Oracle Bones (16 page)

Riding the bus into Shenzhen, she asked me what I most wanted to see.

“I want to go to the Opium War Museum,” I said.

“I’m not going back there,” she said.

“Mr. Meier really enjoyed it,” I said. “He told me I should go. We can take a minibike.”

But Emily was a lot tougher than I had remembered. She quickly narrowed our tourist options to three local theme parks: the Safari Park Shenzhen, which was billed as “interactive”; the China Folk Culture Village, where you could see every single ethnic minority in China dressed in their appropriate traditional costume; or Splendid China, which featured small-scale models of famous sites throughout the country. In the end, I left the decision to her. I had a strong intimation that regardless we were going to see yuppie Chinese entertainment at its worst.

She chose the Safari Park. The “interactive” description turned out to be accurate in the sense that you were allowed to feed the animals. Tourists fed the animals a lot of things—carrots, nuts, celery—and after the snacks were gone, they fed them the paper bags in which they had been packaged. Everywhere in the park, salespeople hawked one-yuan bags of food. They must have been working on commission, because they were almost as aggressive as the Opium War minibike gang. Only one yuan, the salespeople called out. Feed the deer. One yuan. Feed the deer. One yuan. And the deer, like every other animal in the park, staggered around looking glassy-eyed and bloated.

At Monkey Hill, the salespeople turned to threats. If you don’t feed the monkeys, one man said, they will attack you. Monkey Hill is a dangerous place without a one-yuan bag of carrots. Feed the monkeys. One yuan. The monkeys must be fed.

Emily was about to buy some carrots, but I stopped her. “Don’t you want to see what happens if we
don’t
feed them?” I said, and then she cocked her head and grinned. Sure enough, one of the monkeys tried to snatch Emily’s purse, and I had to hold tightly onto my baseball cap. The salesman gave us a triumphant look as we left.

By the time we reached the crocodile pond, there was only one duck left. He was crammed into a tiny cage, and he stared straight ahead, as if avoiding eye contact, the way I always do when I go through customs at an airport. The second-to-last duck had just been thrown in and the crocodiles were still tearing at the pieces. It cost twenty-five yuan per bird. I reached for my wallet.

“I don’t want to throw the duck to the crocodiles,” Emily said.

“You don’t have to throw it,” I said. “The worker will throw it. And he doesn’t throw it to the crocodiles; he just throws it into the water.”

“I don’t like those animals,” she said. “I don’t want to feed them. You didn’t feed any of the other animals.”

“The crocodiles are friendly,” I said. “Look, that one is smiling.”

In the pond, one of the crocodiles had grabbed some pieces of the second-to-last duck and now he reared out of the water with feathers in his jaws.

“That’s just the way their mouths are,” Emily said.

Patiently, I tried to reason with her. I explained that it is cruel to keep a duck in a cage, especially in a Safari Park dedicated to Wild Animals. This is simply what Wild Animals do: they enter Dangerous Situations, and some Survive and others Do Not. And even if the duck Does Not it’s not as if we are actually, physically, personally killing the duck. We never touch the duck at all; we just hand twenty-five yuan to a man. Three dollars—small price to pay for a duck’s freedom.

Emily pointed out that the bird’s wings had been clipped. Well, I said, he can still swim to shore and then walk away. Ducks can actually walk very quickly when they put their minds to it. And who knows, maybe they didn’t clip his wings right; maybe he’ll surprise us and fly away to freedom in a neighboring shoe factory. We won’t know until we try.

After a while, my logic became even more desperate. I told her that crocodiles are rare, practically endangered, and they die if they aren’t fed. Emily countered by saying that these crocodiles weren’t going to starve anytime soon, and although I didn’t want to admit it, she was obviously right. The crocodiles looked like they were about to explode. Even the second-to-last duck had been torn apart rather than eaten. Pieces of him floated near the bank.

Finally, I was reduced to the world’s weakest moral argument: If we don’t throw this duck to the crocodiles, then somebody else will do it. We’re no better or worse—all of us are just
laobaixing
, average people. We are human beings, and it is perfectly human to enjoy a fair battle between a pond full of crocodiles and a duck with clipped wings. Anyway, what makes this particular duck so special? Why should he be treated differently from his comrades? On and on—but Emily was as tough as she had been about the Opium War Museum, and finally we left the duck in his cage.

Our safari experience ended with the Grand Meeting of One Hundred Animals, a parade that was held daily in the park’s stadium. Continuing the interactive theme, the procession involved both animals and humans. A young woman wearing a swan costume led a line of trained swans that defecated as they waddled down the stadium’s dirt track. She was followed by other women dressed as parrots, with real parrots on their shoulders. After that, men rode elephants and ostriches. One ostrich threw his jockey; the man sprinted away, chased by the furious bird, and the crowd cheered.

The entertainment culminated with a bear parade. There were bears in
costumes, bears on bicycles, bears staggering drunkenly on their hind legs. A bear wedding was held. The guest bears appeared first, pushing carts with enormous wood-and-paint models of wedding gifts of the new economy: a refrigerator, a television, a giant bottle of Great Wall wine. The happy couple came last. One bear wore a suit, the other a dress; they appeared on top of a float with a human trainer. There was a short ceremony during which the bears rose on their hind legs, to make their vows, and then the trainer nudged them into the float’s bridal chamber. The man carried a whip. It was like a shotgun wedding. The chamber’s red door was decorated with the gold character for “double happiness.” Almost all of the spectators at the park were young upper-class Chinese. Somebody told me that at night in that same stadium they raced greyhounds.

Before leaving the city, we stopped by the Deng Xiaoping billboard. The animal park had left me numb, and the visit to the billboard felt like a cleansing ritual—absolution for our trip within the gates. It was a hazy afternoon, and I photographed Emily. In the Chinese way, she didn’t smile, striking a somber pose with the Great Leader’s image in the background.

THE RIDE HOME
felt long. Our bus cruised away from the downtown skyscrapers: the glistening blue-green glass of the Stock Exchange, the twin-spired Land King Tower. Heading north, we passed through a few miles of brand-new apartment blocks, and then the neighborhoods started to thin out. The road cut through empty green hills just before the border—the long, low line of the chain-link fence. A billboard stood near the checkpoint:
MISSION HILLS GOLF CLUB, THE FIRST 72-HOLE GOLF CLUB IN CHINA.

Beyond the gates rose a rough cluster of unfinished concrete buildings, with piles of dirt standing beside enormous foundation holes. We passed a sign for a low-security prison:
THE SECOND LABOR CAMP.
Our bus continued north, the factory towns coming one after another: dormitories surrounded by fences, smokestacks sprouting in dirty clumps. The urban landscape was marked by the type of premature aging that was characteristic of Chinese boomtowns. New sidewalks were already overrun by patches of weeds, and unfinished apartment blocks had been so cheaply constructed that their walls immediately became stained and cracked. Almost nothing was finished, and everything was of such low quality that it immediately looked old.

Roadside billboards advertised factory products, and most were aimed at wholesalers who purchased parts in bulk: alternators, air compressors, heat pumps. These weren’t objects that you bought for daily use, and they would have posed a challenge for even a good advertising agency. But the billboard
design, like everything else, had been rushed, and often the ads consisted of nothing more than a photograph of some obscure part—a widget, a wonket—superimposed atop a sunny green field. Beneath the pastoral sprocket, there was a company name, often in awkward English: Professional Manufacture Various Hydraulic Machinery. Friendly Metal Working Lubricants. Good Luck Paper Products.

That night, we ate dinner at an outdoor restaurant near Emily’s factory. In Chinese cities, evening was often the most pleasant time of the day, and this was especially true beyond the gates, where dusk finally made the place seem human. The monotony of the factory towns was brutal in daylight, and the streets seemed abandoned during working hours. But in the evenings, when most work shifts ended, there was a sudden rush of young people outside the factory walls. They moved in excited groups, like schoolchildren after the final bell. Sitting at the restaurant, I watched them walk past on the sidewalk, talking, laughing, flirting. Apart from their jobs, they had few obligations in this place—no families, no traditions. In that sense, they were free.

During dinner, Emily regaled me with stories about the factory owners. One of her boss’s colleagues was a Chinese-American who, after recently arriving from San Francisco on business, had gone to Emily’s office, faxed his wife a love letter, and then immediately gone out and hired a prostitute. Emily’s own boss was always leering at the young women in his factory, and most of his friends were the same. In a nearby plant, another Taiwanese owner had become so distracted by his two Sichuanese mistresses that his company had gone bankrupt.

Emily laughed as she told the stories, and I imagined how quickly they circulated among young women who lived ten to a dorm room. Before coming to Shenzhen, Emily had never imagined that people acted this way. She told me that one of her biggest surprises had been receiving an update about her Fuling neighbor, the young woman who had always been portrayed as a great Shenzhen success. Emily’s sister had learned that in fact the woman was a “second wife” to a factory owner from Hong Kong.

Emily had little respect for the businessmen who came to Shenzhen, especially the Taiwanese. Her boyfriend, Zhu Yunfeng, had recently left the jewelry factory for a new job, where he worked under a Taiwanese who treated employees fairly. But in Emily’s opinion, that kind of boss was the exception, and most of the others were exploitative and sex-crazed. “All of them have failed somewhere else,” she scoffed, explaining that her boss’s old company in Taiwan had gone bankrupt years ago.

When I asked about the political climate, she said that Shenzhen had fewer
government restrictions than her hometown. But she pointed out that labor practices could be just as limiting. “Here it’s not the government but the bosses who control everything,” she said. “Maybe it amounts to the same thing.”

She became particularly animated when talking about a Taiwanese-owned purse factory in a nearby city. Like most plants beyond the gates, the purse factory had a six-day workweek, but the owner kept his doors locked all week. Except on Sundays, the workers couldn’t leave the complex.

“That can’t be legal,” I said.

“Many of the factories do that,” she said. “All of them have good connections with the government.”

One of Emily’s friends had worked at the purse factory, where the Taiwanese boss often ordered everyone to stay on the production line until midnight, yelling when they got tired. One worker complained and got fired; when he demanded his last paycheck, the boss had him beaten up. The story made Emily so angry that she decided she had to do something about it. I asked if she had gone to the police, or another government bureau, or if she had told a journalist.

“No,” she said. “I wrote a letter to the boss that said, ‘This day next year will be your memorial day.’ And I drew a picture of a
guge
.”

I didn’t understand the word, so she traced the characters on her palm, the way the Chinese often did when clarifying a phrase:
. But I didn’t get that either. Finally she pushed aside her plate and sketched an outline on the table: