Guiyu.
The smell of burning solder. Capacitors underfoot. Shattered components spilling from beneath a closed gate. Cellphone faceplates in heaps three feet tall, leaves raked up in autumn. We turn a corner. Ten-foot-tall drifts of gray computer plastic lie waiting to be sorted and recycled, like dirty snow dumped by a plow.
Old keyboards stacked on pallets, cube on cube, bales of electronic cotton. A warehouse of keyboards, a soccer field’s worth of keyboards. A four-foot stack of identical keyboards, grimy and half crushed. I recognize the model; I used to own one. Has my old keyboard come through this place, for its keys to be ripped off, its metal extracted, its plastic melted down? I pry a key off and put it in my pocket.
A team of men shovel hay from the bed of a large truck, tossing it over the side into a heap. The timeless gesture of bodies shoveling hay, but it’s not hay. They’re shoveling circuit boards. Naked and green, the clattering square fronds pile up by the wheel of the truck.
Women toss piles of scrap aluminum into the air with shallow baskets, separating the wheat from the chaff. With broad, circular sieves, a family shakes out resistors and capacitors of different sizes. Did they come here from the countryside? Did they use these tools on the farm?
We did, said Mr. Han. We would use them for corn, back on the farm in Sichuan. Now, though, farms use machines to process the corn, and we just use sieves like these for sorting components.
Mr. Han had his own business. He and his wife had both grown up on farms in the Chinese province of Sichuan, to the northwest. They had met while working in an electronics recycling workshop here in Guiyu, near the southeast coast, and after marrying, they had opened a workshop of their own. They specialized in motherboards—the central circuit boards of personal computers. Mr. Han bought them in large bales three feet on a side, imported from overseas, likely North America.
Together with his wife and her sister and his wife’s sister’s husband, he sorted and processed every component of the motherboards. They cut out the valuable CPU chips for resale, pried off recyclable plastic, melted down and collected the solder that attached the components to the motherboard, sorted the components into sacks, and sent the cleaned motherboards off to have their gold extracted.
Theirs was one of thousands of similar workshops in town. Guiyu’s entire economy is based on tearing apart old electronics and reselling the components and raw materials. Walk the streets and you will see building after building with a workshop at ground level and family quarters on the upper floors.
It’s a dirty business. Computers are full of all kinds of things that are bad for you—things other than the Internet—and when you tear them apart, or melt them down, or saw them into pieces, a portion of those toxic substances is released. In a place like Guiyu, with what I’ll call relaxed workplace standards, you end up with workshops full of lead dust and other heavy metals and clouds of who the hell knows what floating through the streets. The water is laced with PCBs and PBDEs and other hazardous acronyms. The air, the water, the dust—in Guiyu it comes with promises of cancer, nerve damage, and poisoned childhood development.
Exporting toxic waste across borders, especially to developing countries, is supposed to be illegal. The Basel Convention, the treaty that outlaws it, was already nearly twenty years old by the time I visited Guiyu, in 2011. In the case of electronic waste, though, the convention is easy to circumvent. As the green-electronics coordinator at the ever-present Greenpeace has said, “the common way exporters get round existing regulations is to relabel e-waste as second-hand goods for recycling.”
Of course, it is recycling. Which is another thing, along with the town’s curiously agricultural character, that complicates any appreciation of a place like Guiyu. But whether you consider it a toxic hellhole or a paragon of recycling and resourcefulness, the rivers of junked electronics flow in.
That it makes economic sense to ship the stuff halfway around the world for recycling is explained first by the low cost of labor here. But you must also consider the volume of empty shipping containers returning to China. Incredible amounts of manufactured goods are sent from China to the West in shipping containers, and since the conveyor belt must run both ways, sending freight back is cheap. The result is that we don’t really buy our electronics from China after all. We just rent them and then send them back to be torn apart.
India and certain African countries, including Ghana and Nigeria, also get in on the game, but China is the e-waste importer par excellence, and Guiyu is the industry’s crown jewel. Guiyu is so famous for its commitment to electronic waste that it has become a mecca for journalists interested in the topic—which some people here don’t like. In 2008, a crew from 60 Minutes was attacked while filming a television report in Guiyu. Shady business-people don’t want their dangerous, quasi-legal industry exposed. But maybe there was an element of local pride as well. If my town were world famous as a warren of poisonous bottom-feeding, I’d probably be pissed off, too, when people wandered into my workshop with cameras. Whatever the source of the bad vibes, Guiyu sounded unfriendly. I had heard stories of journalists being screamed at, chased, pelted with bricks.
Guiyu isn’t the only weirdly specialized place in Guangdong Province. Only two hundred miles down the coast is the “special economic zone” that is the city of Shenzhen, one of the most concentrated areas of electronics manufacturing in the world. (It was to companies in Shenzhen, Mr. Han said, that he sold his recycled components.) Shenzhen is home, for instance, to the famous “Foxconn City,” the giant complex where iPhones and a million other things are built.
From waste recycling to questionable industrial processes to simple carbon emissions, Guangdong is a land to which we outsource not only our manufacturing but also our pollution. The environmental reporter Jonathan Watts put it best, in his book When a Million Chinese Jump: “This is where the developed world dodges its own rules.”
Then you have Gurao, the Bra Town of Guangdong, just up the road from Guiyu. Passing through Gurao on the bus, I saw billboard after billboard of semi-nude lingerie models. Colossal women in bras looked down from the facades of factory buildings. One lounged next to a violin. Nearly all the models were Western; full hectares of white flesh went by. A rippling male abdomen crowned a pair of tumescent briefs—the work of the Guangdong Puning Unique and Joy Clothing Co. Hanging from the streetlights, where another town might fly banners celebrating a holiday or a music festival, there were pennants with more white people in their undies. The children of Gurao must grow up thinking that without their city to stand in the breach, the Westerners of the world would go completely naked.
I saw bras, but Cecily smelled a story. Cecily was my fixer and translator, a young Chinese reporter whom I had hired in Beijing. She was intrigued by Bra Town. She wanted us to pose as entrepreneurs interested in importing bras to the United States. That way, she thought, we might get a look inside one of those factories.
That we would consider working undercover to get an inside look at the presumably legal underwear industry was symbolic of a broader problem: in China, I was not supposed to be a journalist. My tiresome habit of telling myself I wasn’t one anyway made no difference. Several people, professional reporters with years of experience in China, had advised me to travel on a tourist visa, not to be open about my agenda as a writer, and not to do anything that could draw the attention of local authority figures or media, not to mention those unfriendly guys with the bricks in Guiyu.
As for Cecily, she said I should specify that she was a tourist guide and wasn’t doing any journalistic work. (She was a tourist guide. She did no journalistic work.) And there were larger things afoot. The Chinese government had been spooked by the revolutions of the Arab Spring; before I left the country, it would begin a crackdown that included police intimidation of foreign journalists, and even some violence.
As we rode the bus to Guiyu, Cecily described what she called, with irony, the “fun game” played between Chinese journalists and their government. Reporters would play cat-and-mouse, testing just how far they could go. Items that might be barred from a general interest newspaper, for instance, might be allowed in a specialty magazine. Censors were most active on the Internet at specific times of day, so posting a piece online at the right moment could allow it to find its audience for a few hours—even if the publisher would then cooperate with the censors in taking it down. The government, she said, was “insane about journalism.”
At the moment, our need was to concoct a cover story under which I could both snoop around and plausibly deny that I was a reporter. We soon realized, though, that while my credibility as a reporter was poor, my credibility as everything else was even worse.
“Maybe you are a professor from a university,” Cecily said, evaluating me with a sidelong glance.
Was she serious? Were there really professors out there quite this haggard and blotchy-faced? This badly dressed?
“Maybe you want to open a shop,” she said. “A businessman of some kind.”
Yeah, right, I thought. I’m one of those businessmen who look like they’ve forgotten to shave for twenty years.
I suggested artist instead. Everyone knows that artists can be plug-ugly and sullen, but with a strong undercurrent of narcissism. I was perfect for the role. And it would explain all the photographs I wanted to take.
Cecily was skeptical. She didn’t think the idea of an artist seeking out polluted places would translate. Maybe she had a point. Besides, Edward Burtynsky got there first.
Then it struck me. We didn’t need a cover. We just needed a joke. Humor was the universal language. We would tell everyone that I had thrown my old cellphone away by mistake and had come to Guiyu to retrieve it.
Cecily laughed. “I think artist is better.”
Nobody threw bricks. Instead, we found ourselves under a heavy tea barrage. Through blind luck, we had found the Han family and were now enduring the withering assault of their generosity and good spirits.
After walking down the Guiyu streets for an uncomfortable duration—uncomfortable for the way we stuck out, for the way people stopped what they were doing to watch us and possibly ready their bricks—we came upon Mr. Han sitting in the doorway of his workshop. He was youngish, perhaps in his early thirties, and had a friendly face. His forehead and hair were powdered with dust. He had been using a small circular saw to cut CPUs out of a select stack of motherboards. In Chinese, Cecily asked if we could see his workshop.
Like their neighbors, the Hans lived on the upper floors of their building, reserving the ground floor for a garage-like workroom. One corner of the workshop was a sitting room with a teakettle and a computer; the rest was filled with piles of motherboards, shelves of CPUs, and large grain sacks filled with sorted resistors and capacitors. We sat and drank tiny cups of tea by the half dozen while the family’s tiny, eight-year-old son made a racket throwing circuit boards around in the back of the workshop.
Mrs. Han wanted to know why Cecily, in her late twenties, wasn’t married, and whether I was married, and whether two single people traveling together were perhaps soon to be married to each other, and finally, once again, whether I was married.
“Is he married?” she asked, looking at me with cautious amusement, as though I were a zebra.
I said I was not. Married. I didn’t elaborate. I was in fact more than unmarried. I was newly alone, and homeless. After getting back from Brazil, I had moved out of the Doctor’s place. Now, when not in Guiyu, I resided on an air mattress on Adam’s living room floor, where I spent my nights praying to be hit by an asteroid.
We began the business of lying to our new friends. Cecily and I had not agreed on a cover story in the end, but the Hans quite naturally wanted to know what had brought me to Guiyu, and to their workshop. Improvising, Cecily threw out several stories in quick succession, no doubt creating some confusion as to exactly what an artist/university researcher/entrepreneur was. I told Cecily I was worried they wouldn’t buy it.
It doesn’t matter, she said. We just have to tell them something.
In the meantime, I had realized that the little tyke in back wasn’t thrashing around just for fun. He was working. I told Mr. Han that I’d be happy to relieve his son for a while. I was a hard worker, I said, a claim that proved wildly hilarious to the entire family. When the laughter died down, I was still looking expectant.
Is he serious? Mr. Han asked.
I think he is, Cecily told him.
Mr. Han shrugged. Well, sure. Lang can show him how to do it.
And that is how I began my career in electronics recycling, in the employ of an eight-year-old firebrand called Lang. Our task was to pull the recyclable plastic off the circuit boards, which were piled against the wall in a mound almost as tall as I was. We sat at the foot of the mountain on tiny plastic stools, causing little avalanches each time we grabbed a new board.
Most of the recyclable plastic in a computer’s motherboard, I’ll have you know, is in the slots where sound cards and the like are plugged in. With the use of a screwdriver-size crowbar and a pair of pliers, these narrow rectangles of plastic can, if you are Lang, be popped off the board with a few flicks of the wrist. Lang also had a preternatural ability to move boards around with his feet, leaving his hands free for uninterrupted hammering and prying. He was wearing a pair of fuzzy brown dog slippers with floppy ears, which created the illusion that he was being helped in his work by a pair of supremely well-coordinated puppies. He was a machine. In the time it took me to evict a single battered hunk of plastic, Lang might have gone through three entire boards, plastic flying from his every touch, the boards spinning underneath the jumping ears of his little doggies.
I held up a newly won gobbet of plastic. “Check that out,” I said with pride.
Lang smacked his forehead. “Bu yao!” he cried, and snatched my board away.
“Cecily!” I shouted to the sitting room. “What does ‘buyao’ mean?”
“It means ‘don’t want,’” she said.
It turns out there is no better way to learn a few useful words of Chinese than by taking part in a little child labor. In addition to bu yao, I learned yao, meaning “want,” and hao le, meaning “done,” roughly. Like this, Lang and I established a system of communication, and I began to learn which bits of plastic were worth the prying and which weren’t. Some, I believe, had metal inside them, and so were no good for melting down.
Over the course of several hours, Lang’s excitement at getting to boss around an adult veered into delight at what was becoming an effective collaboration. Soon, when he would go to get a smoke for his uncle, he would get one for me as well, leaving me with a lit cigarette in my mouth before I could even think of saying bu yao.
The smoke stung my eyes as I worked, making me glad that we were not baking circuit boards instead. That task was done in the covered entry space between the workshop and the street, and was a job the Hans didn’t do themselves. They reserved it for their lone employee, who sat in front of a hot plate that held a shimmering pool of molten solder. With a pair of needle-nose pliers, he would pick up a circuit board and float it on the silvery pool of solder. As the solder holding the components on the board melted, acrid fumes rose into a homemade fume hood, which drew them into a chimney and vented them onto the street. This is why the streets of Guiyu smell of cooking circuits. Nearly every building has one of these smokestacks.
After frying for fifteen or twenty seconds, the circuit board’s connections would melt. The worker would pick up the board with his pliers, invert it, and smack it violently on a hunk of concrete to the right of the stove. The components would fly off (along with a spatter of tin and lead, depending on the solder) and go tumbling into an ever-growing pile. He would then toss the board into a heap of newly naked circuit boards.
There was gold in those boards. Printed circuit boards use copper for their circuits, but the copper must be protected from corrosion with some kind of coating or plating, often in the form of a microscopically thin layer of alloyed gold. It takes a lot of circuit boards to accumulate a significant amount of gold, but a lot of circuit boards is exactly what Guiyu has. Once Mr. Han had accumulated a sufficient batch, he would give the boards to a contractor to extract the gold. This was the dirtiest part of the entire process. I had heard tales of acid baths and toxic bonfires. Naturally, I wanted to see it for myself.
Don’t, said Mr. Han. Don’t try to find those people. They operate illegally, and they’re very suspicious. You could get in trouble. Please don’t try to find them.
Not that I had time anyway. I was focused on my work, on improving my turnaround time for each motherboard. Brand names cowered under my crowbar: Intel, Acer, Foxconn, Pentium, Philips, Virtex, Blitzen. Each time I had a CPU to unplug from a board, Lang would hold up the collection bucket for me, and I would shoot a three-pointer, and he would smile like we had won the championship.
A drag on my cigarette and I’d pull over another board to wreck out the plastic, pausing to point when I wasn’t sure.
“Yao?” I would ask.
“BU YAO!” Lang would scream.
“BU YAO!” I would scream back.
And then, if I thought I was done, I would ask, “Hao le?”
“Hao le,” Lang would say, sounding almost philosophical. Then, with a look of what I hoped was respect, or at least camaraderie, he’d pause his helper-dogs and slide another board in front of me, the little slave driver.
A storefront with a small glass case full of integrated circuits. It was a tiny shop, one room, run by two young brothers. Three feet behind the display case was a bunk bed. They lived in the shop. To the left was a table arrayed with a hundred small cups for sorting their wares. One brother, wearing a red pleather jacket and a striped button-down shirt, watched with cautious amusement as I took pictures of his display case.
I wanted to buy a small baggie of chips as a souvenir. He was confused. What did I want it for? The kind of chip I should buy depended on the intended use. When he finally understood, he refused to let me buy one, insisting that I accept it as a gift.
On a busy market street, a nail salon with six young women in black tights and high-heel boots. All the young or youngish women in Guiyu dress this way. They chattered as they bent over their work. It was of course not a nail salon but a circuit shop. Each woman held a handful of chips. Using tweezers, they would pick up a single chip and dip each of its two rows of contacts into a pool of molten solder on a shared hot plate, working with the speed and economy of motion that comes from day upon day of precise repetition.
We asked if we could take a picture of them working. They tittered. One of them, in the second it took her to pick up her next handful of chips, waved her free hand in front of her face and smiled. Please don’t.
We wandered the streets, passing over small canals choked with trash. But trash-choked waterways are like sunsets. They’re great to look at, but they may not mean that much. More interesting are the many smells present in Guiyu, the many shades of water and air that complement the clouds of fried circuitry. At the river, drifting stains and a reek of sewage. Near the bus station, a generalized fetid-toxic smell hanging over a canal by the road. On the bridge, an inky stink of exhaust coming from a passing tractor-tricycle. I watched with some dismay as the choking plume approached us. But then, as the driver passed by, he throttled down for a moment, sparing us the worst. Even in Guiyu, courtesy lived.
Through a back alley we came upon a crew working through pallets of Motorola Broadband Media Centers—cable boxes. A man had stacked about fifty of them along one side of the work area, forming a wall of identical metal boxes, and was going from one to the next with a screw gun, unscrewing the same four screws on each. Behind him his coworkers made tidy piles of tops, of sides, of brackets, of LCD screens that trailed ribbon cables—a tangle of color on a dreary afternoon.
Trucks belched along with loads of semiconductors. A motorcycle cart passed us carrying a pile of strange, green objects. With a start, I saw they were cabbages.
We paused by a truck, its bed loaded high with bulging sacks. The corners of cleaned circuit boards peeked out from the bags. Raw material, about to be hauled off to the mysterious gold extractors, wherever they were. The men loading the truck smiled and asked where I was from.
Mei guo, we said. America. What’s in the truck?
They smiled a little less. Cardboard, they said. Paper. For recycling. And they got in their truck and left.
A gaggle of teenagers waylaid us and led us on a short tour, to a community center, where teachers tried to control a restive mob of music students. We were a sensation. For a moment I knew the life of a rock star, reducing his fans to convulsions with a single moment of eye contact.
Our abductors took us to a nearby temple. This is our temple, they said. We walked through crumbling, ornate rooms overseen by a platoon of deities and demigods.
You should pray here, they said. To this god. Make a wish as you kneel and bow, with your hands together. So I did it. But I couldn’t decide whether to wish for peace or for love.
The secretary of the Guiyu business association—or whatever it was—met us in the evening at the Six Star Coffee Shop in Shantou, the large coastal city where we were staying. The Six Star had two levels, every seat a sofa, including several sofa-like things that hung from the ceiling on cords, porch-swing style. It was a place where the wealthy and cosmopolitan of Shantou could gather to feel wealthy and cosmopolitan. The menu was broad and evocative, with helpful descriptions in English. I wavered over “Irish Coffee—Emotional, romantic, and mysterious” before settling on a latte, because “the latte’s mellowness with the Hazel’s aroma, Special flavor. Men’s favorite.”
The secretary wore a puffy red jacket and stylish eyeglasses. She had brought along her teenage daughter, a docile, wide-eyed girl who ordered an absurdly large pink drink. It exploded with fluorescent straws and a large wedge of fruit cut into an artful splay that evoked a breaching humpback. Her mother ordered a pot of fruity tea.
Cecily had chosen “university researcher” as my cover this evening. To my amazement the secretary accepted it without a blink.
We want to improve the environment, she said. But as she had only been on the job for a couple of months, she didn’t know much about the industry she represented. Maybe that was the point. We were originally supposed to meet the associate director, until he decided otherwise and foisted the secretary on us. She punted question after question by saying she would send us some informational materials put together by the association. (She never did.)
Since she had brought up the environment, though, I felt comfortable asking her about emissions and workshop conditions. She said emissions from burning circuit boards were the main environmental problem.
I doubted it. The Hans’ workshop, for instance, although host to a warm and supportive family atmosphere, was almost certainly powdered with lead, tin, and antimony dust, not to mention other toxins from all the sawing and board frying. So when little Lang and his sister came home from school to help out in the workshop, they were not just taking part in the family business. They were most likely being poisoned. In this, they were representative of both Guiyu and a wider phenomenon. In its pursuit of unfettered economic results, China has allowed widespread lead poisoning. This is especially dangerous to children, whose nervous system and mental health can be permanently damaged. “In more developed nations,” the New York Times said in June 2011, “a pattern of lead poisoning like China’s would most likely be deemed a public-health emergency.”
The secretary told us that the government had recently started taking the environmental problem seriously. And the business association was trying to attract investors and start partnerships to develop new technology to do the work more cleanly. Again, I doubted it. The problem wasn’t technology. It was that to be economically viable, the e-waste industry operated unsafely, and was allowed to.
The secretary asked me a question. Did I have ideas for new technology?
Me? I may have misunderstood Cecily’s translation. The secretary was asking me for ideas of how Guiyu could do its business more cleanly? Or for institutional contacts? What should I say?
I smiled blandly and nodded, in a way that conveyed neither comprehension nor intelligence.
“Not off the top of my head,” I said.
It’s okay that journalists have come to expose the problems, the secretary said, pouring some more fruit tea. But it’s more important to find solutions than to criticize.
We made another visit to the Han family the next day. We wanted to thank them and to say goodbye. Also, when you’re in a strange town where you don’t know anybody, it’s nice to go someplace where people will smile and offer you tea and cookies.
You’re sure he’s not a journalist, Mr. Han asked Cecily.
No, no, she said.
By now I had fully developed the knot of guilt in my stomach. Mr. Han wasn’t stupid, even though, with our cockeyed cover stories, we may have treated him like he was.
Today, adding to my shame, he offered us lunch. Upstairs, around a low table in the kitchen, we ate meat and vegetables in the Sichuan style, and a spicy dish of preserved black beans from the family farm, where their parents and extended families still lived. The Hans sent them money regularly. That was why they had come to Guiyu in the first place; there wasn’t enough work where they came from. They’d been here for fifteen years. The locals, they said, still treated them like outsiders.
Back downstairs, we had another three dozen small cups of tea. Mr. Han sat in front of the computer, paused the movie that was playing, and checked the commodity prices. Figures filled the screen. It was important for him to know the current price of gold and other materials so he didn’t get ripped off by his buyers. His computer also stored the video feeds from the security cameras in his workshop. With a few clicks, he brought up a high-angle shot of Lang and me raining grief on circuit boards.
Mrs. Han wants to know again why you’re not married, Cecily said.
They had asked a dozen times. They couldn’t have known that I spent most of my free time asking myself the same thing. I realized, though, that this was an opportunity for me to answer at least one of their questions honestly.
“Tell them that I was going to get married, but the woman changed her mind,” I said to Cecily.
She translated.
They say that’s terrible, Cecily said. That it’s really embarrassing. But that I shouldn’t tell you they said so.
“Do they have any advice on how to find a good wife?” I asked.
Mr. Han nodded. Choose someone who loves you, he said. It doesn’t matter if you love her. Just make sure she loves you.
I couldn’t decide if this was horrible advice or profound. “Shouldn’t we both love each other?” I asked.
Choose someone who loves you and who takes care of you, advised Mrs. Han. Don’t just choose someone who you love. And if there are things you don’t like about the person, you’ll come to see past those things and love her eventually.
They told us their love story. Mr. Han had pestered his wife-to-be to give him rides to work on her scooter. They had written a long series of love letters. Mrs. Han said she still had the letters he had sent her.
Cecily asked Mr. Han if he still had the letters Mrs. Han had sent him in reply. He shook his head, and his wife rolled her eyes. Men aren’t romantic, she said. They don’t keep that stuff.
Mr. Han was smiling. He pointed at his chest. I keep them in here, he said. I keep them in here. And everybody laughed.
We stood to go, waving to Mr. Han’s brother-in-law, who was working his way through the last few boards of Lang’s mountain from the other day. Lang and his sister were at school, because in Guiyu that’s what jawas do on weekdays.
In the foyer, I drew a lungful of frying circuit board. It reminded me of something Mr. Han had told me earlier. I had asked him if he thought the work was unhealthy for him and his family.
We know it’s a dirty business, he had said. We know it’s a health risk. You have to give something to get something.
As we left, he was standing in the foyer of the workshop, contemplating two bales of motherboards that had just arrived. The next batch. He had slashed them open at the side, spilling fresh, untouched circuitry onto the floor.
At the Beijing airport, the sun peered through a thick scrim of haze. Several years before, in preparation for the Olympics, the Chinese government had gone to extreme lengths to reduce the city’s famous smog. Anything for a coming-out party. If this was reduced smog, though, it was still pretty impressive. I had noticed the haze days earlier as well, on our way through the airport to Guiyu.
“Is that the famous Beijing haze?” I’d asked Cecily.
She looked out the window. “I think it’s just because it’s going to snow later today,” she said. “The forecast is for snow.”
Pre-snow haze?
“I think so,” she said.
“No, Cecily,” I said, laying down some ground rules. “It’s pollution, okay?”
Now, on our way back, she abandoned the snow excuse. Instead, she mentioned that fog was in the forecast.
“There has been fog for three days,” she said.
“Smog,” I said.
“Fog.”
“Smog.”
“Fog.”
She was an uncompromising negotiator. But later in the evening, after we retired to our hotel rooms, she sent me a text message to tell me that, on television, the news was that it had been the most polluted day of the year so far. I win, Cecily.
Night. Beside the highway, the squat, flaring glow of a refinery floated by, bladerunner-like in the haze. We watched from the pitch-darkness of Liu’s cab.
The most polluted city in the world. The beams of oncoming headlights writhed in the heavy air. We were driving to Linfen. Through the city’s outskirts and onto a broad multilane highway, an empty avenue of streetlights, the smog unbelievably thick. We passed a carved sign: WELCOME TO LINFEN. With perfect timing, a truck piled high with coal came onto the road in front of us. A chunk of coal skittered loose and obliterated itself against the roadway, joining the stains that marked the passage of previous coal trucks.
Linfen is a coal town, and legendarily dirty. In fact, hardly anybody outside China has ever heard of the place, unless they’ve heard of its pollution. That was the only reason I had heard of it, and the only reason you’re hearing about it now. Linfen sits at the heart of China’s coal country, in Shanxi Province. But to visit Linfen is not merely to travel to another time, to remember how industry used to dominate the landscape around American and European cities. Linfen is also a convenient symbol of what China is doing to the global environment—the same thing we’ve been doing for a hundred years.
Let’s run some numbers. China’s consumption of coal doubled in the decade leading up to 2010, to more than three billion tons. That’s nearly half the world’s annual supply. About three-quarters of China’s electricity comes from coal, and as the country’s electrical needs have skyrocketed, so has coal-fired power generation. China is not only far and away the world’s biggest consumer of coal but is also its biggest consumer of energy, and its biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. And even though China is fast becoming a world leader in renewable energy, like wind and solar, it is coal that has powered the nation’s precipitous rise.
This matters. The coal gets burned over there, but the carbon dioxide goes everywhere. So if, by some miracle, the West manages to stop screwing over the global climate—well, we probably won’t. Regardless, China has picked up where we haven’t left off.
The most polluted city in the world. We were downtown now. There was dust everywhere, thick on the cars, thick in the air, coating the buildings. Finally, I thought. Someplace really grim. A polluted place that isn’t nice. A place I can point to and say, Yes. It’s even worse than you imagine.
Cars swam past in the murk as we parked and headed into the hotel. In the lobby, the staff seemed to have lost our reservation, seemed in fact surprised that anyone would want to stay in their hotel for an entire night. A dwarf stood by the desk, looking me up and down with a sneer of disbelief.
I shuffled upstairs to my room, past the hall attendants, who insisted on taking my key and opening the room. It seemed less a point of hospitality than a security procedure. My room smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and urine, and I went to sleep grateful, having at last found what I came for.
The next day, though, the spell was broken.
Preferring something less redolent of gambling and low-rent organized crime, we changed quarters, moving to the Honglou, a nice hotel near the university and in sight of Linfen’s drum tower. After dropping our bags, we went to check out the city.
If you’re counting drum towers, the one in Linfen is supposed to be the second tallest in China, at 150-some feet. At the base of the tower, a worker was sweeping the sidewalk, pushing a carpet of beige powder as he went. I noticed again that everything in Linfen was dusty. A brown film coated cars that had been parked outside for even a single day. In the lobby of the Honglou, a woman had pushed a dust mop back and forth over the wide marble floor, Sisyphean and smooth.
We climbed the tower’s dusty stairs. Inside, we stared up at the ornate wooden vault of the ceiling. Drum towers and bell towers used to be important features of Chinese cities, timepieces to mark the day’s passage. But that’s all over now. Besides, when exactly would you drum the sunset in Linfen? When the sun disappears behind the smog? Or sometime later, when you assume it has reached the horizon?
From the balcony, we looked onto the hue and drone of the traffic circle that surrounded the tower. To the south, down the crowded boulevard of Drum Tower Street, we could see only a few blocks before the traffic faded away into the haze. It was like a thick mist lay on the city—but there was nothing misty in this mist, nothing damp or fresh.
At this moment, though, something began to dawn on me. I was having that feeling. That good feeling. The sensation of having woken up in an interesting new place. Oh, no, I thought. Not again.
Was Linfen really all that bad? True, its smog was the smoggiest smog I had ever seen. Smog to irritate your throat. Smog to keep you coughing through the night.
Still. I pointed my camera down Drum Tower Street. If I zoomed in all the way and took a photo where the buildings dissolved into the murk, Linfen appeared oppressive, unbearable. But if I zoomed all the way out, Linfen looked like…just another place.
Later, I showed the zoomed-out photo to my friend James, to show him how, at a visceral level, Linfen wasn’t so horrifying. He looked at me archly and said that, to him, it still looked pretty terrible. His amateur meteorologist side kicked in: he estimated the visibility in the photo at a quarter mile. The same as in a heavy snowstorm.
So don’t let me tell you it’s not bad. It’s bad. It’s really bad. Chronic respiratory disease and even lung cancer must stalk the city’s boulevards and alleyways. Schoolchildren surely contend with lungs seized by asthma. And doubtless, Linfen is symbolic ground zero for what the human race is about, these days. But when I looked down on the city from the drum tower, I saw not only smog but also cars and buses, and the KFC, and people going about their lives.
I put it out of my mind. We went down the stairs and crossed the street to check out the large civic plaza that faced the tower. Drum Tower Square, as I choose to call it, was festooned with decorations for Spring Festival. Festooned is the only word. Large mutant rabbits made of wire and fabric loomed over us. It was the Year of the Rabbit, and although Spring Festival—that’s what they call Chinese New Year in China—had already ended, that didn’t save us from being leered at by cartoon bunny rabbits everywhere we went.
The main problem with the plaza was its heartwarming display of healthy civic life. People gathered here and there in small crowds, singing old Communist anthems with obvious nostalgia. Passersby came together in circles around street musicians. In the back of the plaza, an ad hoc dance hall had been set up, complete with amplified music. Couples twirled through an unorthodox rumba. One pair glided across the stones of the plaza with eerie smoothness, the woman’s long black hair swinging over the purple velvet of her overcoat.
The dance music, too, was an old propaganda song, Cecily told me. The Communist Party saved the people, went the lyrics. The dearest people of all are the communist soldiers.
“People don’t really take this music seriously anymore,” she said.
At its southern edge, the improvised ballroom came up against another dance area, where a rank of about a hundred people, mostly elderly, were proposing a variation on the electric slide. They beamed with carefree amusement as they danced. Who were these happy citizens?
And above all, where was Sad Coal Man?
Who is Sad Coal Man? Search Google Images for “Linfen,” and you’ll see him. Nobody gives his name, of course, so I just think of him as Sad Coal Man, and if there is an iconic image of Linfen, he is it. (The silver medal goes to Sad Coal Man’s older brother, Man on Bike with Face Mask.)
Sad Coal Man’s lot is to stand forlornly by the side of the road, forever staring into the distance over our left shoulder. Sad Coal Man is young and wears a dirty brown jacket over a dirty brown sweater, with a dirty black shirt underneath. Sad Coal Man’s face and neck are covered with coal dust and his brow is furrowed. When reproduced at a small image size, he looks like he’s squinting, almost in pain. Larger versions reveal more subtle emotions. His eyes are clouded not with pain but uncertainty, with doubt for the future. Sad Coal Man is so sad he looks like he might cry. But he can’t. His heart has been hardened beyond tears by a lifetime lived in the world’s most polluted city. Sad Coal Man also needs a haircut.
Never mind the blue sky in the corner of the photograph, over his shoulder. With Sad Coal Man as evidence, you can draw only one conclusion: Linfen is a hellhole, a place bereft of human dignity, where people don’t even know how to wash, because there’s no point. His expression and appearance are calibrated to bring out our condescension. It’s so terrible they have to live that way.
When I look at him now, though, I see something else in his face. Awkwardness. Someone has told him, Stand here. We’re going to take a picture of you. Don’t look at the camera. I’m willing to bet that Sad Coal Man wasn’t thinking about the plight of Linfen when they took his picture. He was probably thinking, I wish they’d let me wash my face first.
But Sad Coal Man was nowhere to be seen in Drum Tower Square. Maybe he was up in the mountains, mining. Maybe we’d find him later, and ask him what he was thinking in that picture, and whether he was friends with the Crying Indian from those anti-littering ads of the 1970s.
The square had more to show us. On the other side of the semi-electric slide, people were playing hacky sack. In this part of the world they use a weighted, feathery shuttlecock, but the moves are the same: the inside kick, the outside kick, the chest check, the behind-the-back. The only difference is that in Linfen—perhaps in all of China, I don’t know—hacky sack is not just a game for young men, but for people of all ages. Best of all were the grandmothers hacking it up like they were between classes at Hampshire College.
Nudging toys and rabbit-shaped balloons out of the way, we ducked in front of a row of vendors. There was writing on the ground. Half a dozen men were practicing calligraphy, using long brushes to paint water on the stones of the plaza.
That was the last straw. The civic charm offensive was complete. To grow old within walking distance of Drum Tower Square seemed like a blessing, if you had the lungs for it. Here, in the smog capital of the universe, I was reminded that there was more than one kind of health.
Sometimes I despair at the prospect of growing old in my own country. In the United States, seniors are supposed to keep to the house, or at least stick to the park benches. You don’t exactly see them playing Frisbee in Central Park. In Linfen, though, citizens old and young come to exercise in the public square, and sing old songs, and play hacky sack. They dance, they slide electrically, they watch their kids or grandkids ride plastic tricycles around like lunatics. They write poems in water on the flagstones, and watch them evaporate. This place was pretty great.
Don’t worry. I’m not debunking anything. We’re still ruining the world, and Linfen is still polluted as hell. The reason I find myself beating the same thematic horse on every continent isn’t that the polluted places of the world aren’t polluted. It’s that I love them. I love the ruined places for all the ways they aren’t ruined. Does somebody live there? Does somebody work there? Does somebody miss it when they leave? Those places are still just places. But when we read horror stories about them at home in our cozy green armchairs, we turn them into something else, into stages on which our worst fears can play out.
We also hold up these poster children—Linfen, Port Arthur, Chernobyl—to tell ourselves that the problems are over there. And we’d like to keep it that way. We’d like to keep a tidy bubble for ourselves, and draw a line around some trees, and declare no farther. That here, at least, inside this boundary, nature survives. As long as there is Yellowstone, we’ll have a little something for what ails us. What a joke. So much of our environmental consciousness is just aesthetics, a simple idea of what counts as beautiful. But that love of beauty has a cost. It becomes a force for disengagement. Linfen is too foul to care about. Port Arthur is too gross.
So I love the ruined places. And sure, I love the pure ones, too. But I hate the idea that there’s any difference. And I wish more people thought gross was beautiful. Because if it isn’t, then I’m not sure why we should care about a world with so much grossness in it.
One calligrapher finished painting a broad grid of beautifully rendered characters, and several of his fellows began a jocular critique of his work. An aging man with a dark green jacket and a bad comb-over saw us watching, and stepped forward.
His name was Mr. Ma, and he wanted to know if I could understand the conversation we were listening to. Cecily told him I couldn’t.
But foreigners are smarter than Chinese, he told us, not even half joking. He had heard a foreigner speak Chinese once, and had concluded that it must be very easy for foreigners to learn it. He thought I must understand it, too.
Disbelief that I didn’t understand Chinese had been a running theme. In Guiyu, Mrs. Han had asked Cecily about it more than once. He can’t understand us? At all?
A retired prison guard, Mr. Ma had lived in the Linfen area all his life. The city had expanded over the years, he said, but it hadn’t changed much. Had I noticed the air?
I had.
It’s haze and coal, he said.
Yes indeed, I said.
He addressed Cecily. Be open-minded about dating foreigners, he told her. It’s okay for Chinese and Americans to marry now.
Cecily rolled her eyes. I think. I couldn’t really tell, as I was busy with my own eye roll. To his credit, though, Mr. Ma also told Cecily that she had done right to focus on her career and education.
Take care of him, he told her, as we parted ways. He’s a guest in our country.
Linfen has a number of decent attractions besides the smog. From Drum Tower Square, you can take a nice run through the grounds of Shanxi Normal University and out to the riverfront, which reminded me a bit of Hudson River Park, in Manhattan. There were no skate parks or beach volleyball courts, but there was a mini-golf emporium, closed for the winter.
Spreading east from the river is the Hua Gate area, a wide pedestrian arcade in the style of the National Mall, lined with temples and buildings. Of these, only the Yao Temple is supposedly original, the site of one of the earliest Chinese dynasties, dating back millennia. But it’s hard to know what’s real. Across the arcade from the Yao Temple is a scaled-down replica of the Forbidden City’s famous Meridian Gate. The fakey vibe only increases down the sidewalk, where there’s a replica Temple of Heaven, distinguishable from the Beijing original not only because it is much smaller but because it has a haunted house inside.
From a cart, we bought two rou jia mo, large flat biscuits stuffed with pork and onions and peppers. In the cold air of winter, devouring my sandwich, I decided it was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.
Next to us was a large sign with a picture of the Hua Gate, a sort of oversize Arc de Triomphe. ONE OF THE FIFTY MOST WORTHY PLACES FOR FOREIGNERS TO VISIT, the sign read. NATIONAL AAAA TOURISM SCENERY.
Good enough for me. We started toward the far end of the mall, passing carnival games and rides, hangers-on from a Spring Festival installation that gave the whole place a Coney Island feel. We stopped for a bit to explore a large, concrete relief map of China, its crumpled mountains reaching halfway to my knee. We stomped over the earth, leaping from one stone section of the mini-Great Wall to the next, clearing entire river systems at a stride. I happened upon Sichuan, the home province of the Han family, and from on high peered down on its rosy surface, the paint coming up in flakes.
At the far end of the boulevard was the Hua Gate. Only a few years old, it was the largest gate in the world, a man told us. But it could only generously be called a gate.
“If it’s a gate, you should be able to drive through it, or something,” Cecily said.
But the Hua Gate’s purpose was not to be driven through. Instead it was some kind of Chinese national bicep for the flexing, the gaudy ornament of a nation newly confident of its dominion. It was a monumentally ornate, gate-like building, its vast doors closed off with walls of glass. Inside we walked across its marble floors and past its huge, colored pillars to find the stairs. Three stories up, under colored LED lights that gave the place a definite Vegas sheen, we encountered a Hall of Great Chinese, with thirty-two gilded statues of this emperor or that navigator or that inventor, all of them ancient, dating to an era somewhere between history and mythology.
In the center of the room was a translucent hemisphere with the outlines of what looked like seven continents floating on its glass surface. It took me a while to realize that they were not the seven continents but rather seven different iterations of China, the outlines of seven different dynasties through the ages, now floating free across the globe, unimpeded by other land.
The next hall up hosted the statues of thirty-two famous Chinese women. They floated in the moody, blue-pink light. Cecily’s eyes went from one to the next, wondering if someday there might be room for her.
Lying in the middle of the room, twenty feet tall if she had stood up, was the grandly naked figure of Nu Kua, the goddess who first created human beings. The humans she had created frolicked all around her: freaky little golden babies that looked to me like they were up to no good.
On the city outskirts, we stopped so I could take some pictures of the billboards. There were advertisements for SUVs and sixteen-wheelers and even coal trucks. What had caught my eye, though, was a series of municipal ads. One had a picture of the drum tower under a suspiciously blue sky. The adjacent billboard showed an idyllic meadow scene, complete with fluttering doves. In the distance were city buildings; in the foreground, a ladybug perched on a photoshopped leaf. Above it all lorded a brilliant, shining sun. It’s always nice to find propaganda that has an element of farce.
Overlaid on the picture was a message: LOVE LINFEN. PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT. ESTABLISH THE IMAGE.
“Does he work for the environmental protection bureau?” the taxi driver asked.
“No,” said Cecily. I was glad to hear her back away from that one.
The driver was a waggish young man who liked to talk. “I heard that foreign media declared Linfen the most polluted city. That was embarrassing,” he said. “Is that why he’s taking pictures of the ads? During the Olympics they shut down a lot of coal mines and polluting industries, so it’s better now.” They were no longer the number-one polluted city, he said.
Cecily asked him who had taken the lead spot. “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. At least it’s not us.”
It was five years earlier that Linfen had first been declared the most polluted city in the world. The rankings were the work of the Blacksmith Institute, a New York nonprofit dedicated to fighting toxic pollution in developing countries. The group’s website notes that, thanks to decades of environmental activism and legislation, “gross pollution” has been radically reduced as an acute problem in countries like the United States, but that in the developing world—out of sight and mind to most of us in the West—more than a hundred million people still face serious health effects from rampant industrial pollution and toxic waste. Blacksmith’s mission is to attack this issue by pinpointing locations where concrete action could have major benefits for the health of a lot of people. The organization then provides grants and other support to local partners, who attack specific problems.
Blacksmith released its first public report in 2006, as part of its campaign to bring attention to such areas. Called The World’s Worst Polluted Places, the list provided a thoughtful, data-driven glimpse of places where pollution had severe everyday effects—effects that could be mitigated, if anyone bothered.
PR-wise, this was a stroke of genius. People love top-ten lists. Top-five lists, top-one-hundred lists, lists of any length. Anyone who craves hits for a website need only publish an article with a headline like “Seven Most Egregiously Philandering Basketball Players,” and watch the traffic flow. Blacksmith’s list was no exception. The report was splashed across magazines and newspapers around the world.
But because the real point of any list, however long, is to know who’s at the top of it, a lot of the coverage focused on Linfen, which had taken the number-one spot. The city became instantly notorious as the most polluted spot on the globe. (Not incidentally, I believe this report to be the original source for the picture of Sad Coal Man.) And this is the continuing source of the city’s fame, fueling article after article about how Linfen is—or was, or may one day be again—the most polluted city in the world. It was the reason I’d first heard of Linfen, and the reason I was now there.
There was, however, a problem with the list.
It wasn’t Blacksmith’s fault, really. The report’s authors clearly understood that coming up with a list of the ten most polluted places in the world was, at some level, silly. It was the same silliness I encountered when I set myself the task of choosing destinations for this book. By what standard do you make the judgment? Health effects? Contribution to climate change? Simple grossness? Blacksmith’s focus—namely, industrial pollution with large affected populations in the low- and middle-income world—was tidier than mine. But even within that niche, it is ultimately fruitless to declare that the radiation in the Exclusion Zone is better or worse than the smog in Linfen. It’s comparing cesium apples to carbon oranges.
To account for this, Blacksmith did something very reasonable: it refused to rank the places on the list. The report even says so, on page 6: “It was not realistic to put [the locations] into a final order from one to ten.”
Instead, the list was ordered by country. Alphabetically.
Nobody noticed. Such distinctions are no match for a reader’s desire to know who’s number one. And so Linfen took the crown…because the C in China comes near the top of the Roman alphabet.
Also unnoticed was that Blacksmith intended Linfen merely as an example of its kind. “Linfen acts in the Top Ten as an example of highly polluted cities in China,” reads a note on page 14. “In terms of air quality, the World Bank has been quoted as estimating that 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world were in China.”
Have a little sympathy, then, for the citizens of Linfen, who instead of a one-in-ten or a one-in-sixteen ranking had to carry the gold medal all on their own. Meanwhile, the Russian city of Norilsk, also on the list, dodged a cannonball of bad press, simply because R comes after C.
Linfen may well have improved since those days. Blacksmith is mum on the topic of late. After a couple of years they realized that providing fodder for sensationalist headlines—and alienating local governments and industry—was not in their strategic interest. They moved on to list toxic problems instead of toxic places. But the taxi driver was right. By the time the 2007 list was released, Linfen was no longer number one. It had lost out to some place in Azerbaijan.
Coal pervades Linfen. It feeds the furnaces of power plants and of single-family homes. In the form of coke, it fuels the sprawling steel plant just east of downtown, a coal-fired fantasia of industrial power that is the last thing an American expects to see in the middle of a residential area. Our very casual attempts to stroll into this steelmaking city within a city were shut down right at the gate, but the guards were friendly enough to let Cecily use the bathroom just beyond the checkpoint. (I recommend trying the coffee shop’s restroom first. Cecily described the one at the guard post as “horrible.”)
We wandered the plant’s margins, through a crowded neighborhood, poorer than the ones we had found near the drum tower. A small pack of boys bearing plastic firearms became our escort.
“Where is he from?” they asked.
“America,” Cecily said.
“How long have you been traveling?”
“Three years,” she answered.
Perhaps more than for the actual coal, Shanxi Province is famous for the coal bosses, a class of nouveaux riches that became astronomically wealthy as the Chinese economy took off. They were legendary for their appetites, for showing up in Beijing and buying one of everything. The most expensive watch, the most expensive car—it was all fodder for a coal boss’s rapacious lifestyle. I had heard the tale, probably apocryphal, of a coal boss who, liking the looks of an apartment building under construction in Beijing, had decided to buy every unit with a southern exposure. Cecily told me that her friends would joke about marrying coal bosses, in much the same way, it seemed, that I had heard young American women joke about finding an investment banker or a hedge fund manager.
I suspect the coal bosses personified certain anxieties about the way capitalism was driving China’s transformation. They were a farcical overstatement of the consumerism that was spreading through the middle class in general. And worse, the coal bosses’ wealth was exploitative, in that it came from a dangerous and often illegal industry. China’s coal mines were notorious for collapses and explosions, with a cost in lives that outstripped any other nation’s mines.
But the golden age of the Shanxi coal boss was drawing to a close. The government had consolidated or closed thousands of coal mines, in a bid to increase efficiency and safety. And the future of the industry lay in less-developed provinces like Inner Mongolia, where huge reserves of coal waited in the ground.
Linfen isn’t really a coal baron town; I hear they prefer the provincial capital of Taiyuan. But even in Linfen, a crust of luxury is overlain on the economy. There was, for example, the Audi dealership—a striking mesh-clad box that housed a sleek, museum-like showroom.
“Our customers are mostly from coal mines,” said a young salesman called Yanlin. And he didn’t mean the miners themselves. Industrialists liked Audis, he told us. Executives from coal mines, metal mines, coke factories. They came here to buy their cars.
A brand like Mercedes-Benz attracts too much attention, Yanlin said. Audi is a good car, very good quality, but not as gaudy. It shows they are the boss, but is a little more low-profile.
Even so, an Audi could go for two million yuan—three hundred thousand dollars. And sales were still good, even with the recent consolidation of the coal industry.
Yanlin seemed to be getting a little nervous at all the questions, so we thanked him and went to roam the showroom floor. I was less drawn to the cars themselves than to the display cases of Audi-branded accessories: leather wallets and portfolios, pens, an iPod case or two, all stamped with the quadruple circle of Audi. The placard for a handbag read, in Chinese, “This purse is a miracle.”
A pair of cufflinks caught my eye. They were engraved with the logo for the Audi R8, a high-performance sports car. The face of each cufflink was mounted with a small, lacquered checkerboard of carbon fiber. This was probably a reference to carbon-fiber components used in the cars, but here, in coal country, the cufflinks took on special meaning.
“Everyone has to have their own style,” said Cecily, reading the placard. “These cufflinks show your spirit and taste. Made with real carbon and stainless steel.”
Were there Shanxi coal men driving around wearing cufflinks made of carbon? It was too good to be true, but one of the salespeople assured us that it was. He also told us that there were health benefits to wearing the cufflinks—the carbon in them absorbed toxins. But this harebrained theory was less interesting to me than the idea that the cufflinks were some kind of badge of honor, a Masonic ring for that brotherhood of men who are helping us seal the deal on climate change. (Order your own from the Audi Web site for $169.)
The dealership’s customer service director, a young man called Jun, had taken an interest in us. He had nobody to eat lunch with that day and offered to take us out. I noticed that he drove a Nissan.
I don’t make enough to buy an Audi yet, he said.
We had lunch at the Taotang Native Association, an ornate wonderland of executive schmoozing. It was a recent building, set down on a stretch of land not far from the Yao Temple and the Hua Gate, near the construction site of a huge shopping mall. We made our way through a warren of courtyards and corridors, into a small ballroom with a stage, and finally to a private room with a large circular table outfitted with a lazy Susan.
Jun ordered lavishly, without looking at the menu, and soon there were something like fifteen dishes on the table, including foie gras, shredded rabbit with cabbage, tofu, fried buns, garlic broccoli, and something Cecily translated as “specialized noodles.”
Jun was twenty-eight, with an attentive face and a crown of wiry hair bursting off his head. He smoked between his measured assaults on the food, and atomized the conversation into small sections divided by the rings of his two cellphones—one white, one black—sometimes stepping out of the room to talk. The white phone was for regular calls, he said. The black one was for his most important customers. The black one he answered twenty-four hours a day.
The guy was unstoppable. “Car sales depend on personal relationships,” he said, and pushed the turntable so the pile of foie gras was in front of me.
He told us that, in sales, you have to put yourself in the customers’ shoes. Anticipate their needs. Become their friend. Then, when they have to choose a car, they will come to you. “Competition is very fierce here,” he said. “You win not by price, but by personal relationships.”
He had majored in car repair in college, but had been doing this job for four years now.
“So you went from servicing the cars to servicing the customers,” I joked.
He nodded. “That’s correct.”
There was nothing Jun wouldn’t do for his clients, whether it was helping them with personal business, running errands, or doing other favors. For one customer, he had recommended a stock pick—and promised to reimburse him if he took a loss on the investment. And he told of having to talk one powerful client down from a drunken rage after a relative received some minor injuries blamed on a faulty Audi air bag. Many of Jun’s clients were rude, he said. But no matter how rude they got, he couldn’t allow himself to lose his temper. In the end, the rudest ones ended up trusting him the most, because he tolerated their behavior more than anyone else would.
The most important part of his job, though, was to smoke and eat and drink without cease. He drank and smoked much more than before. Nothing got done in Shanxi without drinking, he said. It was a hard job. His family didn’t like it.
The conversation had somehow turned, and suddenly, instead of telling us about his ability to manage the personalities of truculent coal men, Jun was talking about how depressed he was.
He had taken a test on the Internet, he told us. A score above fifty meant you were depressed. He scored eighty.
He was under a lot of pressure, he said. He wanted to keep making his salary. He was making five times what he had hoped for when he graduated, and had bought a house for his parents, but he was too busy to enjoy life. He couldn’t relax. He had no time to socialize, and was starting to lose friends. They assumed he was avoiding them, that he thought he was better than them, because of the money he made. But that wasn’t it. He was just busy. The only people he really talked to, he said, were friends he had made online, whom he would never meet in person.
He wanted to have a plan for the future, he said. He wanted to get married. But he didn’t have time to think about himself, to think about his “self-strategy.” The only time he could think about such things was late at night. Or while sleeping.
He lit another cigarette. All he knew was that, if he left the car business, the connections he had built in Linfen’s industrial community would be valuable, whatever he did. Relationships weren’t important just for selling Audis.
I wanted an audience. I wanted to smoke and eat and drink with one of the coal princes of Shanxi. I wanted Jun to help me get a glimpse of the top of the food chain.
He shook his head, a faint smile on his face. It’s impossible to meet those people, he said. Then he got the check, and we rose from the table to go. But before we left, I took another bite of shredded rabbit. You have to eat the year, or it will eat you first.
The closest I got to meeting a coal boss was Liu, the driver who had picked us up at the airport in Yuncheng and driven us to Linfen, and whom we had hired again several times. A middle-aged man with a sleepy expression and a wry smile, Liu and his family had started a coal mine of their own. Only in Shanxi, perhaps, does a taxi driver start a coal mine on the side. Before the recent spate of shutdowns and consolidations, the province had been riddled with small, illegal coal mines.
We had twenty workers, Liu said. Everything was done manually. But it was shut down by the government. We didn’t really make any money at it.
We didn’t press him. I don’t know what cover story Cecily had offered—lost mental patient, maybe?—but it was likely that the Liu family mine had been illegal, and Cecily thought he would spook easily.
I liked Liu. He was considerate—and funny, although Cecily would never translate his jokes—and if he was a little cagey about his failed career as a coal boss, he was still game for adventure. Today he was taking us into the mountains to gate-crash a coal mine.
We headed west out of Linfen. It was what seemed like a sunny day, with occasional patterns on the ground that looked faintly like shadows. We could see farther down the streets than before, and the sky directly overhead was almost blue.
“Look,” I said to Cecily. “Blue sky.”
She looked.
“It’s not blue,” she said. “It’s gray.”
I looked again. I was pretty sure it was blue. Compared with the dingy taupe of the horizon, it was distinctly bluish.
Cecily shook her head. “I know you. You just like polluted city.”
We had crossed the river and were now passing through small squares of farmland on the outskirts of town. A curtain of smog opened, and a smokestack painted with blue and white stripes loomed over us. It was Linfen Thermo Electron, a huge coal-fired power plant.
Its sudden appearance out of the haze was appropriate to the rate at which coal-fired power plants are being built in China. Depending on whom you ask, China has added them to its grid at the rate of one a week, or one every four days, or one every ten days. As we passed the plant’s gate, such numbers took on a mind-boggling significance. Thermo Electron was sleek and massive, a raised fortress with soaring walls of blue metal that would have shone in the sun, had the sun chosen to shine. Yet it was only one of the countless plants that were being plopped down one after the next across the country. Enough to power China. Enough to make up for any fossil fuel you and I haven’t burned.
With so many new coal-fired plants, the Chinese government was having trouble keeping the industry in balance. Record-breaking demand created spikes in the price of coal—but the Chinese government was reluctant to let power companies pass the cost increases along to their customers. So the producers simply chose to produce less power, even as coal extraction rose to record levels. That spring would see some of the worst electricity shortages in years.
Just beyond the power plant, the plain erupted into walls of bare, craggy rock. A temple had embedded itself high on a shattered rock face, a ramshackle fortress trailing a staircase down to earth.
Into the mountains. We climbed past villages. Houses had been carved out of mountain faces, rock alcoves faced with brick walls that allowed a single door and window. Piles of coal sat out front. Black smoke trickled from horizontal chimney pipes. Coal trucks rumbled forward and past, and sat in front of houses, and in repair shops. I thought of the logging trucks I had seen rumbling along BR-163 near Santarém, and about the giant sand haulers in Alberta, and of Nelson’s little dump truck in Beaumont, Texas, and for a moment it seemed likely the world was composed mainly of trucks.
We infiltrated by walking in the gate. Liu had sniffed out a coal mine for us. Actually, there may not have been a gate, just a narrow road leading into a broad loading pit. The loading area was a small landscape draped with a layer of coal powder an inch or two thick. A short mountain of coal sat by the battered housing of a conveyor-sorter, waiting for the afternoon’s convoy of trucks to carry it away.
The experience of leaving soft footprints in a blanket of coal powder is dizzyingly similar to walking through a fresh, dry snowfall. Wavelets of black dust scatter from your feet. It’s just like snow but black, you think—and somehow this feels profound.
A man coasted down the hill on his motorcycle, heading toward the town we had come through on our way up. Would he sound the alarm? After our warmish reception in Guiyu, it seemed that the world owed us some unfriendliness, and Cecily and I were ready to be screamed at and kicked out. But the man on the motorcycle barely gave us a look. So far so good.
We walked uphill to a set of buildings and railroad tracks that surrounded the mine’s extraction mouth. The miners themselves entered through another tunnel, farther down the mountain, but this was where the coal came out, in old-fashioned mining carts similar to those you may have seen carrying Indiana Jones.
It was here, at last, that I came face to face with Sad Coal Man.
He was taking a nap. Or smoking a cigarette. Two of him were chatting with each other. There were eight or nine of him altogether. And just like in his photograph, each of him was wearing clothes darkened with coal, and had a face dusted and smeared with fine, black grit.
But though they looked just like the guy in the picture, there was something different about these sad coal men. They weren’t all that sad. At worst, they seemed kind of…bored? They were between shifts when we walked into the work area, I think. Maybe they were waiting for something to be fixed down below. So instead of working, the not-so-sad coal men were lounging and chatting, resting in the sun, and playing with a visiting toddler. That was incongruous, I thought, a child toddling among the coal carts. Some of the nearby buildings, we learned, were housing for the aboveground workers. One of their wives had brought the toddler for a workplace visit, commuting from about thirty feet away.
Our presence had yet to raise an eyebrow, which I found disorienting. I had gotten used to being noticed. And although the attention that comes with sticking out in a foreign country makes me uncomfortable, I had lived with it for long enough now that this absence of discomfort felt pretty awkward itself.
We leaned against a girder and observed the spectacular lack of activity. Nothing came out of the mine. Nothing happened. Behind us, a woman tossed a shovelful of coal into a fire under a pot of boiling water.
“This is a state-run coal mine,” Cecily said.
“In the United States there’s a stereotype that government jobs are very stable,” I said. “Very easy.”
She nodded. “Same thing. It’s why people work for the government. My parents always wanted me to work as a civil servant. We call it the iron bowl. Because you’ll never break it.” She shook her head. “Boring!”
A supervisor in a trim blue blazer wandered over to us and offered me a cigarette. The offering of cigarettes was a ritual that almost took the place of shaking hands around these parts, and I had bought a pack of my own in order to participate. But because my reflexes had yet to develop, I was always too slow on the draw. I had tried to ramp up my smoking skills before I got to China, as a sort of lung-destroying backup plan, but hadn’t had the discipline. By the time I fumbled the pack out of my coat and shook it in the supervisor’s face, he had already lit a cigarette of his own and offered me another in that perfect way, three filters artfully peeking out of the pack.
The supervisor happened to be from Henan Province, where Cecily had grown up. That was our in. Like any large country that hasn’t had its native people replaced in the past five hundred years, China is not actually a country but a collection of subcountries, and this allows for the on-the-fly formation of much stronger alliances than come about when two people discover they’re both from Cleveland. Cecily told me her Henan dialect was rusty, but clearly it was still good enough to ingratiate us with the supervisor, who gamely let us hang around his work site, instead of dragging us down the hill by our ears, as he should have.
There were limits, though. He would not let us go underground. It wasn’t safe, he said, and it wasn’t up to him, and the people who it was up to wouldn’t let us go below either. Besides, he said, the mine was no place for a woman. I didn’t have to look to know that Cecily was making a face.
A pair of miners wandered over to refuse my cigarettes. The supervisor gestured at me and asked Cecily a question.
“Let me guess,” I said. “He’s asking if I’m married.”
“Yeah,” Cecily said.
I grabbed my head. “Really?!”
“No, no,” she said. “I’m joking with you.” What he actually wanted to know was why we were there.
This time, I thought, we should deploy high school teacher, a new role that I thought was actually plausible. But Cecily went ahead with something like professor of mining engineering at a major American university.
“What if they start asking me questions?” I whispered.
Don’t worry, Cecily said. We just have to tell them something.
In the gear house behind us, a large wheel fitted with a cable began to turn. The two lengths of the cable descended into the tunnel-like mouth of the mine; each end was connected to a train of five mining carts. If they ever got started, one set of carts would descend, empty, while the other rose up from belowground, full of coal. But that was some time off. There was no coal to be seen, except for everywhere. The wheel was only turning so the crew could apportion the slack on the lines.
The track on which we stood ran through nearly five hundred feet of tunnel to reach the loading area, which the supervisor told us was located three hundred vertical feet belowground. Several hundred miners were down there, powering their way through seams of coal. Workers at the mine usually got a day off for every ten they worked. But lately, he said, they had been working constantly, week after week without any days off.
The mine produced a thousand tons a day, which was on the small side, now that so many illegal operations had been shut down. Mines with a daily production of three or four thousand tons a day were not uncommon. In a few years, the supervisor told us, this mine would either be retrofitted with new systems to replace its antiquated technology or be shut down entirely.
In this, it was part of a grand shift in China’s coal industry. New mines were being built with more recent technology; mines like this one, which had been open since the 1940s, were being phased out. A similar shift is happening across a wide range of Chinese industries, a shift that promises to restructure the country’s economic and industrial landscape. Heavy industry is moving inland, to areas where both natural resources and cheap labor are plentiful. Just as the United States and Europe have sent much of their heavy industry overseas, economies within China are bifurcating between industrialized and developing, between high and low income. The tidal wave of industry is moving farther and farther inland from the coast. In its wake stand places like Shanghai and Shenzhen, which have been transformed into resource-hungry approximations of the countries whose consumerist economies they have emulated.
“Do you use this kind of technology in America?”
It was the supervisor. He nodded toward the mining carts, the cables, the giant wheel that drove it all.
I had by now perfected the gesture: a faltering, circular motion with my head that was neither a shake nor a nod.
“Somewhat,” I said.
To kill time while things got going, Cecily and I walked up the road that led over the waste rock pile, a mountain of shattered scree that partially filled the narrow neck of the valley. There, accompanied by two men with strong Shanxi accents, we looked over the vista of the mining operation: the dorms to the right, the throat of the mine tunnel to the left, and beyond it the hopper and conveyor system, which separated the coal from the waste rock.
One of the two, a rosy-cheeked man in his thirties, told us he was the manager of the explosives storehouse. He had previously worked underground as a miner, a job that had paid more. Cecily asked about his wages, and told me they compared favorably to the salary a recent college graduate could hope for in Beijing.
I found it suggestive about mine safety that someone would prefer to make less money, and to work with explosives, than to be underground.
“It’s safer than it was,” the man said. “But it’s still not that safe.”
Our other companion was an elderly man who said he had worked in the mine for several decades. Now he was retired.
“Before the 1980s,” he said, “we did everything manually. We dug with tools. It was hard work. It’s much better now. It’s all machines.”
“Did you like the work?” I asked. “Was it good work?”
“It was hard work,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether I liked it.”
Whether or not he had liked the work, though, he had decided to spend his retirement here. His children worked in the mine, and he saw no reason to leave. He smiled as he looked down over the mining complex, and not for the first time, I reflected that there was more than one kind of health.
The explosives man broke the spell. “Why did you come here?” he said, laughing. “It’s so dirty and black!”
Back at the extraction area, below, I stood by the cave-like mouth of the tunnel for a long time—hours, it seemed—and smoked, and lay on a pile of corrugated sheeting in the sun, and smoked, and eventually wondered if anything was ever going to happen.
The tunnel mouth had walls and a metal ceiling, and a sign over it with two golden characters, and the tracks in the ground, and it all sloped down at a steep grade away from the daylight, to a second, deeper, older mouth, a tunnel mouth built out of stone, and then disappeared into the earth. It was a tunnel, but after staring at it for an hour, I decided that really it was a cave in the end.
I tried to offer a cigarette to the guy next to me, and was again too slow, and again accepted one of his.
Then there was a grinding sound, not quite a rumble, and the cable went tight, and the man whose cigarette I was smoking went and stood on the tracks. The grinding grew louder and louder, and everyone started paying somewhat more attention.
At last the tunnel roared, and a train of five mining carts shot out of its mouth. I felt the urge to dive for safety, even though I wasn’t in the way. The man standing on the tracks—who was in the way—floated onto the leading cart, as casually as if he were stepping onto a streetcar. He reached down with lackadaisical precision and removed a thick metal pin to release the tow cable. The carts moved fast, spiriting him backward away from the tunnel mouth, and as they went by, I saw it. The coal. It filled each cart to the rim, in shining, sticky, dribbling mounds.
The cable-release man hopped off and another man stepped on. He threw aside another pin and the link that connected the lead cart to the train. The cast-off gear hit the black ground with a deep, metal clank. Another worker had put a block on the track to stop the following carts, and now the lead man coasted free, riding his cart along a wide arc of track, all the way to the hopper, where yet another man waited, also with coal on his face, also wearing a jacket and sweater, work gloves and trousers, dark with coal—everything black with the stuff. The lead man stepped off his cart just as it crashed into the hopper, and the two men pushed on the levers, using the cart’s momentum to upend it. They dumped its contents into a chute, where the rocks were shaken out of it, and then the coal was sent along the belt of the conveyor-sorter and onto the heap, where a loader was now scooping huge shovelfuls into a truck.
The cart crashed upright, and the workers pulled it backward, steep into the task, grimacing it into motion until the lead man could pull it back toward the tunnel on his own, and onto a side track where the cart would await its next descent into the mine. Already the second cart had been detached, and shouldered down the faint slope by the next member of the crew, the worker who had been napping when we arrived, his eyes still drowsy now, as he pushed his ton toward the hopper.
We had hung around all afternoon, and watched the workers crack jokes, and shared the international ritual of looking at pictures on the display of a digital camera, and now we saw the workers work. Coal kept shooting out of the mine, in five-cart loads, and the not-so-sad coal men swung through their practiced motions. They would have made a great advertisement for Chinese Communism in its pre-capitalist days. Each worker had his role, each role its place in the chain, a choreography of labor, skilled in a way that only unskilled work can be. They brimmed with rugged, coal-stained intelligence, pausing between mine trains to smoke and to talk. Sad Coal Man was not debased and morose. He was sharp. He was witty. He smiled in the sun when he had a few minutes to himself. Maybe he was just glad to be aboveground.
In the lobby of the hotel, Cecily tried the automatic shoe polisher on her sneakers, completely black from our afternoon at the mine. It had no effect except to blacken the spinning brush of the machine.
I went to my room. I took off my clothes. They were covered in black stains, although I had pushed no carts, handled no coal. It just happens when you’re at a coal mine. Liu had driven down to town ahead of us, so at lunchtime the miners gave us rides down the mountain on their motorcycles. And as soon as you rub shoulders with a coal miner—although you may look clean by comparison—you will find black dust on your every surface, in your pores, under your fingernails.
I washed my face, and stared at the smear of black on the washcloth, and sat on the edge of the bed, and I missed the Doctor. I missed her.
I thought of the motorcycle ride down the valley. We had run with the engine off, because even miners like to save gas, coasting down the steep mountainside at speed, the wind pulling tears out of my eyes, and when I got off the bike, the front of my jacket was streaked black where I had leaned against Sad Coal Man as he drove.