CAR TOWN.(Wuhu)

On the way to Wuhu, I drove through Confucius' home town. I also passed the Stone Warriors of Nanpi, the Iron Lion of Shijia, and the Alfalfa Land of Jinniu. The village of Jinxiang had posted a big sign, in English, above the highway: "The Best Garlic Is from Jinxiang in All of China." Wuhu is a new car town. A local company had recently declared its intention to become the first Chinese automaker to export to the United States, and the American partners were scheduled to arrive on Sunday. On Friday, I had rented a Chinese-made Volkswagen Jetta and headed south to meet them. Two days, eight hundred miles: a road trip from Beijing to Wuhu.

The highways were excellent--four lanes, groomed medians. Some sections were so new that they still appeared on the map as broken lines. The Chinese expressway network has doubled in length in the past four years, and in January the ministry of communications held a press conference to announce plans to add another thirty thousand miles. When asked about the purpose of the new roads, Zhang Chunxian, the minister of communications, mentioned Condoleezza Rice's visit to the People's Republic in July, 2004. According to Zhang, Rice told a Chinese official that she had fond memories from her childhood of vacations spent travelling in the family car. "She said those trips helped her love the United States," Zhang explained. "By building expressways, we can boost the auto industry, but that's only a small part of it."

I drove past miles of shiny new billboards; they were as blank as unplugged televisions, waiting for advertisers to figure out what kind of consumers might someday pass this way. In recent years, increasing numbers of urban Chinese have purchased automobiles, but it's still rare for them to take long trips, because tolls are high and drivers are inexperienced. The highway traffic consisted mostly of trucks, heavily loaded and braking hard on the downhills. South of Tianjin, traffic slowed and swerved; hundreds of pamphlets flapped above the road like dying birds. I pulled over and caught one. Apparently, a truck full of imported recycling materials had come unlatched. The pamphlet was a fourteen-page mortgage application for Woolwich, a financial-services company in Dartford, Kent, and it was as blank as the billboards.

I stopped again at the Confucius family cemetery. The city of Qufu had turned it into a tourist attraction, with signs posted at the highway exits, but my car was the only one in the lot. The cemetery, which sprawled through a big forest, was quiet. For more than twenty centuries, local men with the Confucius family name--Kong--had been buried here, along with their wives. A hundred thousand people were laid to rest among the cypress trees.

One tombstone dated to the late Ming dynasty and the sixty-second Kong generation. I took a few steps to the next memorial and skipped four hundred years: 2001, seventy-fourth generation. I was on my way to another tablet when I heard the sound of wailing. I followed it, picking my way around the tombs.

A group of women cried and kowtowed before a mound of fresh earth. They had arrived on a Taishan 200 tractor, which had three wheels and a two-stroke engine. The tomb offerings were simple: oranges, apples, a boiled chicken.

The men stood nearby, watching, and one of them offered me a cigarette. He told me that they were burying a woman who had been married to a member of the seventy-second generation of Kongs. The wailing continued for ten more minutes, and then stopped abruptly. Two women came over to talk; they asked me what American funerals were like, and if it was true that people in my country could have as many children as they wanted. I told them that I was of the fifth generation of Hesslers in America. A man crank-started the tractor, and they putted off into the mist. They had left the chicken but packed up the oranges.