Rachel Katz - U.S. Student to China
Home Institution: Brown University, Providence, RI
Grant Dates: September 2010 - July 2011
In It for the Long Haul: Exploring the Chinese Trucking Industry
Rachel with drivers Hu and Zhang in front of their truck at a warehouse near Chengdu.
Zhang sat in the driver’s seat of the truck, forcing the long stick shift into gear. He smiled and looked back at me sitting cross legged in stocking feet on the bottom of two tight bunks squeezed into the back of the truck cab.
“Rachel,” he said, in a good English accent. “Deceiyer,” he said, and then in Chinese: “December is pronounced ‘Deceiyer,’ right?”
“December,” I corrected him.
“Hehe, December!” he chuckled, again in that surprisingly good accent.
Driver Zhang is short with high eyebrows and thin eyes that almost close when he smiles, which is often. His hair is evenly buzzed with sophisticated gray flecks frosting the sides. He reminisced to me that in middle school he was good at English, consistently scoring 90 and above on English tests, but lamented that he’s forgotten most of it. Most truck drivers don’t speak any English and we usually communicate in Mandarin, but driver Zhang likes to throw in English words here and there. He grew up in Anhui province, west of Shanghai. Now he drives back and forth three times a month between Chengdu and Shanghai in an eighteen wheeler that he owns.
I met Driver Zhang during my first few months in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in central China. I came to China in the fall of 2010 on a Fulbright research grant for ten months to study the lives of long distance truck drivers and current state of the trucking industry in the country’s interior. I was affiliated with the Logistics Department at the Southwest Transportation University in Chengdu, and during the first couple months of my grant my advisor in the department introduced me to various logistics companies and trucking hubs in the area where truckers congregate when passing through Chengdu. At these sorts of hubs I began getting to know long distance drivers.
As a young American woman, I am an odd addition to a trucking hub; it would be hard to find a group of people with whom I have less in common. Before coming to China I had expected to have a difficult time gaining acceptance in the trucking community, and was nervous about how I would be perceived. But as I began to interact with drivers, I time and again found warm acceptance, eager curiosity about my project and experiences, and outstanding kindness. Driver Zhang was the first of many drivers to welcome me graciously into his home on wheels. Between December and May, I traveled across southern and central China with dozens of long distance truck drivers, learning firsthand about the conditions of life on the road.
A day on the road is long and unpredictable. Drivers usually drive in pairs, switching off driving and sleeping until they reach their destination. Truck overloading, lines at gas stations, mechanical failures and endless toll booths can easily turn a short trip into a multi-day journey, and drivers can never predict where they will be at any given time. Regulation and policing is often ineffective and harmful to the drivers’ livelihoods. I’ve seen checkpoints run by local police departments that charge a flat rate to every truck that passes through under the assumption that the truck is breaking the law in some way but that do nothing to prevent future infractions. In response, drivers try to time their trips so that they pass these checkpoints after police have gone home, sometimes spending hours waiting at gas stations for the sun to go down. Drivers navigate a system of perverse incentives that can only be endured through extreme patience, a shared trait among Chinese drivers and one that I have tried to emulate during the long hours on the road.
From these drivers I have learned about the shocking faults in China’s logistics system and the effort and sacrifice required to sustain this grueling industry that underlies the country’s sensational growth. But perhaps more importantly, drivers like Zhang have proven to me the possibility of building relationships of mutual understanding across seemingly impassible divides. Since meeting him, I have gone on three trips with driver Zhang and we have amassed a collection of shared stories, inside jokes, and mutual friends. The Fulbright program has encouraged me to reach out of my comfort zone and pursue these kinds of unlikely friendships. Over the course of my Fulbright year, the notion of international relations became more meaningful to me in the context of personal interactions with people in my host country, which I have found to be fundamental to building mutual understanding. My most constructive learning about China and my most meaningful sharing about the United States has taken place in the passenger’s seat of a truck, struggling to understand and communicate about vastly different experiences.
Riding in trucks has given me a unique glimpse into the lives of a neglected segment of China’s working population and an unusually personal perspective on this crucial industry, which is usually understood through statistics. I have kept a blog
throughout my project to disseminate stories from the road to my community, and I continue to share my experiences with Americans involved in the trucking industry in China to provide an alternative view of the industry. As I move forward in my career and continue to work on China-related projects, my experiences during my Fulbright year will provide a foundation for my analysis of China, prompting me to think on a more human level about social and economic issues that sometimes feel impersonal. Thanks to today’s communications technologies I can also keep in touch with drivers like Zhang from across an ocean, and I hope to maintain those friendships for years to come.
To the U.S.-China Fulbright Program