Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  The shop signs in the photographs caused the biggest headache for the artists, who didn’t speak English. Meizi had painted a building with a sign in front: “Miners Hospital 1904.” In her picture, the building looked perfect, but the sign now read: “Miers Hospital 1904.” Meizi had turned another shop, “Fine Sheepskin Leather Since 1973,” into “Fine Sheepskim Leather Sine 1773.” A “Bar” was now a “Dah.” Other pictures featured a “Hope Nuseum,” one shop that sold “Amiques,” and a “Residentlal Bboker.”

  There was part of me that preferred the new versions—who wouldn’t want to drink at a place called Dah? But I hoped the artists would do well with their commission, so I pointed out all the necessary corrections. After that, every time I went to Lishui I made a trip out to the Ancient Weir Art Village. I liked the quiet scenery and the peaceful village, which wasn’t going to change until the expressway opened. On my visits I helped Jianhui and Meizi clean up misspellings, and they were always grateful; repeatedly they offered to paint something especially for me. “Just bring a picture,” Jianhui told me. Finally I gave them a photograph of my childhood home in Missouri, where my parents still live. I could tell that Jianhui was careful with this commission, and he apologized when I came to pick it up.

  “I’m sorry about that one part,” he said. “I couldn’t really see it clearly, so I didn’t know what it was.”

  He pointed to the driveway beside the house. In the photograph, shade falls across the asphalt, obscuring the surface. I realized that Jianhui had never seen such an arrangement: Lishui’s first neighborhood with private driveways was White Cloud, which was still under construction. I explained that many Americans park their cars on strips of asphalt beside their homes.

  “Oh, now I understand,” he said. “I couldn’t tell if it was another street or something. I can fix it if you want.”

  In the painting he had broadened the asphalt so it now occupied a good half of the front lawn. For years, back in Missouri, my parents had resisted changing their old-fashioned driveway, believing the new two-car garages were excessive. But now Jianhui had done the widening work for them. I told him it was perfect except for one thing: no signature. The artists always left their work anonymous, because nobody in Europe wants to look at a painting of Venice and see a Chinese name, but I asked Jianhui to sign the canvas. I rolled it up and carried it on my next flight back to the States. My parents were thrilled, and they hung the gift in their kitchen. Every time I saw the painting, it reminded me of one of my favorite parts of Lishui, where the gentle countryside gave way to the Ancient Weir Art Village. But the painting also made me feel a little guilty, because Jianhui and Meizi had refused to accept any money for the commission. In all the time I knew them, that was the closest they ever came to painting for fun.

  AT THE END OF November, the bosses finally made a decision about moving the factory. Boss Gao drove to Ouhai, a region west of Wenzhou where the expressway had recently opened a new exit. He found an empty warehouse that was large enough to contain the Machine and the metal punch presses, and he signed a rental contract with the owners. It was cheaper than the current arrangement, and after the lease had been signed, the bosses consulted a fortune-teller. His advice was unequivocal: the twenty-eighth of November was also the eighth day of the lunar month, and there’s no better luck than double eights.

  They waited until the twenty-sixth to tell the workers. As expected, most of the assembly-line women immediately quit, and Master Luo and the other technicians attempted to leverage the move into higher salaries. But the bosses were able to dismiss these requests one by one. The only remaining issue was whether the Taos and Ren Jing would transfer with the factory. Boss Wang waited until the morning of the twenty-seventh to approach Mr. Tao directly, and at once the negotiations flared up.

  “Are you c-c-coming or not coming?” he said.

  “Not coming!” Mr. Tao said. “My son is in school here. We can’t just leave. And we have our business, too.”

  “You can do business there if you want.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Mr. Tao said. “We’re doing well here.”

  Before Boss Wang had approached, I had been chatting with Mr. Tao, who had been relaxed and good-humored. But now his body language completely changed: back straight, head up, chin thrust forward. Boss Wang tried again. “C-c-come try it for a while,” he said.

  “I need to be here to take care of my son.”

  “Well, then let the girls come.” This in fact was Boss Wang’s ideal solution: to keep the girls and drop Mr. Tao. But Mr. Tao responded quickly.

  “They can’t go alone,” he said. “They’re too young. Anyway, we signed contracts for the whole year. If you move, then you’re breaking the contract.”

  “I’m not breaking any contracts! I’m inviting you to come.”

  “The contract doesn’t say anything about going to another city. How can I move my whole family?”

  “That’s your business,” Boss Wang said. “I’m offering you the same job. That’s the contract.”

  “If I went to the labor bureau, they wouldn’t see it that way.” It was an idle threat—if indeed Mr. Tao were foolish enough to visit the labor bureau, and if by some miracle the cadres actually listened to a citizen complaint, their response would be to stop the fifteen-year-old Yufeng from working illegally. But the remark served its purpose: Boss Wang stormed off in frustration, and Mr. Tao seemed pleased. There was less than a day left to negotiate, but for a man like him that was plenty of time.

  HE DISAPPEARED AT LUNCHTIME, off on some mysterious errand. After Mr. Tao had left the factory, Master Luo invited Yufeng and Ren Jing to lunch in his dormitory room. Old Tian joined them, and after the meal the men began to needle the girls.

  “You don’t have a bank account, do you?” Master Luo said to Yufeng.

  “No.”

  “You’re still giving all your money to your parents! At your age you should have your own account.”

  “They need my help.”

  “It helps more if you learn to be independent,” he said. “Lots of people are independent at your age. In my village, everybody who goes out to work gets a bank account right away.”

  “Well, my village is different,” Yufeng said. Her arms were crossed and she stared stubbornly at the floor. Beside her, Ren Jing was silent; her mother had already told her she couldn’t go unless the girls were accompanied by Mr. Tao.

  “You should open a bank account now,” Master Luo said.

  “Fine, I’ll open one tomorrow!” Yufeng shouted. “Will you leave me alone?”

  “I just think you should make decisions for yourself,” Master Luo said softly. “If you have a bank account, then you can start buying things for yourself. In my village, when young people come home for the Spring Festival, they wear name-brand clothes and they have name-brand cell phones.”

  “People do that in my village too,” Yufeng shot back. “I remember when a girl came back with a motorcycle. Everybody said she was successful.”

  “Well, that’s what you should do. Or at least you should make your own decision.”

  “It’s not my decision!”

  “No, it’s obviously not,” he said. “You’re letting your father decide for you. He doesn’t want you to be independent. What are you going to do if you stay here?”

  “I’ll work in a shoe factory,” Yufeng said.

  “How much will you make?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think a shoe factory is going to hire you now, at the end of the year?”

  The girl fell silent—she knew Master Luo was right. November is a bad time to look for factory work; most people wait until after the holiday to jump jobs. But it’s also true that November is a bad time to find new employees, which was Master Luo and Old Tian’s stake in this conversation. Moving the machinery was going to be an enormous project, and the last thing they wanted to do was train new workers. And Master Luo knew that inevitably he would end up in th
e middle of any negotiations—a typical role for a high-level technician.

  Before leaving on his errand, Mr. Tao had made his terms clear. He demanded one thousand yuan a month for everybody: himself, his two daughters, and Ren Jing. The salary represented a raise of roughly 30 percent, and he also asked for free room and board. Boss Wang hadn’t responded yet—he had his hands full with pre-move preparations. His wife had come to help, and she had brought along his three-year-old son. Whenever the boy stayed in the factory, he spent his days poking into machinery and causing trouble. He pinballed back and forth between the floors, constantly chased away by workers. They did this with relish—they seemed to view the child as a convenient scapegoat for any aggression they harbored toward the boss.

  Now after lunch the child entered Master Luo’s dormitory room. Master Luo grabbed a big cooking knife, rolled up his sleeves, and crouched low to the ground, muttering like a psychopath. The three-year-old froze, eyes wide.

  “Uhhhh!” Master Luo grunted loudly, staggering toward the child. “Uhhh! Uhhhh!”

  He swiped at the air with the knife; the child screamed and ran. His cries echoed as he clattered down the stairway. Soon he’d be down in the chemist’s lab, where Little Long would find some creative way to drive him off. After Master Luo and Old Tian stopped laughing, they resumed their abuse of Yufeng.

  “Where’s all your money?” Old Tian said, teasingly. “You don’t get to keep any of the money you make, do you?”

  “She needs to learn independence,” Master Luo said.

  “I’d like to go,” Yufeng admitted. “But if my father says I have to stay, then maybe I can find a job in a shoe factory and learn some technical skills.”

  “That’s a joke!” Old Tian said. “You’re not going to find a technical job at your age.”

  “Come with us,” Master Luo said. “Learn to be on your own, and then next year you can go to Guangzhou or Shanghai, an exciting place like that.” He told the story of his own first migration, when he had saved money and eventually made his way to Shenzhen. The girls had heard it all before, but nevertheless they fell silent, eyes bright as they listened to tales of the south.

  BY SEVEN O’CLOCK BOSS Wang had offered seven hundred yuan. Mr. Tao held firm at one thousand—the difference came to thirty-eight monthly dollars per person, a significant sum. He was waiting at home when his daughters returned from work.

  “Master Luo and Old Tian are bullying me,” Yufeng complained. “They keep saying I should go out on my own.”

  “It doesn’t matter what they tell you,” Mr. Tao said.

  “But I want to go!”

  “You have to wait and see what the bosses say. Be patient.”

  “I want to go.” Her father ignored her, and the girl raised her voice: “I want to go!”

  “Be good,” Yuran said. The older sister had a calmer personality, and often she kept Yufeng in line. “Don’t start fighting,” she said.

  “But I want to go.” Yufeng’s voice was small now.

  “Just wait,” her father said sternly. “Everything will be fine if you wait.”

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK MASTER Luo arrived. We had just finished dinner, and now all of us gathered close around the gas-powered burner: the two Tao girls, their father, his cousin, and me. The rented room was basically a shack with mud walls; cold November air blew in through the cracks. Master Luo distributed a round of West Lake cigarettes to the men, and the girls quietly left—they knew this matter was restricted to adults. During dinner Mr. Tao and his cousin had talked idly about history, the way people do in the countryside, and now they continued the conversation.

  “The Ming started strong, but then they got weaker,” the cousin said.

  “That’s always true,” Mr. Tao said. “It’s the same way with a person. You get old, you get weak, and then you die.”

  “The Ming was when China got really weak,” Master Luo said, slipping easily into the topic. “They were defeated by the Manchus. The Manchus were a minority, and yet they ruled for four hundred years. So few people ruling so many!”

  “And then China stayed weak until Mao Zedong,” Mr. Tao said.

  From there we could have veered in any number of directions, but Master Luo brought us back on course. “Look, I want to give you what you want,” he said to Mr. Tao. “I don’t want to hire a lot of new people right now. You have to understand that I’m on your side.” He paused to take another puff from his cigarette. “Boss Wang and Boss Gao say that they’ll pay you each two thousand to work for the rest of the year. They’ll give you a bonus if business is good, and then at Spring Festival they’ll give each of you a red envelope. After Spring Festival they’ll guarantee eight hundred per month. Boss Wang said he can’t give you more.”

  The red envelope is a traditional Spring Festival gift, with money inside, but Mr. Tao was unimpressed. “I don’t want to split up my family,” he said. “It costs us money to do that.”

  “I know,” Master Luo said. “I told him that if I have to find workers and train them, it’s going to cost about five hundred per person. I told the bosses that your demands aren’t so high.”

  “It doesn’t include food and lodging?”

  “It doesn’t include food,” Master Luo said. “They’ll give lodging.”

  “I want both.”

  “I’m sorry, but don’t forget they’re offering the bonus and the red envelope.”

  “Red envelope or no red envelope; bonus or no bonus,” Mr. Tao said. “All that matters is what’s guaranteed. If they aren’t paying for food and lodging, then they should pay seven yuan a day for living expenses. It has to be the same for everybody, including Ren Jing. She’s my responsibility, just like the girls.”

  “I don’t know what they’ll say.” Master Luo’s hands were nervous; he folded a scrap of paper repeatedly. Now Mr. Tao’s wife entered the shack and she joined the circle around the burner.

  “When I started this job,” Mr. Tao said, “I left a factory where I made four and a half yuan per hour. They told me I could make more here, which hasn’t been the case. So I’m not going to move without a guarantee.”

  “I know it’s a hassle,” Master Luo said.

  The woman spoke up. “Why bother?” she said. “We can send both of them to work in a shoe factory.”

  “We need to figure this out before we start talking about shoe factories,” Mr. Tao said.

  “For this period, two thousand is fair,” Master Luo said. “And after the Spring Festival you’ll get a guaranteed eight hundred.”

  “Things that happen in the future are things I can’t control,” Mr. Tao said. ‘“Guaranteed’ is just another way to trick workers. Yufeng can do ten thousand pairs of wires in a day. Where are you going to find a new worker who’s that fast?”

  For the next forty-five minutes the conversation circled the room. The men chain-smoked West Lake cigarettes, complaining about the hassles of moving and hiring new workers; they agreed on the general untrustworthiness of Zhejiang bosses. But it took a long time before anybody mentioned a specific number again. “They have to pay each of us an extra hundred per month, before the holiday,” Mr. Tao finally said. “Tell them the money is to cover living expenses.” Master Luo nodded, put out his cigarette, and left the shack. He had been there for more than an hour.

  BACK IN THE FACTORY, Boss Wang and Boss Gao were in the midst of negotiating with a moving crew. For days they had done nothing but haggle, and now they received the message from Master Luo.

  “We should just pay them,” Boss Gao said. “Who cares?” But he looked to his uncle for the final decision. Boss Wang thought for a moment—he was clearly annoyed to be dealing with Mr. Tao, even through an intermediary.

  “Offer him fifty,” he said. “Not one hundred.”

  “Is that the last offer?” Master Luo said. It was a difference of six dollars and thirty-seven cents.

  “Tell him it’s the last offer. I’m not going to give him what he wants.”

/>   MASTER LUO AND I walked back across Suisong Road. It was after 9:30 and the night had grown colder; he laughed bitterly at the routine. “I always have to do this,” he said. “Every job, it’s the same thing—the master has to be the middleman. Nobody wants to deal with each other directly. Mafan! All I want are reliable workers, but I have to do all this negotiating.”

  The Tao home was empty, so we continued to the family dry goods stand, where Yufeng and Yuran were handling the evening’s customers. Usually their father was there at this time, but he had disappeared on another mysterious errand, and he wasn’t answering his cell phone. Master Luo left a message with the girls, asking Mr. Tao to call, but he never did. The offer was still on the table when the night ended.

  ON THE MORNING OF November 28, the eighth day of the lunar month, a day of good fortune and fine prospects, I awoke to a Volkswagen Santana with a flat tire. In over half a decade of driving in China, across all the bad roads and the half-built development zones, that was my first flat. I opened the trunk: no jack, no wrench. At the Wenzhou Prosperous Automobile Rental Company, you got an empty toolbox along with an empty tank; I was lucky they had included a spare. I telephoned a Lishui cabbie I had met in the past, and he arrived with his tools and changed the tire. While he was tightening the last bolt, he decided it was a good idea to stand on the wrench for better leverage. Before I could say anything, the bolt snapped—he sheared the head right off.

  “Mei shir,” he said. “No problem. It’s tight enough—that tire sure isn’t coming off!”

  “But what if it gets a flat? How would I get that bolt off?”

  He considered this in silence. “That would be a problem,” he said slowly. “Maybe you shouldn’t drive too fast.”