workshops full of lead dust and other heavy metals and clouds of who the hell knows what floating through the streets. The water is laced with PCBs and PBDEs and other hazardous acronyms. The air, the water, the dust—in Guiyu it comes with promises of cancer, nerve damage, and poisoned childhood development.
Exporting toxic waste across borders, especially to developing countries, is supposed to be illegal. The Basel Convention, the treaty that outlaws it, was already nearly twenty years old by the time I visited Guiyu, in 2011. In the case of electronic waste, though, the convention is easy to circumvent. As the green-electronics coordinator at the ever-present Greenpeace has said, “the common way exporters get round existing regulations is to relabel e- waste as second-hand goods for recycling.”
Of course, it
That it makes economic sense to ship the stuff halfway around the world for recycling is explained first by the low cost of labor here. But you must also consider the volume of empty shipping containers returning to China. Incredible amounts of manufactured goods are sent from China to the West in shipping containers, and since the conveyor belt must run both ways, sending freight back is cheap. The result is that we don’t really buy our electronics from China after all. We just rent them and then send them back to be torn apart.
India and certain African countries, including Ghana and Nigeria, also get in on the game, but China is the e-waste importer par excellence, and Guiyu is the industry’s crown jewel. Guiyu is so famous for its commitment to electronic waste that it has become a mecca for journalists interested in the topic—which some people here don’t like. In 2008, a crew from
Guiyu isn’t the only weirdly specialized place in Guangdong Province. Only two hundred miles down the coast is the “special economic zone” that is the city of Shenzhen, one of the most concentrated areas of electronics manufacturing in the world. (It was to companies in Shenzhen, Mr. Han said, that he sold his recycled components.) Shenzhen is home, for instance, to the famous “Foxconn City,” the giant complex where iPhones and a million other things are built.
From waste recycling to questionable industrial processes to simple carbon emissions, Guangdong is a land to which we outsource not only our manufacturing but also our pollution. The environmental reporter Jonathan Watts put it best, in his book
Then you have Gurao, the Bra Town of Guangdong, just up the road from Guiyu. Passing through Gurao on the bus, I saw billboard after billboard of semi-nude lingerie models. Colossal women in bras looked down from the facades of factory buildings. One lounged next to a violin. Nearly all the models were Western; full hectares of white flesh went by. A rippling male abdomen crowned a pair of tumescent briefs—the work of the Guangdong Puning Unique and Joy Clothing Co. Hanging from the streetlights, where another town might fly banners celebrating a holiday or a music festival, there were pennants with more white people in their undies. The children of Gurao must grow up thinking that without their city to stand in the breach, the Westerners of the world would go completely naked.
I saw bras, but Cecily smelled a story. Cecily was my fixer and translator, a young Chinese reporter whom I had hired in Beijing. She was intrigued by Bra Town. She wanted us to pose as entrepreneurs interested in importing bras to the United States. That way, she thought, we might get a look inside one of those factories.
That we would consider working undercover to get an inside look at the presumably legal underwear industry was symbolic of a broader problem: in China, I was not supposed to be a journalist. My tiresome habit of telling myself I wasn’t one anyway made no difference. Several people, professional reporters with years of experience in China, had advised me to travel on a tourist visa, not to be open about my agenda as a writer, and not to do anything that could draw the attention of local authority figures or media, not to mention those unfriendly guys with the bricks in Guiyu.
As for Cecily, she said I should specify that she was a tourist guide and wasn’t doing any journalistic work. (She was a tourist guide. She did no journalistic work.) And there were larger things afoot. The Chinese government had been spooked by the revolutions of the Arab Spring; before I left the country, it would begin a crackdown that included police intimidation of foreign journalists, and even some violence.
As we rode the bus to Guiyu, Cecily described what she called, with irony, the “fun game” played between Chinese journalists and their government. Reporters would play cat-and-mouse, testing just how far they could go. Items that might be barred from a general interest newspaper, for instance, might be allowed in a specialty magazine. Censors were most active on the Internet at specific times of day, so posting a piece online at the right moment could allow it to find its audience for a few hours—even if the publisher would then cooperate with the censors in taking it down. The government, she said, was “insane about journalism.”
At the moment, our need was to concoct a cover story under which I could both snoop around and plausibly deny that I was a reporter. We soon realized, though, that while my credibility as a reporter was poor, my credibility as everything else was even worse.
“Maybe you are a professor from a university,” Cecily said, evaluating me with a sidelong glance.
Was she serious? Were there really professors out there quite this haggard and blotchy-faced? This badly dressed?
“Maybe you want to open a shop,” she said. “A businessman of some kind.”
Yeah, right, I thought. I’m one of those businessmen who look like they’ve forgotten to shave for twenty years.
I suggested
Cecily was skeptical. She didn’t think the idea of an artist seeking out polluted places would translate. Maybe she had a point. Besides, Edward Burtynsky got there first.
Then it struck me. We didn’t need a cover. We just needed
Cecily laughed. “I think artist is better.”
Nobody threw bricks. Instead, we found ourselves under a heavy tea barrage. Through blind luck, we had found the Han family and were now enduring the withering assault of their generosity and good spirits.
After walking down the Guiyu streets for an uncomfortable duration—uncomfortable for the way we stuck out, for the way people stopped what they were doing to watch us and possibly ready their bricks—we came upon Mr. Han sitting in the doorway of his workshop. He was youngish, perhaps in his early thirties, and had a friendly face. His forehead and hair were powdered with dust. He had been using a small circular saw to cut CPUs out of a select stack of motherboards. In Chinese, Cecily asked if we could see his workshop.
Like their neighbors, the Hans lived on the upper floors of their building, reserving the ground floor for a garage-like workroom. One corner of the workshop was a sitting room with a teakettle and a computer; the rest was filled with piles of motherboards, shelves of CPUs, and large grain sacks filled with sorted resistors and capacitors. We sat and drank tiny cups of tea by the half dozen while the family’s tiny, eight-year-old son made a racket throwing circuit boards around in the back of the workshop.
Mrs. Han wanted to know why Cecily, in her late twenties, wasn’t married, and whether I was married, and whether two single people traveling together were perhaps soon to be married to each other, and finally, once again, whether I was married.
“Is he married?” she asked, looking at me with cautious amusement, as though I were a zebra.
I said I was not. Married. I didn’t elaborate. I was in fact more than unmarried. I was newly alone, and homeless. After getting back from Brazil, I had moved out of the Doctor’s place. Now, when not in Guiyu, I resided on an air mattress on Adam’s living room floor, where I spent my nights praying to be hit by an asteroid.
We began the business of lying to our new friends. Cecily and I had not agreed on a cover story in the end,
