Guangzhou Dispatches

You can export everything from here: jackets, shoes, Chinese new year ornaments, six-foot tall Santas with saxophones, plastic palm trees, beds, clocks, stuffed animals, machine parts, liquor, playing cards, basketballs, pens, mp3 players, Clinton Halloween masks, magnetic dart boards, ATVs, man shaped lamps with penis on/off switches, pants, boxes, face paints. Also, fortune cookies. There is a factory here that manufactures them for shipment to the States. Chinese people don’t eat them. They prefer watermelon.

The factories themselves, though, are both everywhere and impossible to find. An article came out not too long ago that talked about a Canadian guy with a blackberry full of phone numbers and GPS coordinates. They were all for factories, the GPS necessary because roads change so rapidly addresses are useless.

I found myself at a new construction site while searching for boats. There’s something kind of romantic, I thought, about old fashioned fishing boats floating peacefully in the lee of skyscrapers, so I set off to find one that would take me in. There’s no particular reason to think that way, I know, but purposelessness sets your mind to seek out the romantic, which in the case of China means something old, broken, and dirty. Such is my life here that “Find boat friend” was an actual item on my computer sticky note to do list. At any rate, I figured boats would be located near the water, so I took the subway out past University City and headed for the deep gray river.

The factory was across the street from the subway stop, workers scaling and poking and prodding every surface, looking like freckles on the pale exterior. Teams spackled and cemented. Teams shoveled and moved. And they all stopped to stare at the white guy moving down the dirt road, tripping on discarded cement. I plodded through until I reached the shore, where I knelt and took close-up pictures of a dog carcass seething with flies.

Behind me lay mounds of dirt and the caked in tracks of a squat backhoe. It was a no man’s land, this excavated foundation earth, dull orange and crumbly. I started off across it, and I guess I was eager for some undiscovered something. The workers on their scaffolding worked with the mechanical speed of repetitive motion mastered long ago. A few stopped to rest by the outhouse, shooing chickens from the door entrance as they wiped away dust.

It felt like being king, standing atop a dirt pile as the factory skeleton rose a few more inches. I imagined it mine, this producer of something, safeguard of my financial future. Across the street in front of a dilapidated store front factory was a shining black Mercedes. It lacked the tell-tale tinted windows of a graft funded government ride, this one was pure entrepreneur. I imagined he felt the same way. Four months ago there was nothing here, but now? How many hundreds of lives would involve stories of this place, plucked from the dirt? Out in the field, no one paid me any mind save a worker wearing an army fatigue jacket and loose pants. But he had other things to worry about and he trundled past, up towards the scaffolding.

A year and a half in China and I start questioning if I’ve learned anything. Conversations are still riddled with misunderstandings and everything is changing at such a pace that I wonder what good it is to even ask. No one I talk to knows what life will be like a year from now, but not in some seize-the-future anything is possible sort of way. Just the is of insecurity. Applications for government jobs, the most stable around, are surging. Almost all of my students are members of the Communist Party, but ideology’s got nothing to do with it. For most people, even the college grads, there’s simply no safety net.

And, so, I continued walking across the dirt. Below, at the base of the hill, solidified clay spread towards the factory, cracked like parched desert. Beyond it wound the path to the boats. The day was cold and overcast but the construction site badlands made me wish for rain – to wipe out the dry earth, to give the spackling workers hanging from platforms a chance to rest. I wanted to control this patch of dry and I flung myself down the dirt hill face, imagining bounding across the cracks and dancing in the rubble.

Smiling in the grey I planted my foot on the cracked floor, but the foot kept traveling down, down with a slop. Mud. Up to my knees mud and my left leg kicked out. I was losing my balance so I sank my left leg into the clay too. Moisture seeped down under my pants and into my socks. I was stuck.

The suction was incredible as I tried to high-step out of the mud desert and back in again, the unsure walk of a hungry zombie freshly risen from the grave. I curled my toes to keep my shoes on as I lumbered in the pit towards dry land. No one noticed when I pulled myself out, orange from the knees down. I thought about the mud. I wondered if the workers knew, were laughing to themselves or sympathetic. But there was nobody around and I couldn’t go home like this, trailing clay refuse. I searched for a stick.

There were rocks beneath a mountain of gravel and I sat there, squeegeeing my shoes with a punctured bicycle tire tube. I took off my shoes and socks. I looked around for help but there was no one around in this part of the field, and all I could hear was my scraping and the air horns of passing ships.

Behind me the river puttered on shore in a way that it never had before a couple of years ago, when earth was excavated on a massive scale to create part of the island that became University City. A long conveyor belt tower saluted the water, waiting for the next ship to dock. I wondered about how none of this would look the same in ten years. I scraped slowly; the enforced convalescence was nice.

The army fatigued worker came ambling around the bend and this time, when he saw me, his eyes were gleeful. He came over with ten fingers outstretched. “10 kuai!” he said. “10 kuai and I’ll wash everything until it’s clean. Wash everything until it’s clean!” He squatted down to inspect my shoes and shook his head. He was a local, accent thick and gnarled. I showed him my stick, my rock, and my bicycle tire tube, hoping for sympathy. He held up his fingers again and I became indignant. “Way too expensive,” I said, as though I was in a position to bargain.

I was like a child, being led barefoot up the dirt path towards the river’s edge. The worker held my shoes and a wash basin before him and turned around with a counter-offer. Five kuai. He asked where I was from. He laughed when I told him my salary, far more than his but a pittance, nothing, miniscule compared to what other foreigners make. He told me I should be out making money instead of falling into mud in the middle of nowhere. I nodded and he scrubbed my shoes not far from where the dog lay, buzzing.

He was small down by the water. He had removed his jacket and was squatting in the tiny waves and I stood waiting. I noticed just how thick the pollution was, cradling everything, the pale factory, the pale river, the pale city. This place is rearranging the way the world does business, but I didn’t know what to think. The man came back and took me into his shack to let the shoes dry.

We sat on chairs opposite from each other as orange water leeched from my shoes. I asked him how he got here, to this patrol hut on the edge of the water and the edge of construction, but he just told me he’d always been here, and maybe not here exactly but someplace like here. He told me my shoes were too expensive since things like this can happen to him. I nodded. Behind him, on a white dry erase board, were dozens of phone numbers. There were no names, just digits, scribbled hastily.

“Workers, workers, workers,” he said. Just in case someone doesn’t show up, or quits, or gets hurt, or whatever. Replacements. Work goes on regardless. I asked him what they all were working on, what would occupy that cavernous hulk. Out the door I could see the next bucket load of bricks ascending skyward. At the other end of the rope was a man dragging a handle behind him. There was a single pulley floating near the roof and the worker was walking out into the scrub to pull in enough slack to get the bucket to the top. He laughed. “A factory! Who knows what they will make.”

He was far from the point of wonder. By the time the project reached that point, he’d be out of a job. He looked at me, at my soggy shoes, and finally the pants I stubbornly refused to pay him to clean. It was time for me to go, back through the mystery factory and the muscled workers now curious about my mud-stained pants and on home. Boats would wait for another day. As I arranged my dripping sneakers, the worker took pity on me, drawing his brush in quick strokes across my legs. Flakes of mud flew off, onto the hut floor. Occasionally he’d miss, and the stiff, thick bristles scratched the top of my foot, grating and good.