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

by Peter Hessler

  “Did you like to draw when you were little?”

  “No.”

  “But you had natural talent, right?”

  “Absolutely none at all!” she said, laughing. “When I started, I couldn’t even hold a brush!”

  “Did you study well?”

  “No. I was the worst in the class.”

  “But did you enjoy it?”

  “No. I didn’t like it one bit.”

  Her responses were typical of migrants from the countryside, where there’s a strong tradition of humility as well as pragmatism. In the factory town, people usually described themselves as ignorant and inept, even when they seemed quite skilled. That was another reason that Chen took so little interest in the scenes she painted: it wasn’t her place to speculate, and she scoffed at anything that might seem pretentious. As part of the Barbizon project, the cadres had distributed a promotional DVD about Lishui, emphasizing the town’s supposed links to world art. But Chen refused to watch the video. (“I’m sure it’s stupid!”) Instead, she hung the DVD on a nail beside her easel, and she used the shiny side as a mirror while working. She held up the disk and compared her paintings to the originals; by seeing things backwards it was easier to spot mistakes. “They taught us how to do this in art school,” she said.

  Together with her boyfriend, Chen earned about a thousand dollars every month, which is excellent in a small city. To me, her story was amazing: I couldn’t imagine coming from a poor Chinese farm, learning to paint, and finding success with scenes that were entirely foreign. But Chen took no particular pride in her accomplishment, and she talked about making art in the same way that Little Long described dyeing bra rings. These endeavors were so technical and specific that, at least for the workers involved, they essentially had no larger context. It was like taking their first view of another country through a microscope.

  The Lishui experience seemed to contradict one of the supposed benefits of globalization: the notion that economic exchanges naturally lead to greater understanding. But Lishui also contradicted the critics who believe that globalized links are disorienting and damaging to the workers at the far end of the chain. The more time I spent in the city, the more I was impressed with how comfortable people were with their jobs. They didn’t worry about who consumed their products, and very little of their self-worth seemed to be tied up in these trades. There were no illusions of control—in a place like Lishui, which combined remoteness with the immediacy of world-market demands, people accepted an element of irrationality. If a job disappeared or an opportunity dried up, workers didn’t waste time wondering why, and they moved on. Their humility helped, because they never perceived themselves as being the center of the world. When Chen Meizi had chosen her specialty, she didn’t expect to find a job that matched her abilities; she expected to find new abilities that matched the available jobs. The fact that her vocation was completely removed from her personality and her past was no more disorienting than the scenes she painted—if anything, it simplified things. She couldn’t tell the difference between a foreign factory and a farm, but it didn’t matter. The mirror’s reflection allowed her to focus on details; she never lost herself in the larger scene.

  Whenever I went to Lishui, I moved from one self-contained world to another, visiting the people I knew. I’d spend a couple of hours surrounded by bra rings, then paintings of Venice, then manhole covers, then cheap cotton glove liners. Once, walking through a vacant lot, I saw a pile of bright-red high heels that had been dumped in the weeds. They must have been factory rejects; no shoes, just dozens of unattached heels. In the empty lot the heels looked stubby and sad, like the detritus of some failed party—they made me think of hangovers and spilled ashtrays and conversations gone on too long.

  The associations were different when you came from the outside. There were many products I had never spent a minute thinking about, like pleather—synthetic leather—that in Lishui suddenly acquired a disproportionate significance. More than twenty big factories made the stuff; it was shipped in bulk to other parts of China, where it was fashioned into car seats, purses, and countless other goods. In the city, pleather was so ubiquitous that it developed a distinct local lore. Workers believed that the product involved dangerous chemicals, and they thought it was bad for the liver. They said that a woman who planned to have children should not work on the assembly line.

  These ideas were absolutely standard; even teenagers fresh from the farm seemed to pick them up the moment they arrived in the city. But it was impossible to tell where the rumors came from. There weren’t any warnings posted on factories, and I never saw a Lishui newspaper article about pleather; assembly-line workers rarely read the papers anyway. They didn’t know people who had become ill, and they couldn’t tell me whether there had been any scientific studies of the risks. They referred to the supposedly harmful chemical as du, a general term that simply means “poison.” Nevertheless, these beliefs ran so deep that they shaped that particular industry. Virtually no young women worked on pleather assembly lines, and companies had to offer relatively high wages in order to attract anybody. At those plants you saw many older men—the kind of people who can’t get jobs at most Chinese factories.

  The flow of information was a mystery to me. Few people had much formal education, and assembly-line workers rarely had time to use the Internet. They didn’t follow the news; they had no interest in politics. They were the least patriotic people I ever met in China—they saw no connection between the affairs of state and their own lives. They accepted the fact that nobody else cared about them; in a small city like Lishui, there weren’t any NGOs or prominent organizations that served workers. They depended strictly on themselves, and their range of contacts seemed narrow, but somehow it wasn’t a closed world. Ideas arrived from the outside, and people acted decisively on what seemed to be the vaguest rumor or the most trivial story. That was key: information might be limited, but people were mobile and they had confidence that their choices mattered. It gave them a kind of agency, although from a foreigner’s perspective it contributed to the strangeness of the place. I was accustomed to the opposite—a world where people preferred to be stable, and where they felt most comfortable if they had large amounts of data at their disposal, as well as the luxury of time to make a decision.

  In Lishui, people moved incredibly fast with regard to new opportunities. This quality lay at the heart of the city’s relationship with the outside world: Lishui was home to a great number of pragmatists, and there were quite a few searchers as well; but everybody was an opportunist in the purest sense. The market taught them that—factory workers changed jobs frequently, and entrepreneurs could shift their product line at the drop of a hat. There was one outlying community called Shifan where people seemed to find a different income source every month. It was a new town; everybody had been resettled there from Beishan, a village in the mountains where the government was building a new hydroelectric dam to help power the factories. In Shifan, there was no significant industry, but small-time jobs began to appear from the moment the place was founded. Generally, these tasks consisted of piecework commissioned by some factory in the city.

  Once a month, I visited a family called the Wus, and virtually every time they introduced me to some new and obscure trade. For a while they joined their neighbors in sewing colored beads onto the uppers of children’s shoes; then there was a period during which they attached decorative strips to hair bands. After that, they assembled tiny lightbulbs. For a six-week stretch, they made cotton gloves on a makeshift assembly line. (That job dried up, they told me, because unusually warm winter temperatures killed the market.)

  On one visit to Shifan, I discovered that the Wus’ son, Wu Zengrong, and his friends had purchased five secondhand computers, set up a broadband connection, and become professional players in a video game called World of Warcraft. It was one of the most popular online games in the world, with more than seven million subscribers. Players developed characters o
ver time, accumulating skills, equipment, and treasure. Online markets had sprung up in which people could buy virtual treasure, and some Chinese had started doing this as a full-time job; it had recently spread to Lishui. The practice is known as “gold farming.”

  Wu Zengrong hadn’t had any prior interest in video games. He hardly ever went online; his family had never had an Internet connection before. He had been trained as a cook, and he found jobs in small restaurants that served nearby factory towns. Occasionally, he did low-level assembly-line work. But his brother-in-law, a cook in the city of Ningbo, learned about World of Warcraft, and he realized that the game paid better than standing over a wok. He called his buddies, and three of them quit their jobs, pooled their money, and set up shop in Shifan. Others joined up; they played around the clock in twelve-hour shifts. All of them had time off on Wednesdays. For World of Warcraft, that was a special day: the European servers closed for regular maintenance from 5 A.M. until 11 A.M., Paris time. Whenever I visited Shifan on a Wednesday, Wu Zengrong and his friends were smoking cigarettes and hanging out, enjoying their weekend as established by World of Warcraft.

  They became deadly serious when they played. They had to worry about getting caught, because Blizzard Entertainment, which owns World of Warcraft, had decided that gold farming threatened to ruin the game’s integrity. Blizzard monitored the site, shutting down any account whose play pattern showed signs of commercial activity. Wu Zengrong originally played the American version, but after getting caught a few times he jumped over to the German one. On a good day he made the equivalent of about twenty-five dollars. If an account got shut down, he lost a nearly forty-dollar investment. He sold his points online to a middleman in Fujian Province who went by the Internet name Fei Fei.

  One Saturday, I spent an afternoon watching Wu Zengrong play. He was a very skinny man with a nervous air; his long, thin fingers flashed across the keyboard. Periodically, his wife, Lili, entered the room to watch. She wore a gold-colored ring on her right hand that had been made from a euro coin. That had become a fashion in southern Zhejiang, where shops specialized in melting down the coins and turning them into jewelry. It was another ingenious local industry: a way to get a ring that was both legitimately foreign and cheaply made in Zhejiang.

  Wu Zengrong worked on two computers, jumping back and forth between three different accounts. His characters traveled in places with names like Kalimdor, Tanaris, and Dreadmaul Rock; he fought Firegut Ogres and Sandfury Hideskinners. Every once in a while a message flashed across the screen: “You loot 7 silver, 75 copper.” Wu couldn’t understand any of it; his ex-cook brother-in-law had taught him to play the game strictly by memorizing shapes and icons. At one point, Wu’s character encountered piles of dead Sandfury Axe Throwers and Hideskinners, and he said to me, “There’s another player around here. I bet he’s Chinese, too. You can tell because he’s killing everybody just to get the treasure.”

  After a while we saw the other player, whose character was a dwarf. I typed in a message: “How are you doing?” Wu didn’t want me to write in Chinese, for fear that administrators would spot him as a gold farmer.

  Initially there was no response; I tried again. At last the dwarf spoke: “???”

  I typed, “Where are you from?”

  This time he wrote: “Sorry.” From teaching English in China, I knew that’s how all students respond to any question they can’t answer. And that was it; the dwarf resumed his methodical slaughter in silence. “You see?” Wu laughed. “I told you he’s Chinese!”

  Two months later, when I visited Shifan again, three of the computers had been sold, and Wu was preparing to get rid of the others. He and his friends had decided that playing in Germany was no longer profitable enough; Blizzard kept shutting them down. Wu showed me the most recent e-mail message he had received from the company:

  Greetings,

  We are writing to inform you that we have, unfortunately, had to cancel your World of Warcraft account. . . . It is with regret that we take this type of action; however, it is in the best interest of the World of Warcraft community as a whole.

  The message appeared in four different languages, none of which was spoken by Wu Zengrong. It didn’t matter: after spending his twenties bouncing from job to job in factory towns, and having his family relocated for a major dam project, he felt limited trauma at being expelled from the World of Warcraft community. The next time I saw him, he was applying for a passport. He had some relatives in Italy; he had heard that there was money to be made there. When I asked where he planned to go, he said, “Maybe Rome, or maybe the Water City.” I stood with him in the passport application line at the county government office, where I noticed that his papers said “Wu Zengxiong.” He explained that a clerk had miswritten his given name on an earlier application, so now it was simpler to just use that title. He was becoming somebody else, on his way to a country he’d never seen, preparing to do something completely new. When I asked what kind of work he hoped to find and what the pay might be, he said, “How can I tell? I haven’t been there yet.” Next to us in line, a man in his early twenties told me he planned to go to Azerbaijan, where he had a relative who might help him do business. I asked the young man if Azerbaijan was an Islamic country, and he said, “I don’t know. I haven’t been there yet.”

  After I returned to the United States, I talked with a cousin who played World of Warcraft. He told me he could usually recognize Chinese gold farmers from their virtual appearance, because in the game they stood out as being extremely ill-equipped. If they gained valuable gear or weapons, they sold them immediately; their characters were essentially empty-handed. I liked that image—even online the Chinese traveled light. Around the same time, I did some research on synthetic leather and learned that it’s made with a solvent called dimethylformamide, or DMF. In the United States, studies have shown that people who work with DMF are at risk of liver damage. There’s some evidence that female workers may have increased problems with stillbirths. In laboratory tests with rabbits, significant exposure to DMF has been proved to cause developmental defects. In other words, virtually everything I had heard from the Lishui migrant workers, in the form of unsubstantiated rumor, turned out to be true.

  It was another efficiency of the third-tier factory town. People manufactured tiny parts of things, and their knowledge was also fragmented and sparse. But they knew enough to be mobile and decisive, and their judgment was surprisingly good. An assembly-line worker sensed the risks of DMF; a painter learned to recognize the buildings that mattered; a ring dyer could pick out Sellanyl Yellow. Even the misinformation was often useful—if Christ became more relevant as a Daoist sage, that was how He appeared. The workers knew what they needed to know.

  After I moved back to the United States, I became curious about the small town that Chen Meizi and Hu Jianhui had spent so much time painting. At the Ancient Weir Art Village, I had photographed the artists in front of their work, and now I researched the misspelled signs. All of them seemed to come from Park City, Utah. I lived nearby, in southwestern Colorado, so I made the trip.

  I was still in touch with many of the people I had known in Lishui. Occasionally, Chen sent an e-mail, and when I talked with her on the phone she said she was still painting mostly the Water City. The economic downturn hadn’t affected her too much; apparently, the market for Chinese-produced paintings of Venice is nearly recession-proof. Others hadn’t been so lucky. During the second half of 2008, as demand for Chinese exports dropped, millions of factory workers lost their jobs. Little Long left his plant after the bosses slashed the technicians’ salaries and laid off half the assembly-line staff.

  But most people I talked to in Lishui seemed to take these events in stride. They didn’t have mortgages or stock portfolios, and they had long ago learned to be resourceful. They were accustomed to switching jobs—many laid-off workers simply went back to their home villages, to wait for better times. In any case, they had never had any reason to believe th
at the international economy was rational and predictable. If people suddenly bought less pleather, that was no more strange than the fact that they had wanted the stuff in the first place. And then in 2009, the Chinese economy regained its strength, and workers made their way back onto the assembly lines.

  In Park City, it was easy to find the places that the artists had painted. Most of the shops were situated on Main Street, and I talked with owners, showing them photos. Nobody had any idea where the commission had come from, and people responded in different ways when they saw that their shops were being painted by artists in an obscure Chinese city six thousand miles away. At Overland (“Fine Sheepskim Leather Sine 1773”), the manager became nervous. “You’ll have to contact our corporate headquarters,” she said. “I can’t comment on that.” Another shop owner asked me if I thought that Mormon missionaries might be involved. One woman told a story about a suspicious Arab man who had visited local art galleries not long ago, offering to sell cut-rate portraits. Some people worried about competition. “That’s just what we need,” one artist said sarcastically, when she learned the price of the Chinese paintings. Others felt pity when they saw Chen Meizi who, like many rural Chinese, didn’t smile in photographs. One woman, gazing at a somber Chen next to her portrait of the Miners Hospital, said, “You know, it’s kind of sad.”

  Everybody had something to say about that particular picture. The building brought up countless memories; all at once, the painting lost its flatness. The hospital had been constructed to serve the silver miners who first settled Park City, and later it became the town library. In 1979, authorities moved the building across town to make way for a ski resort, and the community pitched in to transfer the books. “We formed a human chain and passed the books down,” an older woman remembered. When I showed the painting to a restaurant manager, he smiled happily and said that a critical scene from Dumb and Dumber had been filmed inside the Miners Hospital. “You know the part where they go to that benefit dinner for the owls, and they’re wearing those crazy suits, and the one guy has a cane and he whacks the other guy on the leg—you know what I’m talking about?”