Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

but the Hans quite naturally wanted to know what had brought me to Guiyu, and to their workshop. Improvising, Cecily threw out several stories in quick succession, no doubt creating some confusion as to exactly what an artist/university researcher/entrepreneur was. I told Cecily I was worried they wouldn’t buy it.

It doesn’t matter, she said. We just have to tell them something.

In the meantime, I had realized that the little tyke in back wasn’t thrashing around just for fun. He was working. I told Mr. Han that I’d be happy to relieve his son for a while. I was a hard worker, I said, a claim that proved wildly hilarious to the entire family. When the laughter died down, I was still looking expectant.

Is he serious? Mr. Han asked.

I think he is, Cecily told him.

Mr. Han shrugged. Well, sure. Lang can show him how to do it.

And that is how I began my career in electronics recycling, in the employ of an eight-year-old firebrand called Lang. Our task was to pull the recyclable plastic off the circuit boards, which were piled against the wall in a mound almost as tall as I was. We sat at the foot of the mountain on tiny plastic stools, causing little avalanches each time we grabbed a new board.

Most of the recyclable plastic in a computer’s motherboard, I’ll have you know, is in the slots where sound cards and the like are plugged in. With the use of a screwdriver-size crowbar and a pair of pliers, these narrow rectangles of plastic can, if you are Lang, be popped off the board with a few flicks of the wrist. Lang also had a preternatural ability to move boards around with his feet, leaving his hands free for uninterrupted hammering and prying. He was wearing a pair of fuzzy brown dog slippers with floppy ears, which created the illusion that he was being helped in his work by a pair of supremely well-coordinated puppies. He was a machine. In the time it took me to evict a single battered hunk of plastic, Lang might have gone through three entire boards, plastic flying from his every touch, the boards spinning underneath the jumping ears of his little doggies.

I held up a newly won gobbet of plastic. “Check that out,” I said with pride.

Lang smacked his forehead. “Bu yao!” he cried, and snatched my board away.

“Cecily!” I shouted to the sitting room. “What does ‘buyao’ mean?”

“It means ‘don’t want,’” she said.

It turns out there is no better way to learn a few useful words of Chinese than by taking part in a little child labor. In addition to bu yao, I learned yao, meaning “want,” and hao le, meaning “done,” roughly. Like this, Lang and I established a system of communication, and I began to learn which bits of plastic were worth the prying and which weren’t. Some, I believe, had metal inside them, and so were no good for melting down.

Over the course of several hours, Lang’s excitement at getting to boss around an adult veered into delight at what was becoming an effective collaboration. Soon, when he would go to get a smoke for his uncle, he would get one for me as well, leaving me with a lit cigarette in my mouth before I could even think of saying bu yao.

The smoke stung my eyes as I worked, making me glad that we were not baking circuit boards instead. That task was done in the covered entry space between the workshop and the street, and was a job the Hans didn’t do themselves. They reserved it for their lone employee, who sat in front of a hot plate that held a shimmering pool of molten solder. With a pair of needle-nose pliers, he would pick up a circuit board and float it on the silvery pool of solder. As the solder holding the components on the board melted, acrid fumes rose into a homemade fume hood, which drew them into a chimney and vented them onto the street. This is why the streets of Guiyu smell of cooking circuits. Nearly every building has one of these smokestacks.

After frying for fifteen or twenty seconds, the circuit board’s connections would melt. The worker would pick up the board with his pliers, invert it, and smack it violently on a hunk of concrete to the right of the stove. The components would fly off (along with a spatter of tin and lead, depending on the solder) and go tumbling into an ever-growing pile. He would then toss the board into a heap of newly naked circuit boards.

There was gold in those boards. Printed circuit boards use copper for their circuits, but the copper must be protected from corrosion with some kind of coating or plating, often in the form of a microscopically thin layer of alloyed gold. It takes a lot of circuit boards to accumulate a significant amount of gold, but a lot of circuit boards is exactly what Guiyu has. Once Mr. Han had accumulated a sufficient batch, he would give the boards to a contractor to extract the gold. This was the dirtiest part of the entire process. I had heard tales of acid baths and toxic bonfires. Naturally, I wanted to see it for myself.

Don’t, said Mr. Han. Don’t try to find those people. They operate illegally, and they’re very suspicious. You could get in trouble. Please don’t try to find them.

Not that I had time anyway. I was focused on my work, on improving my turnaround time for each motherboard. Brand names cowered under my crowbar: Intel, Acer, Foxconn, Pentium, Philips, Virtex, Blitzen. Each time I had a CPU to unplug from a board, Lang would hold up the collection bucket for me, and I would shoot a three-pointer, and he would smile like we had won the championship.

A drag on my cigarette and I’d pull over another board to wreck out the plastic, pausing to point when I wasn’t sure.

“Yao?” I would ask.

“BU YAO!” Lang would scream.

“BU YAO!” I would scream back.

And then, if I thought I was done, I would ask, “Hao le?”

“Hao le,” Lang would say, sounding almost philosophical. Then, with a look of what I hoped was respect, or at least camaraderie, he’d pause his helper-dogs and slide another board in front of me, the little slave driver.

A storefront with a small glass case full of integrated circuits. It was a tiny shop, one room, run by two young brothers. Three feet behind the display case was a bunk bed. They lived in the shop. To the left was a table arrayed with a hundred small cups for sorting their wares. One brother, wearing a red pleather jacket and a striped button- down shirt, watched with cautious amusement as I took pictures of his display case.

I wanted to buy a small baggie of chips as a souvenir. He was confused. What did I want it for? The kind of chip I should buy depended on the intended use. When he finally understood, he refused to let me buy one, insisting that I accept it as a gift.

On a busy market street, a nail salon with six young women in black tights and high-heel boots. All the young or youngish women in Guiyu dress this way. They chattered as they bent over their work. It was of course not a nail salon but a circuit shop. Each woman held a handful of chips. Using tweezers, they would pick up a single chip and dip each of its two rows of contacts into a pool of molten solder on a shared hot plate, working with the speed and economy of motion that comes from day upon day of precise repetition.

We asked if we could take a picture of them working. They tittered. One of them, in the second it took her to pick up her next handful of chips, waved her free hand in front of her face and smiled. Please don’t.

We wandered the streets, passing over small canals choked with trash. But trash-choked waterways are like sunsets. They’re great to look at, but they may not mean that much. More interesting are the many smells present in Guiyu, the many shades of water and air that complement the clouds of fried circuitry. At the river, drifting stains and a reek of sewage. Near the bus station, a generalized fetid-toxic smell hanging over a canal by the road. On the bridge, an inky stink of exhaust coming from a passing tractor-tricycle. I watched with some dismay as the choking plume approached us. But then, as the driver passed by, he throttled down for a moment, sparing us the worst. Even in Guiyu, courtesy lived.

Through a back alley we came upon a crew working through pallets of Motorola Broadband Media Centers— cable boxes. A man had stacked about fifty of them along one side of the work area, forming a wall of identical metal boxes, and was going from one to the next with a screw gun, unscrewing the same four screws on each. Behind him his coworkers made tidy piles of tops, of sides, of brackets, of LCD screens that trailed ribbon cables—a tangle of color on a dreary afternoon.

Trucks belched along with loads of semiconductors. A motorcycle cart passed us carrying a pile of strange, green objects. With a start, I saw they were cabbages.

We paused by a truck, its bed loaded high with bulging sacks. The corners of cleaned circuit boards peeked out from the bags. Raw material, about to be hauled off to the mysterious gold extractors, wherever they were. The men loading the truck smiled and asked where I was from.

Mei guo, we said. America. What’s in the truck?