Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  Another small gallery, Bomia, had been opened by a woman named Chen Meizi and her boyfriend, Hu Jianhui. The first time I met Chen, she had just finished a scene of Venice, and now she was painting a Dutch street scene from what looked like the eighteenth century. A Russian customer had sent a postcard and asked her to copy it. The painting was twenty inches by twenty-four, and Chen told me she would sell it for about twenty-five dollars. Like everybody in the Ancient Weir Art Village, she referred to Venice as Shui Cheng, “Water City,” and Dutch scenes were Helan Jie, “Holland Street.” She said that over the past half year she had already painted this particular Holland Street as many as thirty times. “All the pictures have that big tower in it,” she said.

  I told her that it was a church—the steeple rose in the distance, at the end of a road bordered by brick houses with red-tile roofs.

  “I thought it might be a church, but I wasn’t sure,” she said. “I knew it was important because whenever I make a mistake they send it back.”

  Through trial and error, she had learned to recognize many of the landmark buildings of Europe. She had no idea of the names of St. Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace, but she knew these places mattered, because even the tiniest mistake resulted in rejection. She worked faster on less iconic scenes, because customers didn’t notice slight errors. On the average she could finish a painting in under two days.

  Chen was in her early twenties, and she had grown up on a farm near Lishui; as a teenager, she learned to paint at an art school. She still had a peasant’s directness—she spoke in a raspy voice and laughed at many of my questions. I asked her which of her pictures she liked the most, and she said, “I don’t like any of them.” She didn’t have a favorite painter; there wasn’t any particular artistic period that had influenced her. “That kind of art has no connection at all with what we do,” she said. The Barbizon concept didn’t impress her much. The government had commissioned some European-style paintings of local scenery, but Chen had no use for any of it. Like many young Chinese from the countryside, she had already had her fill of bucolic surroundings. She stayed in the Ancient Weir Art Village strictly because of the free rent, and she missed the busy city of Guangzhou, where she had previously lived. In the meantime, she looked the part of an urban convert. She had long curly hair; she dressed in striking colors; she seemed to wear high heels whenever she was awake. On workdays, she tottered on stilettos in front of her easel, painting gondolas and churches.

  Hu Jianhui, Chen’s boyfriend, was a soft-spoken man with glasses and a faint crooked mustache that crossed his lip like a calligrapher’s mistake. Once a month, he rolled up all their finished paintings and took a train down to Guangzhou, where there was a big art market. That was how they encountered customers; none of the buyers ever came to the Ancient Weir Art Village. For the most part, foreigners wanted Holland Streets and the Water Citys, but occasionally they sent photographs of other scenes to be converted into art. Hu kept a sample book in which a customer could pick out a picture, give an ID number, and order a full-size oil painting on canvas. HF-3127 was the Eiffel Tower. HF-3087 was a clipper ship on stormy seas. HF-3199 was a circle of Native Americans smoking a peace pipe. Chen and Hu could rarely identify the foreign scenes that they painted, but they had acquired some ideas about national art tastes from their commissions.

  “Americans prefer brighter pictures,” Hu told me. “They like scenes to be lighter. Russians like bright colors, too. Koreans like them to be more subdued, and Germans like things that are grayer. The French are like that, too.”

  Chen flipped to HF-3075: a snow-covered house with glowing lights. “Chinese people like this kind of picture,” she said. “Ugly! And they like this one.” HF-3068: palm trees on a beach. “It’s stupid, something a child would like. Chinese people have no taste. French people have the best taste, followed by Russians, and then the other Europeans. Americans are after that. We’ll do a painting and the European customer won’t buy it, and then we’ll show it to a Chinese person, and he’ll say, ‘Great!’ ”

  Lishui is a third-tier factory town, and in a place like that the outside world is both everywhere and nowhere at all. In the new development zone, assembly lines produce goods for export, but there isn’t much direct foreign investment. There aren’t any Nike factories, or Intel plants, or signs that say DuPont—important brands base themselves in bigger cities. Lishui has a central population of around two hundred fifty thousand, small by Chinese standards, and local companies make pieces of things: zippers, copper wiring, electric-outlet covers. The products are so obscure that you can’t tell much from the signs that hang outside factory gates: Jinchao Industry Co., Ltd.; Huadu Leather Base Cloth Co., Ltd. At the Lishui Sanxing Power Machinery Co., Ltd., the owners have posted their sign in English, but they did so from right to left, the way Chinese traditionally do with characters:

  DTL, .OC YRENIHCAM REWOP GNIXNAS IUHSIL

  It’s rare to see a foreign face in Lishui. Over a period of three years, I visited the city repeatedly, talking to people in the export industry, but I never met a foreign buyer. Products are sent elsewhere for final assembly, some passing through two or three levels of middlemen before they go abroad; there isn’t any reason for a European or American businessman to visit. But despite the absence of foreigners the city has been shaped almost entirely by globalization, and traces of the outside world can be seen everywhere. At a factory called Geley, workers make three-dollar plastic light switches that are marketed proudly as “The Jane Eyre Series.” When Lishui’s first gym opened, it was called the Scent of a Woman, after the Al Pacino movie. Once, I met a demolition-crew worker who had a homemade tattoo on his left arm that said “KENT.” He told me he’d done it himself as a kid, after noticing that American movie gangsters have tattoos. I asked why he’d chosen that particular word, and he said, “It’s from the cigarette brand in your country.” Another time, I interviewed a young factory boss who wore a diamond earring in the shape of the letter K. His girlfriend had the O: whenever they were together, and the letters lined up, everything was all right.

  The degree of detail impressed me. The outside world might be distant, but it wasn’t necessarily blurred; people caught discrete glimpses of things from overseas. In many cases, these images seemed slightly askew—they were focused and refracted, like light bent around a corner. Probably it had something to do with all the specialization. Lishui residents learned to see the world in parts, and these parts had a strange clarity, even when they weren’t fully understood. One factory technician who had never formally studied English showed me a list of terms he had memorized:

  PADOMIDE BR. YELLOW 8GMX

  SELLANYL YELLOW N-5GL

  PADOCID VIOLET NWL

  SELLAN BORDEAUX G-P

  PADOCID TURQUOISE BLUE N-3GL

  PADOMIDE RHODAMINE

  In the labyrinth of the foreign language, he’d skipped all the usual entrances—the simple greetings, the basic vocabulary—to go straight to the single row of words that mattered to him. His specialty was dyeing; he mixed chemicals and made colors. His name was Long Chunming and his coworkers called him Xiao Long, or Little Long. He worked at Yashun, a factory that manufactured the tiny rings that connect to the adjustable straps of brassieres. It was a typically obscure Lishui product: a thin steel ring coated with nylon, weighing less than half a gram. The average bra includes four such rings, and the color has to match that of the other components. Whenever a bra assembly plant made an order with Yashun, they sent a sample strap, and Little Long studied the color. He would consult his notebook and figure out the right mixture of chemicals necessary to make Sellanyl Yellow or Padocid Turquoise Blue.

  He had grown up on a farm in Guizhou, one of the poorest provinces in China. His parents raised tea, tobacco, and vegetables, and Little Long, like both his siblings, left home after dropping out of middle school. It’s a common path in China, where an estimated hundred and fifty million rural migrants have gone to the cities in
search of work. Little Long happened to find his first assembly-line position at a bra factory, and since then he had stayed in the industry, moving from job to job. Eventually he served as an assistant to a ring dyer, who taught him the trade. By the time I met Little Long, his entire professional life had been spent around brassieres, and this experience had given him one extremely specific subject about which he could speak in a worldly manner. “The Japanese like to have little flowers on their bras,” he once told me, with the air of a connoisseur. “The Russians don’t like that. They just want bras to be plain and brightly colored. And big!”

  In the factory town, he had become relatively successful, earning a good wage of three hundred dollars a month. But he was determined to further improve himself, and he studied self-help books with foreign themes. In his mind, this endeavor was completely separate from his work. He had no pretensions about what he did; he never spoke of the export brassiere industry as giving him a special link to the outside world. As far as he was concerned, the skills he had gained were strictly and narrowly technical. “I’m not mature enough,” he told me once, and he collected books that supposedly improved moral character. One was titled The Harvard MBA Comprehensive Volume of How to Conduct Yourself in Society. Another book was called Be an Upright Person, Handle Situations Correctly, Become a Boss. In the introduction, the author describes the divides of the worker’s environment: “For a person to live on earth, he has to face two worlds: the boundless world of the outside, and the world that exists inside a person.”

  Little Long had full lips and high cheekbones, and he was slightly vain, especially with regard to his hair, which was shoulder-length. At local beauty parlors, he had it dyed a shade of red so exotic it was best described in professional terms: Sellan Bordeaux. But he was intensely serious about his books. They followed a formula that’s common in the self-help literature of Chinese factory towns: short, simple chapters that feature a story about some famous foreigner and conclude with a moral. In A Collection of the Classics, the section on effective use of leisure time gave the example of Charles Darwin. (The book explains that Darwin’s biology studies began as a hobby.) Another chapter told the story of how a waiter once became angry at John D. Rockefeller after the oil baron left a measly one-dollar tip. (“Because of such thinking, you’re only a waiter,” Rockefeller shot back, according to the Chinese book, which praised his thrift.)

  Little Long particularly liked A Collection of the Classics because it introduced foreign religions. He was interested in Christianity, and when we talked about this subject he referred me to a chapter that featured a parable about Jesus. In this tale, a humble doorkeeper works at a church with a statue of the crucifixion. Every day, the doorkeeper prays to be allowed to serve as a substitute, to ease the pain for the Son of God. To the man’s surprise, Jesus finally speaks out and accepts the offer, under one condition: if the doorkeeper ascends the cross, he can’t say a word.

  The agreement is made, and soon a wealthy merchant comes to pray. He accidentally drops a money purse; the doorkeeper almost says something but remembers his promise. The next supplicant is a poor man. He prays fervently, opens his eyes, and sees the purse: overjoyed, he thanks Jesus. Again, the doorkeeper keeps silent. Then comes a young traveler preparing to embark on a long sea journey. While he is praying, the merchant returns and accuses the traveler of taking his purse. An argument ensues; the merchant threatens to get the law; the traveler fears he’ll miss the boat. At last the doorkeeper speaks out—with a few words, he resolves the dispute. The traveler heads off on his journey, and the merchant finds the poor man and retrieves his money.

  But Jesus angrily calls the doorkeeper down from the cross for breaking the promise. When the man protests (“I just told the truth!”), Jesus criticizes him:

  What do you understand? That rich merchant isn’t short of money, and he’ll use that cash to hire prostitutes, whereas the poor man needs it. But the most wretched is the young traveler. If the merchant had delayed the traveler’s departure, he would have saved his life, but right now his boat is sinking in the ocean.

  When I flipped through Little Long’s books, and looked at his chemical-color vocabulary lists, I felt a kind of vertigo. In Lishui that was a common sensation; I couldn’t imagine how people created a coherent worldview out of such strange and scattered contacts with the outside. But I was coming from the other direction, and the gaps impressed me more than the glimpses. For Little Long, the pieces themselves seemed to be enough; they didn’t necessarily have to all fit together in perfect fashion. He told me that after reading about Darwin’s use of leisure time, he decided to stop complaining about being too busy with work, and now he felt calmer. John D. Rockefeller convinced Little Long that he should change cigarette brands. In the past, he smoked Profitable Crowd, a common cigarette among middle-class men, but after reading about the American oil baron and the waiter he switched to a cheaper brand called Hibiscus. Hibiscus were terrible smokes; they cost about a cent each and the label immediately identified the bearer as a cheapskate. But Little Long was determined to rise above such petty thinking, just like Rockefeller.

  Jesus’ lesson was the easiest of all: Don’t try to change the world. It was essentially Daoist, reinforcing the classical Chinese phrase Wu wei er wu bu wei. (“By doing nothing everything will be done.”) In Little Long’s book, the parable of the crucifixion statue concludes with a moral:

  We often think about the best way to act, but reality and our desires are at odds, so we can’t fulfill our intentions. We must believe that what we already have is best for us.

  One month, the Bomia gallery received a commission to create paintings from photographs of a small American town. A middleman in southern China sent the pictures, and he requested a twenty-four-inch-by-twenty-inch oil reproduction of each photo. He emphasized that the quality had to be first-rate, because the scenes were destined for the foreign market. Other than that, he gave no details. Middlemen tended to be secretive about orders, as a way of protecting their profit.

  When I visited later that month, Chen Meizi and Hu Jianhui had finished most of the commission. Chen was about to start work on one of the final snapshots: a big white barn with two silos. I asked her what she thought it was.

  “A development zone,” she said.

  I told her it was a farm. “So big just for a farm?” she said. “What are those for?”

  I said the silos were used for grain.

  “Those big things are for grain?” she said, laughing. “I thought they were for storing chemicals!”

  Now she studied the scene with new eyes. “I can’t believe how big it is!” she said. “Where’s the rest of the village?”

  I explained that American farmers usually live miles outside of town.

  “Where are their neighbors?” she asked.

  “They’re probably far away, too.”

  “Aren’t they lonely?”

  “It doesn’t bother them,” I said. “That’s how farming is in America.”

  I knew that if I hadn’t been asking questions, Chen probably wouldn’t have thought twice about the scene. As far as she was concerned, it was pointless to speculate about things she didn’t need to know; she felt no need to develop a deeper connection with the outside. In that sense, she was different from Little Long. He was a searcher—in Lishui I often met such individuals who hoped to go beyond their niche industry and learn something else about the world. But it was even more common to encounter pragmatists like Chen Meizi. She had her skill, and she did her work; it made no difference what she painted.

  From my outsider’s perspective, her niche was so specific and detailed that it made me curious. I often studied her paintings, trying to figure out where they came from, and the American commission struck me as particularly odd. Apart from the farm, most portraits featured what appeared to be a main street in a small American town. There were pretty shop fronts and well-kept sidewalks; the place seemed prosperous. Of all the commissioned pain
tings, the most beautiful one featured a distinctive redbrick building. It had a peaked roof, tall old-fashioned windows, and a white railed porch. An American flag hung from a pole; there were flowers out front. A sign on the second story said “Miers Hospital 1904.”

  The building had an air of importance, but there weren’t any other clues or details. On the wall of the Chinese gallery, the scene was completely flat: neither Chen nor I had any idea what she had just spent two days painting. I asked to see the original photograph, and I noticed that the sign should have read “Miners Hospital.” Other finished paintings also had misspelled signs, because Chen and Hu didn’t speak English. One shop called Overland had a sign that said “Fine Sheepskin Leather Since 1973”; the artists had turned it into “Fine Sheepskim Leather Sine 1773.” A “Bar” was now a “Dah.” There was a “Hope Nuseum,” a shop that sold “Amiques,” and a “Residentlal Bboker.” In a few cases I preferred the new versions—who wouldn’t want to drink at a place called Dah? But I helped the artists make corrections, and afterward everything looked perfect. I told Chen that she’d done an excellent job on the Miners Hospital, but she waved off my praise.

  Once, not long after we met, I asked her how she first became interested in oil painting. “Because I was a terrible student,” she said. “I had bad grades, and I couldn’t get into high school. It’s easier to get accepted to an art school than to a technical school, so that’s what I did.”