Farther Away: Essays (17 page)

The puffin was a Christmas present from my brother Bob. It came in an unmarked plastic bag and appeared to be some sort of puppet or plush toy. It had a fleece-lined body and a big, orange, squeeze-inviting beak, and its eyes were set in triangles of black fur that lent it an expression of sorrow or anxiety or incipient disapproval. I warmed to the bird right away. I gave it a funny voice and personality and used it to entertain the Californian I live with. I sent Bob an enthusiastic thank-you note, in reply to which he informed me that the puffin was not a toy at all but a golf accessory. He'd bought it in the pro shop at Bandon Dunes, a golf resort in southwest Oregon, to remind me of the fun I could have golfing and birding in Oregon, where he lives. The puffin was a head cover for a golf driver.

My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-size chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts. Most of all, I dislike how badly I play the game. Spelled backward, golf is flog.

I do own a cheap set of clubs, but there was no way I was going to impale my puffin on one of them. For one thing, the Californian had taken to clutching it in bed every night. The puffin had quickly established itself as a minor household character. Out in the world of nature, real puffins (and many other pelagic birds) were suffering badly from overfishing of the oceans and degradation of their nest sites, but nature could be a cold and abstract thing to love from the middle of New York City. The toy was furry and immediate.

In Jane Smiley's great novel
The Greenlanders,
there's a tale about a Norse farmer who brings a polar bear cub into his house and raises it as his son. Although the bear learns to read, it can't help remaining a bear, with a bear's huge appetite, and eventually it begins to eat up all the farmer's sheep. The farmer knows he has to get rid of the bear, but he can never quite bring himself to do it, because (according to the story's refrain) the bear has such beautiful soft fur and such beautiful dark eyes. Metaphorically, for Smiley, the bear represents a destructive passion too pleasurable to resist. But the story also works as a straightforward warning about sentimental idolatry.
Homo sapiens
is the animal that wants to believe, in defiance of harsh natural law, that other animals are part of its family. I can make a pretty good ethical argument for our responsibility to other species, and yet I sometimes wonder whether, at root, my concern for biodiversity and animal welfare might be a kind of regression to my childhood bedroom and its community of plush toys: a fantasy of cuddliness and interspecies harmony. Smiley's smitten farmer is finally driven to offer the flesh of his own arm to his insatiable bear-child.

Late last fall, while the
Times
was running a series of long articles about the crisis of pollution, water shortages, desertification, species loss, and deforestation in China and I was managing to read no more than fifty words of any of them, a terrific new Jeep commercial was airing during football games. You know: the one where a squirrel, a wolf, two horned larks, and an SUV driver join together in song while rolling down an empty highway through pristine forest. I especially enjoyed the moment when the wolf gulps down one of the larks, receives a disapproving look from the SUV driver, spits the lark back out unharmed, and bursts into song. I knew perfectly well that SUVs were even more hostile to horned larks than wolves were; I knew that my domestic appetites were part of the same beast that was devouring the natural world in China and elsewhere in Asia; and yet I loved the Jeep ad. I loved the worried eyes and soft fur of my golf accessory. I didn't want to know what I knew. And yet: I couldn't stand not knowing, either. One afternoon, with a kind of grim foreboding, I went to the bedroom and grabbed the puffin by its wings and stuck it underneath a bright lamp and turned it inside out, and there, sure enough, was the label:
HANDMADE IN CHINA.

I decided to visit the part of the world where the puffin came from. The industrial system that had created the fake bird was destroying real birds, and I wanted to be in a place where this connection couldn't be concealed. Basically, I wanted to know how bad things were.

I called up the American company on the puffin's label—Daphne's Headcovers, of Phoenix, Arizona—and spoke to its president, Jane Spicer. I was afraid she'd be reticent about her Chinese sources, especially in light of the recent Chinese toy scandals, but she was the opposite of reticent. In our first phone conversation, she told me about her golden retriever, Aspen, her found cat, Mango, her late mother, Daphne (with whom, at the age of ten, she'd started the company), her husband, Steve, who ran the production end of things, and her most famous customer, Tiger Woods, whose furry tiger head cover, nicknamed Frank, had costarred in a series of Nike television ads in 2003 and 2004. She told me that Daphne, herself an immigrant from England, had made a point of hiring immigrants to sew the head covers, and that she, Jane, had once lent some workers to a woman who manufactured cat toys and had lost her own workers and was desperate to get her orders filled, and that, years later, in the mysterious way of karma, after the woman had struck it rich and Jane had forgotten all about her, she'd called up Jane and said, “Remember me? You saved my business. I've been looking for a way to repay you, and I'd like you to meet some friends of mine from China.”

Daphne's is the world leader in animal head covers. When I went to visit its headquarters, in Phoenix, Jane introduced me to workers she referred to as “the zoo crew,” who inspect the head covers and sort them by species in plastic-lined boxes. She helped me locate the puffins, which, piled in their box, looked about as cute and animate as laundry. In the sample room, she showed me boxes of unauthorized knockoffs with sheaves of legal documents stacked on top. “The vast majority of our lawsuits are against American companies,” she said. “Often the Chinese manufacturers don't even know they're infringing.” Her tiger and her gopher (with its
Caddyshack
associations) were especially popular targets of intellectual piracy. There was also a walrus head cover made from the dense brown pelt of some actual animal. “This should still be on the animal that wore it,” Jane said severely. “Karma's going to get the guy who did this, but our attorney's going to get him first.”

When I asked her if I could possibly meet with her suppliers in China, Jane said maybe. She wanted me to know, in any case, that the suppliers' workers in China were averaging twice, or nearly twice, the local minimum wage. “We wanted to pay for perfection,” she said, “and we wanted good karma there—wanted happy workers in a happy factory.” She and Steve still do some design, but they've come to trust their Chinese partners to do more and more of it. Steve can e-mail a sketch from Phoenix and have a plush prototype in hand a week later. When he travels to China, the team there can produce a prototype before lunch and a revised prototype by the end of the workday. Language is mostly not a problem, although Steve did have trouble explaining a gray whale's “barnacles” to the Chinese team, and an employee once came to him with a strange question: “You said you want all the animals to be
angry
. Why?” Steve replied that, no, to the contrary, he and Jane wanted their animals to look happy and to make people happy to touch them. The word that had been mistranslated as
angry
was
realistic
.

“Work first,
then
pleasure,” David Xu cheerfully admonished me on my first official day in China. Xu was from the foreign-affairs office in the booming city of Ningbo, a hundred miles due south of Shanghai, and our “work” consisted of racing from one factory to another in a hired van. From the back of the van, it seemed to me that every inch of Greater Ningbo was under construction or reconstruction simultaneously. My extremely new hotel had been built in the rear yard of a merely very new hotel, a few feet away. The roads were modern but heavily divoted, as if it were understood that they would all be torn up again soon anyway. The countryside seethed with improvement; in some villages, it was hard to find a house that didn't have a pile of sand or a stack of bricks in front of it. Farm fields were sprouting factories while, outside the less-new factories, the support columns of coming viaducts went up behind scaffolds. The growth rate that Ningbo had sustained in recent years—about fourteen percent—quickly became exhausting just to look at.

As if to reenergize me, Xu twisted around in the front seat and emphasized, with a big smile, that “China is a
developing
country.” Xu's teeth were beautiful. He had the fashionably angular eyeglasses and ingratiating eagerness of an untenured literature professor, and he was charming and frank on every imaginable subject—our driver's lack of basic road skills, the long and eventful history of homosexuality in China, the uncanny suddenness with which old neighborhoods in Ningbo were razed and replaced, even the unwisdom of the Three Gorges project on the Yangtze. Xu had also graciously refrained from asking me what I had been doing in China between my arrival in Shanghai seven days earlier and my official arrival in Ningbo the afternoon before. To repay this kindness, I tried to show keen interest in even the most obviously unrepresentative factories he took me to, such as the automobile maker Geely, a proud pioneer of green manufacturing methods like “water melt” body paint (“ ‘Green' means friendly to the environment,” Xu said), and the heavy-equipment manufacturer Haitian, where workers typically took home nine thousand dollars a year (Xu: “That's twice what I make!”) and many of them commuted in private cars.

The after-work treat that Xu had promised me was a VIP tour of the almost finished Hangzhou Bay Bridge—at thirty-six kilometers, the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world. Before we got there, however, we needed to watch all-terrain-vehicle body parts being spray-painted and motorcycle wheels being milled and acrylic “cotton” fiber being extruded and ingeniously processed in the thriving municipality of Cixi, where exports last year totaled four billion dollars, and there are twenty thousand private companies and only one state-owned enterprise, and so many locals own or manage factories that the resident population is nearly equaled by the population of migrant workers who do the ordinary jobs. I'd read a lot about migrant workers, and I knew that a large percentage of them were in their teens, but I was still unprepared for how young they looked. At the acrylic-fiber plant, the four workers manning the command center might have been borrowed from a tenth-grade homeroom. They sat gazing at flat-panel screens aglow with flowcharts and streaming data, two boys and two girls in jeans and sneakers, communicating nothing so much as a wish to be left alone.

The sun was setting by the time we got to the Hangzhou Bay Bridge. Most of its total cost (about $1.7 billion) had been covered by the government of Ningbo, which was platting out a vast new industrial zone immediately to the east. The bridge will cut the driving time between Shanghai and Ningbo in half; after it officially opens, in May [of 2008], the Olympic torch will be carried across it, bound for Beijing and the Green Olympics. On our drive out and back, the only animal or plant life I saw was a pair of gulls flying rapidly away. Every five kilometers, to combat monotony, the color of the railings changed. At the bridge's midpoint, I got out and surveyed the turbid gray tide running against concrete piers on which a wayside restaurant and hotel were being built. I found myself aching to see more birds, any birds.

According to my visa application, the purpose of my trip to Ningbo was to explore the subject of Chinese manufacturing for American export, but I had taken care to let Xu know that I was very interested in birds as well. Now, trying to please me and to make our day complete, he directed our driver west from the bridge into a system of reed beds and ponds which the Cixi government had preserved as a natural area. Much of the area had recently burned, and all of it was being considered, Xu said, for conversion to a “wetland park.”

I'd seen one of these wetland parks in Shanghai, earlier in the week. I did my best to sound enthusiastic.

“Red-crowned cranes are commonly seen here,” Xu assured me from the front seat. “The government is planting trees to help shelter the birds from the elements.”

I had the feeling that he was improvising a little bit, but I was grateful for the effort. We drove past tidal flats of such barrenness that they appeared to predate multicellular life. We crossed over a broad canal on which I thought I glimpsed four sitting ducks or grebes, but they were only plastic bottles. We passed an “eco-farm” consisting of fish ponds surrounded by vacation cottages. Finally, in failing light, we roused a flock of night herons from a densely vegetated marsh. We got out of the van and stood watching as they circled and drifted closer to us. David Xu was beside himself with joy. “Jonathan!” he cried. “They know you're a birdwatcher! They're welcoming you!”