start a coal mine on the side. Before the recent spate of shutdowns and consolidations, the province had been riddled with small, illegal coal mines.
We had twenty workers, Liu said. Everything was done manually. But it was shut down by the government. We didn’t really make any money at it.
We didn’t press him. I don’t know what cover story Cecily had offered—lost mental patient, maybe?—but it was likely that the Liu family mine had been illegal, and Cecily thought he would spook easily.
I liked Liu. He was considerate—and funny, although Cecily would never translate his jokes—and if he was a little cagey about his failed career as a coal boss, he was still game for adventure. Today he was taking us into the mountains to gate-crash a coal mine.
We headed west out of Linfen. It was what seemed like a sunny day, with occasional patterns on the ground that looked faintly like shadows. We could see farther down the streets than before, and the sky directly overhead was almost blue.
“Look,” I said to Cecily. “Blue sky.”
She looked.
“It’s not blue,” she said. “It’s gray.”
I looked again. I was pretty sure it was blue. Compared with the dingy taupe of the horizon, it was distinctly bluish.
Cecily shook her head. “I know you. You just like polluted city.”
We had crossed the river and were now passing through small squares of farmland on the outskirts of town. A curtain of smog opened, and a smokestack painted with blue and white stripes loomed over us. It was Linfen Thermo Electron, a huge coal-fired power plant.
Its sudden appearance out of the haze was appropriate to the rate at which coal-fired power plants are being built in China. Depending on whom you ask, China has added them to its grid at the rate of one a week, or one every four days, or one every ten days. As we passed the plant’s gate, such numbers took on a mind-boggling significance. Thermo Electron was sleek and massive, a raised fortress with soaring walls of blue metal that would have shone in the sun, had the sun chosen to shine. Yet it was only one of the countless plants that were being plopped down one after the next across the country. Enough to power China. Enough to make up for any fossil fuel you and I haven’t burned.
With so many new coal-fired plants, the Chinese government was having trouble keeping the industry in balance. Record-breaking demand created spikes in the price of coal—but the Chinese government was reluctant to let power companies pass the cost increases along to their customers. So the producers simply chose to produce less power, even as coal extraction rose to record levels. That spring would see some of the worst electricity shortages in years.
Just beyond the power plant, the plain erupted into walls of bare, craggy rock. A temple had embedded itself high on a shattered rock face, a ramshackle fortress trailing a staircase down to earth.
Into the mountains. We climbed past villages. Houses had been carved out of mountain faces, rock alcoves faced with brick walls that allowed a single door and window. Piles of coal sat out front. Black smoke trickled from horizontal chimney pipes. Coal trucks rumbled forward and past, and sat in front of houses, and in repair shops. I thought of the logging trucks I had seen rumbling along BR-163 near Santarem, and about the giant sand haulers in Alberta, and of Nelson’s little dump truck in Beaumont, Texas, and for a moment it seemed likely the world was composed mainly of trucks.
We infiltrated by walking in the gate. Liu had sniffed out a coal mine for us. Actually, there may not have been a gate, just a narrow road leading into a broad loading pit. The loading area was a small landscape draped with a layer of coal powder an inch or two thick. A short mountain of coal sat by the battered housing of a conveyor-sorter, waiting for the afternoon’s convoy of trucks to carry it away.
The experience of leaving soft footprints in a blanket of coal powder is dizzyingly similar to walking through a fresh, dry snowfall. Wavelets of black dust scatter from your feet.
A man coasted down the hill on his motorcycle, heading toward the town we had come through on our way up. Would he sound the alarm? After our warmish reception in Guiyu, it seemed that the world owed us some unfriendliness, and Cecily and I were ready to be screamed at and kicked out. But the man on the motorcycle barely gave us a look. So far so good.
We walked uphill to a set of buildings and railroad tracks that surrounded the mine’s extraction mouth. The miners themselves entered through another tunnel, farther down the mountain, but this was where the coal came out, in old-fashioned mining carts similar to those you may have seen carrying Indiana Jones.
It was here, at last, that I came face to face with Sad Coal Man.
He was taking a nap. Or smoking a cigarette. Two of him were chatting with each other. There were eight or nine of him altogether. And just like in his photograph, each of him was wearing clothes darkened with coal, and had a face dusted and smeared with fine, black grit.
But though they looked just like the guy in the picture, there was something different about these sad coal men. They weren’t all that sad. At worst, they seemed kind of…bored? They were between shifts when we walked into the work area, I think. Maybe they were waiting for something to be fixed down below. So instead of working, the not-so-sad coal men were lounging and chatting, resting in the sun, and playing with a visiting toddler. That was incongruous, I thought, a child toddling among the coal carts. Some of the nearby buildings, we learned, were housing for the aboveground workers. One of their wives had brought the toddler for a workplace visit, commuting from about thirty feet away.
Our presence had yet to raise an eyebrow, which I found disorienting. I had gotten used to being noticed. And although the attention that comes with sticking out in a foreign country makes me uncomfortable, I had lived with it for long enough now that this absence of discomfort felt pretty awkward itself.
We leaned against a girder and observed the spectacular lack of activity. Nothing came out of the mine. Nothing happened. Behind us, a woman tossed a shovelful of coal into a fire under a pot of boiling water.
“This is a state-run coal mine,” Cecily said.
“In the United States there’s a stereotype that government jobs are very stable,” I said. “Very easy.”
She nodded. “Same thing. It’s why people work for the government. My parents always wanted me to work as a civil servant. We call it the
A supervisor in a trim blue blazer wandered over to us and offered me a cigarette. The offering of cigarettes was a ritual that almost took the place of shaking hands around these parts, and I had bought a pack of my own in order to participate. But because my reflexes had yet to develop, I was always too slow on the draw. I had tried to ramp up my smoking skills before I got to China, as a sort of lung-destroying backup plan, but hadn’t had the discipline. By the time I fumbled the pack out of my coat and shook it in the supervisor’s face, he had already lit a cigarette of his own and offered me another in that perfect way, three filters artfully peeking out of the pack.
The supervisor happened to be from Henan Province, where Cecily had grown up. That was our in. Like any large country that hasn’t had its native people replaced in the past five hundred years, China is not actually a country but a collection of subcountries, and this allows for the on-the-fly formation of much stronger alliances than come about when two people discover they’re both from Cleveland. Cecily told me her Henan dialect was rusty, but clearly it was still good enough to ingratiate us with the supervisor, who gamely let us hang around his work site, instead of dragging us down the hill by our ears, as he should have.
There were limits, though. He would not let us go underground. It wasn’t safe, he said, and it wasn’t up to him, and the people who it
A pair of miners wandered over to refuse my cigarettes. The supervisor gestured at me and asked Cecily a question.
“Let me guess,” I said. “He’s asking if I’m married.”
“Yeah,” Cecily said.
I grabbed my head. “Really?!”
“No, no,” she said. “I’m joking with you.” What he actually wanted to know was why we were there.
This time, I thought, we should deploy
