Jon narrowed his eyes and stood firm on his cane. “You’ve been busier than I had imagined.”
“You don’t understand, that’s not what I meant.”
“I’ve seen enough, Catherine.”
“I can explain. At least tell me where you are staying. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Jon stepped into the elevator and pressed the button. “I’m not staying,” he spoke over his shoulder as the door was shutting.
I tried to stop the door from closing by putting my hand in the door, but it wouldn’t stop. “Jon, please don’t leave. We’ll get together in Hong Kong when I get back. Sunday night.”
“I was a bloody fool to come here.” Jon spoke through the closed door. “I’m headed back to elephant country.”
I stood in front of the closed elevator door trying to figure out how I could chase after Jon and still make it to the ivory factory in the morning. It was too dangerous for me to cruise around Guangzhou at night on my own with the triads watching my every move. I’d call Craig and ask him to help track Jon down in Hong Kong, which is where I assumed he would be heading in the morning. Craig could explain everything. And Jon trusted Craig.
We could press the restart button on the reunion all on our own, as soon as I got back. If only I had put the letter in my pocket and not my bag, then the letter wouldn’t have gotten stolen and this whole nightmare wouldn’t have happened.
Guangzhou Market
Sam and I avoided talking about Jon’s surprise visit over breakfast. I tried to put it out of my mind. Craig would fix things, and Jon and I would see each other Sunday night and start again.
Sam asked if I wanted to stop by the Guangzhou market on the way to the ivory factory. There was someone he wanted to talk to and we weren’t expected at the factory until eleven, so we had some time.
“I’ve heard the Guangzhou market is pretty intense.” I sipped my tea as I watched Sam eating a pile of greasy noodles. “Glad I decided not to eat breakfast.”
“Yes, it requires an iron stomach.” Sam winked. “And as a white person, you will stand out. You’ll probably get all kinds of offers for ‘specialty items’ since everyone assumes that a white person has money.”
“But aren’t a lot of the white people that might come to this kind of market more likely to be looking to document illegal activity rather than engage in it?”
“The fact that some are willing to approach means they have reason to think it’s worth the risk,” he said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Why not?
“There may be some things that you see that might be disturbing, but we aren’t in a position to make arrests. Are you okay with that?”
“I understand.” I was starting to dread what I might see openly for sale at this infamous market.
Sam finished his noodles and we took a taxi to the main downtown market. When we got out of the cab, Sam waved away several black-market traders who had rushed to be at our side first.
“What did they offer us?” I asked as we entered the covered part of the market.
“One offered a special lunch menu at a nearby restaurant. He made sure to impress upon me that their special offerings weren’t listed on their regular menu.”
“What else?”
“Tiger penis and rhino-horn powder. The third guy, heroin.”
“I’m surprised they didn’t wait to see if we seemed the type.”
“Opportunists don’t often think about consequences. All they can see is the opportunity. And they’ve got competition. First in is more likely to make a deal.”
“I get it.”
Sam led me into the main aisle of the market. “It might be tempting to stray, but we should stay close by.”
“Sounds good.” My eyes were drawn to a stall that had large bulap bags overflowing with stacks and stacks of thick black wafers, hundreds upon hundreds deep. I nodded my head toward the bags. “What’s that?”
“Placenta.”
The thick wafers of coagulated dried blood were the diameter of a DVD.
“Human?”
Sam nodded. “They all come from the Guangzhou hospital, where the market has an arrangement with them.”
“Do they screen for diseases like hepatitis?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s very popular, though.”
“How is it taken?”
“In a tea.”
“I can’t imagine it.”
We walked down the main hall of the market, and within minutes, my head was spinning with exotic and horrific juxtapositions offered as food, medication, or pets. The San Francisco Chinese market paled in comparison.
Each row had a theme, ranging from fruits and vegetables to fish, both fresh and dried, and then meat of all kinds, ranging from poultry to pork to beef. And then there were the dried lizards, snakeskins, insects, and rows and rows of spices, mushrooms, and many unidentified dried objects.
Never before had I seen kittens for sale as food, nor had I ever seen such a badly painted amalgam of deer hooves passed off as tiger paw. And then I was deeply dismayed to be offered what appeared to be the real thing—or an extremely well done fake.
There was a wet aisle where buckets upon buckets of aquatic turtles of all shapes and sizes were paddling on top of one another, trying to stay toward the top of the dirty water. Some had soft shells, some had spiky shells, and some had short necks, some long. The diversity of turtles was mind-boggling, some probably farmed and many no doubt endangered and stolen from the wild.
Eels of all types squiggled in tanks, buckets, and tubs. I walked past two boys each of whom grabbed a fistful of the wriggling beasts and held them out to me giggling with glee, competing for my attention. I smiled but was temporarily distracted by an aisle of freshly slaughtered geese with their hearts still beating on bare breast meat to show just how fresh they were. This was the Chinese gruesome version of a sell-by date.
We entered another aisle where there was a lot of excitement centered on a group of old women who were sorting live scorpions with chopsticks. There were bins and bins of stir-fried and deep-fried scorpions to choose from, but the live ones seemed to be the prize.
Each woman sat with her bucket and chopsticks and moved scorpions from the larger bucket to smaller buckets, counting as they went. One of the women unceremoniously nipped off the stinger from the end of the tail with her teeth and consumed the flailing snack while continuing to sort her venomous repast.
Next were dried wood cockroaches, dried water scorpions, and giant bundles of dried centipedes. When we got to the pet aisle, I was dismayed to see that the only apparent difference between an animal being sold as a pet versus as food came down to the cleanliness of the cage and the health of the animal—puppies, kitties, and baby bunnies included. The pet aisle abruptly transformed into the fur aisle.
There were rows upon rows and stacks upon stacks of raccoon-dogs, each mesh cage barely larger than the poor animals. I wasn’t about to hang around to see if the rumors were true that these animals were going to be skinned alive right in front of me. While Sam spoke to one of the vendors, I quickly moved past the cages and a pile of old skinned carcasses.
I kept looking over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching me. As Sam had warned, a white woman in an open market like this was reason enough to stare, but I was keeping an eye out for that knowing look, one that was distinctly more threatening than curious. I felt a lot safer with Sam at my side, but after moving too quickly down the fur aisle, I realized that I had lost track of him.
I turned around and walked back along the next aisle, looking through to the fur aisle, but Sam was nowhere in sight. I reached the end of the aisle as it opened out into a courtyard with tables and benches surrounded by food vendors cooking on little hibachis fueled by smoky wood that smelled like lighter fluid. Old women sat on metal or cardboard boxes hunched over the grills, turning sticks of meat. The skewers were loaded with multiple small creatures such as mice, grasshoppers, or
sparrows, five or more to a stick.
People were eating and talking loudly as I turned around in a circle, disoriented by the sudden opening up of the space and wondering which aisle Sam had gone down. I didn’t know in which direction to head.
It occurred to me that we hadn’t thought to exchange cellphone numbers, not realizing that it might become necessary. He had only been a few steps away when I left the aisle. I couldn’t figure out how I could have lost sight of him.
The noise of the diners escalated—the intonations harsh and guttural. A woman held up a plate, offering me what looked like a cracked egg. All her companions looked up and burst out laughing. Another held up her cracked egg and starting peeling it for me. “You like pippin chicken?” she asked and giggled mischievously as she stuffed the embryonic bird into her mouth and held it open for me to inspect her lunch.
I cringed at the thought of eating an embryonic chick complete with underdeveloped feathers and stumbled backward into the next table. “No, thank you.”
The diners were eating all sorts of unidentifiable things, but the purple eggs caught my eye—the thousand-year eggs that I had just read about on the train ride over from Hong Kong. Thousand-year eggs, as they were called, were duck eggs that had been cured with an alkaline mixture—the end result being a purplish egg white with a bluish-purple yoke. Thirty companies in Nanchang County had just been shut down for using copper sulfate rather than baking soda to cut the maturation time of the eggs from two months to one month. In a statement made to authorities, the boss of one of these companies professed that the toxicity of the copper sulfate wasn’t a problem if one didn’t eat too many eggs. I wondered how many was too many as I watched them being consumed with great relish.
There was a separate case where police discovered expired meat that was being sold a year after its expiration date, having been washed with detergent to kill insects and to disguise the smell of rot. This news had made me especially wary of eating in these markets, and so far I hadn’t seen anything that looked like I wouldn’t regret eating it. But I was starting to get thirsty.
I reached the edge of the food courtyard and still no Sam. What business he would have had with a fur vendor eluded me. So many aisles radiated off this central point that I didn’t know where to look for him. I tried to remember where I had come from but everything looked different from this perspective. And I now appeared like I was lost, which was even worse.
I walked up an aisle with stalls and stalls of apothecaries, each with stacks of drawers containing strange medicinal objects. Some of the drawers were labeled, some not.
I watched an old woman point to a drawer in one of the stalls. The vendor opened the drawer and pulled out tiny brown dried objects. He placed them on one side of an old-fashioned scale and then placed tiny brass weights on the other side until both sides balanced out. The old woman nodded and gave the vendor some coins in exchange for a small brown paper bag containing her precious medicine.
An old man approached me, holding two small white flowers in the palm of his hand. He held them toward me, and with his other hand, pretended to eat a flower, making it clear that he was offering them for me to eat. I waved my hand, shook my head, and moved on. He grabbed my arm and opened his mouth wide. He put one of the flowers on his tongue and nodded his head vigorously before closing his mouth.
I pulled my arm away and kept walking. The man grabbed me again and pulled me into a stall. “Must try special flower.”
“Hey, what are you doing?”
All eyes locked on this new development, stabbing at me accusingly.
“I don’t want any flowers, thank you.”
“Magic flower. Must try.” He nodded and grinned. “Good for heart.”
I looked around for an exit strategy as several men approached me with an ominous look on their faces. The five stances of kung fu were not going to be of any help now. I turned in all directions, not seeing any sign of Sam when suddenly he appeared at my side and knocked the flowers out of the old man’s hand.
The man darted away, as if he recognized Sam. He ran with surprising speed for his age. Sam pursued him into the next aisle past the goose butchers, both of them slipping on blood as they ran. Sam collided with a bucket of blood, allowing the old man to disappear into another row on the far side of the aisle.
I looked around nervously as the men who had converged now backed into their stalls as if they hadn’t left them or showed any interest in me at all. I quickly caught up with Sam, who was wiping blood off with a rag that the butcher lent him.
“Where did you go?” an extremely concerned Sam scolded me.
“I was going to ask the same thing.”
“You were right next to me and then you were gone.”
“I couldn’t stay in the fur aisle.”
“I got really worried.”
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“One of the traders who sells in Hong Kong had heard about the tugboat at Jin Jin’s dock. He thinks he knows who was driving it before it broke down and was abandoned.”
“That’s great. Did he give you a name?”
“He is willing to speak to customs in Hong Kong if they agree to let him off on another trafficking charge.”
“Figures there would be a cost.”
“It’s all a negotiation.”
“I’ll leave that one to Ling-Ru.”
Sam suddenly grabbed my hand and threaded his fingers through mine. “I’m not going to let you slip away again, dear.” He kissed my cheek and pulled me along. “You are less likely to get harassed if it looks like we’re a couple,” he whispered. “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got an ivory factory to get to.”
I followed along. “Was it my imagination or did that old man recognize you?”
“Yes.” He smiled. “We arrested him for selling fake rhino horn in Hong Kong and he escaped back to Guangzhou.”
“Do you know what flower that was?”
“Oleander.”
“Is it poisonous?”
He nodded. “Causes cardiac arrest.”
I felt a sudden shyness about holding Sam’s hand, as if we were new lovers embarking on a picnic date in a nice park somewhere—toting a basket of boiled eggs, grilled chicken, a fresh loaf of French bread, and a chilled bottle of white wine—rather than our destiny being a factory that carved elephants’ teeth into art.
Da Xin Ivory Carving Factory
The manager of Da Xin was waiting for us at the entrance to the factory. He introduced himself as Mr. Hang and promptly brought us into a large warehouse, where rows upon rows of carvers sat at long benches in the four-story open space. The whine of dental drills filled the cavernous space, where hundreds of carvers drilled out highly detailed patterns into soft dentine. The air was thick with a heavy white powder generated from drilling the ivory that fell to the floor like sawdust.
“We used to have six hundred carvers in the heyday,” Mr. Hang explained in unexpectedly good English. “All the best carvers were in China, but the big legal markets were in Japan, Europe, and the United States.” He steered us down the first aisle. “Please, after you.” He continued the tour as we walked in front of him. “After the ivory ban in 1989, business drop significantly. But the one-off sale to Japan in 1999 gave carving industry hope. If they succeeded, we could also be considered for follow-up sanctioned sale. All eyes were on Japan to see if they would comply with the regulations. We were down to twenty carvers at the time. They were just finishing what was left from pre-ban stocks.” His arm swung around in a sweeping motion across the expanse of the factory. “But in 2008, overnight we were back in business with hundreds of carvers and plenty of stock.”
We walked down a row where elaborate scenes were being carved into whole tusks, some of them over six feet long. There was an assembly line of carvers, each in charge of one portion of the artwork that had to be completed. Another row had many Buddha statues in various stages of completion.
“In the years leading up to 2008, the economy in China booming, and everyone wanted those things forbidden during the Cultural Revolution. And the price of ivory jumped up.” He picked up a statue of Buddha. “China is Buddhist country. Now that people have money, everyone wants statue of Buddha in their home. This is very popular carving. We make many of these.”
I couldn’t help thinking that Buddha would mostly likely have preferred that tusks remain on their live owners. I was trying to appreciate that the ivory carving tradition had been part of Chinese culture for hundreds of years, if not more, but all I could see when I looked down these aisles in that moment were greed and the decimation of tens of thousands of wild elephants in Africa.
I hadn’t been aware that some Chinese people thought an elephant tusk falls out just like a human baby tooth and is found on the ground. My conversation with Li reminded me that there were so many misconceptions surrounding ivory. Fortunately, awareness programs had popped up in different sectors, attempting to address this issue in schools and in the general media, including the involvement of sports stars and pop singers, but they were by no means eliminating the problem.
We walked down another row where artists were carving balls of ivory the size of a softball—each ball containing intricately carved layers that were incrementally smaller and moved independently of each other. “How do you keep track of the raw material that comes in, relative to the final carvings?”
“When we purchase tusks,” Mr. Hang explained, “we keep track of them by giving each a catalog number and by the weight of each tusk. Then we weigh the carvings that come from each tusk.”
“Is there any way to tell whether a shipment is legal or illegal?”
“Illegal ivory is much more expensive than the legal stocks bought by government.”
“Then why would people buy the illegal stock?”
“They might not have permit to sell ivory legally. There are many that do not have proper permitting.”
“Does the government try to shut illegal vendors down?”
White Gold Page 18
