2 The City

 

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Long journeys end at the Guangzhou railway station, where the passengers pour off the trains after rides that have lasted twenty or thirty or fifty hours. They are mostly young and they arrive alone, dragging a suitcase or a backpack or a coarse burlap sack that once held rice. The vast plaza in front of the station seethes with travelers, and the first thing you hear is the jangle of announcements for people who, newly arrived, are already lost. Someone from Henan, your brother is looking for you. Older brother’s wife, come to the exit area. WELCOME TO THE BEAUTIFUL FLOWER CITY: A bus company is offering tours. But the city does not look beautiful and there are no flowers here.

Up a steep ramp and across an overpass is the long-distance bus station, where the express to Dongguan, thirty miles away, leaves every ten minutes. The bus is packed, and it smells of sweat and of clothing that is worn every day and slept in at night—the smell of migrants. The bus races down the elevated highway and the factories emerge below: printing factories, paint and plastic factories, mobile-phone and screw and sofa factories. The buildings, faced in white tile, resemble giant public bathrooms; worker dormitories rise beside them, their balconies blooming with laundry. Chinese factories are named for their auspicious associations, and the journey to Dongguan is a high-speed tour of virtue and fortune: HIGH REFINEMENT AIR-CONDITIONING. ETERNAL SINCERITY GARMENTS. NEW ERA ZIPPER COMPANY.

Two decades after the first factories were built, development still feels new. The innards of a mountain spill out, red-earthed and raw, where its face was blasted away; exit ramps off the highway disappear in fields of marshy weeds. A brand-new corporate headquarters looks out on rice paddies, fishponds, and duck farms; miraculously, people are still farming here. In the seventeenth century, settlers turned the floodplains of the Pearl River Delta into one of China’s most fertile regions, supplying fish, vegetables, and rice to the country and exporting silk to Europe. Today in the land of full-throttle industry, it is these glimpses of nature that are unsettling. The farmers are mostly migrants, the lowest of the low, for they have traveled a thousand miles from home but have still not left the farm behind.

The bus slows for the Dongguan exit, and now the factories appear up close. Red banners stretch across the fronts of buildings in sagging smiles of welcome: SEEKING EXPERIENCED WOMEN WORKERS. At the gate of one factory, migrants have gathered to stare, in mesmerized silence, at a help-wanted sign: MEET 1:30 EVERY AFTERNOON AT THE SIDE GATE. A company called Jobhop Limited is, appropriately enough, seeking workers. The bus passes through another giant construction site—no, this is the bus station—and releases its passengers.

The best way to understand the city of Dongguan is to walk it. Bank headquarters of mirrored glass tower over street-side shops selling motorcycle parts and plastic pipes and dental services. Roads are ten lanes wide, high-speed highways in place of city streets. Migrants walk along the shoulders carrying suitcases or bedding, while buses and trucks bear down from behind. Everywhere is construction and motion, jackhammers and motorcycles, drills and dust; at street level the noise is deafening. The roads are wide and well paved but there are no pedestrian lights or crosswalks. This is a city built for machines, not people.

The offices of the government bureaucracy that appear on almost every block in other Chinese cities are nowhere to be seen. Men on motorcycles accost pedestrians, each one touting a taxi ride, and all of them illegal. Counterfeit college diplomas are for sale at street corners. In Dongguan there is a fake IKEA and a fast-food chain whose name translates as “McKFC” and a ten-story building that calls itself the Haiyatt Hotel, with a marble lobby and a decidedly lax attitude toward copyright violation (“We have an ‘i’ in our name, they don’t,” explains a young woman at the front desk). The city is divided into thirty-two towns, and each one specializes in manufacturing. Chang’an produces electronic components, Dalang is famous for sweaters, and Houjie makes shoes. Samsung and Pioneer operate plants in Liaobu; Nancheng is home to the world’s largest Nokia mobile-phone factory. All the Nescafé instant coffee that is drunk in China is processed at a plant in downtown Dongguan. Factories are the bus stops and the monuments and the landmarks, and everything exists to serve them. Dongguan’s highway network, already the densest in the country, is under constant expansion in hopes of delivering goods to the world faster. Luxury hotels and golf courses have sprung up to pamper factory clients. The buyers of the world stay at the Sheraton Dongguan Hotel, which gives guests a card listing every destination they will ever need:

 

GUANGDONG INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION CENTER
DONGGUAN INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION CENTER
MUSEUM OF OPIUM WAR
TAI PING JETTY
WAL-MART
CARREFOUR
PARK ’N’ SHOP
HARBOUR PLAZA GOLF CLUB
HILLVIEW GOLF CLUB
LONG ISLAND GOLF CLUB

 

No one is sure how many people live here. According to the city government, Dongguan has 1.7 million local residents and almost seven million migrants, but few people believe these official figures, and speculation about the city’s true population is rife. Dongguan has eight million migrants. Dongguan adds one million migrants a year. Dongguan has ten million migrants, but it reports only seven million to avoid paying higher taxes. The city’s mayor might know more, but he’s not telling: “Dongguan’s population is far more than the publicly announced figure,” he told reporters at a forum in 2005. His personal estimate—“conservative,” in his words—was over ten million.

Dongguan is unfinished, a city where everything is in the process of becoming something else. A stretch of sidewalk is piled high with stone tiles, under a sign promising EUROPEAN STYLE PALACE-LEVEL OFFICE BUILDINGS. The central business district yawns with open pits. On the east side of town, a new city center is rising, which will one day have government offices, a library, a science museum, and a theater. For now, the area’s wide boulevards are empty of cars and its grassy malls perfectly still, the hedges trimmed in tidy geometries. Dongguan’s motto is “One Big Step Every Year, a New City in Five Years.”

Molding a new life is even faster. A few computer lessons can catapult a person into a different class, and a morning at the talent market is enough to establish a new career. Twenty yuan at a photo studio buys a package of snapshots, taken against a painted backdrop of picket fences or formal gardens; these prints are mailed home or given to friends or taped to a dormitory wall, a reminder that the person in the picture is already someone new. On walls around the city, next to flyers for job openings and syphilis clinics, are the advertisements for the missing. HE LEFT HOME FIVE YEARS AGO, DARK-SKINNED, WITH A POCKMARKED FACE, speaks rather fast, likes to play video games. The notices are posted by family members searching for loved ones who have disappeared into the great maw of the city.

On weekends, teenagers take over Dongguan, giving its parks and squares the feel of an open-air high school. Girls roam in cliques, wearing frilly tops and tight jeans, with their arms around one anothers’ shoulders. Boys travel in smaller packs, the sleeves of their factory shirts rolled up under their armpits. Couples parade apart, the girls proud in ownership, the boys slouchy and nonchalant. On Monday mornings, the parks and the squares of Dongguan are eerily empty. The long avenues of factories show only blank faces to the world, the packs of girls and boys swallowed up inside. Industry does not require movement and activity, but their opposite—street after street, there is only silence.

At night, the factories lining the highways are lit. Look closely and you can sometimes see shadows moving against a window, erratic as fireflies—as long as there is light, people are still working. Each strip of blue-lighted windows against the dark signals a single factory; one strip is set apart from the next, like stately ocean liners on the sea. From a distance, they are beautiful.

*  *  *

 

The girls were twenty days out from home, so new to the city they didn’t know who owned the factory where they worked. They carried nothing with them: no drinks, no plastic bags of fruit or snacks. They just sat, under the blazing sun, in the public square of a district of Dongguan known for its small shoe factories.

Their names were Tian Yongxia and Zhang Dali. They were sixteen years old and this was their first time away from home. They had left their farming village in Henan Province on the ninth day of the lunar new year, which was regarded as an auspicious moment to depart. A girl from their village worked in a factory here for eight hundred yuan a month, and they wanted that too. They each paid four hundred yuan, about fifty dollars, to a husband and wife who promised them factory jobs and brought them out on a three-day bus journey. But when they got to the city there were no jobs, and the couple disappeared.

The girls spent four nights in the bus station and finally got in touch with someone from home, who found them work in an electronics factory for three hundred yuan a month. It was a poor salary, but they were in no position to negotiate. “By that time I wanted to join a factory just so I could get a good night’s sleep,” said Yongxia, who had a broad face and small eyes and smiled a lot. She did most of the talking. Dali was slimmer and prettier, with delicate features and uneven teeth.

The girls quickly learned the hierarchy of factory life, and that they were at the bottom. Workers who had joined the previous year looked down on newcomers and did not talk to them. Theirs was a smaller subsidiary factory, which paid less, but to work at a company’s main facility you needed skills and a proper identity card; both girls had joined the factory with borrowed IDs because they had not applied for their own cards yet. The assembly line ran eight hours a day with weekends off, and that was bad too, because overtime would have meant more money. Shoe factories paid more, but they were known to work extremely long days, and the girls constantly debated whether the extra money would be worth the exhaustion. Soon after Yongxia and Dali arrived in the factory, they started talking about how to leave.

Before they went out from home, the two girls had made a pact: If jobs at the first factory fell through, they would go straight home. But when jobs at the first factory fell through, they stayed. They had come to the city, and already they were changed.

 

I MET YONGXIA AND DALI on my second day in town. It was a hot February morning, the sky bleached a dingy white and the air humming with heat and motorcycle exhaust; in the Pearl River Delta, summer would begin in another month. I took the girls to a noodle shop and ordered Cokes. They sipped them carefully through straws as they told me the story of how they had left home.

I explained that I was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Yongxia turned my business card over and over, mulling its unfamiliar Beijing address. “Can we write you letters?” she said suddenly. “We miss our mothers. We are so lonely.” Through the restaurant window, one of the girls spotted something outside. Both rose and scattered, like a pair of startled birds. “Sorry, we have to go now.”

By the time I caught up with them they were halfway down the block, standing on the sidewalk with a girl in their midst—the prize, the one who had come out from their village the previous year, the one who made eight hundred yuan a month. She was going somewhere, and they weren’t letting her get away this time.

I asked Yongxia for the phone number in her dorm, but she was so new to her job that she didn’t know it yet. She promised to write me a letter. We agreed to meet in two weeks, on the spot in the square where we had met that morning. And then they vanished. They were sixteen years old, on the loose in one of China’s most chaotic boomtowns, raising themselves with no adults in sight. They were prey to all sorts of cons, making life decisions on the barest bits of information. They missed their mothers. But they were also having the time of their lives.

______

 

I FLEW DOWN FROM BEIJING two weeks later to wait for them on the square. We had agreed to meet at ten o’clock, but there were many reasons they might not come. Perhaps they had found better jobs with overtime and couldn’t get away. Possibly they had decided they didn’t trust me. Or they simply forgot, or had something more interesting to do; maybe they had already joined the ranks of the disappeared. Why would they come? My only hope came from something Yongxia had said: We are so lonely.

I waited until almost noon. By then I knew they were not coming, but I also knew that once I left the square, they would be lost to me forever. They were sixteen years old from Henan Province; that was all I knew about them, and their names. In their frilly tops and jeans and ponytails, they looked just like the millions of other young women who had come to Dongguan from somewhere else. I couldn’t bring myself to meet anyone else that day. I wandered under the hot sun for hours, looking at people and talking myself out of approaching them for the pettiest of reasons. If they were in a group, they might be hard to talk to; if they were eating or drinking, they were too well-off. The sight of so many girls I would never know was paralyzing—it seemed inconceivable that any single story mattered at all.

For months afterward, whenever I came to the city, I looked closely into the faces of the young girls on the streets, hoping to find Yongxia and Dali again. Many of the girls looked back at me, wary or curious or challenging. There are millions of young women, and each one has a story worth telling. I had to look into their faces to begin.

 

I CAME TO DONGGUAN for the first time that February, in 2004. Migration in China was two decades old, and most foreign newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, had done stories about the harsh conditions inside the factories. I wanted to write about something else—how the workers themselves thought about migration. I was especially interested in women, who seemed to have the most to gain in leaving the village but maybe also the most to lose. The assembly lines of Dongguan, one of the largest factory cities in China, drew the young and unskilled and were estimated to be 70 percent female. That seemed a good place to start.

Over the next two years, I spent a week or two of every month in Dongguan. I got to know a few young women well, and I met a great many others who told me their stories and disappeared, like the two girls on the square whom I never saw again. Their tolerance for risk was astonishing. If they didn’t like a factory or a boss or a coworker, they jumped somewhere else and never looked back, and when they recounted their stories to me, there were unexplained gaps in time from stays at factories they no longer remembered. Their parents back home were only dimly aware of what their daughters were up to. Existence, to the factory girls, was a perpetual present, which seemed immensely liberating but also troubling. Making it in the city meant cutting ties to everything they knew.

The young women I became closest to had something in common: They understood the drama of their own stories and why I wanted to know about them. I think they also understood me, better than I might have expected. I was from America and I had gone to college; in education and class, I was a million miles away from them. But I knew what it was like to be alone, as a single woman, in the city. I was also bullied by Chinese men, and yelled at by police, and cheated by bus drivers; I also had boyfriend dilemmas and parents who worried that I was still single. When I got married in the spring of 2006, one of the migrant women who knew me best surprised me. “Your mother must be very happy” was the first thing she said. “I have a feeling that she is a traditional Chinese person.”

Perhaps my strongest link to the girls was one they never knew: I, too, had left home. After graduating from college in America, I moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia. Altogether I lived abroad for fifteen years, going home to see my family once every couple of years, as the migrants did. For a long time I resisted the pull of China. In college, I avoided Chinese American organizations and took only one Chinese-language class; I majored in American history and literature and wrote my undergraduate thesis on Larry McMurtry’s novels of the American West. In Prague, I reported on Czech politics and society for an expatriate newspaper. One winter day in 1992, a Chinese couple dragging their suitcases along the slushy sidewalk asked me for directions in Mandarin. I waited a long moment before answering, resentfully, in their language—as if they were forcing me back into a world I had already left behind.

Initially, China’s appeal for me was pragmatic—in the early 1990s, its booming economy began to attract global attention, and my fluency in Chinese suddenly became an asset. I went to Hong Kong in 1993 to work as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and began to read books on Chinese history for the first time, eventually to the exclusion of everything else; to me, China has always felt like the test I neglected to study for. When I moved to Taiwan two years later, people there frequently asked me what year I had chuqu, gone out, to America—their unspoken assumption that everyone in the world had been born in the Chinese nation. Later after I moved to China, I often heard the same question. That was one of the ways that Taiwan and China, which until recently had been technically at war, were more alike than they imagined.

One of the first things most Chinese Americans do when they go to China is to visit their ancestral hometowns, but for twelve years I lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China without making the journey. I worried that I wasn’t ready to understand what I would find in my family village; secretly, I was afraid it would mean nothing at all. Either way, I understood the factory girls when they spoke of their complicated feelings for home.

______

 

YOUNG WOMEN from the countryside taught me the city. From them I learned which factories were well run; without ever leaving Dongguan, these workers had figured out the global hierarchy of nations. American and European bosses treated workers best, followed by Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong, and then Taiwanese factory owners. Domestic Chinese factories were the worst, because “they always go bankrupt,” one migrant explained to me. They also knew when major policies were about to change—in early 2005, some workers told me that the minimum wage would rise, before it was officially announced.

Many things I had read about China’s migrants were not true. They no longer lived in fear of being picked up by the police; instead, the authorities just ignored them. Discrimination from local residents was not really an issue, because migrants almost never encountered locals. And I was surprised to learn that job mobility was high. Almost all the senior people I met in factories had started on the assembly line. The young women I knew did not appear destined to return to the farm because they had never farmed before. They often did not know how much land their family had or when the planting season began. My assumptions had come from studies of Chinese migrant workers done in the mid-1990s; almost a decade later, this world had utterly changed, but things were happening too quickly to be written down.

I came to like Dongguan, which seemed a perverse expression of China at its most extreme. Materialism, environmental ruin, corruption, traffic, pollution, noise, prostitution, bad driving, short-term thinking, stress, striving, and chaos: If you could make it here, you’d make it anywhere. I tried to fit in as much as I could. I ate twenty-five-cent bowls of noodles for lunch and took buses everywhere. I dressed, in jeans and sandals, more plainly than many migrant girls who wore embroidered shirts and high heels when they went out. I was invisible in Dongguan, and I liked that too. In other places in China, a person staring at strangers and writing things in a notebook might attract attention; here, people were too focused on their own affairs to notice me. Only once did someone interfere: I was in the talent market, copying down instructions from a sign on the wall. A guard asked me what I was doing. I told him I was practicing my English, and he left me alone.

Dongguan is invisible to the outside world. Most of my friends in Beijing had passed through the city but all they remembered—with a shudder—were the endless factories and the prostitutes. I had stumbled on this secret world, one that I shared with seven million, or eight million, or maybe ten million other people. Living in Dongguan was like arriving in it for the first time, hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour, the scenery changing too fast to keep track of it. Dongguan was a place without memory.

*  *  *

 

Dongguan was also a city of contradictions, because modern Chinese history had begun here. During the nineteenth century, British smuggling of opium into China devastated the country and drained the treasury. In the summer of 1839, a Qing Dynasty imperial commissioner named Lin Zexu ordered the public incineration of twenty thousand cases of opium in the harbor at Humen, a town in Dongguan. That act set the two nations on course for the First Opium War, which was fought in Guangdong Province and ended quickly when British warships overwhelmed Chinese forces. The Treaty of Nanking ceded Hong Kong to Britain, forced open Chinese ports to international trade, and gave foreign nations unprecedented commercial and legal privileges within China. In the history that is taught in Chinese classrooms, the burning of opium in Humen ignited the modern era: the subjugation to foreign powers, followed by the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, revolution, war, and the Communist victory in 1949.

But there was another history of this place. In the autumn of 1978, the Taiping Handbag Factory of Hong Kong opened the first foreign factory in Dongguan. Income in its first year of operation was one million Hong Kong dollars. The factory processed materials from Hong Kong into finished goods, which were shipped back to Hong Kong to be sold to the world. It established the model for thousands of factories to follow. Over the next two years, China set up four “special economic zones” as testing grounds for freeenterprise practices like foreign investment and tax incentives. The largest zone was Shenzhen, about fifty miles south of Dongguan, which quickly became a symbol of a freewheeling China always open for business. Shenzhen was a planned showcase city, willed into being by leaders in Beijing and supported by government ministries and the companies under them.

Dongguan was different. It rose by no one’s decree; it simply grew. While Shenzhen aspired to advanced technology and innovation, Dongguan took what it could get, which meant low-tech factories from Hong Kong and Taiwan that made clothing, toys, and shoes. All they needed was cheap land and labor, as well as local officials who left them alone. What they initially built could not be called modern industry. Many of the early factories were two-or three-story houses where workers sat at desks, fifty to a room, engaged in simple tasks like sewing cloth for a stuffed animal or attaching artificial hair to a doll. Some of the factories were housed in makeshift structures of sheet metal because their owners did not want the expense of real buildings.

In the early days, there was no train service from Hong Kong. Businessmen traveled to the British colony’s border with Shenzhen, crossed on foot, and caught a taxi to their Dongguan factory on the other side, passing farms on the way. “There were no roads around here, no cars, no TVs, not even curtains,” recalled Allen Lee, a Taiwan shoe industry executive who moved to the city in 1989. “You couldn’t buy stuff like that here.” In June 1989, he bicycled forty minutes to watch the news on TV about the shooting of protesters around Tiananmen Square.

The local labor supply was soon exhausted and migrants began arriving from neighboring provinces. Lin Xue, the woman I knew who wrote for a migrant magazine, had come to Dongguan from rural Sichuan in 1990. “We came here blind,” she told me. “I would go to someone selling tickets and ask, ‘Where should I buy a ticket to?’ and we would do what they said.” Lin Xue got a factory job that paid seventy yuan a month, and her younger sister pressed plywood in a lumber factory.

In the 1990s, the city’s manufacturing shifted to electronics and computer parts. Today Dongguan makes 40 percent of the world’s magnetic heads used in personal computers and 30 percent of its disk drives. Economic growth over the past two decades has averaged more than 15 percent a year. Some things have not changed. The migrants are still arriving. Labor-intensive factories still dominate, and though their products have gotten more sophisticated, the work itself has not. There are still a great many apartment buildings where workers sit at desks engaged in simple tasks with their hands.

So Dongguan was a place with conflicting versions of its past—one a high-profile rejection of the foreign presence in China, the other stealthy embrace of it. Every Chinese schoolchild learns about the burning of opium. But from the Taiping Handbag Factory, which did not appear in any textbook, I could trace a direct line to everyone I ever met in Dongguan, from the migrants studying Microsoft Word to the self-help gurus to the Mercedes salesman who told me that the priciest S- and E-Class cars sold best in Dongguan, because “for a boss to improve his image, this is a good product.” For all of them, modern history began with the handbag factory.

*  *  *

 

I went for months without meeting a native of Dongguan. The world of the factory, from the top managers to the assembly line, was the exclusive domain of migrants, though the top boss was sometimes from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Local residents spoke the Cantonese dialect, but the factory world functioned in the official dialect of Mandarin, because that was the only way people from different provinces could talk to one another. Migrants held the local residents in low regard: They were uneducated farmers who made a living renting out farmland to factories, and they could not survive a day in the factory’s demanding environment. “It’s mutual contempt,” my friend Lin Xue said, to describe relations between locals and migrants.

Six months after I started coming to Dongguan, I interviewed the deputy mayor. His name was Zhang Shunguang and he was a Dongguan native: my first. We sat in a big reception room in a city government building and drank tea out of tiny paper cups. Several of his assistants gathered, speaking to one another in Cantonese. I had never met a Dongguan person and here they all were, inside the government.

“Do you speak Cantonese?” one assistant asked me.

“Sorry, no,” I said. No one in the city had ever asked me this question before.

“Is this your first time in Dongguan?”

“No, I’ve been here many times.”

“Oh, were they all secret trips?”

“Is it a secret if you don’t know about it?”

We already disliked each other. In the middle of the interview, I looked over at the assistant and he stared blankly back at me. The young woman next to him had fallen asleep. The phrase mutual contempt popped into my mind.

The interview was useful: Without seeing for myself, I never would have believed how completely the government ignored the migrants. The deputy mayor did not have an accurate count of the migrant population—that was up to the national census, not his department. He admitted that the local government lacked the resources to check conditions in the factories. “If I inspected one factory a day,” he said, “it would take me fifty years to inspect all the factories. So we must rely on the companies to police themselves.”

The deputy mayor then talked of a plan to “lift the quality of the Dongguan people,” but the effort excluded those who were not native-born. Like all city people, he had a reflexive contempt for waidiren, outsiders, the common term for migrants. “The quality of migrant workers is not high,” he said, “but this is the responsibility of the companies. They should be running classes for workers.”

I asked the deputy mayor why there were no Dongguan people in the factories, even at the highest levels, and he contradicted what he had just said without missing a beat.

“The people from outside,” he said, “have higher quality and lower wages.”

After the interview, the deputy mayor shook my hand and praised my knowledge of the city. I didn’t tell him my informants were all teenage girls—migrants of low quality and even lower wages.

 

AFTER A YEAR of visiting the city, I rented a one-bedroom apartment downtown for $160 a month. The high-rise complex was called Dongguan City Holiday, and it targeted single women; hot-pink billboards around town advertised one PERSON’S HOUSE, ONE PERSON’S SPLENDOR. I thought I would meet young women and hear their stories, but no one ever said a word to me in the lobbies and elevators, and I never saw a single person in the common room. People were too busy with their own lives to bother with anyone else’s. I got most of my news from the bulletin boards in the apartment complex, which portrayed a community of petty crime and round-the-clock construction.

 

FOR THE PEACE OF RESIDENTS, RENOVATION WILL STOP ON JANUARY 1. IT WILL RESUME ON JANUARY 2.

 

WHEN A PERSON KNOCKS ON YOUR DOOR, DO NOT CASUALLY OPEN IT UNTIL YOU HAVE CONFIRMED THE PERSON’S IDENTITY.

 

ANYONE WITH INFORMATION ABOUT THE THEFT RING IN THE NANCHENG AREA SHOULD CONTACT THE POLICE.

 

My landlady had moved to the city years before from rural Guangdong. She often showed up at my apartment in pink pajamas and house slippers to collect the rent, and I once heard her say “Fuck your mother” on the phone to her husband because he had just told her he was returning late from a business trip. She worked the night shift at a hotel, doing sales. I wondered what kind of sales had to be done between midnight and six o’clock in the morning, but I never found the courage to ask. My landlady had a way of deflecting questions.

“How did you have two children?” I asked her once. Most urban families were limited to one.

“How do you think I had two children?” she answered.

The retail environment outside my apartment was in constant flux. On the day I moved in, I was excited to see a BRICK OVEN PIZZA sign beside the entrance to my building, a welcome taste of home. By my next visit, that had morphed into the GREAT AMBITIONS MOBILE PHONE DIGITAL SUPERMARKET. Just what China needed: another store selling mobile phones. Over the following two weeks, the space below my apartment transformed from an empty shell with cables dangling from the ceiling into a full-on mobile-phone store, with robotic salespeople and music blasting from giant speakers into an empty parking lot. On my next stay, marketing had begun, in the form of a young woman who stood at the store entrance and read phone model numbers and prices into a microphone, one after another. Another sign had materialized in front of my building: HAVE KFC AS YOUR NEIGHBOR! EARN 8% ANNUAL INTEREST WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING. I wasn’t thrilled to have KFC as my neighbor. The only constant in the neighborhood was the Nescafé plant across the street. On summer days, the smell of coffee enveloped me as soon as I walked outside, a warm bath at once sweet and bitter.

When you lived in Beijing, you were shielded from many things, but in the hinterland cities you could see the strains of China’s development up close. Public buses often diverged from their routes to fill up on gas; fuel shortages were common, so an open station was worth a stop even with a load of passengers. Full-day power stoppages were regular events, and factories had to juggle their production schedules because of government rationing. Among the notices on my apartment bulletin board was one that never varied: THE ORIGINAL POWER SUPPLY TRUNK LINE CANNOT KEEP UP WITH THE NEEDS OF DEVELOPMENT AND MUST BE CHANGED.

During the summer of 2005, the power went off for at least one day on each of my trips to Dongguan. With some advance notice I could plan ahead, but sometimes the power went dead without warning, consigning me to a day indoors in ninety-degree heat and as little movement as possible. I would call the building’s management office, fuming, but it was not their fault. It was not anyone’s fault. China’s economy was growing by 10 percent a year, faster in the south, and it was a miracle that things were holding together as well as they were.

*  *  *

 

I took the bus everywhere. In part this was to see as much of the migrant world as I could, but it was also practical. Taxi drivers were some of the biggest cheats around—more than once I found myself speeding down a dark highway while a cabbie threatened to leave me by the side of the road if I didn’t give him more money. Another high-speed negotiating tactic was to offer to take a passenger partway to his destination for a smaller fare; drivers were such short-term thinkers that they would rather earn less money but get paid sooner. Even honest cabdrivers suffered the shortcomings of peasants: Once they left the patch of turf they knew, they were as lost as I was.

The employees of the bus system worked in pairs: The driver was usually a local man, the ticket seller a female migrant. Sometimes they shouted conversations the length of the bus over the heads of passengers, and sometimes there was a small television screen mounted in the dashboard so the driver could watch TV as he drove. When approaching a stop, the ticket seller leaned out the door while the bus was still moving and called out destinations in a hoarse voice. The waiting people were usually susceptible to pressure; if they were yelled at long enough, some would get on.

The young men on the bus smelled of gamy sweat, the scent of people who walked long distances outdoors and never enjoyed the luxury of air-conditioning. The young women were immaculate: They never smelled, and their hair was always sleek and shiny. On every bus there were several migrants holding plastic bags to their mouths and throwing up quietly. Motion sickness was the terror of people from the countryside, who were not accustomed to car travel. Brown plastic bags hung from bus ceiling hooks in bunches, like overripe bananas beginning to go bad. Passengers on buses carried an amazing variety of things; in the way of the countryside, nothing was ever thrown away. On different journeys, I saw people carrying an ancient TV set, a wicker basket of electric cables, a mud-encrusted bucket of stonemason’s tools, and a murderous-looking wrench a yard long. Once I saw a young woman with a six-foot-long broomstick handle.

Bus stops were unmarked, and there were never signs showing the routes. You had to ask: Information was conveyed by word of mouth, as if we lived in ancient times before the invention of writing. Twice I bought city maps with bus schedules but both times the routes were already out of date; things were happening too quickly to be written down. The other passengers were as confused as I was, often calling out the names of stops that had already passed and making panicked departures. Wherever I went, I was asked directions. One afternoon, I puzzled over routes with a migrant woman, who asked me after a while, “Are you from Hubei?” Was that an insult or a compliment? I just wanted to get home.

At night the buses stopped running early, an injustice to everyone who could afford no other form of transportation. After eight o’clock, people arranged to spend the night in friends’ dorms, even though most factories banned overnight visitors and getting caught would mean a large fine.

I never saw old people on the bus.

 

ONE NIGHT I caught a bus from Shenzhen back to Dongguan. About halfway to our destination, the bus stopped and the driver yelled at the passengers to switch to another vehicle. This was common, though illegal: Late at night, half-empty buses preferred to pool their passengers rather than continue on money-losing journeys alone. The driver of one bus would pay another a set price for each passenger taken off his hands.

After the second bus was on the highway, the new ticket seller announced that we weren’t going to Dongguan after all. This was common, too: Once the second bus had been paid for taking passengers, its sole purpose was to get rid of them as soon as possible.

The bus stopped. “All passengers for Houjie get off here.” The ticket seller was a skinny Cantonese man who yelled everything in a nasal voice. He walked down the aisle, pointing at certain people and ordering them off. He pointed at me.

A passenger ahead of me got off the bus and disappeared into the night. I walked to the front of the bus and leaned out from the bottom step. We were on a pitch-black highway beside a deserted construction site.

“There are no taxis here,” I said to the ticket seller. “I’m not getting off.”

“There are taxis,” he yelled in snarling Cantonese.

“I’m not getting off.”

He came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” I climbed back up the stairs and sat in a front-row seat. None of the other passengers had budged.

And then the bus started driving again. It had failed to dispose of its cargo, so it kept going. Passengers continued to get off at their stops as if nothing had happened. “These buses are very black,” said a young woman with a slender dark face who was sitting next to me. “You should only take buses where the driver is wearing a uniform.” Yet she was on this bus, just like me.

“The people who work on this bus are evil,” she said loudly, “and every word out of their mouths is an obscenity.” I felt safe just being next to her, but then she got off too.

The bus pulled to the side of the road and stopped again. “Okay, everyone off,” the ticket seller yelled. This time he walked up and down the aisle, giving two yuan to each person.

I walked down the aisle to where he was. “I paid twenty-five yuan to get to Dongguan, and I want my money back.”

He turned around to face me. Of course, he was taller than I was, and he was a man. At that moment, I realized how powerless I truly was.

“If you paid a hundred, should I give you a hundred?” he yelled. “If I take my pants off, will you give me a hundred?”

It didn’t make sense and it wasn’t funny, but he liked the sound of it and he said it again. “If I take my pants off, will you give me a hundred?”

“Fuck you,” I said in English. “Asshole. Prick.” That broke my cardinal rule about living in China—never play the American card—but sometimes only cursing in English will do. The man looked at me with newfound respect.

I pushed past him to the front of the bus and looked for something to throw. I wanted to grab his money belt and toss it out the window, but of course he kept that close to him. There was a dirty towel on the dashboard, and I flung it in the driver’s face. Then I got off the bus and ran. My heart was pounding; I thought he might come after me. Then I stopped running, and I realized how stupid I must have looked.

On a side street, I saw a taxi and asked the driver how much to Dongguan. Eighty yuan—ten dollars. I got in. I was so mad I was shaking. I thought of all the young women I knew who lived here, and how every single one had been cheated, abused, and yelled at by someone just like the skinny Cantonese man, who probably woke up in the morning already angry at the world. There was no recourse but tears and fury at your own impotence. In a confrontation, everything boiled down instantly to brute force, and a woman would always lose. I had money, and with money I could buy my way to comfort and safety. They didn’t have that.

And yet there were also people who were kind, like the woman on the bus who had cursed out the driver on my behalf. You had to focus on that or you would never survive.

*  *  *

 

Dongguan might feel like a place without a past, but city officials did not see it that way. In the new downtown, they had erected a museum of history—an immense building of gray stone, as squat and permanent as the mausoleum of a dead dictator. Cabdrivers didn’t know the place—invariably they took me to a commercial exhibition center down the street—and the museum was deserted all three times I went in the summer of 2005.

Chinese history museums are troubled places. Ancient civilization was great, or so the official narrative went, but it was feudal and backward. Modern China was ravaged by foreigners, but the Chinese people were heroic in humiliation and defeat. China stood up in 1949 when the Communists came to power, but there were other years since—1957, 1966, and 1989 in particular—that went prominently unmentioned. Everything that was jumbled and incoherent and better left unsaid must be smoothed into a rational pattern, because the purpose of history from the time of Confucius has been to transmit moral lessons to later generations.

In Dongguan, the museum’s yawning lobby was a monument to wasted real estate and powerful air-conditioning. Signs pointed to History, straight ahead, and Economy, second floor. On my initial visit, I entered History. The first room stretched from prehistoric marine fossils to the Qing Dynasty, with glass cases displaying what looked like piles of rocks. On closer inspection, they were piles of rocks with incomprehensible English captions: Whetstone appearing from Haogang shell mound remains. A room-size diorama of women weavers illustrated Dongguan’s early talent in handicrafts. A tape of the scraping sound of the loom played in a continuous loop and haunted me through the rooms.

More piles of rocks followed, and then history lurched forward with startling accuracy. The population increased and reached 150,378 by the sixth year of the Tianshun reign of the Ming Dynasty (1462 A.D.). Markets developed; the salt industry flourished; agriculture thrived. In a large open room, a fake tree cast its shadow over a fake lake, a fake rowboat, a fake arched footbridge, three fake geese, and two fake ducks. The continuous loop quacked.

That was another difficulty of telling about the past. Every place had to reflect the continuity of five thousand years of Chinese history, but in most places little had been recorded and nothing concrete remained. Valuable artifacts would have been claimed by Beijing or lost in wars and political campaigns, so museums were forced to invent the rest. They forged cannons and bells and suits of armor, and printed texts of old documents on Formica tablets and hung them on the walls. Dioramas occupied whole rooms—a favorite display method, probably because they took up lots of space. The only authentic artifacts in the Dongguan museum were the piles of rocks.

Once modern history began with the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, things got really confusing. A display entitled “Fury Against the British” featured mannequins of British naval officers and an angry Chinese mandarin. The defeat in the Opium Wars has always been a deep-rooted humiliation and agony to China. But perhaps in a city of thriving commerce it was impossible to summon the necessary fury against the British, because the adjoining display had already moved on. In 1878, the governor of Hong Kong suggested founding the Inferior Protection Bureau to protect Chinese women and children. The exhibit marched quickly through the Second World War and straight to Communist victory, a blurry photo of happy faces. Millions of people rejoiced at the liberation.

In the next room, a title stretched across one wall: “A Vision Made Real: From Agricultural County to IT City.” A light board showed photos of the Communist Party meeting at which Deng Xiaoping set forth his program for economic reform and opening to the West. That was in 1978. From one room to the next, the exhibit had jumped thirty years, skipping over the founding of Communist China, the land reform and the execution of counterrevolutionaries, the attacks against “class enemies” and the establishment of the communes, the Great Leap Forward and the famine that killed at least twenty million people, and the decade of the Cultural Revolution.

I had exited History and entered Economy, and now the exhibit came to life. A vast diorama showed the Taiping Handbag Factory with four women bent over a table sewing shoes. A mock-up of the government office where businesses applied for licenses featured the familiar figure of Dongguan Man: a businessman with a potbelly and a pleather briefcase. History picked up speed—Decades passed in a wink—and giant photographs featured highway overpasses and sewage-treatment plants and investment conferences.

 

A BENIGN CIRCLE OF INPUT-OUTPUT-INPUT

 

FIRST PREFECTURAL CITY TO HAVE ONE MILLION MOBILE-PHONE SUBSCRIBERS

 

BUILD ROADS, BRIDGES, AND POWER PLANTS TO GENERATE FUNDS FOR MORE ROADS, BRIDGES, AND POWER PLANTS

 

An interactive demonstration showed the city’s GDP, exports, balance of deposits, and tax revenue. The final display was a photo of the signing ceremony of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

 

A NEW TIME IS COMING!

 

AS I WAS LEAVING THE MUSEUM, third- and fourth-graders on a field trip were lining up in the lobby in jostling rows. The students wore school-issue sweatpants with Young Pioneers scarves tied around their necks. A museum guide, a young woman with a stern face and sticklike legs, picked up a megaphone. I braced for the Opium War and 150 years of humiliation.

“On the third floor, you will see a model of the city,” she began. “I want you all to find your own house on this model. Do you all know Songshan Lake?”

“Yes,” the students replied in chorus.

“Songshan Lake is our high-tech industrial zone. Dongguan has a motto: ‘One Big Step Every Year, A New City in Five Years.’ We are now in Year Three of that plan.”

She paused. “Do you all know ‘Build the City, Construct the Roads, Renovate the Mountains, Harness the Rivers’?”

Silence. Nobody knew that one.

“It is government policy. Dongguan also has a harbor that is open to foreign ships . . .”

In the seventh century, the emperors of the Tang Dynasty ordered court historians to compose a chronicle of the previous reign. Every dynasty since has written the history of the preceding one, slanting or omitting facts to bolster the ruling regime; since 1949, the Communist Party has done the same, presenting modern history as a heroic struggle to resist the will of foreign powers. But here in Dongguan, the past contained a startlingly different lesson: History was openness, markets, and foreign investment. History began with a handbag factory, and schoolchildren must be indoctrinated in the merits of good infrastructure.

The museum guide urged the children to be “civilized spectators,” and the third- and fourth-graders filed into History in ragged lines. Soon the huge lobby was deserted, and I was left alone to ponder the unlikelihood of a Chinese history museum that did not make a single mention of Mao Zedong.