IN THE MAGAZINE

RAW CHINA - PART 2

The couple had moved under the three-sided wall enclosure and were picking through things, and I got the impression they were disgruntled about something. Emily confirmed a bit later that they were, as she put it, “really pissed” about Wu’s unashamed honesty, and that his groveling and “I’m really poor” and implying that maybe I could help him was an affront to their dignity. On one hand I could see their point, because as Emily told me later, “It’s in the telling of oneself that dignity is conjured or destroyed,” but on the other hand it’s hard not to appreciate Wu’s brutal straightforwardness. We’d entered a murky area of conflicting notions of honor, pride, ambition and self-respect, and though to the observer his transgression might have been justifiable, you could also understand their disapproval. But Wu was going for it. You only live once, right? There might be a chance. Breaking up that part of the interview and absent-mindedly forgetting about Emily for a moment Wu and I went through a broken door to his new spot. It had a concrete floor, a bed made out of plywood covered with a mosquito net, and a cabinet with broken drawers. There was a makeshift desk with a small globe on it and tattered copy of an ABCs of English book and a lavender razor and a cup of pens. On one side of the room clothes were hanging and scattered around were a few potted plants. It had a homey feeling, especially in comparison to the trash-strewn surroundings outside. I looked around, and then Wu handed me a piece of paper I took to be a story he’d written. A few weeks previously he’d also given me a drawing of two birds. We brought the story out to Emily, where she read for it under a tree in the lot.

“Let me tell you about a small thing: Truth is the foundation of success,” it starts, and then goes on to tell of Wu’s female friend who is a finance major at a commercial school. Like everyone else she’s looking for a job, looking and looking, unsuccessfully. Then Wu tells her he’ll give her the equivalent of $500, saying that they’re friends and if the situation were reversed “I would want you to help me.” At first she is silent, then she takes the money and gives him an I.O.U. A long time passes without any contact and then one day she gets in touch and tells him she’s found a job with a foreign company and wants to take him out to dinner. She’s happy, and after dinner they go to a nice teahouse and talk about life, and she tells him what happened at the company. At the initial interview she was told they would only call if she got the job, but she persisted and asked that she be called even if she didn’t and told why she wasn’t hired, offering to provide two Yuan to cover the expense of the phone call. That she was willing to give her own money for the phone call impressed the interviewer, and she got hired for three principal reasons, namely that she could separate work from her private life, showed determination, and was able to recognize her own inadequacies. Another year went by and by now she’d become a manager, and when she told Wu she’d repay him he declined the offer and told her “Whatever job you do, aim high, and whatever your heart and mind can reach for can be attained, and your heart and mind have to be ‘turned outward.’” It was a mixture of modern-day aspirational fable, Chinese inspirational sloganeering, and what seemed to be reportage, and that’s what was strangest—it had the feel of being based on real life but was actually fiction. The tale’s yearning for fairness and honesty in advancement and a wish for the world to repay good behavior made it almost mythical in sense of the contemporary aspiratonal mythos of China’s helter-skelter and decidedly not fair rush into and through development.

Again, what do you say to that? Life’s not fair? Good intentions, hard work and persistence don’t pay off? But you don’t want to say that because it’s a cherished dream and to refute the belief in it would just be mean-spirited. So we said something to the effect of “That’s a good story,” and then asked if we could check out the trash.

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We went to the office building they work at but for some reason couldn’t go down to the basement. Then Wu said his friend was the trash boss at another place and we could go there. A ten-minute walk east on Guanghua Lu brought us to the “Winterless” building, one of the countless 25 story high, totally nondescript buildings of its sort in Beijing with a completely nonsensical name. Winterless? Is that some kind of breath mint? Confoundedly the Chinese name does make sense and has no connection whatsoever to the name or concept of “Winterless.” We went down in the elevator, taken by the girl whose job it is to spend her life in the elevator, and came out into the parking garage and went over to a caged-in area where a wire fence went halfway up to the thirty foot high ceiling. At first the smell was overpowering, sour and sickening, coming from a barrel of assuredly “wet” refuse—some kind of food remnants spilling out over the top. To say it was dank, dim, and depressing in there, with two or three weak single bulbs giving off the only illumination, would be a crime of understatement. The disconcerting string of turned-off Christmas lights along the wall and a few plants only emphasized the overall squalor. A cave, a subterranean dungeon, with styrofoam and cardboard overflowing out of trash carts, that rank smell, and to one side a curtained-off area with rudimentary board beds, some clothes drooping from twisted hangers, a calendar hanging from an overhead wire, and a dingy stuffed panda bear in the corner.

An old man was taking a nap while a weathered woman rummaged through the trash, and a younger guy lay on one of the cots not really paying us any mind. The “Boss,” showed up, and there were some mandatory questions: Are you married? How old are you? It’s a funny thing, but just as Westerners have trouble gauging the age of Asians it goes both ways, and almost invariably my age is guessed ten years down from its actual number. That’s flattering, or possibly just flattery. Then we got down to business. They wanted to know the differences between how trash is handled here and in the United States. My simple answer was it’s more mechanized in the US and it’s structured from the top down, not from the bottom up as it is in China. I also said, with a quick “You don’t have to translate this part if you don’t want to” to Emily, that, well, for the most part in American the workers that pick up the trash don’t live right next to the trash. A long, heated discussion ensued without my participation, and as I smoked one of the boss’s cigarettes I pondered the shadow of a fan on the wall and thought about how I’d already gotten used to the smell in there, or at least that as time passed it wasn’t as shockingly bad.

After about 20 minutes we said our goodbyes and emerged into the now fresh air of the street, and went to have an early dinner. There was some kind of licorice-flavored soup, noodles, and beer and cigarettes, which, in an affront to all things scared in China, we were told to put out. Wu asked if I knew a girl named “Lena,” and when I said describe her he said she was “beautiful.” I surmised he meant Eleonora, who he’d given the good luck charm to, and then he asked he if could “have my permission to pursue her.” We sort of laughed it off, and then he said maybe he could introduce me to some girls. Kind of a trade, I suppose.

JOCKO WEYLAND


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Comments

Anonymous, on Oct 12, 2008 wrote: I like chinese box.
	iik, on Sep 6, 2008 wrote: Ginormous paragraphs. Crappy sentences.
Anonymous, on Sep 3, 2008 wrote: this was soooo badly written
	comma, on Aug 30, 2008 wrote: nice job, j... you’ve gotta come hang around my neighbourhood one of these days... stories all over the place, and no beijinger who won’t tell you what they really think if you ask!