100 Boots on the Road, Eleanor Antin; School of the Art Institute of Chicago Collection.
My friend and former coworker, an elfin coder from the Netherlands, is the conversational equivalent of a Wikipedia rabbithole. When we worked together in the same open-plan office, we regularly spent hours per week in meandering discussions about public transit, urban planning, elections, and housing. In sprawling Slack chats after-hours he would send tweets and articles. Once a video walkthrough of the world’s largest bicycle parking garage in Utrecht. Though he’d lived in San Francisco for a decade, he still pointed out the nonsensical in America, or the inhumane, with a foreigner’s acuity. We talked about cars, how stupid it was for our cities to be shaped around them. He told me about his childhood in a Dutch town where he could bike everywhere he’d ever need to go. On Google Maps Street View he showed me the way he’d gone to school, the bike lane that was so wide and unimpeded.
When the pandemic meant we were no longer in the office together, he biked 35 miles across two bridges to come see me. We met outside one of the engineering buildings at Berkeley. The purple flowers were blooming. I bounded towards him with outstretched arms, putting them down at the last minute.
Oh, I said, I guess we’re not supposed to hug anymore.
It was impossible to get tested and everything felt out of control. We commiserated about US government dysfunction.
It would be nice to live in a real country, he said.
By this, I took it he meant a Northern European one, somewhere with universal healthcare and a not-Trump president. Later I repeated the phrase, real country, to another coworker, a Californian who had studied Latin American economic development. She blinked at me on our video call and then said with a barking laugh, Well it is a real country. Most places in the world are not doing better.
And this was (and is) true; we had so many people testing positive, but at least eventually we had the tests. After the production of vaccines, our wealth and intellectual property regime meant we had the shots, more than our recalcitrant countrymen would even accept. We were no New Zealand, and our rent moratoria and paltry stimulus checks were ragged tightropes next to Northern European safety nets, but my Californian co-worker was right. There are no real countries.
How much domination has been justified in the name of chiseling out the real country — function from disorder, progress from decay? The British in India formalized geography as a staging ground of power, with massive projects like the Great Trigonometrical Survey; Alex Tickell writes of such colonial surveys as a “neoclassical allegory of Victorian masculinity, a triumph of Euclidean reason over the threatening landscape.” In 1960, W.W. Rostow, the American economist and architect of foreign policy under Kennedy and Johnson, famously outlined the five stages of economic development that came to comprise modernization theory. These were:
traditional society
preconditions to takeoff
takeoff
drive to maturity
age of high mass consumption
No one who has walked the wide boulevards and verdant green of Lutyens’ Delhi can deny the beauty there. Less clear is whether that particular manifestation of order is any kind of takeoff, or simply a shuffling around of earth.
Modernization theory fell out of vogue alongside the catastrophic failures of America waging war in Asia. The flattening logic of modernization theory — that all countries would progress through the same stages of growth — seemed increasingly indefensible. What came to replace modernization theory was dependency theory, which emphasized the unevenness of economic and political power in the world system. Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer’s hypothesis, that over the long term the prices of primary products (wheat, copper, cotton, or other commodities we take from nature) decline compared to manufactured goods (the cronut from Dominique Ansel, iPhone designed by Apple in California, $300 blouse on Garmentory). Poorer countries — the “periphery” — wind up locked into relationships of less lucrative primary production and export to “core” countries. The tide that promises to lift all boats looks a hell of a lot different from a dinghy than a yacht.
But it’s good to be a rich man on any boat. There’s this scene, “Two Asian tigers feasting on the world,” in the Canadian comedy Kim’s Convenience. Two immigrant characters, the convenience store owner Mr. Kim and his friend Mr. Mehta, complain to each other about having left their respective countries.
MR. KIM: Did Mrs. Mehta have servant back in India?
MR. MEHTA: We all did. Except the servants, I suppose.
MR. KIM: And the big house?
MR. MEHTA: More the land than the house. And the horses.
MR. KIM: I have uncle who work for Samsung. Could’ve got me in the ground floor.
MR. MEHTA: Still, no regrets. [...] Except in this case we foolishly traded in our cards never realizing we were holding the royal flush.
My mother’s best friend, who stayed in China while my mother left, became the owner of a factory that produced party decorations for export. Each time she saw us, she gave us gifts so expensive we felt tongue-tied, unsure of how to reciprocate. A colorful silk scarf I was too scared to take out of its square box more than a handful of times. I’d seen the receipt from the Hermés store in Hong Kong. It cost more than I’d ever spent on a piece of clothing in my life. Sometimes, in conversations with my mother’s family and with other immigrants, it felt like we measured the growth of nations by the acquisitions of the individuals we knew. By the shiny glass malls and high-rise apartments and celebrity-architected airports they could frequent. And oh, the cars, all the cars. In India, there were fewer than 2 million cars operating in 1971, and now it’s over 295 million. China buys more cars than any other country in the world. (Stats here and here). As global concern about the climate emergency rises these numbers are often cited as a major problem. Some from those countries might respond: you rich countries had your turn, and now it’s ours.
Now there’s a sea of imported luxury vehicles on the newly paved roads, midnight’s children driving Audi Q3s. Rana Dasgupta writes about the might-makes-right bellicosity of Delhi traffic: “Car brands regulate the relationships between drivers.” It’s a theme that also drives the plot in Aravind Adiga’s novel White Tiger. In 2016, I saw a college friend in Delhi. He was giving me a ride when an SUV slammed into us from behind. The driver, obviously drunk, staggered towards us.
What’ll you do? I asked my friend urgently before he opened the door.
Nothing, he said. That guy and his car are bigger than me.
Who’s to say that roads make things better? That the speed of delivering mail and medicine outweighs every clear-cutting of forest or razing of homes, and then every princeling’s drunken joyride, every troop mobilization? Dave Eggers makes this point more directly in his novel The Parade, which follows two engineers who refer to each other only by number as they pave a road in an unnamed war-torn country. The book is a strong refutation to the neutrality of development, technological or infrastructural or economic. Who said two countries with a McDonald’s will never go to war? (Thomas Friedman, apparently.) Well, that’s bullshit — the U.S. invasion of Panama and conflicts in Crimea and the Middle East taught us that. It’s easier to make the world safe for capital than people.
I guess what I’m really struggling with is what does the road look like in a real country? I know what my Dutch coworker would say: all buses and bike lanes. That’s probably my vision too except I think of my yifu (uncle, although in this case mother’s cousin’s husband) driving this shiny new SUV around hairpin turns in the Sichuan highlands, veering into the other lane again and again until a truck would come barreling towards us, when he’d deftly switch lanes in the nick of time. We were on our way to Jiuzhaigou National Park. We waited by the side of the road for hours because of a rockslide, peeing for a few RMB in a shack by the highway. I think of this because Yima and Yifu loved that car, what it allowed them to do and where they could go. Yima’s father, my great-uncle, is much shorter than my yeye; as the second son, he didn’t get enough to eat. Yeye’s mother died in a famine. A fancy car that belongs to you and a scenic drive can’t change these things but do you ever feel like sometimes the future redeems the past? Have you ever eaten so much after being hungry for a long time? Which way does the exhaust from a billion tailpipes blow the angel of history?
In this country, we have too many cars and too many guns and we don’t do good things to each other with our roads — drivers run bicyclists off the road or kill them, a fifteen-year-old without a license T-boned my sister at an intersection in Oklahoma, an X distracted by a Y Z’d your _____, here in Connecticut traffic fatalities have increased by 33% in the past couple of years and yet I love the road. Every beautiful thing out the windshield. The deer I saw the last time I drove a car, horrifically sad at 10pm and trying to run from it. I drove with no destination in mind but the hills drew me in. In the grassy outcropping by the field where I’d played soccer years ago, a brown deer gazed up at me from the grass. There was no one behind me, so I braked and stayed there for a long time. Later I reached a science museum parking lot where many other people were parked to look at the view. I could hear snatches of their conversations, saw another woman driving alone. All of us in our little worlds, suspended above the lights, on the two bridges they were like beads unspooled on dark silk. Maybe I stopped studying development because I could never tell anyone not to desire this. In the end St. Peter will admit someone better in my stead. I liked it too much, devouring the miles with the bones of the dead.
truth or dare but just the dare: if you’ve never tried to draw a bicycle from memory, do it right now and take a picture and send it to me