Farther Away: Essays Page 15

  I decided to visit the part of the world where the puffin came from. The industrial system that had created the fake bird was destroying real birds, and I wanted to be in a place where this connection couldn’t be concealed. Basically, I wanted to know how bad things were.

  I called up the American company on the puffin’s label—Daphne’s Headcovers, of Phoenix, Arizona—and spoke to its president, Jane Spicer. I was afraid she’d be reticent about her Chinese sources, especially in light of the recent Chinese toy scandals, but she was the opposite of reticent. In our first phone conversation, she told me about her golden retriever, Aspen, her found cat, Mango, her late mother, Daphne (with whom, at the age of ten, she’d started the company), her husband, Steve, who ran the production end of things, and her most famous customer, Tiger Woods, whose furry tiger head cover, nicknamed Frank, had costarred in a series of Nike television ads in 2003 and 2004. She told me that Daphne, herself an immigrant from England, had made a point of hiring immigrants to sew the head covers, and that she, Jane, had once lent some workers to a woman who manufactured cat toys and had lost her own workers and was desperate to get her orders filled, and that, years later, in the mysterious way of karma, after the woman had struck it rich and Jane had forgotten all about her, she’d called up Jane and said, “Remember me? You saved my business. I’ve been looking for a way to repay you, and I’d like you to meet some friends of mine from China.”

  Daphne’s is the world leader in animal head covers. When I went to visit its headquarters, in Phoenix, Jane introduced me to workers she referred to as “the zoo crew,” who inspect the head covers and sort them by species in plastic-lined boxes. She helped me locate the puffins, which, piled in their box, looked about as cute and animate as laundry. In the sample room, she showed me boxes of unauthorized knockoffs with sheaves of legal documents stacked on top. “The vast majority of our lawsuits are against American companies,” she said. “Often the Chinese manufacturers don’t even know they’re infringing.” Her tiger and her gopher (with its Caddyshack associations) were especially popular targets of intellectual piracy. There was also a walrus head cover made from the dense brown pelt of some actual animal. “This should still be on the animal that wore it,” Jane said severely. “Karma’s going to get the guy who did this, but our attorney’s going to get him first.”

  When I asked her if I could possibly meet with her suppliers in China, Jane said maybe. She wanted me to know, in any case, that the suppliers’ workers in China were averaging twice, or nearly twice, the local minimum wage. “We wanted to pay for perfection,” she said, “and we wanted good karma there—wanted happy workers in a happy factory.” She and Steve still do some design, but they’ve come to trust their Chinese partners to do more and more of it. Steve can e-mail a sketch from Phoenix and have a plush prototype in hand a week later. When he travels to China, the team there can produce a prototype before lunch and a revised prototype by the end of the workday. Language is mostly not a problem, although Steve did have trouble explaining a gray whale’s “barnacles” to the Chinese team, and an employee once came to him with a strange question: “You said you want all the animals to be angry. Why?” Steve replied that, no, to the contrary, he and Jane wanted their animals to look happy and to make people happy to touch them. The word that had been mistranslated as angry was realistic.

  “Work first, then pleasure,” David Xu cheerfully admonished me on my first official day in China. Xu was from the foreign-affairs office in the booming city of Ningbo, a hundred miles due south of Shanghai, and our “work” consisted of racing from one factory to another in a hired van. From the back of the van, it seemed to me that every inch of Greater Ningbo was under construction or reconstruction simultaneously. My extremely new hotel had been built in the rear yard of a merely very new hotel, a few feet away. The roads were modern but heavily divoted, as if it were understood that they would all be torn up again soon anyway. The countryside seethed with improvement; in some villages, it was hard to find a house that didn’t have a pile of sand or a stack of bricks in front of it. Farm fields were sprouting factories while, outside the less-new factories, the support columns of coming viaducts went up behind scaffolds. The growth rate that Ningbo had sustained in recent years—about fourteen percent—quickly became exhausting just to look at.

  As if to reenergize me, Xu twisted around in the front seat and emphasized, with a big smile, that “China is a developing country.” Xu’s teeth were beautiful. He had the fashionably angular eyeglasses and ingratiating eagerness of an untenured literature professor, and he was charming and frank on every imaginable subject—our driver’s lack of basic road skills, the long and eventful history of homosexuality in China, the uncanny suddenness with which old neighborhoods in Ningbo were razed and replaced, even the unwisdom of the Three Gorges project on the Yangtze. Xu had also graciously refrained from asking me what I had been doing in China between my arrival in Shanghai seven days earlier and my official arrival in Ningbo the afternoon before. To repay this kindness, I tried to show keen interest in even the most obviously unrepresentative factories he took me to, such as the automobile maker Geely, a proud pioneer of green manufacturing methods like “water melt” body paint (“ ‘Green’ means friendly to the environment,” Xu said), and the heavy-equipment manufacturer Haitian, where workers typically took home nine thousand dollars a year (Xu: “That’s twice what I make!”) and many of them commuted in private cars.

  The after-work treat that Xu had promised me was a VIP tour of the almost finished Hangzhou Bay Bridge—at thirty-six kilometers, the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world. Before we got there, however, we needed to watch all-terrain-vehicle body parts being spray-painted and motorcycle wheels being milled and acrylic “cotton” fiber being extruded and ingeniously processed in the thriving municipality of Cixi, where exports last year totaled four billion dollars, and there are twenty thousand private companies and only one state-owned enterprise, and so many locals own or manage factories that the resident population is nearly equaled by the population of migrant workers who do the ordinary jobs. I’d read a lot about migrant workers, and I knew that a large percentage of them were in their teens, but I was still unprepared for how young they looked. At the acrylic-fiber plant, the four workers manning the command center might have been borrowed from a tenth-grade homeroom. They sat gazing at flat-panel screens aglow with flowcharts and streaming data, two boys and two girls in jeans and sneakers, communicating nothing so much as a wish to be left alone.

  The sun was setting by the time we got to the Hangzhou Bay Bridge. Most of its total cost (about $1.7 billion) had been covered by the government of Ningbo, which was platting out a vast new industrial zone immediately to the east. The bridge will cut the driving time between Shanghai and Ningbo in half; after it officially opens, in May [of 2008], the Olympic torch will be carried across it, bound for Beijing and the Green Olympics. On our drive out and back, the only animal or plant life I saw was a pair of gulls flying rapidly away. Every five kilometers, to combat monotony, the color of the railings changed. At the bridge’s midpoint, I got out and surveyed the turbid gray tide running against concrete piers on which a wayside restaurant and hotel were being built. I found myself aching to see more birds, any birds.

  According to my visa application, the purpose of my trip to Ningbo was to explore the subject of Chinese manufacturing for American export, but I had taken care to let Xu know that I was very interested in birds as well. Now, trying to please me and to make our day complete, he directed our driver west from the bridge into a system of reed beds and ponds which the Cixi government had preserved as a natural area. Much of the area had recently burned, and all of it was being considered, Xu said, for conversion to a “wetland park.”

  I’d seen one of these wetland parks in Shanghai, earlier in the week. I did my best to sound enthusiastic.

  “Red-crowned cranes are commonly seen here,” Xu assured me from the front seat. “The government
is planting trees to help shelter the birds from the elements.”

  I had the feeling that he was improvising a little bit, but I was grateful for the effort. We drove past tidal flats of such barrenness that they appeared to predate multicellular life. We crossed over a broad canal on which I thought I glimpsed four sitting ducks or grebes, but they were only plastic bottles. We passed an “eco-farm” consisting of fish ponds surrounded by vacation cottages. Finally, in failing light, we roused a flock of night herons from a densely vegetated marsh. We got out of the van and stood watching as they circled and drifted closer to us. David Xu was beside himself with joy. “Jonathan!” he cried. “They know you’re a birdwatcher! They’re welcoming you!”

  The week before, when I’d arrived in Shanghai, my first impression of China had been that it was the most advanced place I’d ever seen. The scale of Shanghai, which from the sky had presented a dead-flat vista of tens of thousands of neatly arrayed oblong houses—each of which, a closer look revealed, was in fact a large apartment block—and then, on the ground, the brutally new skyscrapers and the pedestrian-hostile streets and the artificial dusk of the smoke-filled winter sky: it was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, “Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?” and this place had raised its hand and said, “Yeah!”

  One afternoon, I’d ridden north from Shanghai in a rented car with three homegrown Chinese birdwatchers. The artificial dusk had been gathering for hours, but night didn’t actually fall until the moment we all piled out of the car, on the fringes of Yancheng National Nature Reserve, and followed the bird guide known as M. Caribou down a little farm road. The temperature was below freezing. The only colors were various dark bluish grays. An utterly unidentifiable bird flushed out of some weeds and flew deeper into the night.

  “Some kind of bunting,” Caribou speculated.

  “It’s pretty dark,” I said, shivering.

  “We want to use the last light,” the beautiful young woman who called herself Stinky said.

  It got even darker. Right in front of me, the young man named Shadow flushed what he said was a pheasant. I heard it and looked around wildly, trying to distinguish shapes. Caribou was leading us past the car, where our hired driver sat with the heat blasting. We ran blindly down an embankment into a grove of sticklike trees whose pale bark made the undergrowth even darker.

  “And what are we doing here?” I said.

  “Could be woodcock,” Caribou said. “They like wet ground where the trees aren’t too close together.”

  We crashed around in the dark, hoping for woodcock. Up on the road, thirty feet away from us, minibuses and small trucks rushed by, swerving and honking and raising dust that I tasted but couldn’t see. We stopped and listened intently to a twittering song that turned out to be the bearings of an approaching bicycle.

  Stinky and Shadow and M. Caribou all went by their Web names when speaking English. Stinky was the mother of a five-year-old and had taken up birding two years ago. Via e-mail, she and I had arranged to visit Yancheng, the largest nature reserve on the Chinese coast, and she had talked me into avoiding official guidance and employing her friend Caribou, who charged seventy dollars a day to find birds. I’d asked Stinky if she really wanted me to call her Stinky, and she’d said yes. She’d come to my hotel wearing a black fleece hat, a nylon shell, and nylon adventure pants. Her friend Shadow, a biology student with a borrowed wildlife camera and time on his hands, was dressed in a down parka and thin corduroys. The first half of our drive took us up through the heart of the Yangtze River Delta, which had lately accounted for nearly twenty percent of China’s GDP. One vast plain of industry and medium-rise housing and isolated shards of agriculture was succeeded by another. Always, on the southern horizon, mirage-like in the winter light, was some mythically outsize structure—some power plant, some glass-clad temple of finance, some steroidally bulked-up restaurant-hotel complex, some . . . grain elevator?

  Caribou, in the front seat, was scanning the sky with a vaguely irritable alertness. “The word eco is very popular in China now, you see it everywhere,” he commented. “But it’s not real eco.”

  “There was no birding at all in China until four or five years ago,” Stinky said.

  “No—longer,” Shadow said. “Ten years!”

  “But only four or five years in Shanghai,” Stinky said.

  North of the Yangtze, in the region known as Subei, we drove through crowded, run-down urban outskirts for a long time before I understood that these weren’t outskirts, this was just what Subei looked like. The houses were blocky, unpainted, blatant; only in the rooflines, which never failed to end in a vestigial Far Eastern upturning, was there a breath of aesthetic relief. We drove alongside canals frosted with thick layers of floating trash and lined on either side with even thicker deposits; white and red were the leading trash colors, but there existed sun-bleached plastic equivalents of every other major color as well. Very rarely did I see a tree more than eight inches in diameter. Vegetables were planted in tight rows on road embankments, in the aisles between the regiments of stick trees, on traffic triangles, and right up to the walls of every building.

  When even Caribou had admitted that night had fallen, we left the reserve and drove into the village of Xinyanggang. The buildings there were two-story and made of unadorned concrete or brick. The light consisted mainly of spillage from low-wattage fixtures inside open-fronted stores. Over dinner, in a room where a ceiling-mounted heater blew freezing air, Caribou told me how he’d come to be one of the first professional bird guides born in the People’s Republic. As a kid, he said, he’d liked animals, and as a college student he’d sometimes sketched birds and e-mailed his nature notes to his classmates. But it was impossible to be a real birdwatcher without a complete, illustrated field guide to Chinese birds, and the first of these, by John MacKinnon and Karen Phillipps, wasn’t published until 2000. Caribou bought his copy in 2001. Two years later, he took a job as an air-traffic controller in Shanghai. “It was a great job,” Stinky told me. But Caribou himself hadn’t thought so. He’d hated the long nights and the constant arguing with pilots and airline directors; he’d even had to argue with passengers who called him on their cell phones. His biggest complaint, though, was that the job was incompatible with full-time birding. “Sometimes, for a week or even two weeks,” he said, “I wouldn’t get any sleep at all, it was just birding and work.”

  “But you could fly to other cities for free!” Stinky said.

  This was true, Caribou admitted. But his schedule had never allowed him more than one full day in any given city, and so he’d quit. For the last two and a half years, he’d made his living as a freelance bird researcher and guide. Stinky, who had recently discovered Facebook, was trying to get Caribou to set up a page to advertise himself abroad. A lot of Europeans and Americans, she said, were unaware that there was even such a thing as Chinese birdwatchers, let alone Chinese bird guides. When I asked Caribou how many days he’d worked as a guide in 2007, he frowned and calculated. “Less than fifteen,” he said.

  At six-thirty the next morning, after stopping for a breakfast of noodles and rice buns filled with savory greens, Stinky and Shadow and Caribou and I headed back to the reserve. Like many Chinese reserves, Yancheng is divided into a highly protected “core area” and a larger “outer area,” where visitors with binoculars are tolerated and local people are permitted to live and work. There is very little pristine habitat anywhere in eastern China, and certainly none to be seen in Yancheng. Every last hectare of the outer area seemed to be in use for fish farming, paddy building, road grading, ditchdigging, reed cutting, house rebuilding, and miscellaneous major earthmoving and concrete pouring. Caribou led us to red-crowned cranes (bushy-tailed, majestic, endangered), reed parrotbills (tiny, funny-faced, threatened), and, by my count, seventy-four other species of bird. We searched for buntings along a channel that was being widened and paved by a brigade of workers who b
uzzed up on motorcycles and asked if we were hunting pheasants. This is a common question in China, where birders also get used to being mistaken for surveyors, to being informed, “There are no birds here,” and to being asked, “Is the bird you’re looking at expensive?”

  We saw a Chinese gray shrike near a billboard ominously urging DEVELOP THE LAND, PRESERVE THE WETLANDS, CONTRIBUTE TO THE ECONOMY and a peasant digging a barn foundation with a shovel. We invaded the yard of a family that had come outside to watch two men tinker with an electrical substation while, twenty feet away, near a pile of cinder blocks, a fantastic, prison-striped, crazily crested hoopoe foraged in dead grass. At the site of a reservoir where, just two months earlier, Caribou had seen waterfowl, we pulled up face-to-face with a very handsome man who sat straddling his motorcycle and smiled at us implacably while Caribou determined that the site had been bulldozed for fish farming and was now devoid of birds. We ended the day by combing through trees and brush near the reserve’s tourist center. Here, for free, on one side of the road, you could see a solitary ostrich, while, on the other side, for four dollars, you could see a few tame red-crowned cranes, listless in a pen, with yellow grass and dirty water, and climb a tower from which the reserve’s core area was distantly visible.

  “It’s a wasteland, not a wetland,” Caribou said bitterly, of the visitor center. “The problem with nature reserves in China is that local people don’t support them. People who live near them think, We can’t get richer, we can’t build factories, we can’t build power plants, because of the protections. They don’t know what a reserve is, or what a wetland is. Yancheng should open part of the core area to the public, to get them interested. To help them get to know the red-crowned crane. Then they can support it.”