I loved listening to her, and here’s some of what I learned: she’d grown up, the youngest of seven children, in the province of Hunan, about forty miles from its capital city of Changsha, where, along with her parents, brothers, and sisters, she lived and worked on a collective rice farm. Her father, Yu-lin Liu, had himself been born in the city of Changsha, where his father, Yuan-sou Liu, had been a teacher and an acting school principal. Yu-lin Liu had been raised in a large house with many brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. A gifted student, he’d attended the university in Changsha for three years before being informed upon by a fellow student for a casual remark he’d made about Chairman Mao when he and the student were spending an afternoon together in a teahouse. Yu-lin Liu was convicted of ‘impure thoughts,’ and sent to a stone quarry on an island in Taihu Lake, in Jiangsu province, where he served for seven years as part of a labor-reform brigade.
At the time of his sentencing, he was twenty-four years old and had been married to Jin-gen’s mother, Yuan-ling, for six years. Like Yu-lin Liu, Yuan-ling came from an educated family, and she and Yu-lin Liu had had six children, two boys and four girls. By the time Yu-lin returned from the labor camp in 1984, the one-child-per-family law was in effect, and when Jin-gen was born a year later, they claimed she was the daughter of Si-hui, a childless aunt who lived with Yu-lin Liu and Yuan-ling in the commune.
As soon as Jin-gen could walk and talk, her father and mother began teaching her to read and to write. Because she was a girl, along with the risk that the truth of her birth would be uncovered (and with it, her father and grandfather’s criminal records), they were certain Jin-gen would never be admitted to a university, and so, when she was fifteen, the family sent her and an older sister, Wei-li, to Guangzhou—the former Canton—in the province of Guangdong, where hundreds of clothing manufacturers had been setting up factories. The plan, one that had worked for Jin-gen’s oldest sister, Yu-mei, was for her to find work there and, by the force of her beauty, intelligence, and industriousness, to attract a sponsor, either Chinese or foreign (and preferably American or Dutch), who might bring her to one of the great international cities—Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Jakarta, or Singapore—where she could earn more than she would on the rice farm or in a factory, and where she might eventually come to a better life.
Like her sisters before her, Jin-gen lied about her age, and arrived in Guangzhou with documents, secured from a neighbor on the commune, that validated the lies. On her third day in Guangzhou, she found work in an American factory that made children’s dresses, and though the work was demanding, it was somewhat less exhausting than work in the rice fields had been. From conversations with other women she learned she’d been lucky in this first job—that they preferred working in American factories because conditions there were usually cleaner, and more humane, than they were in factories run by companies from other nations. What American firms such as Nike and Gap had discovered—this confirmed what Nick told me at our reunion—was that the better the working conditions and the happier the workers, the more efficient and productive the factories, and the more reliable its products.
Every American company, from the smallest to the largest (as was true in Singapore), had to have a local partner in order to be able to do business, and the American companies did what they could, bribes included, to keep Chinese officials from shutting them down for violations of laws regarding working conditions. Still, the local Chinese officials and inspectors were, to Jin-gen’s surprise, less feared by the American businessmen than their own American inspectors, who didn’t hesitate to give pink slips to anyone found violating even the most minor technicalities.
In the factory, Jin-gen and her sister started out trimming and cutting threads from hems, linings, and buttonholes. Wei-li, more adept at these tasks than Jin-gen, was soon working at a sewing machine, stitching in labels. A short while later, Jin-gen, favored by one of the local Chinese foremen, became a tea-and-water girl, walking the factory floor all day and dispensing tea and water to workers from a large two-barreled aluminum canteen on her back. She lived with the Chinese foreman, whose status allowed him his own small room so that—a welcome perk—Jin-gen didn’t have to spend her nights in the factory itself, where hundreds of families, many with infants and children, slept on the floor.
What surprised me were not Jin-gen’s descriptions of how relentlessly hard, boring, and dis-spiriting the work was—how little life for workers existed beyond work itself (in Amherst, Nick had given me graphic, first-hand reports on this)—but the pride she took in the factories and their productivity. “We are machines, you see,” she kept saying (based on my experience, I’d respond, she was anything but a machine). “But we are machines, Charlie,” she’d insist. “We are machines and that is why we are great—China, not India!—and why the world will have to reckon with us before all others. We—the workers!—are cogs in wheels, wires in motors, fuel for electricity, chips for computers, do you see? We are machines! That is what we are—and that is why we are the future…”
The children’s dress factory, which employed fewer than five hundred women, could, she boasted, turn out more than twelve thousand dresses in a day. And a jewelry factory where she worked after this (transferred there, the foreman took her with him), could produce ten thousand pairs of earrings by noon, and could do this from a new design given to them at the start of the workday.
There seemed no disgrace, despite her age, to being the companion of the Chinese foreman. Rather the opposite, for she had privileges that made her the envy of other women, not the least of which was her ability to send money to her family with a reasonable assurance it would get there.
Her father, I learned, was not the only member of her family to have been imprisoned. Her grandfather had spent six years in a labor camp, and on our fourth night together, while we ate in a makeshift tent on the outskirts of the city where a Chinese man and his wife cooked for us (they lived behind a curtain that separated the kitchen and small eating area from their sleeping quarters), Jin-gen told me her grandfather’s story.
Before his imprisonment, her grandfather had been the acting principal at a school in Changsha, and he had hoped some day to be made principal of the school, a school he himself had attended. The local Communist Party chief, however, was also determined to become principal of the school, and Jin-gen’s grandfather and the party chief became fierce rivals. In 1968, two years after Mao declared a Cultural Revolution for China, her grandfather was declared a Rightist, and sentenced to six years in a coal mine being used as a forced labor camp. Early in his fourth year in the camp—during the first three he’d been forbidden to write or receive letters—he was, for having protested his treatment by a guard, placed in solitary confinement, at which time, the guard took pleasure in reminding him of what Chairman Mao had said: that a revolution was not a dinner party.
In despair, he decided to take his own life by tearing apart his shirt and trousers and braiding them into a rope he attached to an overhead beam, and he was about to hang himself when he heard a deep sigh come from an adjoining cell. He put his ear to the wall, and heard the wailing of another prisoner. He thought he recognized the voice, listened more intently and soon realized that the man in the adjoining cell was his rival, the local party chief, who was proclaiming that he too was going to kill himself.
In that moment, Jin-gen’s grandfather decided to postpone his own suicide, reasoning, as he later explained to Jin-gen’s father, that if the party chief killed himself, and if he survived his imprisonment, and if the political winds shifted direction, he would have lost his major rival for the position of principal.
The party chief, however, informed by a guard that they were expecting Jin-gen’s grandfather to commit suicide, also decided not to kill himself so that, upon his release from the camp, he might have a clear path to becoming principal. The result was that both men survived their incarcerations. Three years after Jin-gen was born, in 1989, her grandfather died of th
roat cancer. Neither he nor the party chief ever became principal of the school.
Jin-gen’s father had told her the story, but had never spoken in any detail of the torture either he or her grandfather suffered. What she did tell me, however—because, she said, she wanted me to have some small sense of what these years were like for Chinese families such as hers—was that while her father was working in the stone quarry, he several times watched men place their legs on railroad tracks used to carry carloads of stone down from the high quarry to a stone-breaking area below. In this way, they hoped to lose one or both legs and, if they survived, to have the possibility of spending the rest of their lives in a home for invalids. Caution, however, was required, for if a guard saw a prisoner preparing to amputate a leg in this manner, the man would be taken away and summarily executed.
What Jin-gen found as remarkable as the events by which her grandfather and the party chief survived was that either of them had survived at all. Her own survival was less mysterious.
While she was working in the jewelry factory, the foreman introduced her to an American supervisor, Marty Garfunkel, a married man with a wife and three children in Dedham, North Carolina, who took her with him to Dongguan, a city of more than six million people that was situated a short distance from Guangzhou, and had become a center of toy manufacturing. There, Jin-gen lived with Marty and worked in a factory painting cast-iron airplanes, tanks, and soldiers. They stayed in Dongguan for nine months, until her factory was shut down because inspectors discovered it was using lead paint, at which point Marty brought her with him to Hong Kong, where he got her a job as hostess in an exclusive men’s club.
Two months after they arrived in Hong Kong, Marty announced that he’d be returning to the States. Before his departure, he introduced her to a heavy-set man in his sixties who liked to call himself Charles Atlas (his real name, she discovered by looking at his passport while he was asleep one night, was Joe Wanczyk), and who, when drunk and physically abusive, would keep repeating, “I was once a ninety-eight-pound weakling, sweetheart… I was once a ninety-eight-pound weakling, can you believe it?… I was once a ninety-eight-pound weakling…” the meaning of which Jin-gen didn’t understand until one of her American clients explained it to her.
Joe Wancyzk traded in currencies, and spent most of his days in his hotel suite, smoking and following exchange rates on his computer. He made large profits by taking advantage of small discrepancies in the rise and fall of currencies. He also traded in women, providing companions for businessmen (primarily Japanese, American, and Indonesian) who were in Hong Kong for limited periods of time.
Jin-gen learned that several women who worked at the club had been able to persuade their American clients to arrange jobs for them in the United States as au pairs (American families that had adopted Chinese children were eager and willing, they’d learned, to pay a premium to obtain Chinese au pairs), and when she’d been with Joe for nearly a year and he informed her he’d be returning to New York sometime soon, she asked if he would get her a job with a family in America. To her surprise, he liked the idea, and said he’d see what he could do, provided that if he succeeded, she would find ways on her days off and vacations to service clients he sent her way.
At this point, she explained, her bad luck became her good luck. As Joe’s departure grew near—he’d been living in Hong Kong for eight years and, overweight and often short of breath, had become increasingly anxious about his health—he also became increasingly abusive, which made her job difficult, since men—this was particularly true of the Japanese—did not like their women to have any bruises or blemishes. Make-up, she said, only went so far, and the more Joe beat her, the less desirable she became to his clients.
This—we were lying in bed before dawn on Sunday morning when she gave me the news—was when she met Nick.
“You knew Nick in Hong Kong?!”
“Yes.”
“Then the two of you were…?”
She put a hand over my mouth.
“Shh,” she said, and pulled my head down to her chest. Though the news that she’d known Nick in Hong Kong surprised me, what she said next astonished. “We were good friends only,” Jin-gen stated, “and not in ways I was with other men, but that does not matter, Charlie, because what you must know first and last and always is that Nick is one of the kindest human beings who has ever lived.”
“Nick?!” I exclaimed, and started to sit up. “Look. Nick’s many things, and he’s been a good friend to me, but…”
“Shh,” she said again. “Listen to me. I am not the only woman to whom Nick has been kind. I can introduce you to others whose lives have been saved by him. Saved, Charlie! Can you understand? If not for him, we…”
Then she began to weep, and the next thing I knew I was holding her to my chest, and telling her it was okay, that I was listening, that I wanted to hear more, that I’d try to believe her.
But Nick? I thought to myself. Nick Falzetti?
When Nick and I hung out at the reunion, we’d exchanged stories of what we’d been doing since he and Trish had split, and he’d told me about working in the garment business in New York for a while—sales and marketing—and that he’d spent most of his time after that in the Far East, wheeling and dealing with clothing manufacturers, local businessmen, and with customs and tax officials. He’d started out with small firms that made their bundles in one place and then, when labor costs rose, took their businesses to the next place—India or Vietnam, Indonesia or Malaysia or the Philippines—wherever the cost of labor was cheaper.
Creative accounting was their specialty—how to hide profits, how not to pay bills or taxes, how to pay off people who had to be paid off, and how to stiff people less shrewd than they were. But for Nick, their most venal sin was that they were vulgar—true garmentos, he said, like guys he’d worked with in New York but without the blunt, no-nonsense New York style he loved—and once he figured out how things worked, he sought out people from companies that had contracts with bigger players—firms such as Macy’s, Wal-Mart, and T.J. Maxx—and hooked up with them.
The money, perks, and hours were about the same with the large firms as they’d been with the shlock companies, but working with the shlock companies had taken its toll, and for a guy who’d always prided himself on being fit, he found he was feeling sluggish too much of the time, especially during working hours, when he couldn’t stop daydreaming about being somewhere else. He was also drinking and whoring more, and the more he did, the more obsessed he became about getaways and about carving out a different life, so that when, at a resort in Borneo—in Sarawak, where he’d gone for a weekend of scuba-diving—he met a South African who owned several palm oil plantations and they hit it off, he’d asked the man to make him an offer he wouldn’t want to refuse.
“I’ve never been famous for what’s in here,” I remember Nick saying—tapping on his chest with his knuckles—“but it was the children who got to me. Seeing little kids—this was in the factories where I started out, not the more legit places—but seeing kids of two, three, and four years old sleeping in filth, and kids not much older working all day in mud up to their ankles, and then the way the mothers would stare at me with all their fucking pain—and with calculation equal to the pain: ‘Hey, if I look miserable enough, maybe you’ll give me some money, or a chit for an extra meal, or some medicine’—this got to me, and it got to me not when I was there, hip-deep in it, but when I was already gone and working for companies that didn’t allow the worst of these conditions.”
I remember Nick saying I probably wouldn’t believe him—that if he heard what he was saying he probably wouldn’t believe himself either, but that it was as if, after the fact—when he thought he was free of the glooms—some huge wave had risen up, knocked him down, and rolled over him.
He’d grabbed my wrist then and squeezed so hard I had to pry up one of his thumbs. “Sorry,” he said. “But you can’t know what it’s like to see people living in their o
wn puke and diarrhea, with women and older kids cleaning up the younger ones every morning so a foreman won’t kick them out. To see kids going around begging, some with no hands, or only two or three fingers, or one eye, or none, and having to wonder if they were born that way, or if that was just some ordinary part of getting with the program…”
I pressed my eyes closed, to get shut of Nick’s voice.
“Tell me what happened,” I said to Jin-gen.
“You will believe me then—about Nick?”
“I hope so,” I said, but even as I said the words, I was remembering that the whole time he was telling me about how much he felt for Asian kids on the other side of the world, he never said a word about his own son—about Gabe—and how he was doing. And in Singapore, when we’d been working together, our offices adjoining, though he talked about Trish once in a while—telling me he sent her money regularly, and reminding me about crazy stuff the three of us used to do together—he never mentioned Gabe.
“What I think,” Jin-gen said, “is that your friend Nick—our friend Nick—has more heart than appears on his sleeve. That is one of your expressions, yes?”
“Not quite, but I like it better the way it comes from your mouth.”
“Better? Better than what—better than the way your Shakespeare said it?”
“How’d you know it’s from Shakespeare?”
“Nick told me when I recited the words one time—he said I was quoting your Shakespeare.”
“As far as I know, Shakespeare hasn’t become an American yet.”
“I know that!” she said. “I am not a stupid, passive Chinese woman!”
“Hey, it was a joke,” I said, and added that I’d meant what I said as a compliment—that I preferred her way of phrasing it, and I went on to ask if she knew that the line was from Othello, and that it was spoken not by Othello but by Iago, and I added that my father told me that people found it surprising that a character famous for being devious and evil could have uttered a line most people thought of as revealing generous impulses.
The Other Side of the World Page 11
