Barbarian Lost (24 page)

My tea is a light golden colour and grassy tasting.

“The factories here have moved,” Sue tells me. “No one is quite sure where they have gone.”

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Some kind of self-censorship at work, I figure. I let it be.

“Then where to next?” I ask.

Sue has ideas of where to go, but she isn't quite sure how to get there. She heads back into the street to ask strangers more questions.

“Things are changing fast; it can be confusing at times,” Viv comments. “In places like this, people come from all sorts of different places. They're busy; they don't get to know the city well. Even if they do, the neighbourhoods change fast.”

“Do dialects make things difficult?”

“In big cities, people don't usually speak in their dialect to strangers.”

Sue is back. “We need a taxi,” she says.

So we walk a few blocks toward a larger boulevard. I ponder the real estate conundrum surrounding us. How could such large buildings be empty yet still serviced? Who owns them? Who is suffering from this vacancy and paying for the upkeep? Land here is expensive, and utilities as well.

Maybe they're not actually empty. But evidence would say otherwise. As I peer up at the buildings, I see few lights. The neighbourhood is clearly running at a very low capacity. State ownership or big business lurks behind the situation, I conclude. These were textile factories, probably built in the 1980s but recently shut down. Labour was redeployed. A number of converging factors explain this, I figure. Multi-storey production is not efficient. And capacity is reached quickly.

I conjure an image of the neighbourhood running at full capacity, churning out product: the constant din of ventilators and air conditioners, freight elevators taxed with all the lifting, the streets choked with delivery trucks being loaded and unloaded with materials and product, the air thick with fumes, masses of labourers filling the multiple floors of the buildings, toiling away at sewing machines. Vast mobs forming when shifts start and end. Impressive. Reckless. Problematic. And now implausible.

In China, industrialists are scaling up production. Planners and market forces both seek higher efficiency. Old-school industry like this kind of textile production, which occurred here only recently, no longer has a place in Guangzhou.

The Pearl River economy possibly invented the sweatshop, but they're no longer easy to find here. Well-ventilated factories are built out of lighter materials. They produce higher-value items. Electric forklifts move pallets toward shipping containers. Humans are moved about more carefully between high-efficiency operations and better-planned settlements. Low-end, high-scale production exists, but elsewhere—inland, upcountry. In smaller cities with cheaper property and labour. Or across Southeast Asia, where labour is less expensive, industrial options more limited and risks more easily ignored.

Here, it's hard to tell what'll happen. The area can hardly be left in such a passive state. Light industry, I guess. I imagine computer widgets or packaging of some kind being manufactured here. But who knows? Perhaps the neighbourhood will be destroyed, the utilities improved and huge residential complexes built. Consumption replacing production. Perhaps.

Our next stop is on reclaimed land. We cross a swampy river. The area is suddenly grassy and the road roughly surfaced—in places, earthen. It's almost like we're heading into the countryside, but we're not; we are coming through the back door. Buildings quickly multiply around us. They are made of crude cement, at most two storeys high. Some are tiny houses; others are more commercial in feel, with high ceilings and big doors. People are everywhere. Open hangars emit the sound of machines or the bright blue flashes of welding torches. The smell of fumes but also of wet earth and fresh sawdust. We'll not be seeing sweatshops here, but raw human industry.

We instruct the taxi to take us deeper. He tells us there should be a market up ahead. But it's slow moving now; we share the rough and narrow road with trucks, carts, pedestrians and even animals. We see that we would move faster on foot, so we settle the fare and exit the car.

Narrow streets lead off the main road, each one to more activity. People are making metal implements, wooden tools and furniture. They're packing things into crates. One shop is quiet and filled with identical appliances in their boxes. Perhaps a local speculator got an inside deal on a whole pile of locally made air conditioners and is hoping to sell them off en masse to a retailer.

Another street is geared toward recycling. Piles of old televisions fill a yard. Clusters of computer keyboards are laid out unceremoniously on bare earth. The smell of melting plastic and burnt metal permeates the air. Inside, small walls of desktop units stand behind a group of workers who are opening them up and stripping them down. They unscrew the fans, amass the wiring, then go at the circuitry, prying off condensers and chips.

Elsewhere, carpenters are assembling bathtubs out of planks of wood. They are fitted around a central plate and banded together—a luxury item for new Asian wealth. Such a tub is a finicky affair to keep in good working order but affords a luxurious soak to which your average Chinese workaholic is ill-accustomed.

“How much?” Viv inquires.

The bathtub builder takes a moment to think about it, then tells Viv that he'll accept the equivalent of forty dollars. He's grinning with the thought of a guaranteed sale to us fine people. Alas, we move on.

Here, there's no indolence and little waste. What's new about this neighbourhood is not its industry. Switch out a few variables of production and decor and this neighbourhood might closely resemble the old Pearl River Canton. What's new is that the bustle is occurring in an economic boom of unrivalled proportions. Total mobilization.

In these rough dregs where everything is happening on a small scale, there's an excess of paid work. Even the toothless illiterate grandmother finds her station sorting motherboards. She's paid but a pittance, I'm sure. Or she donates her time to her family, who run the salvage business, in exchange for food and shelter. But there she is, in an earthen-floored concrete garage, toiling away for long hours, making the tiniest contribution to a gargan
tuan economic phenomenon. Her work too will be turned into product. Her time will be rewarded by further consumption—not the wooden bathtub, perhaps, but the air conditioner possibly will find its way through her toils to her modest home.

Sue, Viv and I ramble through the quarter, eventually stumbling upon the market. It's big and mostly covered, but without walls. The space under the roofing is packed with people and products. It's a food market with many rows of fruit, root vegetables and leafy greens. I'm more interested in the animals. Several carcasses hang in brightly lit enclosures with soiled tarps for walls. Bloodied butchers hack away at steer or pig and lay quarters and cuts of meat on the display tables alongside glistening organ meat.

Even in this heat, the market doesn't seem to make much use of refrigeration. Fish are piled up in buckets or boxes, mostly without ice, shiny and slimy.

The myth of Chinatown tells us that the Chinese eat everything—birds, reptiles, monkeys, dogs, cats and insects—all sold alive. Upcountry, this may be true. But not here. Despite its roughness and spontaneity, this place is no village and offers up no bush food. The neighbourhood is a migrant labour encampment in the middle of Guangzhou. People from all over feed off the action, however marginally, slowly trying to get ahead or at least dig in.

The Cantonese themselves have a taste for refined and rare food, much of it from the sea. Abalone or flying fish roe. A bed of congealed saliva woven together by tropical swallows living high on volcanic outcroppings over water is the famed bird's nest on the Chinatown menu. I have yet to come across it. I've enjoyed frogs' ovaries, though; they're sold as a topping over sweet creamy shakes in Hong Kong. You would never know what they are from eating them; the clear gelatine is mostly without flavour and
disappears quickly into the drink. I'm always amazed that people eat amphibian egg sacs in such a casual manner.

These delicacies are not well represented in this coarse market, though. Still, there are many rows of caged chickens, ducks, geese and small birds. The flesh of domesticated birds is loved by the Chinese, rich or poor. An ancient source of animal protein for Chinese peasants and a cornerstone of the menu throughout the land but especially in the south, these birds are well suited to high-density cohabitation with humans. Compared with larger animals, birds are less polluting, an important fact when one considers the great pressures on drinking water in China. Fowl can be raised on the tiniest parcels of land, or in and around rice paddies or drainage ditches. They even function as a kind of pest control.

China has run out of land, and hundreds of millions of its citizens live in concrete cities now. The country has become a huge importer of frozen foreign meat: beef, swine and sheep from places where land is cheaper. China's also fast adopting industrial meat production methods of its own. Chickens and pigs can now be kept and fed by the thousands in warehouses from the moment that they are born to when they are ready to be eaten.

When these industrial practices combine with the traditional preference for live animals, as is clear in this food market, one senses a danger. One imagines flu viruses mutating through dense populations of animals brought to markets alive and then into people's cramped apartments. Add to this modern air travel and we begin to understand the origins of previous pandemics—old culinary habits coinciding with new food production methods, high population densities and easy air travel.

Sue wonders whether we might be interested in eating snake.

“Yes, we must eat snake at once!” I say in jest. I ate snake many, many years ago in Hong Kong. The meat was tough and brown. It had been cooked in a light broth and had a faint but peculiar aroma. Still, I'm curious.

We find another taxi and travel over a few bridges and through brush-covered hillocks toward the outskirts of town. Our destination is a stand-alone banquet hall on the side of a minor road. Its huge ornate sign depicts a variety of snakes, laid out in an encyclopaedic manner.

It's well into the afternoon and there isn't a client in the place. Young waiters jump into action to attend to us. I'm made to understand that all the snakes they serve are slaughtered on the premises. I'm asked if I would like to choose a snake for our meal. How can I refuse? I must see the snakes before eating them. Viv and Sue tell me to follow one of the waiters; they'll remain at the table.

I'm led to the back of the building and to a grimy, stinky area on the back side of the kitchen complex. In the dim light, we are met by a tougher-looking employee in dirty, dark brown uniform-like shirt and pants. The snake wrangler, I assume. He leads me to a wooden door that opens onto a windowless room. Fluorescent lights turn on and I notice a desk and filing cabinet to one side and a dozen or so tall baskets in the middle of the room. Baskets are quickly thrust in my face, each holding live snakes. There must be several hundred snakes in this little cement room. Thankfully, I detect no peculiar odours. And unlike with poultry, there is no such danger as snake flu.

What do I know about choosing snakes to eat? I turn down a couple of slender banded types and point at the bigger baskets. I'm casually shown some pretty menacing-looking creatures and
settle on a thick, inky-black type; a creepy-looking beast for sure, but at least it's big and meaty, and I hope its shiny eel-like appearance might make for more tender flesh.

The man starts gesticulating for me to pick one of the dark snakes from the writhing snake salad at the bottom of the basket. I can't take him seriously and laugh out loud.

Ever more insistent, the man reaches into the basket with a metal tool to pluck a snake out for my approval. I'm already heading for the door, but I turn back to see a long black snake with a pale underbelly wiggling from the wrangler's tongs like a giant worm on a hook. I merely bark out, “Right, right, thank you!” in Mandarin and exit the room. Enough with the chamber of snakes! The way things were going, next I'd be invited to help the guy carry my chosen snake to the kitchen and asked to hold its body down while the cleaver severed its neck.

Back at the table, Viv and Sue explain that people mostly eat snake for vigour. It's food to bring the fire up. Many men think that snake will help them perform in bed or be more fertile.

“A little too obvious for my liking,” I say.

The snake arrives in a series of dishes. Its organs with country herbs. Its bony tail dry-fried with salt and spice. A brothy soup with its head. Then a bigger dish: sweet fried snake sections. I reckon these my best bet. The sauce is sweet and tasty, but the meat is beyond tough. On one side of the morsels, the black skin is like stewed belt leather. On the other side are portions of the creature's bony rib cage, equally difficult to chew through. Only by pulling the skin hard away from the ribs can I nibble on the sliver of meat between the two.

I am left wondering whether this snake business is just a gimmick. Then I think of all the live animals in the back; it's no small
affair to catch and assemble so many of them. Snake eating must be serious enough business to some people.

A waiter asks us how we are enjoying the meal. The snake is too tough for enjoyable eating, I say. He quickly offers to take it back to be cooked more. Pretending to be a connoisseur, I declare that snake should be cooked right the first time.

Jokes aside, I conclude that I'm going about it all wrong. The skin and bones are probably relished by avid snake eaters. I picture a lustful lover coming here to chew through a whole bunch of snake gristle, believing the meat's resilience and endurance will wear off on him and his member. Too much for me.

As we leave the restaurant, Sue unexpectedly takes her leave. Her newspaper has called and she has to report to duty for an event on the other side of town. She promises to meet up with us later. So much for seeing the sweatshops of Guangzhou, I muse to Viv.