As we rode the bus to Guiyu, Cecily described what she called, with irony, the “fun game” played between Chinese journalists and their government. Reporters would play cat-and-mouse, testing just how far they could go. Items that might be barred from a general interest newspaper, for instance, might be allowed in a specialty magazine. Censors were most active on the Internet at specific times of day, so posting a piece online at the right moment could allow it to find its audience for a few hours—even if the publisher would then cooperate with the censors in taking it down. The government, she said, was “insane about journalism.”
At the moment, our need was to concoct a cover story under which I could both snoop around and plausibly deny that I was a reporter. We soon realized, though, that while my credibility as a reporter was poor, my credibility as everything else was even worse.
“Maybe you are a professor from a university,” Cecily said, evaluating me with a sidelong glance.
Was she serious? Were there really professors out there quite this haggard and blotchy-faced? This badly dressed?
“Maybe you want to open a shop,” she said. “A businessman of some kind.”
Yeah, right, I thought. I’m one of those businessmen who look like they’ve forgotten to shave for twenty years.
I suggested artist instead. Everyone knows that artists can be plug-ugly and sullen, but with a strong undercurrent of narcissism. I was perfect for the role. And it would explain all the photographs I wanted to take.
Cecily was skeptical. She didn’t think the idea of an artist seeking out polluted places would translate. Maybe she had a point. Besides, Edward Burtynsky got there first.
Then it struck me. We didn’t need a cover. We just needed a joke. Humor was the universal language. We would tell everyone that I had thrown my old cellphone away by mistake and had come to Guiyu to retrieve it.
Cecily laughed. “I think artist is better.”
Nobody threw bricks. Instead, we found ourselves under a heavy tea barrage. Through blind luck, we had found the Han family and were now enduring the withering assault of their generosity and good spirits.
After walking down the Guiyu streets for an uncomfortable duration—uncomfortable for the way we stuck out, for the way people stopped what they were doing to watch us and possibly ready their bricks—we came upon Mr. Han sitting in the doorway of his workshop. He was youngish, perhaps in his early thirties, and had a friendly face. His forehead and hair were powdered with dust. He had been using a small circular saw to cut CPUs out of a select stack of motherboards. In Chinese, Cecily asked if we could see his workshop.
Like their neighbors, the Hans lived on the upper floors of their building, reserving the ground floor for a garage-like workroom. One corner of the workshop was a sitting room with a teakettle and a computer; the rest was filled with piles of motherboards, shelves of CPUs, and large grain sacks filled with sorted resistors and capacitors. We sat and drank tiny cups of tea by the half dozen while the family’s tiny, eight-year-old son made a racket throwing circuit boards around in the back of the workshop.
Mrs. Han wanted to know why Cecily, in her late twenties, wasn’t married, and whether I was married, and whether two single people traveling together were perhaps soon to be married to each other, and finally, once again, whether I was married.
“Is he married?” she asked, looking at me with cautious amusement, as though I were a zebra.
I said I was not. Married. I didn’t elaborate. I was in fact more than unmarried. I was newly alone, and homeless. After getting back from Brazil, I had moved out of the Doctor’s place. Now, when not in Guiyu, I resided on an air mattress on Adam’s living room floor, where I spent my nights praying to be hit by an asteroid.
We began the business of lying to our new friends. Cecily and I had not agreed on a cover story in the end, but the Hans quite naturally wanted to know what had brought me to Guiyu, and to their workshop. Improvising, Cecily threw out several stories in quick succession, no doubt creating some confusion as to exactly what an artist/university researcher/entrepreneur was. I told Cecily I was worried they wouldn’t buy it.
It doesn’t matter, she said. We just have to tell them something.
In the meantime, I had realized that the little tyke in back wasn’t thrashing around just for fun. He was working. I told Mr. Han that I’d be happy to relieve his son for a while. I was a hard worker, I said, a claim that proved wildly hilarious to the entire family. When the laughter died down, I was still looking expectant.
Is he serious? Mr. Han asked.
I think he is, Cecily told him.
Mr. Han shrugged. Well, sure. Lang can show him how to do it.
And that is how I began my career in electronics recycling, in the employ of an eight-year-old firebrand called Lang. Our task was to pull the recyclable plastic off the circuit boards, which were piled against the wall in a mound almost as tall as I was. We sat at the foot of the mountain on tiny plastic stools, causing little avalanches each time we grabbed a new board.
Most of the recyclable plastic in a computer’s motherboard, I’ll have you know, is in the slots where sound cards and the like are plugged in. With the use of a screwdriver-size crowbar and a pair of pliers, these narrow rectangles of plastic can, if you are Lang, be popped off the board with a few flicks of the wrist. Lang also had a preternatural ability to move boards around with his feet, leaving his hands free for uninterrupted hammering and prying. He was wearing a pair of fuzzy brown dog slippers with floppy ears, which created the illusion that he was being helped in his work by a pair of supremely well-coordinated puppies. He was a machine. In the time it took me to evict a single battered hunk of plastic, Lang might have gone through three entire boards, plastic flying from his every touch, the boards spinning underneath the jumping ears of his little doggies.
I held up a newly won gobbet of plastic. “Check that out,” I said with pride.
Lang smacked his forehead. “Bu yao!” he cried, and snatched my board away.
“Cecily!” I shouted to the sitting room. “What does ‘buyao’ mean?”
“It means ‘don’t want,’” she said.
It turns out there is no better way to learn a few useful words of Chinese than by taking part in a little child labor. In addition to bu yao, I learned yao, meaning “want,” and hao le, meaning “done,” roughly. Like this, Lang and I established a system of communication, and I began to learn which bits of plastic were worth the prying and which weren’t. Some, I believe, had metal inside them, and so were no good for melting down.
Over the course of several hours, Lang’s excitement at getting to boss around an adult veered into delight at what was becoming an effective collaboration. Soon, when he would go to get a smoke for his uncle, he would get one for me as well, leaving me with a lit cigarette in my mouth before I could even think of saying bu yao.
The smoke stung my eyes as I worked, making me glad that we were not baking circuit boards instead. That task was done in the covered entry space between the workshop and the street, and was a job the Hans didn’t do themselves. They reserved it for their lone employee, who sat in front of a hot plate that held a shimmering pool of molten solder. With a pair of needle-nose pliers, he would pick up a circuit board and float it on the silvery pool of solder. As the solder holding the components on the board melted, acrid fumes rose into a homemade fume hood, which drew them into a chimney and vented them onto the street. This is why the streets of Guiyu smell of cooking circuits. Nearly every building has one of these smokestacks.
After frying for fifteen or twenty seconds, the circuit board’s connections would melt. The worker would pick up the board with his pliers, invert it, and smack it violently on a hunk of concrete to the right of the stove. The components would fly off (along with a spatter of tin and lead, depending on the solder) and go tumbling into an ever-growing pile. He would then toss the board into a heap of newly naked circuit boards.
There was gold in those boa
rds. Printed circuit boards use copper for their circuits, but the copper must be protected from corrosion with some kind of coating or plating, often in the form of a microscopically thin layer of alloyed gold. It takes a lot of circuit boards to accumulate a significant amount of gold, but a lot of circuit boards is exactly what Guiyu has. Once Mr. Han had accumulated a sufficient batch, he would give the boards to a contractor to extract the gold. This was the dirtiest part of the entire process. I had heard tales of acid baths and toxic bonfires. Naturally, I wanted to see it for myself.
Don’t, said Mr. Han. Don’t try to find those people. They operate illegally, and they’re very suspicious. You could get in trouble. Please don’t try to find them.
Not that I had time anyway. I was focused on my work, on improving my turnaround time for each motherboard. Brand names cowered under my crowbar: Intel, Acer, Foxconn, Pentium, Philips, Virtex, Blitzen. Each time I had a CPU to unplug from a board, Lang would hold up the collection bucket for me, and I would shoot a three-pointer, and he would smile like we had won the championship.
A drag on my cigarette and I’d pull over another board to wreck out the plastic, pausing to point when I wasn’t sure.
“Yao?” I would ask.
“BU YAO!” Lang would scream.
“BU YAO!” I would scream back.
And then, if I thought I was done, I would ask, “Hao le?”
“Hao le,” Lang would say, sounding almost philosophical. Then, with a look of what I hoped was respect, or at least camaraderie, he’d pause his helper-dogs and slide another board in front of me, the little slave driver.
A storefront with a small glass case full of integrated circuits. It was a tiny shop, one room, run by two young brothers. Three feet behind the display case was a bunk bed. They lived in the shop. To the left was a table arrayed with a hundred small cups for sorting their wares. One brother, wearing a red pleather jacket and a striped button-down shirt, watched with cautious amusement as I took pictures of his display case.
I wanted to buy a small baggie of chips as a souvenir. He was confused. What did I want it for? The kind of chip I should buy depended on the intended use. When he finally understood, he refused to let me buy one, insisting that I accept it as a gift.
On a busy market street, a nail salon with six young women in black tights and high-heel boots. All the young or youngish women in Guiyu dress this way. They chattered as they bent over their work. It was of course not a nail salon but a circuit shop. Each woman held a handful of chips. Using tweezers, they would pick up a single chip and dip each of its two rows of contacts into a pool of molten solder on a shared hot plate, working with the speed and economy of motion that comes from day upon day of precise repetition.
We asked if we could take a picture of them working. They tittered. One of them, in the second it took her to pick up her next handful of chips, waved her free hand in front of her face and smiled. Please don’t.
We wandered the streets, passing over small canals choked with trash. But trash-choked waterways are like sunsets. They’re great to look at, but they may not mean that much. More interesting are the many smells present in Guiyu, the many shades of water and air that complement the clouds of fried circuitry. At the river, drifting stains and a reek of sewage. Near the bus station, a generalized fetid-toxic smell hanging over a canal by the road. On the bridge, an inky stink of exhaust coming from a passing tractor-tricycle. I watched with some dismay as the choking plume approached us. But then, as the driver passed by, he throttled down for a moment, sparing us the worst. Even in Guiyu, courtesy lived.
Through a back alley we came upon a crew working through pallets of Motorola Broadband Media Centers—cable boxes. A man had stacked about fifty of them along one side of the work area, forming a wall of identical metal boxes, and was going from one to the next with a screw gun, unscrewing the same four screws on each. Behind him his coworkers made tidy piles of tops, of sides, of brackets, of LCD screens that trailed ribbon cables—a tangle of color on a dreary afternoon.
Trucks belched along with loads of semiconductors. A motorcycle cart passed us carrying a pile of strange, green objects. With a start, I saw they were cabbages.
We paused by a truck, its bed loaded high with bulging sacks. The corners of cleaned circuit boards peeked out from the bags. Raw material, about to be hauled off to the mysterious gold extractors, wherever they were. The men loading the truck smiled and asked where I was from.
Mei guo, we said. America. What’s in the truck?
They smiled a little less. Cardboard, they said. Paper. For recycling. And they got in their truck and left.
A gaggle of teenagers waylaid us and led us on a short tour, to a community center, where teachers tried to control a restive mob of music students. We were a sensation. For a moment I knew the life of a rock star, reducing his fans to convulsions with a single moment of eye contact.
Our abductors took us to a nearby temple. This is our temple, they said. We walked through crumbling, ornate rooms overseen by a platoon of deities and demigods.
You should pray here, they said. To this god. Make a wish as you kneel and bow, with your hands together. So I did it. But I couldn’t decide whether to wish for peace or for love.
The secretary of the Guiyu business association—or whatever it was—met us in the evening at the Six Star Coffee Shop in Shantou, the large coastal city where we were staying. The Six Star had two levels, every seat a sofa, including several sofa-like things that hung from the ceiling on cords, porch-swing style. It was a place where the wealthy and cosmopolitan of Shantou could gather to feel wealthy and cosmopolitan. The menu was broad and evocative, with helpful descriptions in English. I wavered over “Irish Coffee—Emotional, romantic, and mysterious” before settling on a latte, because “the latte’s mellowness with the Hazel’s aroma, Special flavor. Men’s favorite.”
The secretary wore a puffy red jacket and stylish eyeglasses. She had brought along her teenage daughter, a docile, wide-eyed girl who ordered an absurdly large pink drink. It exploded with fluorescent straws and a large wedge of fruit cut into an artful splay that evoked a breaching humpback. Her mother ordered a pot of fruity tea.
Cecily had chosen “university researcher” as my cover this evening. To my amazement the secretary accepted it without a blink.
We want to improve the environment, she said. But as she had only been on the job for a couple of months, she didn’t know much about the industry she represented. Maybe that was the point. We were originally supposed to meet the associate director, until he decided otherwise and foisted the secretary on us. She punted question after question by saying she would send us some informational materials put together by the association. (She never did.)
Since she had brought up the environment, though, I felt comfortable asking her about emissions and workshop conditions. She said emissions from burning circuit boards were the main environmental problem.
I doubted it. The Hans’ workshop, for instance, although host to a warm and supportive family atmosphere, was almost certainly powdered with lead, tin, and antimony dust, not to mention other toxins from all the sawing and board frying. So when little Lang and his sister came home from school to help out in the workshop, they were not just taking part in the family business. They were most likely being poisoned. In this, they were representative of both Guiyu and a wider phenomenon. In its pursuit of unfettered economic results, China has allowed widespread lead poisoning. This is especially dangerous to children, whose nervous system and mental health can be permanently damaged. “In more developed nations,” the New York Times said in June 2011, “a pattern of lead poisoning like China’s would most likely be deemed a public-health emergency.”
The secretary told us that the government had recently started taking the environmental problem seriously. And the business association was trying to attract investors and start partnerships to develop new technology to do the work more cleanly. Again, I doubted it. The proble
m wasn’t technology. It was that to be economically viable, the e-waste industry operated unsafely, and was allowed to.
The secretary asked me a question. Did I have ideas for new technology?
Me? I may have misunderstood Cecily’s translation. The secretary was asking me for ideas of how Guiyu could do its business more cleanly? Or for institutional contacts? What should I say?
I smiled blandly and nodded, in a way that conveyed neither comprehension nor intelligence.
“Not off the top of my head,” I said.
It’s okay that journalists have come to expose the problems, the secretary said, pouring some more fruit tea. But it’s more important to find solutions than to criticize.
We made another visit to the Han family the next day. We wanted to thank them and to say goodbye. Also, when you’re in a strange town where you don’t know anybody, it’s nice to go someplace where people will smile and offer you tea and cookies.
You’re sure he’s not a journalist, Mr. Han asked Cecily.
No, no, she said.
By now I had fully developed the knot of guilt in my stomach. Mr. Han wasn’t stupid, even though, with our cockeyed cover stories, we may have treated him like he was.
Today, adding to my shame, he offered us lunch. Upstairs, around a low table in the kitchen, we ate meat and vegetables in the Sichuan style, and a spicy dish of preserved black beans from the family farm, where their parents and extended families still lived. The Hans sent them money regularly. That was why they had come to Guiyu in the first place; there wasn’t enough work where they came from. They’d been here for fifteen years. The locals, they said, still treated them like outsiders.
Back downstairs, we had another three dozen small cups of tea. Mr. Han sat in front of the computer, paused the movie that was playing, and checked the commodity prices. Figures filled the screen. It was important for him to know the current price of gold and other materials so he didn’t get ripped off by his buyers. His computer also stored the video feeds from the security cameras in his workshop. With a few clicks, he brought up a high-angle shot of Lang and me raining grief on circuit boards.
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