Oracle Bones

by Peter Hessler

  “So he started Dacheng by himself,” Mr. Wang told me. “He did it as revenge. And he didn’t call it Dragon Junior—he called it Dacheng instead.”

  I was growing more interested in meeting Mr. Xu. I wanted to see exactly what kind of clearheaded, cold-hearted, calculating man would start a cornstarch plant as revenge against his enemies.

  “It’s always like that with politics,” Mr. Wang continued. “You always get fucked by your deputies. That’s politics. If you want to be president, you have to fuck up your competition. If you’re a mild, nice guy, then you’ll get moved out. They fuck you.”

  Wim and Kees jumped every time Mr. Wang used the word “fuck.” Mr. Wang’s English was excellent, but he was one of those foreigners who had learned the language without becoming aware of what happens when you use the word “fuck” three times in one paragraph. What happens is that Dutch people jump.

  He was probably about to use it again when Mark telephoned.

  “Has the director arrived yet?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Some factory guy just got angry at me for taking pictures.”

  “What was the problem?”

  “I was taking pictures of workers with dust on their faces and he didn’t like that. He started yelling at me and he told me to leave. I explained and finally he left me alone.”

  “Did he think you were trying to make the factory look bad?”

  “Maybe,” Mark said. “Or maybe they thought I was a spy from another factory.”

  I considered telling Mark about the blood feud with Yellow Dragon, but it was too complicated. I figured that Mark could take care of himself. I promised to call when Mr. Xu arrived.

  I wanted to learn more about Mr. Wang’s role in the State Economic Commission, but he waved off my question. There was something else that interested him.

  “When you interviewed that worker this morning, what did he say when you asked him to compare the Dorr-Oliver and Westfalia machines?”

  For an instant I was caught off-guard, and then I answered: “He said they were basically the same.”

  “What did he say the difference is?”

  I answered brightly, “He told me that the Dorr-Oliver machines load from the bottom while Westfalia loads from the top.”

  “No, no, no.” Mr. Wang was growing impatient. “Which one did he say was better?”

  “He said they were about the same.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Mr. Wang said. “He told you that the Westfalia machines were better, didn’t he?”

  I considered lying, but I realized that I was trapped, and so was the worker.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s what he told me. But he said it wasn’t a big difference.”

  Now Wim and Kees appeared interested. Mr. Wang looked at me triumphantly.

  “You know what?” he said. “He’s right!”

  Nobody said anything. Mr. Wang grinned.

  “Our machines aren’t designed as well as the Westfalia centrifuges,” he said. “Those machines are better.”

  The two Dutchmen stared at the floor.

  “That’s important for us to know,” Mr. Wang said. “How can we possibly do business if we don’t know that our product is inferior?”

  The room was dead silent. In my mind, I repeated his question twice over, but still I couldn’t figure out how you could possibly answer it. It was one of the most intelligent questions I had heard in a long time.

  “Everybody always says that their product is the best,” said Mr. Wang. “They have to talk about how much better they are than the competition, and usually they believe it. But the truth is that it’s much easier once you realize that your product is inferior. Then you can focus on just doing business!”

  Now I realized what kind of work Mr. Wang had done for the State Economic Commission. Whenever I met people like him, I understood why the transition from Communism to a market economy had been handled so well by many Chinese.

  The Dutch men seemed uncomfortable until Mr. Wang changed the subject. He talked about modified starch and how it is different from normal, unmodified starch. The distinction was subtle and I had difficulty grasping it; at last Wim spoke up. He wanted to clarify things. “Basically, modified starch is the same material as crude oil,” he said. “It’s a carbohydrate.”

  MARK FINALLY FINISHED with the pile of corn. He came inside the office, where he negotiated with Mr. Wang about the photograph of Mr. Xu, the director. The negotiations were not simple.

  Mr. Wang wanted the director to be photographed in his office. He pointed to the wall, which prominently displayed framed copies of calligraphy by Li Peng and Zhou Jiqiu, both of whom had visited Dacheng. Li Peng was the former premier who had announced the official decree of martial law during the demonstrations of 1989. I had no idea who Zhou Jiqiu was, but Mr. Wang assured me that he was an important official. Zhou Jiqiu’s calligraphy read: “The Brilliant Future of Industrial Corn Production.” Li Peng’s calligraphy read: “The Base of China’s Changchun Corn Production.” All across China, Li Peng was famous for having lousy calligraphy.

  Mr. Wang wanted Mr. Xu to be photographed with the calligraphy in the background. Mark saw his cover shot evaporating.

  “The light’s bad in here,” he said. “It’s better in the factory, and I can take a picture of him in front of the Dorr-Oliver machines.”

  “You can’t do that!” Mr. Wang exclaimed. “He’ll never agree to that! You can’t drag the chairman of such a huge company anywhere you wish! It’s politics—it’s not that simple!”

  Mark was growing visibly frustrated. “Well, then I’ll just have to use a photo of a common worker,” he said. “Do you think he’ll be happy if there’s a common worker on the cover of the magazine?”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that,” Mr. Wang warned. “With a high official it’s not good to use a photo of somebody below him, especially not a common worker. You have to put the highest official on the cover!”

  They argued for a while. Each had his own obsession: Mark worried about lighting and Mr. Wang worried about politics. It seemed that these forces were mutually exclusive, at least until the moment when Mr. Xu walked in. Everybody stood up. As if the argument had never taken place, Mr. Wang asked directly if Mr. Xu would accompany us to the factory to have his photograph taken next to the Dorr-Oliver machines. Without hesitating, Mr. Xu agreed.

  We went outside. It was cold, and empty plastic bags blew across the factory grounds. You could see Mark’s pile of corn in the distance. It was enormous. We walked into the machine room.

  Mark was careful to keep the Westfalia machines out of the frame. Mr. Xu was barely over five feet tall and he wore a gray checked suit. He chuckled proudly while the picture was taken. He was fifty-seven years old.

  Afterward, we returned to his office, where I interviewed him. He gave me his card, which listed his two main positions: vice-secretary-general of the Municipal People’s Government of Changchun, and general director of the Changchun Corn Industry Development Zone. The development zone had been established after the Shenzhen model.

  I asked Mr. Xu how things had changed since the 1980s, when he started Yellow Dragon.

  “The biggest problem was administrative,” he said. “In those days, I had to go through so many departments. And everything had to be approved by the state council. But now the approval system has been decentralized. I just have to go through the Changchun municipality—and there I can basically approve it myself, because I’m the vice-secretary-general. As long as I put my signature on the applications, the other departments will also approve.”

  Mr. Xu beamed after giving this explanation. I wrote it down.

  He expounded on how much easier it was now that he could give official approval for the business projects. That cleared up a lot of hassles, and he was hoping to quadruple Dacheng’s cornstarch production. Already they were making half a million tons a year. They benefited from the falling price of corn, which would drop even more af
ter China joined the WTO. Mr. Xu smiled at the thought of the future. At the end of the interview, he remembered one more thing.

  “I also want to add processing plants to make enriched starch,” he said. “And I hope that through these new industries we can create job opportunities for the peasants who might have trouble because of the lower corn prices.”

  I WROTE THE story in two hours. The article was one thousand words long, and I stuffed it with as many statistics as possible. I didn’t mention how the Dorr-Oliver machines sometimes jammed up, or the feud between Yellow Dragon and Dacheng, or how Mr. Xu’s government position facilitated the factory expansion. In Manchuria, I had learned one important fact about propaganda: the key information isn’t what you put in, but what you leave out.

  A couple of weeks later, a woman from the magazine told Mark that they weren’t going to use the picture of Mr. Xu for the cover. Instead, they wanted to publish the photograph of Mr. Guo, the man who had spent six years researching cigarette filters. They just had to put him on the cover, the woman said, because he had such a beautiful smile.

  6

  Hollywood

  April 25, 2000

  OVER THE WINTER, POLAT ARRANGED FOR ME TO HAVE A HOLLYWOOD VIP card. In cold weather, we couldn’t sit on the outdoor platform at the small Uighur restaurant, and so our Yabaolu routine shifted. Sometimes we ate at Hollywood, which was a nightclub as well as a restaurant; the VIP card meant that they waived the cover charge. Polat knew the manager—he seemed to know the managers at all the Yabaolu clubs.

  The Hollywood menu was printed in Russian as well as Chinese, and we almost always ordered the same thing: chicken Kiev for me, steak for Polat. He liked to get there early on weekend nights, so we could have a slow meal and watch the place steadily fill with people. Everybody who entered the club passed beneath an enormous statue of King Kong that loomed above the doorway. Inside, the place had been decorated as an imitation of the Planet Hollywood chain. Fake movie paraphernalia was displayed in glass cases, complete with detailed labels: a silver sheriff’s badge that had supposedly been used in Sidekicks (Warner Brothers, 1991); a black cape with red lining (Dracula, Castle Rock, 1995), a leather whip (Bullwhip, Columbia, 1958). Just inside the door, encased in a huge glass tube, was a life-size statue of Arnold Schwarzenegger dressed as the Terminator. The statue, like many of the movie objects, had been so cheaply made that it was barely recognizable. The place felt like a museum dedicated to the concept of jiade: an exhibition whose artifacts reminded you how far you had slipped from reality. In a neighborhood of knockoffs, Hollywood was the biggest fake of them all.

  It was also a prime hangout for Russian prostitutes in Yabaolu. Whenever Polat and I went there for dinner, I kept one eye on the progress of the evening’s business. By eight o’clock, the women started to filter in; an hour later, potential customers arrived. Most were small-time Chinese businessmen, the type of men who might have some money but not much education. They wore cheap Buddhist beads on their wrists for good luck, and invariably they clutched the fake leather money bags that were standard for traders. Elsewhere in the city, such men tended to be loud—barking into cell phones, shouting orders at waitresses. But the presence of all those white women in Hollywood left them subdued. The Chinese men stayed in packs, talking in low voices, fiddling with their phones. Whenever a peroxide blonde walked past, the fidgeting increased. Sometimes, I’d watch a man work himself up to action: pick up the phone, put down the phone; light a cigarette, put down the lighter. The cycle gained speed—phone up, phone down; phone up, phone down—until finally he’d rise, walk across the room, and speak directly to a woman. And then I’d glance at my own phone, or turn back to the conversation with Polat, suddenly conscious of my voyeurism.

  INCREASINGLY, POLAT TALKED about going to America. He’d mention the possibility of studying abroad, or finding some kind of job that would take him across the Pacific. For a spell, he was interested in Canada, because somebody told him that immigration was easy in Quebec, but then he decided that he didn’t want to learn French. Our Hollywood discussions always returned to the same place: the United States.

  Polat’s desire to go there mystified me. He spoke no English, and I couldn’t imagine how he’d qualify as a student or a businessman; the U.S. embassy would never give a tourist visa to somebody who worked as a middleman in Yabaolu. He had a wife back in Xinjiang, although he rarely spoke of her, and I sensed that there were complications with the relationship. He told me that he didn’t want to bring her to a place like Yabaolu. They didn’t have children, and I had the impression that the couple hadn’t spent much time together. In China, that sort of situation wasn’t unusual, especially when migration was involved.

  I wondered if Polat’s talk about America was just a reflection of his instability, but I also worried about possible misperceptions of the United States. In China, people who had never been to America tended to take extreme views, and often both sides were equally inaccurate. I met many Chinese who believed that America was evil incarnate, but I also met others who had complete faith in the wealth, opportunity, and freedom of the United States. In conversations, I often tried gently to push people away from both extremes, but it was difficult without any context. America was an idea, not a place.

  In a few parts of China, certain concepts about America had become so deeply ingrained that people would do almost anything to emigrate. In January of that year, three Chinese men died in a shipping container en route to Seattle. Along with other illegal immigrants, the men had come from Fujian province, in the southeast, which was famous for its “snakeheads”—people smugglers who arranged passage across the Pacific.

  After the deaths, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer hired me to write a series about the snakeheads. For most of a week, I traveled along the coast near the city of Fuzhou. On an island called Langqi, I found the family of one of the Seattle survivors; the man was in detention, awaiting a hearing with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Invariably, such immigrants claimed political asylum, although in fact most had left for economic reasons. In one of the Fujianese villages, I randomly met a young man who told me that he had spent four months in a detention center, in Jamaica, New York, before being denied asylum. The snakeheads generally charged between thirty and fifty thousand dollars to arrange transport, and usually the emigrants’ debt ensured that they would spend years as indentured servants in Chinatown restaurants or sweatshops.

  It might have been understandable in a poor part of the country, but Fujian was far better off than the average province. Nevertheless, many Fujianese weren’t satisfied with a good life by Chinese standards. An entire industry had sprouted to support the local version of the American dream: snakeheads, shady visa services, pre-emigration English lessons. In the small village of Tantou, three private English schools offered courses such as “Restaurant English,” “Life English,” and “English for Leaving the Country.” I saw one advertisement for a class that was simply called “Menu.” Another sign promised: FOR THE MONEY YOU’LL MAKE IN A DAY AND A HALF WORKING IN AMERICA, YOU CAN STUDY A FULL SEMESTER OF “RESTAURANT ENGLISH.” One school offered a course in Cantonese, because that was the dominant dialect in some of the Chinatown restaurant districts. The Fujianese were studying another Chinese language so they could work illegally in America.

  A number of locals had made the trip, worked hard, and eventually became the owners of restaurants or some other business in the States. They remitted money to family members back in Fujian, who built enormous mansions in the villages. These structures tended to be narrow and vertical; they might be only three rooms wide but five stories tall. Usually they were faced with white tile, and often they had big glass windows in the shade of green that was so common in modern Chinese construction. That color always made me think of The Great Gatsby—the glow at the end of Daisy’s dock.

  But in Fujian, it was like glimpsing light that had taken years to cross a galaxy. Some of these success stories had bel
onged to an earlier generation, when China’s economy didn’t provide much opportunity. In truth, nowadays the Fujianese might be better off staying at home; even if the immediate dollar figures were higher in the States, they’d probably be happier and have better long-term prospects in China. But the people kept seeing the mansions, and they kept leaving. They were chasing a star that might be dead by the time they got there.

  In Tantou, I stopped at one brand-new six-story building whose gateway was inscribed with gold characters: . The phrase meant: “Garden of Virtue and Prestige.” Inside, I met an old woman who proudly told me that she had four children in America; one daughter ran a hotel. I asked where the hotel was located, and the old woman slowly inscribed five English words into my notebook. She didn’t speak the language, and her handwriting had the odd angles of somebody who has memorized shapes rather than words. Nevertheless, she made only one mistake:

  Vallege Inn Edison New Jersey

  WHENEVER POLAT AND I had our Hollywood conversations, I mentioned the Fujianese, because I worried that he might overestimate the economic opportunity in the United States. And I knew that business in Yabaolu was slowly dying. In the past, there had been no shortage of traders from Russia and Central Asia, and many of them acquired visas by joining “tour groups” that stayed for a week. Special agencies arranged the trips; it was much easier to go to China as a tourist than as a businessperson. I imagined the charter flights that set off from Moscow, packed with hard-faced women and heavyset men with vodka-rimmed eyes. They were jiade vacationers—bad imitations of people going off on a holiday.

  But by the end of 1999, the number of Russians and Central Asians in Yabaolu was dropping. Polat sometimes described these changes in the language of currency movement: he told me that the Kazak tenge had lost a third of its value, and most of his old customers from Almaty were staying at home. It was the same with the Uzbeks, the Kyrgyz, the Tatars. Polat’s last big clothing deal had been in September of 1999, when he arranged for the sale of three thousand pairs of Guangzhou-made blue jeans to a Kazak. Around the same time, he had helped some Russians buy a shipment of jiade Nokia cell phone batteries (they’d function for only fifteen days, he told me). After those sales, Polat’s work as a middleman was essentially finished.