Touring with the Chinese
Back to Yiwu, Commodity City. So far I have only written about less than 24 hours. I need to scroll through my photos to remember what came next. After the plastic factory, we were driven to the second generation commodities mall, which was a huge, open mall selling the woven goods and hosiery that are one of the backbones of the commodities trade here. They called these malls by their generation. There were four generations so far, but a fifth generation mall-market was being built. We walked into one of the first shops we passed, which was the factory store for the socks place we visited. We stared around at the various socks and eventually were told that they wanted to buy for us. Okay. It is polite to refuse a gift on the first attempt but not for too long. I didn’t really need socks, but I spent some time looking for one. I learned to identify the Chinese character for ‘cotton’, which was a bonus. We each selected a pair and showed them off. Somehow, we were talked into choosing more, as Sabrina told us that if we each picked six pairs of socks, they would be cheaper. We are not good at refusing egregious gifts, and held true to form at this juncture.
We had a nice lunch with our new hosts and Sabrina. They took us to a nice restaurant where we got a private room and ordered a bunch of food. Our host, the cousin, was a smiley man and happy to show us around, and though he knew almost no English, Josh translated for us, and his dad was excited to learn a bit of English. More on that later. The biggest dish from that meal (I am embarrassed I did not write down more) was a fish head from a good-sized fish in a huge plate with lots of sauce, red hot-sweet peppers and garlic.
We relaxed for a while at lunch, but this was not to be a relaxing vacation. We were driven off to the Fourth Generation Commodities Market to do some shopping. This was a huge structure on the outskirts of town, and it was crazy. This was the marketplace of cheap, crappy Chinese stuff. We walked in and stared at the signs directing us to the correct area. We chose Jewelry and Hair Ornaments. We walked through aisles and aisles of stalls, each selling hair ornaments.
Ornaments of all sorts were available, but mainly barrettes, hair bands, and so forth. It wasn’t so much the variety of the items that were available (though there were quite a lot), it was the sheer number of these shops. Hundreds of 10-foot wide stalls lining hallways that went on forever. Each selling perhaps a few dozen samples, and ready to deliver 10,000 of anything if you should order it. We walked through hair ornaments to jewelry. Here were the cheap rings, earrings, necklaces, and other adornments. Nothing cost more than a few cents here, it seems. We were literally lost for a few minutes searching for a shop run by a different cousin of Sabrina’s who owns a different ring factory. Finally we found it.
At this shop both walls were lined with samples of their rings. There were mostly mood rings and glow in the dark rings, with some generic gold-ish and silver-ish rings. One could purchase 100 of these rings for around $4. If you bought in bulk (and earlier that week a Russian had ordered 200,000), the discount would be steeper. Here we were given a few more rings, a few which now sit on our bedside table glowing eerily when we turn off the nights. We fought through a few aisles of the toy section, purchasing a few dozen sheets of stickers and tiny origami folding papers.
Exhausted, we left and crammed four into the back of the Accord. We then drove to one of the proud new developments in Yiwu, a big stadium and park area. We had to pile out of the car and pose for a few photos in front of it before piling back in. We drove to a new school, which was built like a fancy new college campus. It was spotless and modern, and had well-tended gardens and lawns, fountains and sculptures in addition to the academic and dormitory buildings. In the background we could see the low green mountains surrounding Yiwu.
We eventually drove to a noodle restaurant for dinner. The specialty of this restaurant was chicken feet, but though they looked meatier and more interesting this time, I still opted for pork instead. It was good, spicy and warm. This was a hot day and the sweat that formed my brow was welcome.
On our way home, Josh’s mother insisted that we stop and buy snacks for the evening. We protested but relented. So inside a grocery store, we had to pick up some sunflower seeds, nuts, chips and chocolates for the evening, though we did not wind up eating any of them. I eyed a cured pig leg that is sold here in a convenient zippered bag but didn’t follow through.
We went home and Josh’s mom met us at the door of her home. This consisted of the top two floors of a five-story complex. It was luxurious by the local standards. Josh’s mom was a very nice woman. She had slightly reddish-brown hair cropped short and slightly permed. She was rather stylish and always wore a smile. She didn’t know a word of English and couldn’t comprehend me when I attempted to speak Chinese. But when we arrived she frantically gestured for us to sit on the longest couch I have seen (it could have easly seated seven) and watch English TV. They didn’t have satellite but many cities in China have one English channel. This station’s programming was typically “Dialogues,” where the host interviewed people at length about random topics. We spent a few minutes watching a ping-pong gold medallist from the 1980s ruminate about the sport before our interest waned.
The father was also a very jovial man. I believe he wore red every day we were there. He had just purchased one of China’s most popular English programs: “Crazily Speak English.” This was built somewhat on a cult of personality, a charismatic guy who had a riled up studio audience in his DVDs, handy phrase cards to take with you on the road, CDs to practice in the car, and a work book as well. The early lessons involved simple, idiomatic phrases, like, “Isn’t is a nice day?” “Isn’t a good idea?” and “Isn’t it wonderful?” We (mainly Erica) spent much of the trip helping him pronounce these phrases.
Soon, some other friends or relatives came over with three children, one in college, one in high school and one in middle school. Sabrina was going to tutor one in the girls in English for a big test she had. “You must be exhausted,” again came the plea. It had been a busy day, but the clock said it was 8:30. Well, not really. We decided to go outside to their patio and practice some Chinese with Josh and Sabrina’s husband, Michael, who had arrived that afternoon.
After maybe an hour of conversation, the older two girls who had come to visit trickled outside to see us. One of them was very bold and asked us promptly, “What do you think of President Bush and Iraq?”
We told her, trying not to be overly critical of our country, that we did not agree with the invasion, and asked her opinion. She said that she thought the war was a good idea because Saddam treated his people so poorly and “because he was responsible for the World Trade Center.” We tried to correct the error in the latter half of her justification and Josh jumped in with a defense to the former.
“It’s his country, he can do what he wants,” he said. At first I thought he was talking about Bush, but no, he was talking about Hussein. We are not sure if he was just giving her a hard time or not, but it was a very surprising point to come from him.
We were a tad grumpy that night because our suitcase, which we were told to leave at the first place we stayed, had not made the transfer. So we got up in the morning with our same clothes and one (my) really stinky shirt. At least they had loner toothbrushes. But our clothes came and I was able to change before running out.
We had another breakfast, this one we ate out. I had some noodles, some dumplings, and a fried egg. It was a lot like lunch, with an egg, though a variety of porridges were available.
A neat thing about the common Chinese way of traveling is that it is usually done with a crowd. So in addition to our hosts and Sabrina, for the rest of our trip we were accompanied by a half dozen other family friends or members, giving us between 10 and 14 people, just enough to ensure a large, jolly dinner table or tour group wherever we went. We didn’t observe a chain of command, but there were few problems in terms of indecision. Remarkable. Or perhaps everything was figured out beforehand so there would be no quibbling.
And then we were off, crowded into the back seat, again, to visit an ancient city. I don’t remember the name of it or the specifics, but essentially a really smart emperor from maybe 1200 years ago hailed from this city. There were some halls in commemoration of his greatness and various other interesting aspects of the city. It was somewhat mazelike and at the center there was a pond and a large cement platform that formed a yin-yang figure. We hired a guide and wandered around for a few hours. There were calligraphy demonstrations and old-time farming equipment you can try out, as well as some views and such. Many locals were selling preserved vegetables.
This ran late and threw us off in our search for lunch. We went to a nearby town and wandered around looking for a place to eat. It was very late for Chinese to eat lunch—almost 2:00. Finally, we found a smaller place that took us and we had a big feast, eating lots of snails and chicken. After a lounging around the table for awhile, we got back in the car for the hour’s drive back to Yiwu.
I dozed much of the ride, and when I awoke we were driving past the main square with what may be the only building in Yiwu that is more than 10-years old—a decrepit looking tower from the Ming dynasty that had small plants growing out of the brickwork and looks as though its days are numbered. We pulled up to a new building facing the square. We were ready to eat dinner. Dinner! We couldn’t believe it. Even I, he of insatiable appetite, couldn’t imagine eating more. This was a teahouse, however, and not as regimented in the eating as normal restaurants.
This was our second experience in a teahouse (the previous was the location of my chicken-fetus eating episode), and this time we were able to appreciate it in a different manner. The allure of the teahouse is that you get a table or a room, order a glass of tea for each person, and get free access to snacks and refills for as long as you want. So the response to our grumblings about not being hungry yet was essentially, “wait an hour and then maybe you will be.”
A few of us took a short walk around the square, which our table overlooked. The sky was overcast and windy and rain loomed on the horizon, but it was break from the stickiness that we had endured throughout the day. This square was more of a park, with a small pond and tended lawns and shrubs. It was decent. We spent a moment staring at a stubbly palm-palmetto type tree with three or four main trunks emerging from the ground, each about the size of a ten-year old maple. We were informed that this tree was very valuable tree, and had recently been purchased by the city from a private collector for something like $200,000. It looked nice, but not amazing. I sadly look back through our photos from the trip and note that somehow we neglected to take one.
So back to the teahouse, where everyone else was involved in conversation. We talked some, snacked some, and I somehow found myself paying lots of attention to dried lychees and pistachios. We drank a lot of tea, had a generally good time, and went home later. Back at home, we showed them a few photos from home and gave them our meager host gift, some candied pistachios we had purchased before leaving. It was just a tiny token and seemed all the more tiny when we realized how many meals they had taken us out to and things they had done for us. In China, the host always pays. There is usually a ceremonial fighting for the bill, but it is accepted that the host is the one who pays for everything. This has obviously worked to our advantage, but we are helpless in most cases to try to pull our weight.
We watched a few more minutes of Dialogues, Erica helped out the father with Crazily Speak English for a bit, and we went to bed.
We suspect that, despite the fact that the father was a very nice guy, he likely has been accepting kickbacks or various types of bribes on the job. He is a city employee, and though he seems rather high in the government, his position likely doesn’t pay all that much on his own. As one in charge of zoning and future citywide development, he had many opportunities to direct growth one way or another, thereby enriching those who had land in the area early. A different cousin was remarking how his new home, which was still being built, had almost doubled in value since he started building because of rising land values in the district. It was quite possible that our host had something to do with this.
Commodities!
We spent a wild weekend in Yiwu, known around here as Yiwu, Commodity City. This was the place where all of the stereotypical cheap Chinese stuff comes from. It was amazing on many, many levels.
Sabrina, one of our colleagues at Xiaoshi who has actively befriended us, invited us on this adventure. She was excited about showing us her hometown, and since we were stuck teaching in the middle of this May holiday, we decided that though four days was not enough time to explore Beijing, it was enough to explore Yiwu.
We drove out there in her friend’s old Audi. I looked out the window the entire ride. The countryside in foreign places fascinates me. Perhaps this is because my many trips on I-80 through Indiana and Ohio made me value anything moderately interesting out the window, like that dome of Notre Dame’s you can glimpse for an instant on your way through South Bend. But people, machines, buildings, and crops keep me entertained for hours. This trip was only three hours, and we shared the backseat with Sabrina’s mother in law. I was anticipating spending a lot of time on this trip with her classic toothless grin and unintelligible dialect, but once we got to Yiwu, we pulled into a housing development and she hopped out, disappearing into her son’s apartment never to be seen again.
We also said goodbye to the Audi at this time, as one of Sabrina’s grown nieces pulled up in her four-door pickup truck. She introduced them, “This is my niece and nephew, they own a ring factory.” Okay. We piled into the back seat and drove off to their house, through the new developments of this city. We crossed a bridge and stared at the cranes dotting the skyline. Maybe in the China of ancient generations, the cranes would have gracefully spread their wings and flown off, but these were made of steel and were busily attending to buildings swathed in dark mesh fabric while their insides were put together.
We drove through the city and emerged on the other side. We drove past a cluster of derelict brick buildings on the left, some four or five stories tall. Sabrina said this was the village she grew up in. But it is slated for redevelopment, meaning that everything will be leveled and a spiffy new housing development or factory will arise in their place. She admitted she was going to miss it.
Suddenly the concrete ended and we pulled onto a rutted dirt path. So the pickup had a use after all, I thought, as we bounced along. But 50 meters further a brand new, though narrow, street emerged. We drove a bit longer on this road. To our left we passed an acre-sized pond lined with floating plastic soda pop bottles every meter or so in a perfect grid. We had seen many similar ponds in the countryside, but never in the presence of a local who spoke English. Sabrina explained that those bottles were buoys that marked the spots where pearls were cultured. Under the surface of the pond hundreds or thousands of pearls were slowly growing inside the shells of freshwater clams.
We continued on and turned off abruptly where a larger, stout building stood facing a similar pond, this one without the soda bottles. This was home. We got out and dropped off our bags inside the spacious living room. Then we immediately ducked back outside to check out the scene at the pond, where several children and men were loitering.
At the pond, we watched as a 10-year-old attended four primitive fishing poles. He also had a fine mesh net on a pole. After his patience ran out with one of the poles, he would slowly lift it out of the water with the net poised next to it. If he was lucky, a crayfish would be clamped onto the piece of bait he had tied to the end of the stick and he could quickly scoop up his prey and dump it into a plastic bag he had with him.
The view from the front patio of the house was of this small pond, the road to the left, and fields on the other side of the road. It seemed like the idyllic country life that so many of us pine for. But it would not be so for long. On the other side of the pond was a small field, but past that a low mound of red soil arose like a broad dune. This soil, devoid of vegetation, would soon become the base for new factories. Yiwu is growing.
We went inside and watched them prepare some dinner, which was a simple affair meaning only about 10 dishes for us, but none elaborate. Dinner was nice, and we were invited to try their homemade wine. I was excited, but the pale pink alcohol was rather sour. I’d rather drink our concord grape wine back home.
After dinner, a handful of other relatives stopped by (Sabrina has six older siblings, each with their own set of children) and the room was alive with little children running by, laughter, and the TV playing some kung fu movie that involved. We sat back in a daze eating watermelon and not even discerning whether we were hearing Mandarin or the local dialect. Eventually, the guests left and Sabrina and her niece coaxed us up to bed. “You must be exhausted,” she said. It was 8:30. But we went up to the bedroom and red for an hour or two before drifting off to sleep.
We were awoken at 6:30 in the morning by the same animated conversations, this time from the patio outside our window. That got us out of bed and we pulled on our clothes and headed down to join the crowd. Not being a morning person or understanding their conversation, I left the crowd and went off to watch the crayfishermen, who maybe never left for all I knew. Some had a few dozen crayfish in their buckets already. But soon I was called back for breakfast.
This was our first real Chinese breakfast (we generally eat wok fried or scrambled eggs or yogurt and granola at home), and I don’t really need to eat any more. We had the famous rice porridge which tastes like, well, overcooked rice in a lot of water. There were a few condiments available, but the preserved tofu was slimy and salty and sour (though not as bad as that description makes it sound) and the preserved vegetables were too salty for me to deal with so early. And the fried, baguette-sized piece of airy dough was a bit too much for me to deal with. I am not a breakfast person anyways, so it didn’t bother me too much.
We were off by 7:30, piling into the back of the pickup and heading off to visit the factories! We pulled into the ring factory and first started in the storeroom where we examined the rings that were made here. They were generic, pewter or silver-plated or stainless steel (I’m embarrassed I don’t know which), and molded into shapes of all kinds—the Irish handshake thing, peacocks, skulls, hearts with the Chinese character for heart written on each one, and various patterns and so forth. They pulled out a little bag and insisted we take some. We really didn’t need nor want any, but we didn’t want to insult them so we picked a few. They picked several more for us and we walked out with maybe two dozen of them.
Next we walked upstairs to where they were being made. No rings were being poured into the molds today, since it was the Sunday of May holiday, but a handful of workers had showed up. We watched as a man buffed out the scuffs on a ring, spending perhaps 10 seconds on each one. After being cast, the rings had to be filed, pounded and welded into ring shapes, and then plated. We were told that a worker makes one fen per ring. One fen is about $0.0012. Not a whole lot. If they are fast workers, they can make 30 yuan (about $4) a day. Sabrina told us this proudly. Perhaps it is one of the better paying factory gigs in the area.
There was another factory on the lot, and we walked into this one. The building was owned by her niece and rented out to another producer. This one made cheap cloth belts, the kind that are basically woven straps with buckles on them. We walked into where a half-dozen power looms were stitching the fabric at a rate of maybe a foot a minute and several workers attended the machines, keeping everything running. The straps were collected into huge woven rice bags where they were carried into the other building and turned into belts.
Next we drove to a building under construction. This was the house that Sabina’s niece and her husband were going to move into. It was big and spacious but had no greenery anywhere near it. This was a long ways from the house they would be leaving. We were told that the home had already almost doubled in value due to its proximity to the manufacturing area. We inspected the progress, noted that at least two workers had taken up residence in the uncompleted rooms (as is standard practice here), and headed off to the next factory.
Here we met more relatives, who, unbeknownst to us, were taking over as hosts. Erica and I got into another car, this one a new Honda Accord, and were introduced to our the driver, Sabrina’s cousin (I think), his wife in the front seat, and their son, Josh, who was a sophomore in college and spoke very good English. He immediately started asking us about the wildlife in Australia. We answered him as best we could until we admitted that he probably knew more about Australian wildlife than we did, since we had never been there.
“You aren’t from Australia?” he asked. We shook our heads. “I can’t believe it! My aunt told me you were! I spent all night trying to figure out something to talk to you about!” He hadn’t needed to bother. He was a very nice and interesting guy, and we had no problem finding things to talk about for the next few days. We pulled into another factory, this one quite modern, large, and new looking. It was the Meng Na sock factory. Sabrina asked if we knew of it. Apparently it is quite famous in China and Sabrina’s cousin was proud that he had pulled some strings to get us in. And quite a factory it was. Cavernous but decently lit, one of the first things I saw was a small Wal-Mart sign on the wall with the Arkansas company’s name the only thing not in Chinese.
Despite detractors’ accusations, there was no evidence of sweating in this shop. Hundreds of Italian-made looms churned out tubes of fabric that were inspected and then closed at the toe, steamed or stretched into the correct shape, and packaged. It was a fascinating place to see in action. The six of us walked around snapping pictures and poking at socks. We were not the first visitors this place had seen—a sign with bilingual regulations for visitors was prominently placed at the entrance.
From here we drove off to BOPP, another factory run by a cousin or nephew of Sabrina’s. Here we watched as a huge machine turned a vat of hot chemicals into plastic sheeting, perhaps 8 meters wide and hundreds of meters long. This was used mostly for greenhouses and so forth. It was hot enough to sweat in here, but most of the employees were engineers or computer guys monitoring the German machinery.
That concluded the factory segment of our trip. I will write more when I have the time. I am off to explore a nearby island that is very sacred to Buddhists.
Calendar Games
I am writing this on May 8, a day known to the rest of the world as Saturday. And our Chinese calendars also say it is a Saturday. However, the entire country is operating as though it were a Thursday. Banks had regular Thursday hours and we had to teach our Thursday classes today. Tomorrow will be Friday. And the day after, Monday again, returning us to the normal week.
You may find this strange, but there is a reason for it. See, yesterday, when our calendars said Friday, was actually Sunday. And the day before (allegedly Thursday) was Saturday. The government pulled this nifty switcharoo where they gave three statutory holidays to the masses yet everyone got 7 consecutive days off. Most got Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off as a holiday, and then were able to take another weekend just three days after the first one in order to pull off the seven days.
It has caused no shortage of confusion among us. This is only a few years old (it seems it was introduced in order to stimulate the tourist economy for 7 hectic days). The downside of this switch is, of course, that after seven straight days off, you have seven straight weekdays. Aye.
