Oracle Bones (15 page)

With that out of the way, the Shenzhen Museum undertook a far more enthusiastic documentation of modern history. One exhibit noted that on December 1 of 1987, the city held New China’s first public auction for the right to use a piece of land. Nearby, a photograph commemorated the first talent market—another Shenzhen innovation that quickly spread. There were other photographic artifacts: the founding of China’s first stock exchange, in 1990; the first transfer of state-owned housing to the private marketplace, in 1988. One museum display proudly marked the historic Shenzhen opening, in 1996, of China’s first Wal-Mart.

DESPITE THE SLOGANS,
none of this had actually happened overnight, or without opposition. If Deng Xiaoping was the city’s god, it was in the Greek sense—a patron who was periodically resisted by other mysterious powers. Deng believed that the Special Economic Zones would help drive China’s changing economy, but there was also a political dimension: in particular, he hoped to attract investment from Hong Kong and Taiwan, subtly bringing these regions closer to the mainland. But conservatives feared the opposite: they believed that cities such as Shenzhen allowed foreign companies to exploit cheap Chinese labor. Many of the new economic zones happened to be located in former treaty ports, the cities that had been forcibly opened in the nineteenth century after the Opium War. Opponents of Deng’s strategy sometimes attacked it as an echo of foreign imperialism. In the mid-1980s, when a series of smuggling scandals broke out in the zones, the criticism intensified.

One response was to build the Shenzhen fence, which was completed in
1984. It was an age-old Chinese solution, with a new twist: in Shenzhen, one function of the city wall was to keep things in. Officials hoped to restrict the potentially dangerous effects of reform, and the wall provided a reassuring sense of control—a physical demarcation that showed where the experimental city began. In order to enter Shenzhen proper, citizens had to carry a border pass that had been approved by their home province.

After the summer of 1989, when the Beijing crackdown left conservatives with the upper hand, some feared that Shenzhen would lose its special status. But three years later, the benevolent god returned. In 1992, Deng made his famous “Southern Tour,” which was intended to show that China’s economic reforms would continue. The tour’s key moment came in Shenzhen, where the eighty-eight-year-old leader delivered a speech, saying, “The important lesson of Shenzhen is to dare to charge into forbidden zones.” And thus the second stanza of “Spring Story”:

In another spring of 1992

An old man wrote a poem on the

southern coast of China…

Oh, China, China,

You have opened a new scroll that will last for one

hundred years

You hold up a springtime that is a blaze of color.

In Shenzhen itself, few average residents seemed to realize that they were part of a massive experiment. But they sensed the uncertainty, and they tended to describe their city’s development as the result of a powerful man’s patronage rather than as the natural product of free-market economics. During one of my trips to Shenzhen, I met a businessman who told me that the offerings to the billboard after Deng’s death had been a way of giving thanks. But he said that there had also been an element of fear and superstition; it was almost like traditional Chinese ancestor worship, in which the departed could still influence daily life. Another time, I chatted with a cab driver who had migrated there from Hunan province. “This place used to be a poor country village, and then Deng Xiaoping came and told them to build it,” he said. “That’s how things work in China—one person says something should be done, and it happens. That’s Communism.”

Despite the leaders’ attempts to define and delineate their experiment, certain aspects of Shenzhen developed in their own way. The region came to be dominated by labor-intensive light industry, and factory managers preferred female workers, who could be paid less and were easier to manage. Although
there were no reliable local statistics, it was obvious that women in Shenzhen far outnumbered men. Locals often claimed that the ratio was seven women to every man. Shenzhen became famous for prostitution, and also for its “second wives,” the mistresses of factory owners who already had families in Hong Kong or Taiwan.

Attempts at border control had unintended consequences. Many factories moved to the other side of the Shenzhen fence, where they took advantage of cheaper land and less rigorous law enforcement. The Shenzhen area became divided into two worlds, which were described by residents as
guannei
and
guanwai
—“within the gates” and “beyond the gates.” In centuries past, these phrases had described regions on either side of Shanhaiguan, a famous section of the Great Wall that marked the border with Manchuria. But in Shenzhen the old terms were applied to the new boundary. Satellite towns sprang up beyond the fence, most of them squalid and unplanned. In this sprawl of cheaply constructed factories and worker dormitories, wages were lower. The typical workweek was six days instead of five. Labor accidents and factory fires were more frequent than they were in Shenzhen proper.

It was here, beyond the gates, where Emily found her first job, in a satellite city called Longhua. Shortly after she started work, the company added a production division, becoming a full-fledged factory, complete with workshops and dormitories. The factory produced pewter, brass, and low-grade silver jewelry, as well as cheap plastic beads that were painted and lacquered, packaged in ziplock bags, and exported to Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and the United States.

EMILY’S STORY ABOUT
the businessman from Hong Kong ended quickly. A couple of weeks after our telephone conversation, she called again, and I asked about the man.

“He likes all women he sees,” she said with a laugh. “Because of that he is not such a problem.”

She told me that her sister had found a new job with a lonely hearts hot-line, talking on the telephone with people who felt lost in Shenzhen. She didn’t earn as much as Emily, but the work was easy. She received bonuses based on volume, and there were plenty of callers. I asked Emily why so many people telephoned.

“Everyone in Shenzhen has many troubles,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“There are many troubles about affections,” she said. “Some people say
there is no real love in Shenzhen. People are too busy with earning money to exist.”

She sounded a lot older than the student I remembered. After our phone conversations, I often found myself wondering how any young person could find her way in Shenzhen, or in any of the other boomtowns. The anonymity was unsettling: millions of faceless migrants heading south. It seemed inevitable that a young woman like Emily would lose her way.

IN THE SPRING,
a man named Zhu Yunfeng came to work at the jewelry factory. He had been trained as a mold maker, and at his previous job he had miscalculated the weight of a metal part. Along with three other workers, he tried to lift the part, but it slipped. Zhu Yunfeng let go. The other workers did not, and they lost some of their fingers. The injured laborers were promised compensation, and Zhu Yunfeng wasn’t blamed for the accident, but nevertheless he decided to leave the job. Seeing the maimed workers around the plant made him feel uncomfortable.

Emily didn’t take much notice of Zhu Yunfeng when he first arrived in March of that year. He was quiet and there wasn’t much about his appearance that initially caught her eye. He was of average height, with thick black hair, and his shoulders were broad from working with the molds. He wasn’t handsome. But over time, Emily began to notice him more. She liked the way he walked—there was confidence in his gait.

Two months later, small gifts started appearing in her desk drawer. She received two dolls and a small figurine of a sheep. She didn’t ask who had put them there.

In June, Emily and Zhu Yunfeng were out with their co-workers and somehow found themselves walking alone in the local park. She didn’t know how they had become separated from the group. Suddenly, she felt afraid; things were happening too fast. She was twenty-two years old. He was twenty-six.

“I don’t want to walk with you,” she said.

“Who do you want to walk with?” he asked.

“I don’t want to walk with anybody!”

They returned to the factory. Months later, Zhu Yunfeng would tell her that that was the moment when he knew there was a chance of success. He could see that she hadn’t made up her mind yet.

The factory had fifty employees. The Taiwanese boss told the workers openly that the only reason he had come to mainland China was because of the cheap labor. The workers didn’t like their boss very much. Some of them
made as little as one yuan an hour, or twelve cents, which meant that they had to work overtime to earn a decent income. When describing the boss, they often used the same two words that many workers in Shenzhen used to describe Taiwanese owners: stingy and lecherous. But the jewelry factory boss wasn’t as bad as many of the others, and conditions at the plant were better than the average “beyond the gates” factory. The workers had Sundays off, and during the week they were allowed to leave after work hours, although everybody had to be back in the dormitory in time for curfew. Curfew was eleven or twelve o’clock at night, depending on the boss’s whim.

The dormitory occupied the top two floors of a six-story building. There were four to ten workers to a room. It was a “three-in-one” factory—production, warehousing, and living quarters were combined into one structure. This arrangement was illegal in China, and the workers knew it, just as they knew that some of the production material stored on the ground floor was extremely flammable. What’s more, an electrician had made an inspection, during which he told Emily and the other secretaries that the building had faulty wiring. Afterward, Emily mapped out an escape route for herself. If a fire happened to break out at night, she intended to run to the dormitory’s sixth-floor balcony and jump across to the roof of the building next door. That was the extent of her plan—it was pointless to complain to anybody about the violations. There were many three-in-one factories beyond the gates, and workers couldn’t do anything about it. All of them were far from home.

One Saturday night in October, Zhu Yunfeng took Emily’s hand while they were crossing the road. Her heart leaped up in her chest. Zhu Yunfeng held on tightly.

“I’m too nervous,” she said, once they had reached the other side of the street. “I don’t want it to be like this.”

“What’s wrong?” he said. “Haven’t you ever done this before?”

“I have,” she said. “But I’m still scared.”

“It’s going to be like this in the future,” he said. “You should get used to it.”

Much later, when Emily told me the story, she couldn’t help laughing. And she made a certain gesture that was common to Chinese women, covering her mouth with her hand, as if she shouldn’t take too much pleasure in the memory.

EVERY SIX MONTHS,
I took the train down to Shenzhen. In China, official journalist visas required a great deal of paperwork—with the support of a sponsoring publication, you had to apply for a bureau license and a journal
ist card. These were things that I still lacked, and so twice a year I crossed into Hong Kong, where a travel agency sold six-month multi-entry business visas for fifty dollars, no questions asked. That became my migratory routine: whenever summer turned to fall, or winter to spring, it was time for me to head south once more.

I made my first visa run in April of 1999. The train journey was pleasant; I liked watching the dry northern plains give way to the lushness of the south. In Hong Kong, it took less than a day to process the new document, and then I crossed the land border back into Shenzhen. I caught a bus out to the satellite city of Longhua, where Emily’s factory was located. She had told me to meet her at the local McDonald’s, which was the only Western restaurant in town. When I arrived, she was already out in front, standing next to the statue of Uncle McDonald. She had asked for a day’s vacation from the factory.

Two years had passed since we’d last met, but she looked much the same. She wore a simple blue silk dress, and her hair was tied back; she smiled and shook my hand, the way she knew Americans did. We spoke mostly in Chinese—she told me that she felt more comfortable if we talked in her native tongue. Her student shyness had disappeared; she was the guide now, steering me briskly through town to another bus stop, where we caught a ride to the gates of the Special Economic Zone. Uniformed guards at the fence checked our IDs—my passport, her border pass—and then the highway led us into the heart of the city.

A year earlier, when I was still in the Peace Corps, Adam Meier had visited Emily in Shenzhen. He told me that the highlight of his southern tour was the Opium War Museum, which was located on the coast nearby. To reach the museum, one had to hire a ride on a minibike; to hire the minibike, one had to negotiate with an entire pack of drivers. The pack was vicious and to them a foreigner was like a chunk of raw meat dropped bleeding onto the road. Dealing with the minibike drivers took half an hour, and it helped Adam get warmed up for the museum, which consisted of a series of “Living History” displays. One display featured a foreign warship manned by wax foreign devils who were using military force to wrest Hong Kong from China. Somehow, Adam became entangled in Living History, and a number of Chinese tourists were startled to see a flesh-and-blood foreign devil jump out from within the bowels of the warship. Emily had always appreciated her foreign teachers’ sense of humor, and she generally liked it when we teased her. Nevertheless, Adam’s role in Living History had tested the poor girl’s patience.