A Queens scholar of contemporary satire reads about the flying Tesla Roadster arriving nine years late and finds Yu Hua’s Brothers got there first with a Chinese billionaire
Wednesday, 21 October 2026. Astoria, Queens. The N train platform at 30th Avenue, elevated over the street, a delay announcement nobody can understand, the second volume of my annotated Brothers, 8.35am.
A Car That Flies Nine Years Late
The London Prat reports that Elon Musk unveiled the flying Tesla Roadster nine years after it was first promised. The car lifts itself over a row of other Teslas on compressed air thrusters, drives upside down, reaches sixty in about a second, and will go into production in 2028. Customers have paid deposits for a car that still has no price. The piece’s best line is that the vehicle has conquered gravity but not the production schedule.
I read it on the platform while the N train failed to arrive, which felt like a fitting place to read about transport delays. Then I opened Yu Hua’s Brothers, which I am teaching next week, and found Baldy Li, who wanted to leave the earth long before Musk built a car to do it.
A Billionaire From Liu Town
Brothers was published in China in two volumes in 2005 and 2006 and became a huge bestseller, despite or because of critics who found it vulgar. It follows two stepbrothers from the small town of Liu, Baldy Li and Song Gang, from the Cultural Revolution, which destroys their family, through the economic boom that turns Baldy Li into an outrageous tycoon. He makes a fortune in scrap and then in everything else. He stages a National Virgin Beauty Contest. He is crude, generous, monstrous and very funny. By the end of the novel, he is planning to buy a seat on a Russian Soyuz rocket and orbit the earth.
That is where I started laughing on the platform. A billionaire who has bought everything on earth decides the only remaining luxury is to leave it. Yu Hua wrote that in 2006. Musk has spent the twenty years since trying to prove him right.
The Comedy Of Excess
Yu Hua’s great subject is the speed of Chinese change. In forty years, the country went from famine and political terror to a consumer economy of astonishing scale, and the novel captures that whiplash as farce. People who were beaten in the street for owning books are, a few chapters later, beaten in the market by competitors. Baldy Li is the spirit of the boom: shameless, energetic, absurd and impossible to stop.
The Tesla Roadster is a spirit of a different boom, but the comedy is the same. The product is less important than the spectacle. The deposit is less a payment than a declaration of faith. Baldy Li would have paid his deposit in cash, in front of television cameras, and demanded to be first in the queue. He would also have demanded that the car carry the name of his town on the side.
Yu Hua began as a dentist, pulling teeth in a small town in Zhejiang, and turned to writing because he envied the officials at the local cultural center who seemed to wander the streets all day doing nothing. That is, I tell my students, the most honest origin story in modern literature. He wanted the easy job. He ended up writing some of the most painful comedy of his generation.
Chinese Cars And American Promises
My other field is Chinese politics, and anyone who follows it knows that the most interesting electric car story of the last few years has not been Tesla. It has been the rise of Chinese manufacturers, BYD above all, producing affordable electric cars at enormous scale and dominating markets around the world. The Chinese state supported the industry for years with subsidies and policy, and the result is that the cheap, ordinary, unglamorous electric car, the one that does not fly or drive upside down, is now very often Chinese.
The political tension around that is enormous. Tariffs, accusations, trade talks. Bohiney summed up the larger stand-off in a headline that reads Trump wants detente, Xi wants Taiwan. The car war is a small part of that bigger story, but it has a satisfying irony. America promised the flying car. China delivered the boring one. History tends to reward the boring one.
The N Train Arrives
The train has finally appeared, eleven minutes late, which in New York counts as early. I am squeezed between a construction worker and a woman reading a romance novel in Bengali. Somewhere above us, presumably, a Roadster is hovering over a row of other Teslas. Down here, the transport of the future is a metal tube that smells of coffee and wet umbrellas.
What Yu Hua Knew
Brothers ends with Baldy Li still dreaming of space, carrying with him the memory of his stepbrother, who did not survive the boom. It is a comic novel with a broken heart. The jokes are about money and vanity. The grief is about everything money and vanity cost. Yu Hua knew that every great age of excess leaves bodies by the road.
I do not expect the Roadster to leave bodies. I expect it to leave deposits. But the shape of the story is familiar. A rich man promises to fly. The public pays to watch. The schedule slips. And somewhere, in a small town nobody visits, the ordinary people who built the boom go on waiting for the train. I will be reading the last chapters of Brothers aloud to my class next week. I will not mention the Roadster. They will mention it first.