Traffic Ooze By Nicholas Momurray Decades ago, I saw a map of the world illustrating the various travel restrictions the State Department placed on Americans. China was bright red, indicating "absolutely off-limits." This was in the early 1950s when indeed an American citizen could not go there. Even as a teenager, I felt a surge of anger that my government would keep me away from China. It was the first hint of a puzzling, lifelong infatuation with things Chinese. Last winter, almost 50 years after I saw that awful map, I went. A former student, Chinese, had called in October to say he was going back and asked if I would like to go. He was aware of my avid interest in China, and the invitation was a way to thank me for having helped him learn English 10 years earlier. He would be my translator, a friend who could guide me through the burgeoning new China and its "market economy with Chinese socialist tendencies." Though I had collected and read many books about Chinese culture, I had never studied the language. My student’s offer was the perfect opportunity. Perhaps he could help me find remnants of the old China whose art and philosophy I had come to admire so much. Off we went on a four-leg cheap flight (Houston-Los Angeles-Taipei-Hong Kong). My student was going back primarily to visit relatives. From Hong Kong we immediately boarded a bus and entered China (I learned that the Hong Kongese still speak of China as a separate entity), bound for my student’s family home, Shantou, a small seaport 250 miles up the coast and way, way off any standard tourist route. My guidebook, only a year old, spoke of a slow, winding road, passing miles of paddies, peasant villages, and pirate coves, a trip of some 11 hours. I was full of anticipation, eager to absorb the vistas of the timeless Chinese landscape. The trip took four and a half hours on a new freeway, equal to any American Interstate highway, which bypassed most of the picturesque villages and cut mercilessly through others. Goodbye, Pearl S. Buck. It was the first of many disappearances to be experienced in the following three weeks, some serious, some funny, some simply baffling. For one, the ocean of bicycles in the major coastal cities is gone. You still see many bikes, but they timorously hug the edge of highways and streets packed with mopeds, motorbikes, cars, taxis, trucks, buses. The traffic itself is a new phenomenon which virtually obliterates whatever street scene old China might have offered. Goodbye, Marlene Dietrich and Shanghai Express. The streets have lane markings and pedestrian crosswalks, but it was quickly apparent that these indications of order are purely decorative. Other traffic control aids are notably lacking: during five days of roaming widely in Guangzhou, a city of 12 million, we encountered six traffic lights and a total of zero stop signs.
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