After the summer of 1989, when the Beijing crackdown left conservatives with the upper hand, some feared that Shenzhen would lose its special status. But three years later, the benevolent god returned. In 1992, Deng made his famous “Southern Tour,” which was intended to show that China’s economic reforms would continue. The tour’s key moment came in Shenzhen, where the eighty-eight-year-old leader delivered a speech, saying, “The important lesson of Shenzhen is to dare to charge into forbidden zones.” And thus the second stanza of “Spring Story”:
In another spring of 1992
An old man wrote a poem on the
southern coast of China…
Oh, China, China,
You have opened a new scroll that will last for one
hundred years
You hold up a springtime that is a blaze of color.
In Shenzhen itself, few average residents seemed to realize that they were part of a massive experiment. But they sensed the uncertainty, and they tended to describe their city’s development as the result of a powerful man’s patronage rather than as the natural product of free-market economics. During one of my trips to Shenzhen, I met a businessman who told me that the offerings to the billboard after Deng’s death had been a way of giving thanks. But he said that there had also been an element of fear and superstition; it was almost like traditional Chinese ancestor worship, in which the departed could still influence daily life. Another time, I chatted with a cab driver who had migrated there from Hunan province. “This place used to be a poor country village, and then Deng Xiaoping came and told them to build it,” he said. “That’s how things work in China—one person says something should be done, and it happens. That’s Communism.”
Despite the leaders’ attempts to define and delineate their experiment, certain aspects of Shenzhen developed in their own way. The region came to be dominated by labor-intensive light industry, and factory managers preferred female workers, who could be paid less and were easier to manage. Although there were no reliable local statistics, it was obvious that women in Shenzhen far outnumbered men. Locals often claimed that the ratio was seven women to every man. Shenzhen became famous for prostitution, and also for its “second wives,” the mistresses of factory owners who already had families in Hong Kong or Taiwan.
Attempts at border control had unintended consequences. Many factories moved to the other side of the Shenzhen fence, where they took advantage of cheaper land and less rigorous law enforcement. The Shenzhen area became divided into two worlds, which were described by residents as guannei and guanwai—“within the gates” and “beyond the gates.” In centuries past, these phrases had described regions on either side of Shanhaiguan, a famous section of the Great Wall that marked the border with Manchuria. But in Shenzhen the old terms were applied to the new boundary. Satellite towns sprang up beyond the fence, most of them squalid and unplanned. In this sprawl of cheaply constructed factories and worker dormitories, wages were lower. The typical workweek was six days instead of five. Labor accidents and factory fires were more frequent than they were in Shenzhen proper.
It was here, beyond the gates, where Emily found her first job, in a satellite city called Longhua. Shortly after she started work, the company added a production division, becoming a full-fledged factory, complete with workshops and dormitories. The factory produced pewter, brass, and low-grade silver jewelry, as well as cheap plastic beads that were painted and lacquered, packaged in ziplock bags, and exported to Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and the United States.
EMILY’S STORY ABOUT the businessman from Hong Kong ended quickly. A couple of weeks after our telephone conversation, she called again, and I asked about the man.
“He likes all women he sees,” she said with a laugh. “Because of that he is not such a problem.”
She told me that her sister had found a new job with a lonely hearts hot-line, talking on the telephone with people who felt lost in Shenzhen. She didn’t earn as much as Emily, but the work was easy. She received bonuses based on volume, and there were plenty of callers. I asked Emily why so many people telephoned.
“Everyone in Shenzhen has many troubles,” she said.
“Why is that?”
“There are many troubles about affections,” she said. “Some people say there is no real love in Shenzhen. People are too busy with earning money to exist.”
She sounded a lot older than the student I remembered. After our phone conversations, I often found myself wondering how any young person could find her way in Shenzhen, or in any of the other boomtowns. The anonymity was unsettling: millions of faceless migrants heading south. It seemed inevitable that a young woman like Emily would lose her way.
IN THE SPRING, a man named Zhu Yunfeng came to work at the jewelry factory. He had been trained as a mold maker, and at his previous job he had miscalculated the weight of a metal part. Along with three other workers, he tried to lift the part, but it slipped. Zhu Yunfeng let go. The other workers did not, and they lost some of their fingers. The injured laborers were promised compensation, and Zhu Yunfeng wasn’t blamed for the accident, but nevertheless he decided to leave the job. Seeing the maimed workers around the plant made him feel uncomfortable.
Emily didn’t take much notice of Zhu Yunfeng when he first arrived in March of that year. He was quiet and there wasn’t much about his appearance that initially caught her eye. He was of average height, with thick black hair, and his shoulders were broad from working with the molds. He wasn’t handsome. But over time, Emily began to notice him more. She liked the way he walked—there was confidence in his gait.
Two months later, small gifts started appearing in her desk drawer. She received two dolls and a small figurine of a sheep. She didn’t ask who had put them there.
In June, Emily and Zhu Yunfeng were out with their co-workers and somehow found themselves walking alone in the local park. She didn’t know how they had become separated from the group. Suddenly, she felt afraid; things were happening too fast. She was twenty-two years old. He was twenty-six.
“I don’t want to walk with you,” she said.
“Who do you want to walk with?” he asked.
“I don’t want to walk with anybody!”
They returned to the factory. Months later, Zhu Yunfeng would tell her that that was the moment when he knew there was a chance of success. He could see that she hadn’t made up her mind yet.
The factory had fifty employees. The Taiwanese boss told the workers openly that the only reason he had come to mainland China was because of the cheap labor. The workers didn’t like their boss very much. Some of them made as little as one yuan an hour, or twelve cents, which meant that they had to work overtime to earn a decent income. When describing the boss, they often used the same two words that many workers in Shenzhen used to describe Taiwanese owners: stingy and lecherous. But the jewelry factory boss wasn’t as bad as many of the others, and conditions at the plant were better than the average “beyond the gates” factory. The workers had Sundays off, and during the week they were allowed to leave after work hours, although everybody had to be back in the dormitory in time for curfew. Curfew was eleven or twelve o’clock at night, depending on the boss’s whim.
The dormitory occupied the top two floors of a six-story building. There were four to ten workers to a room. It was a “three-in-one” factory—production, warehousing, and living quarters were combined into one structure. This arrangement was illegal in China, and the workers knew it, just as they knew that some of the production material stored on the ground floor was extremely flammable. What’s more, an electrician had made an inspection, during which he told Emily and the other secretaries that the building had faulty wiring. Afterward, Emily mapped out an escape route for herself. If a fire happened to break out at night, she intended to run to the dormitory’s sixth-floor balcony and jump across to the roof of the building next door. That was the extent of her plan—it was pointless to complain to anybody about the violations. There were
many three-in-one factories beyond the gates, and workers couldn’t do anything about it. All of them were far from home.
One Saturday night in October, Zhu Yunfeng took Emily’s hand while they were crossing the road. Her heart leaped up in her chest. Zhu Yunfeng held on tightly.
“I’m too nervous,” she said, once they had reached the other side of the street. “I don’t want it to be like this.”
“What’s wrong?” he said. “Haven’t you ever done this before?”
“I have,” she said. “But I’m still scared.”
“It’s going to be like this in the future,” he said. “You should get used to it.”
Much later, when Emily told me the story, she couldn’t help laughing. And she made a certain gesture that was common to Chinese women, covering her mouth with her hand, as if she shouldn’t take too much pleasure in the memory.
EVERY SIX MONTHS, I took the train down to Shenzhen. In China, official journalist visas required a great deal of paperwork—with the support of a sponsoring publication, you had to apply for a bureau license and a journalist card. These were things that I still lacked, and so twice a year I crossed into Hong Kong, where a travel agency sold six-month multi-entry business visas for fifty dollars, no questions asked. That became my migratory routine: whenever summer turned to fall, or winter to spring, it was time for me to head south once more.
I made my first visa run in April of 1999. The train journey was pleasant; I liked watching the dry northern plains give way to the lushness of the south. In Hong Kong, it took less than a day to process the new document, and then I crossed the land border back into Shenzhen. I caught a bus out to the satellite city of Longhua, where Emily’s factory was located. She had told me to meet her at the local McDonald’s, which was the only Western restaurant in town. When I arrived, she was already out in front, standing next to the statue of Uncle McDonald. She had asked for a day’s vacation from the factory.
Two years had passed since we’d last met, but she looked much the same. She wore a simple blue silk dress, and her hair was tied back; she smiled and shook my hand, the way she knew Americans did. We spoke mostly in Chinese—she told me that she felt more comfortable if we talked in her native tongue. Her student shyness had disappeared; she was the guide now, steering me briskly through town to another bus stop, where we caught a ride to the gates of the Special Economic Zone. Uniformed guards at the fence checked our IDs—my passport, her border pass—and then the highway led us into the heart of the city.
A year earlier, when I was still in the Peace Corps, Adam Meier had visited Emily in Shenzhen. He told me that the highlight of his southern tour was the Opium War Museum, which was located on the coast nearby. To reach the museum, one had to hire a ride on a minibike; to hire the minibike, one had to negotiate with an entire pack of drivers. The pack was vicious and to them a foreigner was like a chunk of raw meat dropped bleeding onto the road. Dealing with the minibike drivers took half an hour, and it helped Adam get warmed up for the museum, which consisted of a series of “Living History” displays. One display featured a foreign warship manned by wax foreign devils who were using military force to wrest Hong Kong from China. Somehow, Adam became entangled in Living History, and a number of Chinese tourists were startled to see a flesh-and-blood foreign devil jump out from within the bowels of the warship. Emily had always appreciated her foreign teachers’ sense of humor, and she generally liked it when we teased her. Nevertheless, Adam’s role in Living History had tested the poor girl’s patience.
Riding the bus into Shenzhen, she asked me what I most wanted to see.
“I want to go to the Opium War Museum,” I said.
“I’m not going back there,” she said.
“Mr. Meier really enjoyed it,” I said. “He told me I should go. We can take a minibike.”
But Emily was a lot tougher than I had remembered. She quickly narrowed our tourist options to three local theme parks: the Safari Park Shenzhen, which was billed as “interactive”; the China Folk Culture Village, where you could see every single ethnic minority in China dressed in their appropriate traditional costume; or Splendid China, which featured small-scale models of famous sites throughout the country. In the end, I left the decision to her. I had a strong intimation that regardless we were going to see yuppie Chinese entertainment at its worst.
She chose the Safari Park. The “interactive” description turned out to be accurate in the sense that you were allowed to feed the animals. Tourists fed the animals a lot of things—carrots, nuts, celery—and after the snacks were gone, they fed them the paper bags in which they had been packaged. Everywhere in the park, salespeople hawked one-yuan bags of food. They must have been working on commission, because they were almost as aggressive as the Opium War minibike gang. Only one yuan, the salespeople called out. Feed the deer. One yuan. Feed the deer. One yuan. And the deer, like every other animal in the park, staggered around looking glassy-eyed and bloated.
At Monkey Hill, the salespeople turned to threats. If you don’t feed the monkeys, one man said, they will attack you. Monkey Hill is a dangerous place without a one-yuan bag of carrots. Feed the monkeys. One yuan. The monkeys must be fed.
Emily was about to buy some carrots, but I stopped her. “Don’t you want to see what happens if we don’t feed them?” I said, and then she cocked her head and grinned. Sure enough, one of the monkeys tried to snatch Emily’s purse, and I had to hold tightly onto my baseball cap. The salesman gave us a triumphant look as we left.
By the time we reached the crocodile pond, there was only one duck left. He was crammed into a tiny cage, and he stared straight ahead, as if avoiding eye contact, the way I always do when I go through customs at an airport. The second-to-last duck had just been thrown in and the crocodiles were still tearing at the pieces. It cost twenty-five yuan per bird. I reached for my wallet.
“I don’t want to throw the duck to the crocodiles,” Emily said.
“You don’t have to throw it,” I said. “The worker will throw it. And he doesn’t throw it to the crocodiles; he just throws it into the water.”
“I don’t like those animals,” she said. “I don’t want to feed them. You didn’t feed any of the other animals.”
“The crocodiles are friendly,” I said. “Look, that one is smiling.”
In the pond, one of the crocodiles had grabbed some pieces of the second-to-last duck and now he reared out of the water with feathers in his jaws.
“That’s just the way their mouths are,” Emily said.
Patiently, I tried to reason with her. I explained that it is cruel to keep a duck in a cage, especially in a Safari Park dedicated to Wild Animals. This is simply what Wild Animals do: they enter Dangerous Situations, and some Survive and others Do Not. And even if the duck Does Not it’s not as if we are actually, physically, personally killing the duck. We never touch the duck at all; we just hand twenty-five yuan to a man. Three dollars—small price to pay for a duck’s freedom.
Emily pointed out that the bird’s wings had been clipped. Well, I said, he can still swim to shore and then walk away. Ducks can actually walk very quickly when they put their minds to it. And who knows, maybe they didn’t clip his wings right; maybe he’ll surprise us and fly away to freedom in a neighboring shoe factory. We won’t know until we try.
After a while, my logic became even more desperate. I told her that crocodiles are rare, practically endangered, and they die if they aren’t fed. Emily countered by saying that these crocodiles weren’t going to starve anytime soon, and although I didn’t want to admit it, she was obviously right. The crocodiles looked like they were about to explode. Even the second-to-last duck had been torn apart rather than eaten. Pieces of him floated near the bank.
Finally, I was reduced to the world’s weakest moral argument: If we don’t throw this duck to the crocodiles, then somebody else will do it. We’re no better or worse—all of us are just laobaixing, average people. We are human beings, and it is p
erfectly human to enjoy a fair battle between a pond full of crocodiles and a duck with clipped wings. Anyway, what makes this particular duck so special? Why should he be treated differently from his comrades? On and on—but Emily was as tough as she had been about the Opium War Museum, and finally we left the duck in his cage.
Our safari experience ended with the Grand Meeting of One Hundred Animals, a parade that was held daily in the park’s stadium. Continuing the interactive theme, the procession involved both animals and humans. A young woman wearing a swan costume led a line of trained swans that defecated as they waddled down the stadium’s dirt track. She was followed by other women dressed as parrots, with real parrots on their shoulders. After that, men rode elephants and ostriches. One ostrich threw his jockey; the man sprinted away, chased by the furious bird, and the crowd cheered.
The entertainment culminated with a bear parade. There were bears in costumes, bears on bicycles, bears staggering drunkenly on their hind legs. A bear wedding was held. The guest bears appeared first, pushing carts with enormous wood-and-paint models of wedding gifts of the new economy: a refrigerator, a television, a giant bottle of Great Wall wine. The happy couple came last. One bear wore a suit, the other a dress; they appeared on top of a float with a human trainer. There was a short ceremony during which the bears rose on their hind legs, to make their vows, and then the trainer nudged them into the float’s bridal chamber. The man carried a whip. It was like a shotgun wedding. The chamber’s red door was decorated with the gold character for “double happiness.” Almost all of the spectators at the park were young upper-class Chinese. Somebody told me that at night in that same stadium they raced greyhounds.
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