Farther Away: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen

  Ji showed me a robotic machine of his own design which cuts fake fur with lasers. For a small-volume item like the puffin, the fabric is cut by hand. Workers in the design department demonstrated how the pieces are machine-stitched together, with the backing side outermost, how the pointed plastic stems of the animal’s eyes are pushed through the fur and cinched with washers, and how the animal is then dramatically turned inside out—dull fabric transformed into furry friend. Polyester fluff is stuffed into its head through a hole in its back, the hole sutured by hand, the seams trimmed, the fur brushed, and a Daphne’s tag applied. The whole process takes an average worker about twenty minutes. Ji presented me with three finished puffins, one of them embroidered with my brother’s name.

  “I imagine that a panda would be a popular head cover in China,” I said idly.

  “In China?” Ji laughed and shook his head. “The Chinese want maybe a bald eagle for their head cover. Or the face of George Bush.”

  I was feeling a certain guilty-liberal disappointment at not having found more industrial horror upstream from my puffin. Its American seller was an animal nut and its Chinese maker a Model Citizen. Even the pollution aspect wasn’t obviously terrible. A week earlier, in Nanjing, I’d visited two factories belonging to Nice Gain, an industry leader in fake fur (or, as it’s known in the trade, “pile fabric”), and learned of certain advantages that synthetic fibers have over natural fibers. Nice Gain’s fake fur begins as big cotton-like bales of acrylic fiber, imported from Japan, which is carded into fluffy rope and fed into computerized Jacquards that knit it into wide, strokable flows of fur. The primary raw material in acrylic fiber is petroleum—no thirsty cotton fields; no overgrazing; and a better use of oil than burning by Jeep SUVs—and the dyeing process is much cleaner with acrylics than with wool or cotton, which are contaminated with miscellaneous proteins. “If the dye coming out is dirty, we can’t export the product; it means you never reached it with the dye,” Nice Gain’s president, Tong Zheng, told me. Because Zheng, like Ji, was at the top of the market and could afford to run a clean operation, he bought his natural fibers precolored and didn’t ask his suppliers any questions about the dyeing. (“The one thing I know,” he said, “is that if you do it to code, you’re the least competitive player in the market. As a good citizen, you soon find yourself out of business.”) My puffin’s fur was all acrylic, and if the acrylic-fiber plant in Japan was anything like the acrylic-fiber plant I’d seen being managed by teenagers in Cixi, there were no great environmental horrors to be found there, either. The puffin was evidently more of a luxury item than I’d known.

  I asked Ji how he felt, personally, about animals, given that his business consisted of making toy images of them. The story he chose to tell was about one of the pigs his family had had when he was a boy. This pig, he said, had been skilled at burrowing holes through the mud and straw of its pen and escaping. Ji’s father had finally become angry and pierced the pig’s mouth with three or four iron rings; and the pig never escaped again. “Now it’s a joke I have with my kids,” Ji said. “ ‘You’d better not get a ring in your nose or your belly button, because it will make me remember my pig!’ ”

  Nose rings are a worry because his kids are growing up in North America. Ji and his wife had always wanted to raise them in, as he put it, a “Western environment,” and the final push into a new hemisphere came two years ago, shortly after Ji was named a Model Citizen. Because of China’s population policy, one thing a Model Citizen really can’t do is have more than one child. Ji already had a boy from a previous marriage, and his wife had a daughter from her previous marriage. They were now expecting their first child as a couple, which would be Ji’s second. One night, when his wife was six months pregnant, the two of them decided that she should go to Canada to have the baby. Their child was born in Vancouver three months later; and Ji was able to remain a Model Citizen.

  There are two competing theories about the connection between economic growth and environmental protection in developing nations. One, which happens to be very convenient to business interests, holds that societies generally start worrying about the environment only after being allowed to pollute their way to middle-class wealth, leisure, and entitlement. The other theory notes that developmental maturity hasn’t exactly stopped Western societies from overconsuming resources and laying waste to nature; this theory’s proponents, who tend to be apocalyptic worriers, tear their hair at the thought of China, India, and Indonesia following the Western model.

  Proponents of the “growth first, then environment” theory may take heart at how closely the explosion of China’s GDP was followed by the emergence of Western-style nature lovers. The problem, however, is that China has so little good land and is changing so quickly. A new generation may be learning conservation, but not as fast as habitat is disappearing. Already China’s national parks are being loved to death by an increasingly mobile middle class. In North America, you can still take schoolkids to a nature center one busload at a time and let them spend a day or a week watching animals. In Shanghai, where the population will soon hit twenty million, there is only one accessible nature reserve—Chongming Dongtan, on an alluvial island in the Yangtze. The reserve is well managed but heavily stressed by fishermen and upstream pollution. The entire northern third of it is engulfed by a bird-hostile invasive rice grass (according to local legend, the grass was introduced at the behest of Premier Zhou Enlai, who had asked his experts to find him a plant that could increase the size of China), and an enormous wetland park, containing a “vacation villa zone” and “wetland golf,” is under construction along the western boundary. Beginning in 2010, a system of bridges and tunnels will link the island directly to the heart of Shanghai. It will be possible to bus every kid in Shanghai to Chongming Dongtan for a day in nature; but the buses would be lined up bumper to bumper across the Yangtze.

  Successful Chinese conservation efforts today tend to sidestep the populace altogether and appeal directly to the government’s self-interest. In Shanghai, Yifei Zhang, the journalist-turned-WWF-staffer, is trying to get the city government to think about its maximum sustainable population and its future sources of drinking water. The city is currently planning to rely on the Yangtze estuary, but rising sea levels threaten to make it too salty to use, and Yifei is pressing the city to develop an alternative source by cleaning up the tributary Huangpu River and restoring its watershed—which, as a fringe benefit, would create new wildlife habitat. “We never despair, because we don’t have high expectations,” Yifei said. Upriver from Shanghai, where hundreds of lakes have been permanently severed from the Yangtze, the WWF in 2002 set a goal of persuading the government of Hubei to reconnect just one of them. “Nobody believed it was possible,” Yifei said. “It was just a dream—a castle in the air. But we set up a demo site, and after two or three years we got the local government to try opening the sluice gates seasonally, to let the fish fry into the lake. And it worked! We were then able to give small amounts of money to local governments to set up pilot programs. We started with a goal of one lake. As of now, seventeen lakes have been reconnected.”

  In Beijing I met an exceptionally effective grassroots activist named Hai-xiang Zhou. Zhou had been doing serious amateur bird photography for twenty years—he felt he’d been a national pioneer in this regard—but had come to activism only recently. In the fall of 2005, he’d heard news that avian flu had broken out near his childhood home, in Liaoning Province, and that officials were claiming the flu was spread by wild birds. Fearing an unnecessary slaughter, Zhou had taken a leave from his job and hurried to Liaoning, where he found that waterfowl and migrating cranes were dying from more ordinary causes—hunting, poisoning, starvation.

  Zhou wore glasses so big that they seemed to cover half his face. “If an NGO wants to do anything here, it has to be in cooperation with the government,” he told me. “Birdwatchers and conservationists can investigate things, but to actually get anything done you have to have an
angle. Local people always want more development, while the government officially wants sustainable development and protection for the environment. Since resources are very limited, officials are happy if you can help them to show that they really are doing what they’re officially committed to doing. When an environmental project is done well, county leaders get a lot of positive feedback and gain a lot of face.”

  On a laptop, Zhou showed me photographs of dignitaries smiling on a wildlife observation platform they’d built in his hometown. Zhou is now working on a new project at the Laotie Mountain Nature Reserve on the Liaodong Peninsula. Every fall, the entire migratory-bird population of northeast China funnels through the peninsula on its way south, and there, on public land, local poachers put up thousands of nets to capture and kill them. Most highly prized are the big raptor species, many of them endangered or threatened. A few of the birds are eaten locally, Zhou said, but most are sent to southern provinces, where they’re considered a delicacy. Zhou and his daughter, a volunteer at the reserve, are collecting data to present to the central government, so that it can coordinate local policy. His photographs showed wardens chasing poachers by daylight and by headlight. They showed trees that the poachers had chopped down to block the wardens’ trucks. They showed confiscated motorcycles. A room neck-deep with balled-up nets of every color—a single morning’s haul by the wardens. Cages of small birds left behind as bait for bigger birds. Tree trunks lashed vertically to the tops of other trees, elevating nets to eagle height. Smaller eagle traps hung from high branches and weighted with logs. House-size nets dotted with stricken doves, white-tailed eagles, Saker falcons. Birds still alive with their wings compound-fractured, bones sticking out, the angles gruesome. A confiscated mesh laundry bag stuffed with falcons and owls, many dead, many not, all mashed together like dirty underwear. A poacher in handcuffs, wearing a nice shirt and new sneakers, his face digitally smudged. Sweat beading on the face of a warden extricating a falcon from a net. A pile of forty-seven dead hawks and eagles, each one decapitated by poachers to keep it from biting, all of them confiscated in one morning. A smaller pile of bloody heads found scattered on the ground the same morning.

  “The people who do this aren’t poor,” Zhou said. “It’s not subsistence—it’s custom. My goal is to educate people and try to change the custom. I want to teach people that birds are their natural wealth, and I want to promote ecotourism as an alternative livelihood.”

  The migrant birds that make it unscathed past Laotie Mountain are mostly bound, of course, for Southeast Asia: a region well on its way to being clear-cut and strip-mined into one vast muddy pit, since China itself is hopelessly short on natural resources to supply the factories that supply us. The Chinese people may bear the brunt of Chinese pollution, but the trauma to biodiversity is being reexported around the world. And it does seem like rather a lot to ask of the Chinese people that, while working to safeguard Laotie Mountain and achieve breathable air and drinkable water and sustainable development, they also pay close attention to the devastation of Southeast Asia, Siberia, Central Africa, and the Amazon Basin. It’s remarkable enough that people like Shrike and Hai-xiang Zhou and Yifei Zhang exist at all.

  “To see something being destroyed and not be able to do anything about it, it’s sad sometimes,” Shrike said to me. We were standing by a badly polluted river outside Nanjing, surveying a landscape of new factories in what had been wetland two years earlier. But there was still a small area that hadn’t been developed, and Shrike wanted me to see it.

  ON THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN

  An actual Swedish person, my college roommate Ekström, introduced me to this book. He gave me a mass-market edition on whose cover was a cheesy photograph of a raincoated man in mod sunglasses pointing a submachine gun into the reader’s face. This was in 1979. I was exclusively reading great literature (Kafka, Goethe), and although I could forgive Ekström for not understanding what a serious person I’d become, I had zero interest in opening a book with such a lurid cover. It wasn’t until several years later, on a morning when I was sick in bed and too weak to face the likes of Faulkner or Henry James, that I happened to pick up the little paperback again. I was married to another writer by then, and I was devoting a lot of energy to the morbid avoidance of colds, because whenever I got a cold I couldn’t write or smoke, and whenever I couldn’t write or smoke I couldn’t feel smart, and feeling smart was pretty much my only defense against the world. And how perfectly comforting The Laughing Policeman turned out to be! Once I’d made the acquaintance of Inspector Martin Beck, I was never again so afraid of colds (and my wife was never again so afraid of how grouchy I would be when I got one), because colds were henceforth associated with the grim, hilarious world of Swedish murder police. There were ten Martin Beck mysteries altogether, each of them readable cover to cover on the worst day of a sore throat. The volume I loved best and reread most often was The Laughing Policeman. Its happily paired authors, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, had wedded the satisfying simplicities of genre fiction to the tragicomic spirit of great literature. Their books combined beautiful, deft detective work with powerful pure evocations of the kind of misery that people with sore throats so crave the company of.

  “The weather was abominable,” the authors inform us on the first page of The Laughing Policeman; and abominable it remains thereafter. The floors at police headquarters are “dirtied” by men “irritable and clammy with sweat and rain.” One chapter is set on a “repulsive Wednesday.” Another begins: “Monday. Snow. Wind. Bitter cold.” As with the weather, so with society as a whole. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s negativity toward postwar Sweden—a theme in all ten of their books—reaches its delirious apex in The Laughing Policeman. Not only does the Swedish winter weather inevitably suck, but the Swedish journalists are inevitably sensationalist and stupid, the Swedish landladies inevitably racist and rapacious, the Swedish police administrators inevitably self-serving, the Swedish upper class inevitably decadent or vicious, the Swedish antiwar demonstrators inevitably persecuted, the Swedish ashtrays inevitably overflowing, the Swedish sex inevitably sordid or unappetizingly blatant, the Swedish streets at Christmastime inevitably nightmarish. When Detective Lennart Kollberg finally gets an evening off and pours himself a nice big glass of akvavit, you can be sure that his phone is about to ring with urgent business. Stockholm in the late sixties probably really did have more than its share of ugliness and frustrations, but the perfect ugliness and perfect frustration depicted in the novel are clearly comic exaggerations.

  Needless to say, the book’s exemplary sufferer, Martin Beck, fails to see the humor. Indeed, what makes the novel so comforting to read is precisely its denial of comfort to its main character. When, on Christmas Day, his children play him a recording of “The Laughing Policeman,” in which the singer Charles Penrose gives out big belly laughs between the verses, Beck listens to it stone-faced while the children laugh and laugh. Beck blows his nose and sneezes, enduring an apparently incurable cold, smoking his nasty Floridas. He’s stoop-shouldered, gray-skinned, bad at chess. He has stomach ulcers, drinks too much coffee (“in order to make his condition a little worse”), and sleeps alone on the living room sofa (in order to avoid his nag of a wife). At no point does he brilliantly help solve the mass murder that’s committed in chapter 2 of the book. He does achieve one valuable insight—he guesses which cold case a deceased young colleague has been reworking—but he neglects to mention this insight to anyone else, and by failing to perform a thorough search of his dead colleague’s desk he inflicts a month and a half of avoidable misery on his department. His most memorable act in the book is to prevent a crime, by removing bullets from a gun, rather than to solve one.

  One striking thing about Sjöwall and Wahlöö, as mystery writers, is how honestly unsmitten they are with their main character. They let Martin Beck be a real policeman, which is to say that they resist the temptation to make him a romantic rebel, a heroic misfit, a brilliant problem-solver, an exciting
drinker, a secret do-gooder, or any of the other self-flattering personae that crime writers are wont to project onto their protagonists. Beck is cautious, recessive, phlegmatic, and altogether unwriterly. By nonetheless rendering him with exacting sympathy, Sjöwall and Wahlöö are, in effect, swearing their allegiance to the realities of police work. They do occasionally indulge themselves with their secondary characters, notably Lennart Kollberg, the “sensualist” and gun-hater in whose leftist tirades it’s hard not to hear the authors’ own voices and opinions. But Kollberg, tellingly, is the one detective who feels ever more estranged from the police department. Later in the series, he finally quits the force altogether, while Martin Beck dutifully persists in rising through the ranks. Although much is made (and rightly so) of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s ambition to create a ten-volume portrait of a corrupt modern society, no less impressive is their openness to discovering, book by book, via the character of Martin Beck, how stubbornly Other the world of police work is.

  As long as the mass murder remains unsolved, Beck can be nothing but miserable. He and his colleagues pursue a thousand useless leads, go door to door in freezing winds, endure abuse from fools and sadists, make punishingly long drives on wintery roads, read unimaginable reams of dull reports. To do police work is, in a word, to suffer. We readers, not being Martin Beck, can laugh at how awful the world is and with what cruel efficiency it visits pain on the detectives; we readers are having fun all along. And yet it’s the suffering cops who, in the end, produce the beautiful thing: the simultaneous solution of a very old crime and a horrific new one, a solution that turns on a delicious piece of automotive arcana, a solution that's been lying almost in plain sight all along. The Laughing Policeman is a journey through real-world ugliness toward the self-sufficient beauties of good police work. The book is fueled by the tension between the dystopic vision of its authors and the essential optimism of its genre. When Martin Beck finally does laugh, on the final page, it’s in recognition of how unnecessary all the suffering turns out to have been. How unreal.