Blockchain Chicken Farm

by Xiaowei Wang

  Take care to cover the finished mooncakes well, to prevent them from drying out. Happy Chang’e Festival!5

  To Make the Wrappers

  Combine the glutinous rice flour, rice flour, wheat starch, powdered sugar, coconut milk, and vegetable oil in a bowl. Whisk together until smooth—it’s important to make sure there are no lumps. The wrapper mix should now be a thick texture, similar to glue.

  Put the wrapper mixture in a deep metal bowl or plate, the one that fits inside your steamer. Steam on high for 15 minutes.

  Remove the metal bowl from the steamer. Take the dough out carefully since it’s hot. Place onto a kneading surface that is lightly dusted with glutinous rice flour.

  Knead the dough vigorously for 5 to 10 minutes, incorporating more glutinous rice flour so it does not stick to the kneading surface. The dough will start to feel smoother and oilier as you knead.

  Cover the dough tightly in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge. Keep refrigerated for 2 hours.

  To Make the Filling

  In a large metal bowl, combine butter (sliced into pieces), moon-maize meal, powdered cream, and powdered sugar. Place the metal bowl over a pot that has boiling water in it, so that the metal bowl functions as a double boiler—this way the custard will not stick to the bowl. Stir until butter is melted and contents are well mixed. Add the two eggs and whisk until the mixture is smooth. Keep whisking until the mixture starts to thicken into a paste. The custard is done once the paste no longer sticks to the sides of the bowl or the spatula.

  Transfer the filling into a smaller container and cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate the filling for 2 hours.

  Assemble the Mooncakes

  After the wrapper and filling have cooled, put glutinous rice flour on a surface to assemble the mooncakes. Measure the wrappers into 20–25 g balls, depending on the size of your mold. Measure the filling into 25–30 g balls. Using a rolling pin, flatten the wrapper balls. Dust one side of each wrapper with rice flour so that it does not stick to the mold. If using a wooden mold, put the wrapper on top of the mold. Place filling inside the wrapper. Wrap ends and gently press (make sure not to press too forcefully, otherwise the filling might break through). Remove from mold. Dust the mooncakes with rice flour before storing so that they do not stick to each other.

  8

  Welcome to My Pearl Party

  1.

  My hand is deep inside a large mussel, fingers searching for small round pearls through light pink flesh. “Yeah, we feed these mussels chicken and pig poop, so you might want to wash your hands after this,” says my host, Zhao. Inside a large shell about twenty centimeters tall and ten centimeters wide is a mass of pearls stuck to the interior. One by one, through the film of slimy water on mussel meat, I remove each of these pearls and put them in a red plastic bucket.

  It’s a gray, cloudy day, and I am standing next to pearl mussel ponds, with the fuzzy outline of mountains in the background. There’s a little hut nearby, for shelter. It’s built with torn tin, some wood, and plastic sheeting. A barking, mangy dog whose sole purpose is to protect these ponds from pearl thieves is chained next to it. Narrow, unpaved muddy roads form a grid across these ponds. There are some other people on small metal boats, tending to mussels. Zhao is dressed in a jean jacket, shivering in the cold, with fresh white sneakers that have somehow managed to stay clean despite the mud.

  Over 70 percent of the world’s freshwater pearls come from China, and the vast majority come from ponds like the ones I am visiting, in a rural area near the city of Zhuji, in Zhejiang Province. Zhuji has been nicknamed “the Pearl City” because of its pearl production. I’m about an hour outside Zhuji, at a production site in Shanxiahu Village. Zhao, a vivacious man in his late twenties, has the demeanor of a Silicon Valley CEO. It’s the only way I can describe it—his mannerisms, his long, carefully phrased speeches that burst with excitement, his proclamations about how he is disrupting the pearl industry, and his inability to let any part of the conversation fall silent. He’s talking, telling me about his vision, asking his director of marketing to show me an image, trying to convince me of their future plans. His hair is choppily cut, and he’s constantly gesturing, pointing, making strange shapes using his hands that suggest boxes, clean slates, or explosions. New. Outside of the box. Different.

  Zhao and his company’s director of marketing, Lisa, had come to pick me up from the Zhuji train station. He immediately took us out to eat. We sit in a small restaurant that has discarded napkins all over the floor. The local specialty is a bowl of noodles with tiny shrimps that have grown alarmingly large claws. Another, much more delicious, local treat is mochi-like dumplings made with sticky rice wrappers, filled with finely minced vegetables. “What we’re doing here,” he says, “we’re changing the pearl industry. We’re shaking things up. Those old heads you see at the pearl market, they don’t know what’s coming to them.” He slurps a noodle loudly and tosses an empty shrimp shell on the table.

  Zhao runs a small, agile pearl company with his wife and two friends, all of them under the age of thirty. If he’s the firecracker CEO who swaggers around with a mission, his friend who takes us out onto the mussel ponds plays the restrained, tireless CTO (chief technical officer) trope. Unlike the other pearl companies, which rely on a vast network of employees and facilities, Zhao’s company runs lean. They have only a few pearl ponds, emphasizing quality of pearls over quantity. Instead of hiring their own employees, they siphon off the services of mussel opening and pearl sorting from other pearl companies.

  Agile methods have been at the heart of modern technology’s growth. While hardware advances have enabled more sophisticated software, such software would not exist without the particular working processes and collaboration methods that bind tech companies together. These processes that enable companies to run lean draw upon gemba kaizen, or the art of continuous improvement, pioneered by Japanese management consultants. Gemba kaizen emphasizes cutting away waste, and ensuring that workers and managers are aligned, decreasing miscommunications and wasted time, known as “thrash.” Originally used as a working process in Japanese manufacturing, agile methods in software are now spilling back over into other industries. Zhao’s company is small and agile—continuously evaluating and reevaluating future plans and past mistakes, making sure communication is clear, always syncing managers and workers up with one another.

  “Raising pearl oysters is not easy,” his CTO tells me, as he stands in rain boots, camouflage-patterned pants, and a black jacket with muddy paw prints on it. He gestures to the ponds. Each of these ponds features floating soda bottles. We’re currently standing next to what I jokingly call the Sprite-sponsored pond. The bottles bob on top of the pond like lane markers in a swimming pool. Beneath each of the bottles is a webbed net that contains several large pearl mussels.

  “It takes five years to get a good pearl, and you have to seed these mussels, with flesh from another mussel. Each of the pearls starts off as a round piece of flesh from another mussel. Another thing is maintenance. The mussels are bottom-feeders, and we feed them chicken and pig feces. But if you put too much in, algal blooms start to form and choke up the mussels. Algae loves warm water, which does make pearls grow faster. One of the hardest parts is raising the next cycle of mussels, since when they reproduce, the larvae stick to fish gills. You have to really use a lot of water to force the larvae to come off the fish and to grow into a large-enough mussel.”

  Zhao’s father-in-law was one of the earliest pearl farmers in the Shanxiahu area and a pioneer of the industry. While pearl farming has existed in China since the thirteenth century, it wasn’t until the 1980s that it became industrialized under China’s “reform and opening up,” initiated by Deng Xiaoping, when the state enacted policies for market privatization. The change in production scale demanded a shift in mussel species as well. Early industrial-scale farmers like Zhao’s father-in-law started switching to the Hyriopsis cumingi mussel, the “three-corner mussel” (sanjiao
bang, 三角蚌), which has far higher pearl yields than traditional mussels. The local ecology has changed drastically since the 1980s, with waterways becoming inundated with excess nitrogen and phosphorus from the animal feces that feed the mussels.

  Located in the south of China, with the Yangtze River running through it, Zhejiang is blessed with an abundance of water from plentiful ponds, groundwater, and favorable rains. In fact, the “glut” of water in the south has existed for thousands of years, with Xi Jinping recently trying to revive an ancient plan to funnel water from the south to the dry north. While Zhao’s father-in-law originally used public ponds for his mussels, the government started to regulate the industrial uses of public waterways in the 1990s. Farmers scrambled to turn their tiny plots of land into lucrative pearl ponds instead. In 2017, the town of Shanxiahu and the surrounding villages produced a thousand tons of pearls, making the area the global epicenter of cultured pearls.

  2.

  “I mean, the thing is, I came back because I knew that it’s easy to do business when all the existing companies you know are run by stupid people, by simpletons,” Zhao proclaims loudly. We’re in his office, which is located on the first floor of his three-story home, overlooking a canal and bridge. It’s peaceful. His office is all white, with track lighting and shoddy replicas of mid-century modern furniture. There’s a receipt printer that is constantly spewing out new orders, and a jewelry-making station that his wife sits at, with hand-knit gray fingerless gloves on. It’s chilly inside, so we’re all still wearing our coats.

  Southern China is notorious for not having central heating. It was an arbitrary city-planning decision made back in the 1950s, for northern China to have central heating provided by the government, but southern China to be left to its own devices.1 The government recently decided to crack down on air pollution in an attempt to build an “ecological civilization,” so cheap coal heating is being replaced with natural gas or electric heaters. Wages remain low in the countryside, and household heating is a luxury.2 Zhao’s office is especially cold today, after yesterday’s snowfall.

  Across the canal, Zhao’s childhood friend happens to be getting married. It’s an auspicious day, Zhao jokes, with a wedding and a visit from an American. Large golden elephants and an inflatable red awning greet visitors to the village. A brass marching band is playing, and fresh flowers line the streets. The village economy has been buoyed by the pearl business, and wealth seems to be everywhere.

  Zhao has a bachelor’s degree in economics, from a small college in the city of Hangzhou. Life at school was carefree, if boring at a certain point, which led Zhao to finding some creative ways to fill time.

  “I mean, I’ve done it all. I even had a side job as a food delivery courier. Which is weird, right? Most of the kids I grew up with, they either never went to college or their parents struck it rich in the pearl business and sent them to college with loads of money. They were fuerdai [富二代, a commonly used term for well-off, rich kids]. But man, I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing like these fuerdai. My parents didn’t have money. I worked so hard to get to college. I’m not stupid. But I just knew I couldn’t win in the city, not against kids whose parents do have money.”

  I ask Zhao what his dad did for work. “Manual labor. He sold his labor. Do you know how difficult that kind of work is? These houses in this village, these beautiful houses, he built most of them. He’s only sixty now, but man, he worked so hard he can barely walk now. Has back problems.”

  Hustling and fate brought Zhao back to his hometown. He tells me he was sick of city life. Besides, he says, after he got married he and his wife had a son; their son has autism.

  “I’m the kind of person who’s liable to drift off … which I did in the city, during college. I did KTV [karaoke], hung out in bars, all that low-life stuff. But I saw my future before me, I knew I could never afford a house in the city and my kid’s school fees. This is what happens when you come from nothing. I knew I needed to build something and I needed a quiet place to do it. To be part of shehui [社会, society], to hun shehui [混社会, get by in society], you need to have a strategy,” Zhao says philosophically.

  Zhao’s business now has clients from all over the world—Italians, Japanese, British. He points out repeatedly that he specializes in the best pearls only, because he was sick and tired of “the trash that comes out of Zhuji, that gives us all a bad name.” “What I’m trying to do,” he says, “is to build a market, an ecosystem, by creating a company that runs lean, producing consistent, quality pearls. For so long, in Zhuji, we’ve been known for making low-quality pearls, or even fakes. Instead, I’ll pick maybe one hundred pearls out of a harvest of one thousand to sell to clients. The rest of them, those nine hundred low-quality pearls, I’ll sell back to people at the market in Zhuji. They’ll buy them and resell them. Or, if it’s too low quality, I’ll make it into pearl powder.”

  Not missing a beat, he peers at me. “I mean, you could use some pearl powder. It’s good for your skin, it unclogs pores and whitens you up. You could really, really use some pearl powder.”

  3.

  Zhuji is proud of its status as a pearl city, and it even includes the Angel’s Tears Pearl Museum. Like Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei for electronics, Zhuji’s pearl market is a dizzying array of stalls and booths. The pearl market is filled with the loud noises of yelling and bargaining, bright fluorescent lights, and pearls everywhere. Handbags made of pearls, pearl necklaces, pearls by the ton.

  A global crowd frequents this market, buying pearls in bulk and then reselling them back in their respective countries. Indians, Japanese, Nigerians, Europeans, all roam the market, looking for the best deals. Calculators displaying numbers (the offering amount) are passed back and forth until someone finally relents.

  “I hate this market,” says Zhao. “This is no way to do business,” and I agree, sweaty and getting what I call “the market flu.”

  The market flu can strike at any time, but it often does under the overwhelming, bright fluorescent lights of a wholesale market. It’s a kind of jitteriness where you can’t pay attention to a single thing, where you’re distracted by shiny objects everywhere. You leave the market feeling a buzz, uncertain how much time passed between when you first entered and when you left. In places like Shanxiahu, Yiwu, or Huaqiangbei, in Shenzhen, what I experience as the market flu, others experience as the smell of money and hustle.

  Anywhere there is money to be made, fakes proliferate, and cons happen. Some sellers at the market offer the lowest-quality pearls, seeded with plastic instead of mussel flesh. Only the thinnest layer of lacquer forms on the plastic, yielding large pearls in a short amount of time. This budget method is unlike tissue nucleation, where a mussel deposits lacquer for up to five years.

  Other types of fakery include changing the color of a pearl, which allows sellers to convince buyers that it is a different type of pearl, like a sea pearl. Mabe-type pearls are also easily faked, by sanding cheaper pearls sawed in half.

  The ultimate scam that Shanxiahu sellers pull is so brash that I am not sure I would call it a scam. Zhao points out to me two people standing over a bin with calipers, examining a pearl necklace. “The calipers say it’s 6.5 millimeters, right?” he asks. I nod.

  “Well, here at Shanxiahu pearl market, a 6.5 is a 7.00!” He laughs, cackling at how Shanxiahu sellers intentionally misread a caliper’s measurements to exaggerate a pearl’s size.

  In a somber tone, he says, “The thing that makes these older, traditional sellers extra stupid is that they don’t realize fakes give our market a bad name. It’s an ecosystem. The last thing I want our village, our market, or even our country to be known for is fake pearls. It drives the price of good pearls down, and makes people feel like they can ask us for lower and lower prices.”

  The longer I spend with Zhao and his team, the more I learn about the different kinds of pearls. Baroque pearls, akoya pearls, Edison pearls, sea pearls, abalone pearls, cassis pearls, oblon
g pearls that look like puffed rice, pearls so perfectly round that you would swear they were made in a laboratory. And of course, wish pearls. Wish pearls are the reason I came here in the first place. Wish pearl oysters are small, dead oysters that have a pearl inside. These oysters are vacuum sealed and shipped all the way to places in the United States. Zhao doesn’t sell any wish pearl oysters, but he knows of a few companies that do, in case I want some.

  Perusing Alibaba.com, I see that most wish pearl manufacturers are located in Zhuji. In order to get these wish pearl oysters into the United States, Zhao tells me, I need a wildlife permit, even though the oysters are already dead.

  4.

  It’s a Friday night in early 2017 and I’m sitting at home in California, leisurely watching Facebook Live. After a tumultuous political news cycle, I’ve found relaxation in crevices of the internet like livestream. There are ten thousand other people also watching Kristie’s Krazy Kultured Pearl Parties livestream. Kristie herself is on-screen, singing: “Like a pearl-gin! Shuckin’ for the very first time!” to the tune of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” Kristie is a thirty-six-year-old white woman from Georgia who has a Facebook pearl empire. Her page, Kristie’s Krazy Kultured Pearl Parties, has over fifty thousand likes.

  She sticks her hand into a plastic jar, riffles around, and pulls out a small oyster. “Jessica’s first oyster! What will it beeeeeeeee?” Kristie shrieks, with great suspense. “Will it be twins?”

  What I’m watching this evening is a pearl party—it’s like a Tupperware party for the Facebook age, where hostesses sell goods on social media livestream. Selling parties like this are not just for pearls. These days, the multilevel marketing (MLM) industry is thriving on social media as millions of people hawk aromatherapy oils, yoga leggings, and vitamins across Instagram and Facebook. While MLMs have been known for their predatory, pyramid-scheme structures, some MLMs, like Rodan + Fields, are now legitimizing themselves, sporting luxe offices in downtown San Francisco, near Salesforce and Google. Other companies, like the venture-capital-funded Stella & Dot, proliferate throughout my own Facebook feed, relentless in their quest to have me join the craze as a seller.