They smiled a little less. Cardboard, they said. Paper. For recycling. And they got in their truck and left.
A gaggle of teenagers waylaid us and led us on a short tour, to a community center, where teachers tried to control a restive mob of music students. We were a sensation. For a moment I knew the life of a rock star, reducing his fans to convulsions with a single moment of eye contact.
Our abductors took us to a nearby temple. This is our temple, they said. We walked through crumbling, ornate rooms overseen by a platoon of deities and demigods.
You should pray here, they said. To this god. Make a wish as you kneel and bow, with your hands together. So I did it. But I couldn’t decide whether to wish for peace or for love.
The secretary of the Guiyu business association—or whatever it was—met us in the evening at the Six Star Coffee Shop in Shantou, the large coastal city where we were staying. The Six Star had two levels, every seat a sofa, including several sofa-like things that hung from the ceiling on cords, porch-swing style. It was a place where the wealthy and cosmopolitan of Shantou could gather to feel wealthy and cosmopolitan. The menu was broad and evocative, with helpful descriptions in English. I wavered over “Irish Coffee—Emotional, romantic, and mysterious” before settling on a latte, because “the latte’s mellowness with the Hazel’s aroma, Special flavor. Men’s favorite.”
The secretary wore a puffy red jacket and stylish eyeglasses. She had brought along her teenage daughter, a docile, wide-eyed girl who ordered an absurdly large pink drink. It exploded with fluorescent straws and a large wedge of fruit cut into an artful splay that evoked a breaching humpback. Her mother ordered a pot of fruity tea.
Cecily had chosen “university researcher” as my cover this evening. To my amazement the secretary accepted it without a blink.
We want to improve the environment, she said. But as she had only been on the job for a couple of months, she didn’t know much about the industry she represented. Maybe that was the point. We were originally supposed to meet the associate director, until he decided otherwise and foisted the secretary on us. She punted question after question by saying she would send us some informational materials put together by the association. (She never did.)
Since she had brought up the environment, though, I felt comfortable asking her about emissions and workshop conditions. She said emissions from burning circuit boards were the main environmental problem.
I doubted it. The Hans’ workshop, for instance, although host to a warm and supportive family atmosphere, was almost certainly powdered with lead, tin, and antimony dust, not to mention other toxins from all the sawing and board frying. So when little Lang and his sister came home from school to help out in the workshop, they were not just taking part in the family business. They were most likely being poisoned. In this, they were representative of both Guiyu and a wider phenomenon. In its pursuit of unfettered economic results, China has allowed widespread lead poisoning. This is especially dangerous to children, whose nervous system and mental health can be permanently damaged. “In more developed nations,” the
The secretary told us that the government had recently started taking the environmental problem seriously. And the business association was trying to attract investors and start partnerships to develop new technology to do the work more cleanly. Again, I doubted it. The problem wasn’t technology. It was that to be economically viable, the e-waste industry operated unsafely, and was allowed to.
The secretary asked me a question. Did I have ideas for new technology?
Me? I may have misunderstood Cecily’s translation. The secretary was asking
I smiled blandly and nodded, in a way that conveyed neither comprehension nor intelligence.
“Not off the top of my head,” I said.
It’s okay that journalists have come to expose the problems, the secretary said, pouring some more fruit tea. But it’s more important to find solutions than to criticize.
We made another visit to the Han family the next day. We wanted to thank them and to say goodbye. Also, when you’re in a strange town where you don’t know anybody, it’s nice to go someplace where people will smile and offer you tea and cookies.
You’re sure he’s not a journalist, Mr. Han asked Cecily.
No, no, she said.
By now I had fully developed the knot of guilt in my stomach. Mr. Han wasn’t stupid, even though, with our cockeyed cover stories, we may have treated him like he was.
Today, adding to my shame, he offered us lunch. Upstairs, around a low table in the kitchen, we ate meat and vegetables in the Sichuan style, and a spicy dish of preserved black beans from the family farm, where their parents and extended families still lived. The Hans sent them money regularly. That was why they had come to Guiyu in the first place; there wasn’t enough work where they came from. They’d been here for fifteen years. The locals, they said, still treated them like outsiders.
Back downstairs, we had another three dozen small cups of tea. Mr. Han sat in front of the computer, paused the movie that was playing, and checked the commodity prices. Figures filled the screen. It was important for him to know the current price of gold and other materials so he didn’t get ripped off by his buyers. His computer also stored the video feeds from the security cameras in his workshop. With a few clicks, he brought up a high-angle shot of Lang and me raining grief on circuit boards.
Mrs. Han wants to know again why you’re not married, Cecily said.
They had asked a dozen times. They couldn’t have known that I spent most of my free time asking myself the same thing. I realized, though, that this was an opportunity for me to answer at least one of their questions honestly.
“Tell them that I was going to get married, but the woman changed her mind,” I said to Cecily.
She translated.
They say that’s terrible, Cecily said. That it’s really embarrassing. But that I shouldn’t tell you they said so.
“Do they have any advice on how to find a good wife?” I asked.
Mr. Han nodded. Choose someone who loves you, he said. It doesn’t matter if you love her. Just make sure she loves you.
I couldn’t decide if this was horrible advice or profound. “Shouldn’t we both love each other?” I asked.
Choose someone who loves you and who takes care of you, advised Mrs. Han. Don’t just choose someone who you love. And if there are things you don’t like about the person, you’ll come to see past those things and love her eventually.
They told us their love story. Mr. Han had pestered his wife-to-be to give him rides to work on her scooter. They had written a long series of love letters. Mrs. Han said she still had the letters he had sent her.
Cecily asked Mr. Han if he still had the letters Mrs. Han had sent him in reply. He shook his head, and his wife rolled her eyes. Men aren’t romantic, she said. They don’t keep that stuff.
Mr. Han was smiling. He pointed at his chest. I keep them in here, he said. I keep them in here. And everybody laughed.
We stood to go, waving to Mr. Han’s brother-in-law, who was working his way through the last few boards of Lang’s mountain from the other day. Lang and his sister were at school, because in Guiyu that’s
In the foyer, I drew a lungful of frying circuit board. It reminded me of something Mr. Han had told me earlier. I had asked him if he thought the work was unhealthy for him and his family.
We know it’s a dirty business, he had said. We know it’s a health risk. You have to give something to get something.
As we left, he was standing in the foyer of the workshop, contemplating two bales of motherboards that had just arrived. The next batch. He had slashed them open at the side, spilling fresh, untouched circuitry onto the floor.
At the Beijing airport, the sun peered through a thick scrim of haze. Several years before, in preparation for
