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nathan vanderklippe

Vehicles are seen in a traffic jam during weekday rush hour in Beijing January 10, 2011.LARRY DOWNING/Reuters

On Monday afternoon, I cracked open a thin black billfold to gaze at a possession worthy of the kind of regard usually reserved for something actually important, like a family heirloom.

It is a piece of green paper the size of a business card, laminated and bearing a small photo of me. It is my new Chinese drivers licence.

For many foreigners in China, securing a drivers licence is a rite of passage, marking a big new step toward autonomy that can only come by adopting, in the smallest of ways, a fundamentally local custom: learning how to learn by rote.

The outlines of the test are simple. You study from a bank of some 1,300 questions, 100 of which appear on an electronic examination that costs under $10 to sit for. Get 90 right, and you are suddenly accorded the right to drive (a right whose value is, admittedly, questionable given that most large urban roads are used primarily to exercise a vehicle's ability to stop, and a driver's ability to swallow fury).

The difficulty lies in the questions themselves, many of which require a knowledge of arcane legal and statutory minutiae with little bearing on an ability to drive safely. Is this white-arrow sign indicative, prohibitive, directional or a warning? Should a driver, when he senses he will inevitably be thrown out of the vehicle, violently straighten both his legs to increase the force of being thrown out and jump out of the vehicle? The answer, apparently, is yes.

Or, what is the maximum turning angle of your car, top speed in hail with visibility of 50 metres, or in a foggy situation with similar visibility, or going down a slope? (Answers: 30 degrees, 30 kph, 20 kph, 30 kph.)

It does little good to protest the senselessness of ensuring these facts remain lodged in your grey matter. One can only memorize, hope for the best and, if you're looking for a salutary outlet, revel in the ridiculousness of it all.

After all, "when a vehicle overturns slowly and jumping out of the vehicle is possible" which way should you go? Wrong answer: never jump out of a rolling vehicle. Right answer: in the opposite direction of the overturn.

And then there's the jarring incongruity of it all. Like so much of China, what exists on paper has only the loosest of bearings to what exists in the real world. On paper, the right answer to the question, "when discovering road congestion ahead, the correct way to deal with the situation" is "stop and wait in line."

It's not "weave through" or "find space and overtake one vehicle after another" or "honk" — even if China's roads are jammed with honkers, overtakers and weavers. Those are exactly the sorts of road conduct one must employ to move on the city's streets.

China is not the world's sole generator of driving exam-related complaints, of course. Canadian driving exams can prove equally frustrating to Chinese (and where China allows holders of Canadian licences to merely pass a written exam, Chinese must pass a driving test in Canada). A lengthy post to a "Jessica in Toronto" blog documents the travails of a 40-something PhD woman who eventually, in a fit of frustrated pique, penned a two-page complaint letter to the Ministry of Transportation.

She accused her various examiners of racism, bad manners, issuing mistaken instructions, speaking too fast and using "high tones that caused nervousness for the driver."

Canadian tests might not suffer from exquisite specificity but they are expensive and unduly important given the impossibility of navigating much of Canada without a car. The blogger accuses privately-run test centres of profiting from a subjective testing system to fail students for added revenue. "Canadian road tests are full of numerous uncertainties," she writes. "The standard of what constitutes a safe driver is is comparatively vague, and also different for different people."

She failed three times before passing on her fourth. The experience, she reported, came complete with a significant loss of dignity.

This is, of course, a universal feeling at the driver's licence office, and there's a certain reassurance in discovering how broadly this human experience is shared.

In China, too, there is the added thrill of leaping head-long into a metaphor for a country that after 35 years of "reform and opening up" still bears more than a few traces of its former hermit nature. Do business without a domestic partner or without bending to local demands, and prepare to be undermined in some often-underhanded way (or just booted outright: see, Twitter, Facebook, Google). Come to China to work, and prepare to surrender your passport for weeks every year as China re-evaluates whether it wants you to stay.

Chinese itself remains largely unsullied by outside influence. China's language police have been far more effective than their French counterparts. You don't use a computer, but a diannao, an electric brain. The Internet is wangluo, the network. A Big Mac is a juwubao, a giant fortress. (Even my new drivers licence does not contain my English name — there is space only for the three characters in the Chinese name chosen for me by a teacher I had never met.)

Life in China, then, requires a certain fluency in Chinese, one that extends beyond linguistic considerations.

So it is with the driving test. It's available in six languages. But really, it's all written in Chinese.

And so yes, of course it makes sense that the article that cannot be used to stop bleeding by dressing is hemp rope (wrong answers: bondage, sling, tourniquet); or that before the driver escapes from a fire disaster, he should turn off the ignition switch, cut off the power switch and the blind, and manage to turn off the fuel tank switch (true or false, wrong answer: false); or that the Law of the People's Republic of China on Road Traffic Safety is enacted to strengthen the administration over the motorized vehicles (true or false, right answer: false).

Because this is China, and that's the way it is.

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