Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (56 page)

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.

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 the 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.