Farther Away: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen

  “You should definitely keep them,” Miss Wang agreed.

  I was thinking of the trip I’d made to Oregon a month earlier. On the occasion of a major birthday of my brother’s, I’d finally gone with him to Bandon Dunes. I’d seen baskets of worried-looking puffins in the pro shop, and I’d butchered, with growing impatience, eighteen gorgeous golf holes while Bob was sinking putts that seemed to cross two county lines. To get to Bandon from Bob’s house, we’d taken Portland’s light-rail line to the airport. If you want to feel radiantly white, male, and leisured, you can hardly do better than to trouble an ethnically diverse crowd of working people to step around your golf bags during morning rush hour.

  I told David Xu that I wanted to make a present of my new clubs to him. He protested: “I’ve never in my life touched the gate of a golf course!” In the end, though, he had little choice but to accept. “It will help me remember you,” he said philosophically. “It will be a wonderful, colorful spice to my life.”

  Among thousands of recent postings on the website of the Jiangsu Wild Bird Society—based in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, which neighbors Shanghai—is a thread that began when a newcomer to the group, Xiaoxiaoge, posted bird pictures that he’d taken at a zoo and was roundly reprimanded for it. Xiaoxiaoge fired back:

  I never heard of any animal-protection organization expressing a negative opinion of zoos. . . . Aren’t so-called “wild animal preserves” just a place set up to “imprison” animals to protect them?

  He continued:

  Aren’t zoos the only place one can take pictures of birds with a simple camera from close up? Otherwise, you have to spend thousands [on camera equipment] to take pictures of birds, and then isn’t it like an upper-class activity? . . . These people get caught up in the pleasure of the birds’ beauty and cannot get out of it; they all get caught in the pleasure of finding a new species somewhere and cannot get out of it.

  If birdwatchers truly cared about birds, Xiaoxiaoge wrote, they would spend less energy on making pretty images and more time defending nature against human threats.

  In reply to Xiaoxiaoge, one poster pointed out that Nanjing’s very first birder had used

  an average set of binoculars, 200 yuan, to watch birds, and he became a nationally known expert. He insisted on using those binoculars for five years, until he finally traded them for new ones this year.

  Another poster took the opportunity to lament the profit motive at Chinese zoos:

  Go to Western zoos and you will realize that animals in real zoos have a much better life than in the wild. Recently, I’ve talked with people who’ve come back from overseas or friends from overseas, and I feel even more strongly that the gap in our country is: we never do a thing the way it should be done. Everything is some kind of transaction, just some self-centered transaction.

  And another poster wrote of his internal conflict:

  Personally, I don’t like zoos and I don’t like humans imprisoning animals. In my heart I want to smash the cages, but I don’t have the guts. Smashing them is definitely a crime.

  The longest, most patient, and most carefully reasoned response to Xiaoxiaoge’s provocations came from a poster who called himself asroma13 (an Italian soccer reference). Asroma13 acknowledged that zoos can be useful, especially for novices, if they’re well managed. He explained the difference between zoos and reserves: that what a reserve primarily protects is a place. He told Xiaoxiaoge that he, asroma13, had personally posted many photographs of “environmental destruction, bird catching, and other harmful phenomena,” but that this couldn’t be the only focus of the website. As for Xiaoxiaoge’s charges of self-indulgence, asroma13 acknowledged that not many people took up birding or bird photography out of a conservationist impulse, and yet most people who pursued the hobby did come to favor the protection of nature. Moreover, he wrote:

  If birdwatchers and bird photographers can’t indulge in the pleasures of beauty and of finding new species—if we can’t sigh with emotion at birds’ beauty—then where will we find the reasons and the passion to protect them?

  It was asroma13 who, two years earlier, at the age of twenty, had created the Jiangsu Wild Bird Society. In English, he called himself Shrike. I met up with him in Nanjing on a Sunday morning, and while we were riding in a cab to the Botanical Garden, on the city’s densely forested Purple Mountain, the car radio happened to air a news report about a flock of migrant swans that the society had observed on a lake south of Nanjing. Shrike had been feeding local editors a steady stream of bird news for the last two years. “If you can get one station or newspaper to run a story, all the others will get interested, too,” he said.

  Shrike was a tall, high-cheekboned, very young-looking student of biomedical engineering. He said he knew every detail of every bird species in Nanjing, and I believed him. On a cold gray day, in two very slow loops around the Botanical Garden—we were there for six hours—he induced an urban park to yield up thirty-five species. (We also encountered three feral cats near a trash dump, the only mammals I saw roaming free in my weeks in China.) Carrying a tripod-mounted camera like a small cross he bore for nature, Shrike led me back and forth through underbrush until we got a good look at a hwamei, one of China’s most charismatic and beloved songbirds. The hwamei’s plumage was a rich brown except for the crazy white spectacles from which it takes its name (literally, “painted eyebrow”). It was scratching in leaf litter like a towhee, nervously, alert to us. Elsewhere on the Purple Mountain, Shrike said, people set nets to catch hwamei, but the fence around the Botanical Garden kept poachers out.

  Shrike had grown up in Nanjing, the only child of an engineering professor and a factory worker. When he was sixteen, he’d bought a pair of binoculars and said to himself, “I should go out and watch some creatures.” He wrote “ECOLOGICAL RECORDS” on the cover of a notebook and took it to the Botanical Garden. The first bird he looked at was a great tit (a colorful relative of the chickadee). Six months later, he scratched out the word “ECOLOGICAL” on his notebook and wrote “BIRD.” In 2005, via the Internet, he’d found his way to another birder, a police-academy cadet, and teamed up with him to create a forum that became the Jiangsu Wild Bird Society. The group now has about two hundred members, including twenty whom Shrike described as “very active,” but, unlike its Shanghai cousin, it doesn’t officially exist. “Our joke about ourselves is that we are an underground organization that’s been exposed everywhere,” Shrike said. “More and more people in the city know about us now, because of all the news coverage. Sometimes, now, when we’re out birding, people will go by, and we’ll hear them say to each other, ‘Oh, they’re birding.’ ”

  Besides pollution and habitat loss, the biggest threat to birds in China is the widespread illegal netting and poisoning of them for use as food. In certain ancient cities, including Nanjing, wild birds are also commonly sold as pets or for release at festivals by Buddhists who believe that freeing caged animals brings good karma. (A nun at a monastery outside Nanjing told me that the monks aren’t picky about what kind of animals are released; quantity is all that matters.) According to Shrike, the laws against selling wild birds can’t be enforced without risking “social instability,” and so he and his group were trying to educate the buyers instead. “Our message in our promotions is ‘If you love birds, don’t trap them—let them fly free in the sky,’ ” he said. “We also tell people about all the parasites and viruses they can get. We try to persuade them, but we threaten them, too!”

  Shrike agreed, rather unhappily, to take me to Nanjing’s bird market. There, in a maze of alleys north of the Qinhuai River, we saw freshly caught skylarks beating themselves against the bars of cages. We saw a boy taming a sparrow on a leash by stroking its head. We saw tall cones of bird shit. Least disturbing to me were the cages of budgies and munias that had possibly been bred in captivity. Next-least disturbing were the colorful exotics—fulvettas, leafbirds, yuhinas—that had been extracted from some beleaguered souther
n forest and spirited to Nanjing. I hated to see them here, but they looked only half real, because I didn’t know them in their native habitat. It was like the difference between seeing some outlandish stranger in a porn flick and seeing your best friend: the most upsetting captives were the most familiar—the grosbeaks, the thrushes, the sparrows. I was shocked by how much smaller and altogether more ragged and diminished they looked in cages than they had in the Botanical Garden. It was just as Shrike had told Xiaoxiaoge: what a nature reserve protected was a place. Almost as much as the animal was in the place, the place was in the animal.

  The two most popular wild birds in Nanjing, both of them singers, were the tiny, jewel-like Japanese white-eye and the unfortunate hwamei. Newly caught songbirds sold for as little as a dollar-fifty apiece, but after a year of taming and training a single bird might fetch three hundred dollars. The white-eyes were housed in elegant, reasonably spacious cages in which it was possible to imagine, or hope, that incarceration felt something like house arrest. Most of the hwameis I saw, though, were being raised in grim, solid-sided wooden cells, barely big enough for the animal to turn around in. There was a grille of bars in front through which the hwameis peered out in their white spectacles, silently, while their cash value appreciated.

  The first thing David Xu did with his new golf clubs was lend them back to me. We were finishing up another long day (“Work first, then pleasure”) with a visit to the older of Ningbo’s two golf courses. Though the air was getting worse by the hour, we were finally in a pretty part of town. Suddenly, the roads were less crowded, the agriculture a little more optional-looking, the detritus of construction discreetly hidden rather than being dumped by the curb, the billboards promising developments with names like Tuscany Lake Valley. China in general, in its headlong pursuit of money, with fabulous millionaires and a vast underclass and a dismantled social safety net, and with a central government obsessed with security and skilled at exploiting nationalism to quiet its critics, and with economic and environmental regulation entrusted to incestuous consortia of businesses and local governments, had already been striking me as the most Republican place I’d ever been. And here, nestled between a strictly protected montane forest and the bright-blue freshwater expanses of Dong Qian Hu—literally, East Money Lake—was Ningbo Delson Green World Golf Club.

  The course had been built by a retired businessman who, in 1995, had been flying from city to city in China, looking for something to do with his wealth. On a jet bound for Ningbo, he’d dropped his glasses on the floor; the man who’d picked them up turned out to be Ningbo’s mayor. Ningbo had recently decided that it needed a golf course, and it was willing to sell a chunk of forest preserve, at an attractive price, to get one built.

  The club’s general director, a handsome woman named Grace Peng, showed us around on an electric cart. The fairways were narrow and green and surrounded by a zoysia-like grass that turned almost white in winter. Rippling blond knolls receded into the haze like desert sand dunes; the caddies, most of them female, had white cloths wound over their hats and around their necks, T. E. Lawrence–style. We saw three groups of players on the front nine and none on the back nine. “Golf in China is still for rich people and businessmen—it’s very private,” Peng said. Life membership cost sixty thousand dollars; for a million more, you could buy a villa in an adjoining gated compound. Peng said that many of the two hundred and fifty life members, including the factory owner who’d given me the golf clubs, played here seldom or never. A few, though, came as often as five times a week and had single-digit handicaps. At the course’s highest point, up by the forest preserve, we watched three regulars tee off on a long and unforgiving hole. One of them hooked his drive across the undulating fairway and into gnarly underbrush, and Peng called out to him, “Ha, ha! Not very good!”

  I’d intended to take David Xu to the course’s driving range and give him a lesson with his new clubs, but as soon as Peng suggested that I play some actual holes myself, I lost all interest in pedagogy. A caddie set about peeling the plastic wrappers off our clubs while a clerk at the rental counter rummaged for golf shoes big enough to fit me. Peng pointed out the new clubhouse that was being built next door to the very comfortable, ten-year-old existing one. “Rich people in Ningbo are quite young,” she explained. “It’s not like in the U.S., where rich people tend to be older. Things in China change so fast, you have to build quickly. You have to renew your stuff very quickly to catch the new people.”

  Xu, Miss Wang, and I followed the caddie to the tenth hole. It was a par-five dogleg that required a scary tee shot over water. I surveyed the empty dunelike hillocks and, beyond them, the jagged ridgeline—a faint black cutout. The driver that the caddie handed me was candy-red, gleaming, as light as air. And this, I realized, was golf as it was supposed to be: exotic scenery, brand-new top-of-the-line clubs, and not a soul on the back nine except me and a retinue that consisted of two people being paid by me directly and a third being paid by the government to be nice to me. Xu, Miss Wang, and the caddie stood apart at a respectful distance. I could feel them willing me to excel, and I was overcome with a sense of responsibility to excel. To—for once in my life—not overswing. To let the club do the work. To keep my head down and rotate through my hips. I took a couple of practice rips with the virgin red driver. Then I creamed the ball down the center of the distant fairway.

  “Nice-uh!” the caddie cried.

  “Jonathan, you’re really good!” Xu said.

  It was my habit, as a golfer, to follow any strong drive with eight or ten atrocious hacks, and I did nearly whiff my next two shots, with a three-wood, at Ningbo Delson Green World Golf Club. My fourth shot, however, rocketed to within eighty yards of the green, and I dropped my pitch right on top of the flag.

  “Nice-uh!” the caddie said.

  The irons I’d been given seemed fantastically well balanced. They felt like fine surgical tools. On the eleventh hole, I three-putted for a double bogey, but not a bad-feeling double bogey. I now deeply regretted having given the clubs to Xu. My tee shot on the par-three twelfth drifted right—“Slice-uh!” the caddie cried—but there was plenty of springy grass to work with, and I carded an easy four. I was looking forward, literally, to the thirteenth tee.

  “Jonathan,” Xu said gently, “I think we have to go now.”

  I gave him a stricken look. I knew we had plans for dinner with his boss, but I couldn’t believe that the best golf of my life was ending after only three holes. I pressed my putter on Xu and told him to try it, to try putting, to try golf. He placed his hands on the grip experimentally and began to giggle. I dropped a ball ten feet from the flag. He took a few wild, poking swings at it and then pulled the club up to his face and did some more giggling. I suggested that he set up closer to the ball. He took another swipe at it, as if it were a small animal he wanted to scare but not kill. The ball moved a few inches. Xu covered his face and giggled helplessly. Then, gathering himself, he struck the ball harder. It squirted directly at the hole, hit the pin, and stuck there. Xu emitted a thin, high-pitched scream and doubled over, giggling hysterically.

  We didn’t say much as we drove back into the congested center of Ningbo. I looked out dully at the prolonged predusk, the ground-level objects already twilit, the sun still well up in the sky, apricot-colored, safe to stare at. With construction and traffic and commerce stretching out in all directions—everybody in China still going at it with admirable industry, if not exactly optimism—I was pierced again by the feeling I’d had on my first night in Shanghai. But what I’d wanted to describe then as advancedness was, I decided now, more like simple lateness: the sadness of modernity, the period of prolonged unsettling illumination before nightfall.

  The puffin’s maker, Ji, had grown up in Subei, not far from the Yancheng nature reserve. His parents had met as teenagers in Nanjing just before the Cultural Revolution. Like so many young city people of their generation, they’d been sent to the countryside to learn the value of
labor from peasants. In Subei, they built a hut out of mud and straw, leaving slits for windows. Ji was born in 1969 and was raised by his grandparents in Nanjing for two years, but his mother missed him and brought him back to Subei. Every year, in early spring, after the family pig had been killed and eaten, the family became too hungry to do anything but lie in bed for weeks at a time, subsisting on congee, waiting for the wheat harvest.

  When Ji was fourteen, he applied for one of three hundred openings at the local high school and came in at number 302 on a list of fifteen hundred applicants. Three students ahead of him were disqualified, however, and so he squeaked in. A year later, he squeaked into a better high school in Nanjing, and two years after that he squeaked into the University of Chengdu. There he was swept up in the student reform movement, marching in the street, protesting against corruption, and was fortunate—again—not to be in Beijing in June 1989, for the Tiananmen Square massacre. Like many other talented students of that time, he turned his attention from politics to business and ended up working in the toy division of a provincial import-export corporation. In 2001, he and his wife borrowed money from friends, obtained a letter of credit from Hallmark Cards, and struck out on their own. They now own four factories and employ two thousand people. Their customers include Hallmark, Gund, and Russ Berrie—the top of the market—and Ji was recently named a Model Citizen by his local government, in the category of Labor-Intensive Industry.

  “I am the most lucky guy,” Ji said. He had agreed to show me around his headquarters, provided I didn’t use his real name. (“Why would I want to advertise?” he said. “Whenever I want to expand, all I have to do is mention that we’re the supplier for Hallmark Cards.”) His offices were situated beside a pleasant, tree-lined, concrete-bottomed river in an industrial suburb in eastern China. There was a happy bounce in Ji’s step as he took me around the small production facilities he maintains there. In the last four years, most of his production has moved inland, to Anhui Province, where, he said, workers will accept substantially lower wages to be closer to their families. Ji obviously benefits financially from lower wages and lower attrition rates, but he believes that society benefits, too—that marriages are strengthened and children better cared for when the parents live close to home, and that bringing factories to rural workers is a more sustainable economic model for China than bringing rural workers to factories.