Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  We had twenty workers, Liu said. Everything was done manually. But it was shut down by the government. We didn’t really make any money at it.

  We didn’t press him. I don’t know what cover story Cecily had offered—lost mental patient, maybe?—but it was likely that the Liu family mine had been illegal, and Cecily thought he would spook easily.

  I liked Liu. He was considerate—and funny, although Cecily would never translate his jokes—and if he was a little cagey about his failed career as a coal boss, he was still game for adventure. Today he was taking us into the mountains to gate-crash a coal mine.

  We headed west out of Linfen. It was what seemed like a sunny day, with occasional patterns on the ground that looked faintly like shadows. We could see farther down the streets than before, and the sky directly overhead was almost blue.

  “Look,” I said to Cecily. “Blue sky.”

  She looked.

  “It’s not blue,” she said. “It’s gray.”

  I looked again. I was pretty sure it was blue. Compared with the dingy taupe of the horizon, it was distinctly bluish.

  Cecily shook her head. “I know you. You just like polluted city.”

  We had crossed the river and were now passing through small squares of farmland on the outskirts of town. A curtain of smog opened, and a smokestack painted with blue and white stripes loomed over us. It was Linfen Thermo Electron, a huge coal-fired power plant.

  Its sudden appearance out of the haze was appropriate to the rate at which coal-fired power plants are being built in China. Depending on whom you ask, China has added them to its grid at the rate of one a week, or one every four days, or one every ten days. As we passed the plant’s gate, such numbers took on a mind-boggling significance. Thermo Electron was sleek and massive, a raised fortress with soaring walls of blue metal that would have shone in the sun, had the sun chosen to shine. Yet it was only one of the countless plants that were being plopped down one after the next across the country. Enough to power China. Enough to make up for any fossil fuel you and I haven’t burned.

  With so many new coal-fired plants, the Chinese government was having trouble keeping the industry in balance. Record-breaking demand created spikes in the price of coal—but the Chinese government was reluctant to let power companies pass the cost increases along to their customers. So the producers simply chose to produce less power, even as coal extraction rose to record levels. That spring would see some of the worst electricity shortages in years.

  Just beyond the power plant, the plain erupted into walls of bare, craggy rock. A temple had embedded itself high on a shattered rock face, a ramshackle fortress trailing a staircase down to earth.

  Into the mountains. We climbed past villages. Houses had been carved out of mountain faces, rock alcoves faced with brick walls that allowed a single door and window. Piles of coal sat out front. Black smoke trickled from horizontal chimney pipes. Coal trucks rumbled forward and past, and sat in front of houses, and in repair shops. I thought of the logging trucks I had seen rumbling along BR-163 near Santarém, and about the giant sand haulers in Alberta, and of Nelson’s little dump truck in Beaumont, Texas, and for a moment it seemed likely the world was composed mainly of trucks.

  We infiltrated by walking in the gate. Liu had sniffed out a coal mine for us. Actually, there may not have been a gate, just a narrow road leading into a broad loading pit. The loading area was a small landscape draped with a layer of coal powder an inch or two thick. A short mountain of coal sat by the battered housing of a conveyor-sorter, waiting for the afternoon’s convoy of trucks to carry it away.

  The experience of leaving soft footprints in a blanket of coal powder is dizzyingly similar to walking through a fresh, dry snowfall. Wavelets of black dust scatter from your feet. It’s just like snow but black, you think—and somehow this feels profound.

  A man coasted down the hill on his motorcycle, heading toward the town we had come through on our way up. Would he sound the alarm? After our warmish reception in Guiyu, it seemed that the world owed us some unfriendliness, and Cecily and I were ready to be screamed at and kicked out. But the man on the motorcycle barely gave us a look. So far so good.

  We walked uphill to a set of buildings and railroad tracks that surrounded the mine’s extraction mouth. The miners themselves entered through another tunnel, farther down the mountain, but this was where the coal came out, in old-fashioned mining carts similar to those you may have seen carrying Indiana Jones.

  It was here, at last, that I came face to face with Sad Coal Man.

  He was taking a nap. Or smoking a cigarette. Two of him were chatting with each other. There were eight or nine of him altogether. And just like in his photograph, each of him was wearing clothes darkened with coal, and had a face dusted and smeared with fine, black grit.

  But though they looked just like the guy in the picture, there was something different about these sad coal men. They weren’t all that sad. At worst, they seemed kind of…bored? They were between shifts when we walked into the work area, I think. Maybe they were waiting for something to be fixed down below. So instead of working, the not-so-sad coal men were lounging and chatting, resting in the sun, and playing with a visiting toddler. That was incongruous, I thought, a child toddling among the coal carts. Some of the nearby buildings, we learned, were housing for the aboveground workers. One of their wives had brought the toddler for a workplace visit, commuting from about thirty feet away.

  Our presence had yet to raise an eyebrow, which I found disorienting. I had gotten used to being noticed. And although the attention that comes with sticking out in a foreign country makes me uncomfortable, I had lived with it for long enough now that this absence of discomfort felt pretty awkward itself.

  We leaned against a girder and observed the spectacular lack of activity. Nothing came out of the mine. Nothing happened. Behind us, a woman tossed a shovelful of coal into a fire under a pot of boiling water.

  “This is a state-run coal mine,” Cecily said.

  “In the United States there’s a stereotype that government jobs are very stable,” I said. “Very easy.”

  She nodded. “Same thing. It’s why people work for the government. My parents always wanted me to work as a civil servant. We call it the iron bowl. Because you’ll never break it.” She shook her head. “Boring!”

  A supervisor in a trim blue blazer wandered over to us and offered me a cigarette. The offering of cigarettes was a ritual that almost took the place of shaking hands around these parts, and I had bought a pack of my own in order to participate. But because my reflexes had yet to develop, I was always too slow on the draw. I had tried to ramp up my smoking skills before I got to China, as a sort of lung-destroying backup plan, but hadn’t had the discipline. By the time I fumbled the pack out of my coat and shook it in the supervisor’s face, he had already lit a cigarette of his own and offered me another in that perfect way, three filters artfully peeking out of the pack.

  The supervisor happened to be from Henan Province, where Cecily had grown up. That was our in. Like any large country that hasn’t had its native people replaced in the past five hundred years, China is not actually a country but a collection of subcountries, and this allows for the on-the-fly formation of much stronger alliances than come about when two people discover they’re both from Cleveland. Cecily told me her Henan dialect was rusty, but clearly it was still good enough to ingratiate us with the supervisor, who gamely let us hang around his work site, instead of dragging us down the hill by our ears, as he should have.

  There were limits, though. He would not let us go underground. It wasn’t safe, he said, and it wasn’t up to him, and the people who it was up to wouldn’t let us go below either. Besides, he said, the mine was no place for a woman. I didn’t have to look to know that Cecily was making a face.

  A pair of miners wandered over to refuse my cigarettes. The supervisor gestured at me and asked Cecily a question.

  “Let me guess,” I sa
id. “He’s asking if I’m married.”

  “Yeah,” Cecily said.

  I grabbed my head. “Really?!”

  “No, no,” she said. “I’m joking with you.” What he actually wanted to know was why we were there.

  This time, I thought, we should deploy high school teacher, a new role that I thought was actually plausible. But Cecily went ahead with something like professor of mining engineering at a major American university.

  “What if they start asking me questions?” I whispered.

  Don’t worry, Cecily said. We just have to tell them something.

  In the gear house behind us, a large wheel fitted with a cable began to turn. The two lengths of the cable descended into the tunnel-like mouth of the mine; each end was connected to a train of five mining carts. If they ever got started, one set of carts would descend, empty, while the other rose up from belowground, full of coal. But that was some time off. There was no coal to be seen, except for everywhere. The wheel was only turning so the crew could apportion the slack on the lines.

  The track on which we stood ran through nearly five hundred feet of tunnel to reach the loading area, which the supervisor told us was located three hundred vertical feet belowground. Several hundred miners were down there, powering their way through seams of coal. Workers at the mine usually got a day off for every ten they worked. But lately, he said, they had been working constantly, week after week without any days off.

  The mine produced a thousand tons a day, which was on the small side, now that so many illegal operations had been shut down. Mines with a daily production of three or four thousand tons a day were not uncommon. In a few years, the supervisor told us, this mine would either be retrofitted with new systems to replace its antiquated technology or be shut down entirely.

  In this, it was part of a grand shift in China’s coal industry. New mines were being built with more recent technology; mines like this one, which had been open since the 1940s, were being phased out. A similar shift is happening across a wide range of Chinese industries, a shift that promises to restructure the country’s economic and industrial landscape. Heavy industry is moving inland, to areas where both natural resources and cheap labor are plentiful. Just as the United States and Europe have sent much of their heavy industry overseas, economies within China are bifurcating between industrialized and developing, between high and low income. The tidal wave of industry is moving farther and farther inland from the coast. In its wake stand places like Shanghai and Shenzhen, which have been transformed into resource-hungry approximations of the countries whose consumerist economies they have emulated.

  “Do you use this kind of technology in America?”

  It was the supervisor. He nodded toward the mining carts, the cables, the giant wheel that drove it all.

  I had by now perfected the gesture: a faltering, circular motion with my head that was neither a shake nor a nod.

  “Somewhat,” I said.

  To kill time while things got going, Cecily and I walked up the road that led over the waste rock pile, a mountain of shattered scree that partially filled the narrow neck of the valley. There, accompanied by two men with strong Shanxi accents, we looked over the vista of the mining operation: the dorms to the right, the throat of the mine tunnel to the left, and beyond it the hopper and conveyor system, which separated the coal from the waste rock.

  One of the two, a rosy-cheeked man in his thirties, told us he was the manager of the explosives storehouse. He had previously worked underground as a miner, a job that had paid more. Cecily asked about his wages, and told me they compared favorably to the salary a recent college graduate could hope for in Beijing.

  I found it suggestive about mine safety that someone would prefer to make less money, and to work with explosives, than to be underground.

  “It’s safer than it was,” the man said. “But it’s still not that safe.”

  Our other companion was an elderly man who said he had worked in the mine for several decades. Now he was retired.

  “Before the 1980s,” he said, “we did everything manually. We dug with tools. It was hard work. It’s much better now. It’s all machines.”

  “Did you like the work?” I asked. “Was it good work?”

  “It was hard work,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether I liked it.”

  Whether or not he had liked the work, though, he had decided to spend his retirement here. His children worked in the mine, and he saw no reason to leave. He smiled as he looked down over the mining complex, and not for the first time, I reflected that there was more than one kind of health.

  The explosives man broke the spell. “Why did you come here?” he said, laughing. “It’s so dirty and black!”

  Back at the extraction area, below, I stood by the cave-like mouth of the tunnel for a long time—hours, it seemed—and smoked, and lay on a pile of corrugated sheeting in the sun, and smoked, and eventually wondered if anything was ever going to happen.

  The tunnel mouth had walls and a metal ceiling, and a sign over it with two golden characters, and the tracks in the ground, and it all sloped down at a steep grade away from the daylight, to a second, deeper, older mouth, a tunnel mouth built out of stone, and then disappeared into the earth. It was a tunnel, but after staring at it for an hour, I decided that really it was a cave in the end.

  I tried to offer a cigarette to the guy next to me, and was again too slow, and again accepted one of his.

  Then there was a grinding sound, not quite a rumble, and the cable went tight, and the man whose cigarette I was smoking went and stood on the tracks. The grinding grew louder and louder, and everyone started paying somewhat more attention.

  At last the tunnel roared, and a train of five mining carts shot out of its mouth. I felt the urge to dive for safety, even though I wasn’t in the way. The man standing on the tracks—who was in the way—floated onto the leading cart, as casually as if he were stepping onto a streetcar. He reached down with lackadaisical precision and removed a thick metal pin to release the tow cable. The carts moved fast, spiriting him backward away from the tunnel mouth, and as they went by, I saw it. The coal. It filled each cart to the rim, in shining, sticky, dribbling mounds.

  The cable-release man hopped off and another man stepped on. He threw aside another pin and the link that connected the lead cart to the train. The cast-off gear hit the black ground with a deep, metal clank. Another worker had put a block on the track to stop the following carts, and now the lead man coasted free, riding his cart along a wide arc of track, all the way to the hopper, where yet another man waited, also with coal on his face, also wearing a jacket and sweater, work gloves and trousers, dark with coal—everything black with the stuff. The lead man stepped off his cart just as it crashed into the hopper, and the two men pushed on the levers, using the cart’s momentum to upend it. They dumped its contents into a chute, where the rocks were shaken out of it, and then the coal was sent along the belt of the conveyor-sorter and onto the heap, where a loader was now scooping huge shovelfuls into a truck.

  The cart crashed upright, and the workers pulled it backward, steep into the task, grimacing it into motion until the lead man could pull it back toward the tunnel on his own, and onto a side track where the cart would await its next descent into the mine. Already the second cart had been detached, and shouldered down the faint slope by the next member of the crew, the worker who had been napping when we arrived, his eyes still drowsy now, as he pushed his ton toward the hopper.

  We had hung around all afternoon, and watched the workers crack jokes, and shared the international ritual of looking at pictures on the display of a digital camera, and now we saw the workers work. Coal kept shooting out of the mine, in five-cart loads, and the not-so-sad coal men swung through their practiced motions. They would have made a great advertisement for Chinese Communism in its pre-capitalist days. Each worker had his role, each role its place in the chain, a choreography of labor, skilled in a way that only unskill
ed work can be. They brimmed with rugged, coal-stained intelligence, pausing between mine trains to smoke and to talk. Sad Coal Man was not debased and morose. He was sharp. He was witty. He smiled in the sun when he had a few minutes to himself. Maybe he was just glad to be aboveground.

  In the lobby of the hotel, Cecily tried the automatic shoe polisher on her sneakers, completely black from our afternoon at the mine. It had no effect except to blacken the spinning brush of the machine.

  I went to my room. I took off my clothes. They were covered in black stains, although I had pushed no carts, handled no coal. It just happens when you’re at a coal mine. Liu had driven down to town ahead of us, so at lunchtime the miners gave us rides down the mountain on their motorcycles. And as soon as you rub shoulders with a coal miner—although you may look clean by comparison—you will find black dust on your every surface, in your pores, under your fingernails.

  I washed my face, and stared at the smear of black on the washcloth, and sat on the edge of the bed, and I missed the Doctor. I missed her.

  I thought of the motorcycle ride down the valley. We had run with the engine off, because even miners like to save gas, coasting down the steep mountainside at speed, the wind pulling tears out of my eyes, and when I got off the bike, the front of my jacket was streaked black where I had leaned against Sad Coal Man as he drove.

  SEVEN

  THE GODS OF SEWAGE

  After Sati killed herself, her husband was inconsolable. It was Sati who had convinced him to love, and who had taught him desire. It was for Sati that he had emerged from a life of austerity and isolation to be part of the world. And it was for his honor that she had thrown herself on the pyre.

  He pulled her body from the fire and carried it for days, wandering, crazed with grief and rage. Because he was Shiva, and a god, his fury was destruction—a chaos that threatened to engulf the whole world. Vishnu went to calm him down, dismembering Sati’s corpse as Shiva carried it. (Gods have their ways.) People still worship at the places where Sati’s body parts fell.