, the primary one being that a supposedly unfettered road trip would bring me closer to some Truth, and that hurtling through the new China I would touch the future somehow, when in fact our extravagantly, over-orchestrated \"raid\" through this seemingly old, industrial China had brought me closer to Emptiness.\n\n10. The Last Brick in the Wall\n\nOur final day on the road took us from Yinchuan to Lanzhou, dubbed the \"Invisible City\" because of its world-record smog. And it was on this day that the Generalissimo made his single most inspired decision. The Chinese operatives had mentioned something about an ancient piece of the Great Wall to see but held it out with their usual noncommittal vagary. Gigi had yet to bend to whimsy\u2014in fact, had become more and more incensed any time we deviated from the most direct road between destinations, yelling his patented \"Go, go, go!\" into the walkie-talkie\u2014so this seemed particularly outlandish: that we would randomly go in search of a pile of old bricks somewhere, but who knew where?\n\nWherever we were, this was officially nowhere. And officially, no one knew where the hell we were. The convoy stopped repeatedly to confer, then pushed on. More than an hour off the beaten path and we still hadn't given up. An hour and a half and we pushed on. Two hours\u2014and beyond the window it was all highland desert (still, not a blade of grass!) in which enormous windmills with slicing propellers eventually appeared. Finally, Gigi had had enough. The convoy came to a stop, and by happenstance another convoy\u2014the deus ex machina in this tale\u2014pulled up. It was Chinese television, in search of the same destination. But they at least had a marked map.\n\nSo we followed them.\n\nOff-road, on a serpentine dirt track, stripped of all self-delusions now, I did all the driving without bottoming out or getting yelled at. I just wanted to get there.\n\nThe Wall came up in the distance, eroded and pocked, with a huge slice taken out of it, through which a road passed to a quarry somewhere. Unlike the Wall at Badaling, that perfectly intact spectacle with thousands of tourists swarming aboard, there was no one here at all. And the Wall itself showed every bit of its indeterminate age.\n\nWe came up through the gap, car by car, in a holy procession, then disengaged on the open plain. In all that sun and wind. Suddenly, people were beaming. Everyone appeared angelic in the silver light. Where were we?\n\nThe Wall had been whittled over time to a well-worn, magnificent snaking lump. It was said that millions upon millions had worked, and died, building it: common laborers, criminals, widows. \"The wall is so tall because it is stuffed with the bones of soldiers,\" went one poem. \"The wall is so deep because it is watered with the soldiers' blood.\" There was no paved walkway or watchtowers, no one selling sodas or postcards. In places the Mongolian wind had broken through or left soft pillows of fine, golden Gobi sand up against the Wall's base. Here we were looking on a time before Christ, the time of Confucius.\n\nA few pictures were taken of the cars, but then more were taken of people, in slow-morphing, miscegenating groups, arm in arm, throwing high fives: the Chinese, the Italians, the Chinese and Italians, the Americans and the Chinese, the French and the Chinese, the Americans and the Italians with the French, etc. Sheno, the dog-boy, was levitating from happiness, something in him crying out Love me! Gigi kept stalking around, in mock modesty: How do you like me now, baby? People kept breathing in deeply and exhaling loudly. Wow!\n\nThere was no hurry. At some point, I walked away on my own and stood at a distance from everyone, in the Wall's shadow, in the shadow of all the dynasties that had built it. That's when R. Nixon spoke to me from the Other Side as he'd spoken to reporters on an excursion to Badaling thirty-four years ago. \"This is a great wall,\" he'd said, \"and only a great people with a great past could have a great wall and such a great people with such a great wall will surely have a great future.\"\n\nThe clunky old bastard never did quite master the concept of \"spontaneity,\" but he was right. Now I held my hand up to it, pressing my palm into the packed dirt, then I closed my eyes. Here it was: the timeless Tao moment in all of its full-throated emptiness, the letting be. I stood silently, touching the ancient earth and could feel something inside the Wall beating back. Husbands and wives and children, parents and grandparents, peasants and kings all turned to dust. It was blood beating back, and the bones that held the Wall against the relentless wind. What I felt then, the momentary imprint of my Western hand on that wall, was the immensity of this place, China, the real China, and its cost, beating back. As I lifted my hand, the wind scoured any trace of us.\n\nWould the future be great? It was destined to be, but then one day wouldn't it all come to look like this Wall again, as it would look like the rusted carapace of a designer sports car perhaps stranded here, found millennia from now by another traveler like me? That is, weren't we destined to become the dusty relics of our own imaginations? We would consume until everything\u2014our fast cars, our dreams, ourselves\u2014had been consumed.\n\nWhen I looked up along the length of the Wall from where I stood, I was surprised to see my bodyguard off in the distance, maybe 300 yards away, up on top, waving me over. He'd found some ledges to climb in order to summit, so I joined him up there. My bodyguard was in his own glinty-eyed ecstasy. \"This has always been my dream,\" he said. \"To jump off the Wall.\" So we did, two nameless bodies hurtling down, landing in a cloud of sand, then resummiting. Gigi and a couple of the Italians soon joined us up there, too. What would it have been like to watch Genghis Khan's Mongol horde riding toward you here? What fear and wonder held the world in its orbit?\n\nThe Magic Cars were still parked down below, but we were all looking out the opposite way, out at the endless desert. No one knew what shade of light played over their hoods now or what the gas gauges read. In this one moment, with nothing but empty space before us, no one cared to look back on them at all."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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