While on assignment in southeast China, a travel writer is warmly welcomed by factory owners but soon learns the answers he seeks may not be so easy to find.
As the factory owner once again fills up my small glass with a pungent 58% alcoholic spirit, I look into his eyes and wonder if he’ll ever tell me the truth. That is what I am here to find, and the closer I get, the further away it seems.
I have come here to China’s Guangdong province to tell a story, not as a journalist, but as a writer recruited, hardly for the first time, to the services of commerce. My client wants me to find out how a particularly delicate manufacturing procedure works and find a clear and pleasant way to explain this to his customers. Years’ worth of messages and phone calls have yielded only confusion. And so, we have come to the source.
The factory owners seem delighted we are here. We call them laoban, a term of respect, but also refreshingly casual; Though my student days in Chengdu are far behind, I can still break the ice in stuttering Mandarin. In a white Lexus, we leave Dongguan Central Station and head where? It is hard to say. The highways merge into each other, towering grey apartment blocks, grey sky, grey power lines, grey cameras that flash white as we drive underneath them.
In factory after factory, the workers are focused. Except for one young woman who blushes as we smile at her, the others pay us interlopers no mind as they polish, pick, sort, and prod with calm but relentless energy. Some are young, with expensive-looking haircuts and rock-band T-shirts. Others, the higher-ranked doing more skilled work, are older; they wear blue plastic slippers and work without looking up, answering our questions without pausing their work.
View from the window of a high-speed train, somewhere in Guangdong.
Most rooms are quiet. Green floors. White walls. In some pop music plays, Sabrina Carpenter serenading the laborers. In this room, the air is cool. They wear pink gowns over their clothes. Most workers are women, but I see a young man in the same outfit. In the next room, the air is sweet and acrid. It is dark and suddenly loud, a thousand fans, a hiss of a million taps gushing angrily, echoing off the exposed concrete walls. Bubbling cauldrons of clear liquid simmer and steam as metal objects are dipped and removed by flitting figures, their faces in the shadows, and somehow you know that the clear liquid is more than water. It drips on the floor, and the workers hold the metal stakes at arm’s length; they wear no safety gear, and yet they seem completely at ease.
In fact, they all seem relaxed, everywhere we go, one movement following the other as if it were pre-ordained. Perhaps they are in a trance? One gets the sense that there is no gossip here, or if there is, it is not among the workers but among the bosses. We sit with them in the air-conditioned office rooms, around those huge round tables, where signs encourage workers to “handle work at work, handle personal matters after work,” and remind them that “the customer is number one, top quality is first.” Here, piles of berries, sweet tomatoes, and small green fruits that look like apples but taste like pears are thrust upon us. We ask our questions, we try and get a straight answer.
Truth is tricky here. There are no lies, but questions are responded to with apparent contradictions. One person says left. The next says right. And when you mention this inconsistency, it is brushed away with a smile, ‘yes, sometimes it is left, that’s true, but also it is right.’ I fill page after page with notes, with diagrams, step-by-step guidance, but then we enter the next room, the next boss arrives, and the facts are turned on their head. No, this process isn’t that, only this. No, no, it was that, but now it isn’t. Truth itself becomes something to mould, to assemble, to inspect, to reject, to refine. I build prototypes of clarity, but never arrive at a finished product.
We are getting to the end of the bottle, and the factory owner seated beside me, not drinking himself (he says he must drive), is forcing shot after shot on us hapless foreigners. Fortunately, the other factory owner is eager to help. The sober owner is tall and wears glasses, and looks like you would imagine a factory boss to look like. The one who drinks is shorter and balder and has the energy of a bus driver or clerk. He is keen to help us finish this bottle. I pour him a full flask; about 120 mils of 58% strong spirit. I expect him to pour himself a small shot into the tiny glass before him, but he drinks the whole sinister flask in one. His face turns red. He steadies himself. He sits. For the rest of the evening, he is silent.
My mouth is the battleground. It crunches on small, river fish, feeling bones, far too big, refusing to disintegrate. It chews on roast duck, normally so tender, but tonight as hard as rubber. It tries to form the Chinese syllables, those ‘zh’ that sound sort of like the soft English ‘g’, but not quite, those ‘r’ sounds that are almost swallowed. My mouth smiles at the right moments. It absorbs that scorching, hot baijiu, this harsh, clear alcohol. And finally, after yet another toast “to our prosperous cooperation,” it mutters “zaijian,” goodbye. And somehow, we leave.
I speak to a stray dog on the street outside the restaurant while arrangements are made for our immediate future. It is long after dark, but we do not know where we are sleeping. We are shown into another large, white, expensive car. The sober factory owner is at the wheel, and I am now grateful that he refused to drink. We drive out of the town, further and further into the heart of Guangdong province. And soon we are among fields, and I hear the sound of frogs outside as the air grows cooler and loses some of that sooty, metallic taste which has always reminded me of China.
And here we exit. We are given room keys. There is a brick staircase leading up a hill, and to each side, small bungalows. In one, a party is raging. 15 or so Chinese, drunk on beer and cigarettes, surround a mahjong table, whooping with delight. My American client and his fiancée are shown to room 888, a prestigious number. They have two beds and a huge hot spring fed by the waters underground, and inside the room, there is an electric mahjong table.
My room is smaller but also contains a large, square pool. The water scalds my feet. I fill a plastic scooper with cold water and douse my head as I enter. I sit for a long time, hearing the shrieks of the mahjong players, the croak of the frogs, the distant mutter of traffic down the hill, and replaying the events of the last two days. I have learned much, but understand even less than before.
Jetlag always hits me hard when I fly from Europe to Asia. It’s almost three AM, but I am more awake than I have been all day. I sift through the preceding 48 hours, replaying conversations, scanning my notes in my mind. Still, nothing makes sense. Plans form and collapse around us, information crumbles between your fingers like so much stale bread.
And yet the water is warm. The bosses seemed happy, the evening one of the most memorable I’ve experienced in years. What good will it do, trying to pin down all of this fast-moving chaos and forcibly flatten it into the shape of logic? I stare out of the small, steamed-up window into the darkness of China beyond, and know that I will see no more of this country than it wishes to show me.
