Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  I asked him what the shops sold.

  “Floor tiles,” he said.

  He had rejected the government payoff, and he was trying to get the story into the press, but meanwhile he profited from the construction work that occurred in the exit towns. I wasn’t about to blame him for hedging his bets—at least he was trying to figure things out, and perhaps someday more Chinese people like him would find a way to press fundamental issues. Maybe the education system would improve, and citizens would gain a broader vision that could be combined with their practical skills. In the development zone I was most heartened by signs of individualism—ways in which people had escaped the group mentality of the village, learning to make their own decisions and solve their own problems. But it would take another major step for such personal lessons to be applied to society-wide issues. Perhaps the final motivation would be economic—often I sensed that China needed to reach a point where the middle and upper classes felt like the system prevented them from succeeding. But that hadn’t happened yet, not even in the exit towns, where there was still good money to be made from floor tiles.

  AT THE BEGINNING OF November the bosses decided to move the bra ring factory. They didn’t say when the transfer would happen, or where they were going, and they probably didn’t know themselves. Periodically Boss Gao headed to the expressway in his Buick Sail, returning a day later to confer quietly with Boss Wang. Master Luo believed they were still searching out a new site, most likely near Wenzhou, but even he didn’t know for certain. And it was characteristic of the bosses to keep such information quiet. If they announced a moving schedule, the lower-wage workers would either demand raises or immediately look for new jobs. With business still improving, the bosses couldn’t afford to lose labor, so they simply said that they would move sometime in the distant future.

  Boss Wang made one initial foray into negotiations with Mr. Tao. By this point, Mr. Tao had established himself as the spokesman for roughly one-quarter of the factory’s workforce: himself, his two daughters, the Tao cousins who occasionally did part-time work, and Ren Jing, the sixteen-year-old who was also from Anhui Province. Boss Wang despised dealing with the man, but there was nothing he could do about it, and the girls were valuable workers. One day he asked Mr. Tao if the family would be willing to move.

  “Where to?” Mr. Tao said.

  “N-n-not sure yet,” Boss Wang said. His stutter always emerged when he dealt with Mr. Tao. “But it won’t be very far.”

  “Well, then I’m not sure either,” Mr. Tao said. “You have to tell me where, and then I can answer.” Boss Wang wasn’t willing to give more information, and that was as far as they got—nothing more than a spark, but that was how the slow-burn negotiations always got started.

  Nobody else in the factory could bargain like Mr. Tao. In the evenings, after the assembly-line work was finished, he managed the family’s dry goods stand, and he was good at that, too. He stocked hundreds of books and magazines, and dozens of cheap goods; he knew every price by heart. Unlike some shopkeepers, he didn’t joke around or feign friendship with potential customers. He intimidated people: with his height and ramrod posture, he made for a formidable bargainer. But he was known for having good judgment, and other local shopkeepers sometimes turned to him for advice.

  The Tao stand was located on a small alley that connected to Suisong Road. Most alleyway entrepreneurs had come from Anhui Province, and there was a degree of camaraderie, despite the fact that they were all in competition. Over the months, some had expanded into real shops, and one couple had opened a storefront directly across from the Taos. The couple had a ten-month-old son whose features were strikingly different from most Chinese. The baby had light wispy hair that was almost blond, and his eyes were grayish. He had fair skin—locals called him “the Little Foreigner.” In the evenings I sometimes sat with Mr. Tao, and the neighbors joked, “Hey, he could be your baby!” It made me uncomfortable when they talked this way. Occasionally in China I saw a child who looked different; it wasn’t surprising in a country that had always been more ethnically diverse than people imagined. After centuries of movement and migrations, there were all sorts of genes floating around, and sometimes an unusual characteristic appeared in a child. These kids always received a lot of blunt attention—the baby in Lishui was still too small to understand, but I imagined that someday he would tire of these remarks.

  His parents had never gotten along. The Taos told me they had bickered from the moment they arrived in the development zone, and one evening that November they erupted into a vicious public argument. As usual, the disagreement concerned money. In Chinese families, it’s more often the man who is profligate, spending money on cigarettes and baijiu and banquets, and this was the point of contention for the Anhui couple. For five minutes they faced off, shouting at each other in the middle of the alley, and then the husband stalked away. Long after he was gone, his wife remained apoplectic, screaming into the distance. She was heavyset, with dark peasant features; it was hard to guess where the baby’s fairness had come from. In all my trips to the Taos’ stand I never saw this woman smile.

  Tonight she yelled for a quarter of an hour, and then she began to set fire to the store’s stock. She took a few cardboard packages of nylon socks, stacked them like kindling in the alleyway, and got a cigarette lighter. She left the baby on the shop’s cold cement floor, where he began howling. Soon thirty people gathered to watch, but they didn’t have the usual mood of a street crowd. For the most part, Chinese arguments and fights serve as public entertainment, but tonight nobody was smiling or laughing. They looked shocked, and finally a man in a factory uniform stepped forward.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “That’s bad. Just go back inside; he’s already gone.”

  The shopkeeper flung off his arm and kept struggling with the lighter. She was so angry that it took her a while to get the flame to catch a corner of the cardboard. By now the baby was red-faced and wet with tears.

  “Don’t let him cry like that,” somebody else said. “He’s too small!”

  But the shopkeeper ignored them. She flicked the lighter again, igniting another package. Without a word Mr. Tao stepped into the alley. As always, he was completely decisive; he didn’t bother talking to the shopkeeper, who paid him no mind. Mr. Tao picked up her baby and carried him across the alley to his own stand.

  Soon a heavy acrid smell filled the air. The socks were the cheap kind that sell for a few cents a pair, and they burned poorly, giving up thick black smoke. The woman stepped back into her shop, studying the shelves. The crowd began to murmur.

  “Don’t let her burn something else.”

  “She should just forget it!”

  “Leave it alone!”

  Mr. Tao held the baby so he couldn’t see his mother, and he gave him a plastic Spiderman toy from the dry goods stand; at last the child stopped crying. The fire was still smoldering, but the shopkeeper couldn’t seem to bring herself to add to it. The dispute had started over money, and even in her rage she still clung to her thriftiness: she had chosen the cheapest socks to ignite. And now she sat down heavily in the shop entrance, face furious, staring straight ahead. A few people in the crowd laughed uneasily, and finally they started to disperse. Somebody stamped out the fire. At last Mr. Tao walked across the alley and offered the woman her child.

  She shook her head curtly. The baby began to cry once more, but his mother refused to look at him, and Mr. Tao had no choice but to return across the alley. Over the next forty-five minutes the baby became increasingly frantic. Mr. Tao’s wife held him for a while, and then she passed him to me, and I passed him back to Mr. Tao. All of us tried to talk softly and calm him down, but it was hopeless; he screamed and his little head shone red beneath the fair hair. Whenever somebody approached the mother, she ignored them. She had failed to control her husband, and the bonfire had been an embarrassment, and now she directed the last of her rage at the only person she could overpower.

  We s
tood with the baby until after nine o’clock, when the Tao sisters showed up. They had just finished an overtime shift at the factory, and Yuran, the oldest girl, immediately took the screaming baby. Yuran was only seventeen, and she had just worked an eleven-hour day, sorting out pink and purple bra rings, but now she took this new challenge in stride. She cooed at the baby and bounced him gently; at last his exhausted eyes began to close. The first time Yuran took him across the alley, his mother refused. Yuran waited patiently, baby on her hip, and then she tried again. She never said a word—she simply held the baby toward the woman. And finally, nearly two hours after the scene had started, the woman accepted her child. Together they disappeared into the back of the shop.

  The next time I saw Yuran, I asked if there had been a problem when the shopkeeper’s husband finally returned. She shook her head: he’d come back late that night and nothing happened. Yuran had a young, girlish face, but often her words seemed old. “They do this kind of thing all the time,” she said. “It’s just the way they are. Some people like to fight.”

  SOUTH OF LISHUI THE government had already started building another highway. Eventually it would connect with the Jinliwen Expressway, and the new road would run southwest past the development zone and into the countryside. The project was still in its early stages; work crews were blasting tunnels through the cliffs. Apart from the demolition sites, the region was mostly quiet, and sometimes, when I wanted a break from the development zone, I took a drive in that direction. A few years from now the factory towns would begin to rise, but for the time being this area remained peaceful farmland.

  One of the expressway’s future exits would be near a place called Dagangtou, which is less than twenty miles from Lishui. In the past, Dagangtou was a small fishing village on the Da River, where an old stone weir had been built many centuries ago. The village has a cobbled main street lined with traditional houses of wood and tile, and the city government identified it as the perfect location for a “green industry.” Because of Lishui’s early reliance on pleather factories, the cadres were looking for ways to encourage cleaner business, and in Dagangtou they decided to start an artists’ commune. Their goals were twofold: painters would produce marketable work, and after the expressway was finished the place would also attract tourists. The only thing lacking was a vibrant arts community, which the government intended to attract in the exact same way that they attracted industry. In the development zone, factories received tax breaks for their first three years of residence; in the artists’ commune, any painter who moved to town received discounted rent for the first three years. If it worked for pleather, why couldn’t it also work for art?

  The cadres named their project the Ancient Weir Art Village, and they claimed to have modeled it on the Barbizon, the nineteenth-century movement that first developed near the forest of Fontainebleau in France, where artists gathered to paint rural scenes and peasant subjects. In the Barbizon spirit, the Lishui government commissioned a series of landscapes of the surrounding countryside. They built a gallery to display these paintings, and not long after it opened I made a visit. I wandered through the gallery, gazing at scenes from the region: a bucolic stretch of the Da River, a quiet hillside of tangerine groves, a picturesque cluster of traditional peasant homes. Most paintings were heavily influenced by French Impressionism, with muted colors and soft light; some of the details even seemed European. One picture featured three languid cows, an animal I never saw in Lishui. Another painting used Van Gogh–style brushstrokes to depict a tangerine tree. There was a Monet-inspired scene of a local chaff fire. In the gallery’s main room, out of twenty-six landscapes, only one included a human figure. It was exactly how Lishui would look if it were located in France and had no people.

  The Ancient Weir Art Village had just opened, but its promise of free rent had already attracted eleven art companies. Most of these small businesses employed painters who created European and American cityscapes destined for the overseas market. They had been trained in art schools across Zhejiang, and a number of them specialized in reproducing portraits of Venice. One of the biggest local companies was called Hong Ye, where a manager told me that they dealt with a European buyer who wanted a thousand paintings of Venice every month. Back in Europe, these canvases were sold to tourist shops, hotels, and restaurants. There was also a good market for paintings copied from the work of Dutch Masters. Chinese artists called these scenes Helan Jie, “Holland Street,” and usually it took them a little more than a day to turn one out.

  At a gallery called Bomia, I watched a woman named Chen Meizi work on a “Holland Street.” The scene featured cobblestones, a horse-drawn cart, and a building she referred to as “the tower.” When I told Meizi it was actually a church, she said she had suspected as much but wasn’t certain. She estimated that she had already painted this particular scene thirty times. Her other most common subjects were Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Doge’s Palace, although she didn’t know the names of either building. Like other local artists, she referred to Venice as Shuicheng, “Water City.” Originally she had grown up on a farm in another part of Zhejiang, and I asked how she first became interested in art.

  “Because I was a terrible student,” Meizi said. “I had bad grades and I couldn’t get into high school. It’s easier to get accepted to an art school than a technical school, so that’s what I did.”

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

  “No,” she said.

  “But you had natural talent, right?”

  “Absolutely none at all!” she said. “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.”

  To my eye, Meizi seemed technically quite capable; her paintings looked good. But she spoke of her work without the slightest sentimentality. Chinese people tend to be blunt about such matters, especially if they’re from the countryside, and often it’s refreshing. A young American who doodles for an ad company might expound on creativity and inspiration—if only the company would let me follow my muse! But Meizi had no use for any of that. She was a petite, pretty woman with a raspy voice; she wore a white painter’s smock and laughed at many of my questions. She never painted anything for fun—when I mentioned the possibility, she looked at me like I was crazy. She mocked the Barbizon concept; as with most young migrants, the last thing she wanted was rural tranquillity, and she had moved to Dagangtou strictly for the free rent. I asked which of her paintings she liked the best, and she said, “I don’t like any of them.” She had a similar response when I inquired if she admired the work of any famous artists, like Monet and Van Gogh. “I don’t have a favorite,” she said. “That kind of art has no connection at all with what we do.”

  She lived with her boyfriend, another artist named Hu Jianhui, and together they ran the Bomia gallery. They had hired a couple of young art school graduates to work with them. Every month or so, Jianhui packed up a bundle of paintings and took a train to Dongguan, a city in the far south. Dongguan has a market that specializes in such paintings, and most of Jianhui’s customers came from Europe and Russia. They paid according to size: an 8 x 10 usually went for $6.25, a 12 x 16 was $12.50, a 30 x 40 was $45.11. In the average month, Meizi and Jianhui earned a total of a thousand dollars, which is excellent money for Lishui. Among technicians in the factory world, only a Big Master can earn so much.

  One afternoon I hung out in their studio while they painted. The conversation turned to taste, and Jianhui talked about things he noticed from the art market. “Americans prefer brighter pictures,” he said. “They like scenes to be lighter. Russians like bright colors, too. Koreans like them to be more subdued, and Germans like things that are grayer. The French are like that, too.”

  Meizi flipped through a book that displayed sample landscapes, and she pointed to a clumsily exotic scene of palm
trees on a beach. “Chinese people like this kind of picture,” she said. “It’s stupid, something a child would like. Chinese people have no taste. French people have the best taste, followed by the Russians and then the other Europeans, and the Americans are after that. We’ll do a painting and the European customer won’t buy it, and then we’ll show it to a Chinese person, and he’ll say, ‘Great!’”

  Sometimes the artists received commissions in the form of photographs that were to be reproduced in oil paint. That week an American had sent a bunch of snapshots, and Meizi showed me one: a big white barn with two silos. I asked her what she thought it was.

  “A development zone,” she said.

  I told her it was a farm. “So big just for a farm?” she said. “What are those for?”

  I said the silos are used for grain.

  “Those big things are for grain?” she said, laughing. “I thought they were for storing chemicals!”

  Now she studied the scene with new eyes. “I can’t believe how big it is!” she said. “Where’s the rest of the village?”

  I told her that American farmers don’t usually live in a town.

  “Where are their neighbors?” Meizi asked.

  “They’re probably far away, too,” I said.

  “Aren’t they lonely?”

  “It doesn’t bother them,” I said. “That’s how farming is in America.”

  She showed me the rest of the photos, which consisted mostly of shopfronts and old buildings that appeared to come from an American small town. Meizi couldn’t tell me anything else about the commission—it had come through a middleman who didn’t want to reveal the final buyer. From reading the shop signs and checking online, I learned that all the featured buildings were located in Park City, Utah. At first I thought they must be connected with some local tourist campaign, but when I contacted people in Park City they had no idea that their homes and businesses were being painted in the Chinese Barbizon. Probably somebody had passed through northern Utah with a camera, taken some quick snapshots, and commissioned the paintings. Most likely they would be sold as decorations for hotel rooms or restaurants; the final destination could be anywhere in America or Europe.