Farther Away: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen

  The fine for trespassing in the core area is nominally forty dollars but can run as high as seven hundred dollars, depending on the mood of the policeman. In theory, the core area is closed in order to minimize human disturbance to rare migratory birds, but if you were to go ahead and enter it anyway, some morning in late February, you would see long, loud convoys of blue trucks bouncing down networks of dirt roads in clouds of dust and diesel exhaust. The trucks go in empty and come out stacked house-high and road-wide with harvested reeds. You’d have an easy time finding threatened species like the reed parrotbill, because their populations are driven into narrow strips of vegetation beside vast mud flats—square miles of them, stretching to the horizon—that have been clear-cut to the ground. If you’re lucky, you might also see one of the world’s two thousand or so remaining black-faced spoonbills, feeding in shallow water alongside endangered Oriental storks and endangered cranes, while, on a spit of land directly behind them, workers pitch bundles of reed onto a truck.

  According to an administrator at the reserve, local regulations allow reeds to be cut before and after migratory birds come through. When the reserve was established, in the 1980s, the central government hadn’t given it enough funds to operate, and it had charged peasants a fee to cut reeds; nowadays, the cutting is justified as a fire-prevention measure. “Global NGOs want China to do conservation the Western way, but they don’t want every Chinese to drive a car,” the director of another coastal reserve told me. “That’s why we have to do things the Chinese way.” It wasn’t obvious to me that fire posed a greater risk to Yancheng’s red-crowned cranes than the semiannual clear-cutting of the core area, but I knew that much of China still operates under the national watchword of the eighties, “Development first, then environment.” I asked Caribou if, as China’s economy continued to expand, things were simply going to get worse for birds.

  “Definitely,” Caribou said. He listed some of the species—Baikal teal, scaly-sided merganser, Baer’s pochard, black-headed ibis, Japanese yellow bunting, hooded crane—that bred or wintered in eastern China and were disappearing. “Even just ten years ago, you could see much bigger numbers of them,” he said. “The problem isn’t just poaching. The biggest problem is habitat loss.”

  “It’s a trend, there’s nothing we can do about it,” Stinky said.

  Down the road from the visitor center, in near-darkness, Shadow called out that he’d found four teals and a snipe.

  Stinky was officially looking for a job in marketing or PR, but she wanted a job that didn’t require overtime, and in China nowadays every job required overtime. She and her husband had lived for two years in the United States. Although they’d ultimately found life there too boring and predictable, compared with China, they now felt less “flexible” than the friends of theirs who never left. “It’s a little harder for the two of us to abandon our principles,” Stinky said. “For example, in both China and the U.S., people say that family is the number-one priority. But in the U.S. they really mean it. In China, everything is about career now and getting ahead.” She and her husband had already bought a retirement apartment in the Sichuanese city of Chengdu, where people have a reputation for knowing how to relax and enjoy life, but for now the husband was working long hours in the city of Suzhou and getting home to Shanghai only a few nights a week, and Stinky was scarcely less industrious in pursuing her new hobby. In the two years since she’d gone on a walk sponsored by the Shanghai Wild Bird Society, she’d kept financial records for the society, managed several of its outreach projects, become an active online poster of local bird counts, and, last summer, in Fujian Province, seen one of the world’s rarest species, the Chinese crested tern.

  I joined her on a Sunday morning at the annual meeting of the Shanghai Wild Bird Society. Forty members, including a dozen women, had gathered in a classroom on the nineteenth floor of a Forestry Bureau building. It was easy to spot the newest members—they were the shy ones trading little glossy stickers of common birds. Stinky, in stylish black jeans, her hair thick and loose on her shoulders, detached herself from a cluster of friends and gave a clear, polished financial report, using spreadsheets decorated with a cartoon of coins tumbling into a cute-faced piggy bank. (Funding in 2007 had consisted primarily of a nine-hundred-dollar gift from the Hong Kong Bird Society to pay for Shanghai’s annual birding festival.) This year, for the first time, the society’s board of directors was being elected directly by the membership rather than being appointed by its governmental sponsor, the Shanghai Wild Animal Protection Bureau. An older member stood up to offer roastlike mini-bios of nine nominees, including “a supermodel” (Stinky), “a student who is extremely young” (Shadow), and “a nice guy, very easygoing” (the best amateur birder in Shanghai). Members smiled for a camera as, one by one, with half-joking ceremony, they dropped pink ballots into a slotted box.

  China’s political system does not allow for an environmental movement in the Western, activist, integrated sense of movement. The Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze, did generate something close to an organized national resistance, but this was partly because the government itself was divided about the project and because the dam became a rallying point for political discontents in general. The government was recently shamed into addressing the pollution of Tai Lake, near the city of Wuxi, but not because of the noisy citizen (subsequently jailed) who’d blown the whistle on the problem; it was because an algal bloom had fouled Wuxi’s water supply. China does have a number of prominent and outspoken environmental activists, many of them former journalists, and private citizens frequently mount NIMBY protests against specific environmental threats. But the dynamic of activists-versus-officialdom is less important than the tension between the government in Beijing, which is committed in principle to strong environmental protection, and the unequivocally progrowth local and provincial governments. Nongovernmental organizations, such as the Shanghai Wild Bird Society, are not permitted to form alliances or to take direction from a national group, and each one needs a governmental sponsor. They’re a bit like what our local Audubon chapters would be if there were no national groups to the left of them—no Sierra Club agitating in Washington. Nearly all are less than ten years old, and their mission thus far is primarily educational.

  Western-style conservation protests, when they do occur, are usually ad hoc, local, and ineffective. Until four years ago, the Jiangwan Wetland—eight square kilometers of diverse habitat on the site of an abandoned military airport—had been the largest natural space in central Shanghai and a magnet for local birders. When the birders learned that it was going to be developed for housing, they teamed up with local researchers, petitioned the government to abandon or modify the project, and enlisted journalists to publicize their campaign. In response, the government set aside a postage stamp of wetland on which, in Caribou’s disdainful words, “you might see some blackbirds, or a little egret.” Otherwise, the development had proceeded as planned.

  Stinky was the leading vote-getter in the board election, mentioned on thirty-eight of the forty ballots. Extremely young Shadow was one of the two nonqualifiers. After a buffet lunch, we watched a slide show by Shanghai’s nice and very easygoing best local birder, who’d recently been traveling in the lushly biodiverse province of Yunnan. (“Here,” he said, clicking, “I was attacked by a leech.”) Stinky was watching the presentation raptly. She herself was about to embark on a two-week birding expedition in Yunnan, leaving behind her husband and her daughter, bringing along Caribou, and hoping to see at least a hundred bird species she hadn’t seen before. I’d asked her how her husband felt about her hobby. “He thinks I’m having all the fun,” she said.

  From the classroom windows, I could see the upper half of the Jin Mao Tower—the half that housed the hotel I was staying in. The Jin Mao had been the fifth-tallest building in the world until a few months ago, when the much taller Shanghai World Financial Center went up across the street, beginning a reign as Asia’s Tallest Building
which will last until the year after next, when an even taller building is scheduled to go up nearby. In my hotel room, on the seventy-seventh floor, with my eye attuned to sourcing and the sky in my windows white with coal smog, each gleaming fixture invited me to consider the energy required to extract its raw materials, process them, haul them to Shanghai, and hoist them nine hundred and something feet above the ground. The cut and polished marble, the melted glass, the plated steel. After the cold and dark of Subei, the room seemed to me outrageously luxurious, except for the tap water, which guests were advised not to drink.

  “Whatever species you can’t find in the forest,” the top birder in Shanghai quipped, “you can go to the local market and see in a cage.”

  Two young men at the meeting, Yifei Zhang and Max Li, offered to show me around the Yangtze estuary the next day. Yifei was a slender, fine-featured former journalist now working for the World Wildlife Fund in Shanghai. Max was a Shanghai native who’d gone to Swarthmore to study engineering and come home as a vegan birdwatcher pursuing a career in ecology. (“I try, but it’s hopeless to be a vegan here,” Max said while he bought us a breakfast of omelets from a street vendor.) After a morning at a nature reserve on Chongming Island, Yifei and Max wanted me to see a wetland park on the outskirts of Shanghai. To Chinese conservationists, the phrase wetland park has approximately the same valence as petting zoo. These parks typically consist of dredged ponds and photogenic islands crisscrossed by wide wooden promenades repellent to birds. The park in Shanghai was adjacent to a military base whose firing range was so loud and close that the salvos sounded like a video arcade; I saw a tracer round cross the sky over our heads. There were also colored spotlights, fake boulders emitting Chinese pop music, and dense rectilinear plantings of pansies. Yifei looked down at the pansies and said, “Dumb.”

  We crossed the Yangtze in an old, slow ferry. The waters were the color of wet cement mix. As we approached the shore, hundreds of passengers pressed against the ferry’s bulkheads, trying to squeeze through small doors, onto a narrow platform, and down a set of steep, narrow metal stairs. Although I liked the country’s pace—the Chinese empty out of jetliners wonderfully fast, and Chinese elevator doors are hair-triggered—I didn’t appreciate being jostled so close to ladder-like stairs. I was used to crowds in New York City, but not crowds like this. One difference was the alacrity with which the tiniest advantage was seized, the slightest hesitation exploited. Even more striking, though, was the self-blinkering angle at which the women pushing around me (they were mostly women) held their heads. It was the angle of looking at the ground exactly one step ahead, and the effect was not to make me feel challenged or resented (the sort of thing that raised my blood pressure on the Lexington Avenue subway line) but to render me somehow inanimate. I was nothing more than an obstacle dimly sensed.

  I asked Max and Yifei about the seeming indifference of most private citizens in China to the environmental crisis, especially regarding wildlife.

  “There’s a long cultural tradition here of living in ‘harmony with nature,’ ” Max said. “Those ideas persisted for thousands of years, and they can’t have just evaporated. They’re just temporarily lost in this generation. Under Mao, all sorts of traditional values were broken down. So now all people think is, I just want to get rich. The richer you get, the more respect you’ll get. And the first people to get really rich, in the nineties, were the Cantonese. Then people in other provinces started to copy the Cantonese lifestyle, part of which is to eat a lot of seafood to show off how much money you have.”

  “We don’t have enough researchers studying what’s happening environmentally,” Yifei said. “And the researchers we do have don’t speak up. In all the bureaus, even at the Academy of Science, everybody is just thinking about how to say the right thing to please his boss. Instead of real information, there’s a lot of fake information—you know, ‘China has a wealth of natural resources.’ The country’s general trend is good—toward greater intellectual freedom—but it’s still very limited. So, finally, everyone just cares about what he can get for himself. The goal becomes personal survival.”

  In Ningbo, I’d asked to see a golf-club factory, and the tireless, beautifully smiling David Xu had granted my wish. Xu was on the phone with the company president until the very minute we arrived at the factory, reassuring him that I really was a writer and that he, Xu, really did work in the foreign-affairs office. The year before, one of the company’s competitors had sent spies to the factory in the guise of journalists.

  Modern golf clubs may look ultra-high-tech, but they’re irreducibly labor-intensive to make. The factory in Ningbo employed about five hundred workers, most of them from central and western China. They lived in the factory dormitory, they ate in the factory cafeteria, and, according to the company’s young sales manager, Lawyrance Luo, they generally didn’t understand much about the items they were making. Luo said that he himself went golfing only a few times a year, when the company had new products to test. Most of the clubs the factory produced were sold in sets, complete with bulky bag, at big retail outlets in America. The factory’s bare concrete and basic lighting could have been one year old or fifty years old. Ditto the grease-blackened machines, operated by male workers, that rolled raw steel tubing into a taper and pressed neat rings of crimp into the resulting shaft. Female workers painted glue onto strips of graphite composite which were then rolled onto the shafts and heat-bonded to them. One heavy-duty machine stamped sheet steel into hollow driver heads; on either side of a different machine, two men used tweezers to insert and remove driver faces into which the machine pressed horizontal grooves. After stamping, the driver heads were milled in a dimly lit room full of water-cooled grinding machines and well-muscled men in masks; Luo assured me that the water here was recycled and the ventilation much better than it used to be, but the scene was still pretty infernal. Upstairs, in a room filled with shockingly intense paint fumes, tough-looking girls with big hair and extreme boots and stockings were inspecting the finish on driver shafts and buffing away small flaws. Other young people sandblasted clubheads, applied decals to shafts, hand-tinted the grooves of logos, and injected glue into driver heads to keep the residual grit in them from rattling. In a crowded ground-floor space where the finished product piled up, forests of shiny clubheads loomed above ridges of colorful bags and wide reed beds in which the stems were shafts and the heads of the reeds were cushioned grips.

  Like China’s nature reserves, this factory was hemmed in by difficulties. The company payroll, currently averaging about two hundred dollars a month per worker, was rising every year, and there were new federal laws that, in theory at least, increased the minimum wage and required companies to give insurance and severance pay to all but their short-term workers. Because the central government was also bent on developing the country’s interior, employers in coastal cities like Ningbo had to offer ever greater incentives to lure workers from home and retain them. Meanwhile, China’s export tax credit had been made less generous, raw-material costs were increasing month by month, the American economy was slackening, the American dollar was a dog, and yet the factory couldn’t pass along its increased costs to its customers—the American buyers would simply go to another factory.

  “Our profit margin has become very, very small,” Luo said. “It’s the same as when the Taiwanese manufacturers moved over here ten years ago. We see more and more businesses moving to Vietnam now.”

  “Vietnam is very small,” David Xu countered with an intense smile.

  By the front door, as we were leaving, we came upon an enormous golf bag filled with plastic-wrapped clubs.

  “These are the best clubs we make,” Luo told me. “The top of the line. The president wants you to have them as a gift, because of your interest in golf.”

  I looked at Xu and at my translator, Miss Wang, but neither was able to give me a clear sign of what to do. As in a dream, I watched the clubs being loaded into the rear of our van. I watched
the door being closed. Surely some well-known rule of journalistic ethics applied here?

  “Oh, I don’t know about this,” I said. “I’m not at all sure about this.”

  The next thing I knew, Luo was waving goodbye and we were driving off into the late-morning haze. A strong, warm, smoke-laden wind had kicked up; the air was suddenly very bad. I thought I might have accomplished a refusal of the gift if only I’d felt more sure about business etiquette in China. Admittedly, though, I’d been further paralyzed, at the critical moment, by the tastiness of the phrase “top of the line” and by the thought of handling those glossy, sexy, late-model golf clubs; the extended factory tour had given me an appetite for finished product. Only now was it occurring to me that there was a lot of schlepping between Ningbo and New York. Plus: after accepting such a handsome gift, wouldn’t it be rude of me to write about the intense workplace paint fumes? Plus: didn’t I dislike golf?

  “I’m thinking we should go back and return the clubs,” I said. “Could we do that? Would the president be offended?”

  “Jonathan, you must keep the clubs,” Xu said. He didn’t sound entirely sure of himself, though. I explained what a bother it was to travel with excess luggage, and Miss Wang, who was not much bigger than the bag of clubs, offered to carry them back to Shanghai for me and store them until I flew home. “I need to lose weight,” she said.

  “They will be a memento of your trip,” Xu said.