Hour of the Rat (14 page)

She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter to me. He is not a serious person.”

“I don’t really know David,” I say. “I’m friends with his brother. They haven’t heard from him in a while, and they’re worried about him.”

“Humph,” she says, sounding like every young heroine in every bad Chinese comedy I’ve ever seen. “They should not worry. I think he is fine.”

“Do you know where he is?”

She shrugs again.

The thing I’m starting to figure out is that sometimes people will just answer your questions, tell you what you need to know. Other times they want to tell you their story first.

So ask for the story.

“Why do you say David isn’t serious?”

She sucks up a noisy strawful of
boba
balls, then stares at me over the plastic cup, chewing on the last few pellets.

“We come here because he say he has business,” she finally tells me. “He say we do the business and leave. We stay in this … in this cheap guesthouse. Noisy. Dirty. Okay, I can
put up with this. I know worse places. Then he say he has to go to Guiyu. He don’t know when he comes back. He don’t know where he wants to go after. I don’t want to go to Guiyu.”

“Guiyu?”

“Bad place. Dirty place. Nobody wants to go there.” She abruptly shoves her empty drink aside. “Okay, I tell him, I wait for you here. I get some work. When you finish, you tell me.”

She tucks a lock of her glossy hair behind her ear, like none of this matters.

“He doesn’t come back. He doesn’t have real business. He just has stupid dreams.”

“Sorry,” I say, and I’m not sure what to say after that. I want to know what happened to Jason, but that’s not the rest of
her
story.

“So you’re working at the factory,” I say.

She smiles at me. “Yes. They are always looking for girls.”

Now she takes a package of cigarettes out of her purse. Marlboros. Offers me one. I haven’t smoked in years, but I’m tempted.

“No, thank you.” I have to hold the line somewhere. She taps one out, lights it, inhales.

“It is a silly job,” she says. “I sit on a stool all day, painting toys. Silly. Every day, ten hours, on a stool. Sometimes more. It smells bad, from paint and things. My back hurts. My hands. My head. I hate it.”

“But you’re not doing that now.”

She laughs. “No. One of the bosses from the factory, he watches me. Says he can give me a better job. In the office. So I do that now.” She takes a long drag on the cigarette. “He gets me an apartment, too. Not so nice. But better than, than …” She frowns. “Better than
sushe
, how do you say that?”

“Dormitory.”

“Yes. Better than dormitory.”

Not quite two months and she’s gone from the factory floor to the office.

I don’t need to ask what the rest of the deal is.

“Sounds like you’re doing okay,” I say.

She gives me a look. Draws on her cigarette, holds it between her fingers, palm up, the smoke curling around her face. She looks like a movie star.

“I can do better,” she says. “And I will.”

I
ASK HER IF
she has “David’s” cell-phone number, and she shakes her head. “Old one won’t work. He must have new one.”

“Do you know if he’s still in Guiyu?”

She looks at me like I’m pretty stupid. “How can I know?”

Fair enough.

“When was the last time you heard from him?”

“Maybe … a month ago.”

I try to think of a nice way to ask,
So did he dump you or what?

“Did he say … anything about his plans or …?”

“He say a lot of stupid things,” she snaps. “He say what he does is important. He say he can’t come back right now. It’s not safe. He say he loves me but he is no good for me.” She laughs again. “Maybe that second thing is true.”

Not safe
. Great.

“Why isn’t it safe?”

“I don’t know,” she says, playing with her straw, sounding like a sullen kid.

“Look, I just want to help his family. Is there anything you can tell me? Anything at all? Just so I can let them know
something
?”

She sticks her finger on the top of the straw, then lifts it up, watches the liquid drain out. I want to reach across the table and smack her.

Instead I take a deep breath. There’s no point in me getting all worked up over Daisy and her bullshit, over Jason/David and whatever he’s been up to. I don’t have to be doing this. Nobody’s forcing me. I’m trying to do a favor for a buddy, and if this is as far as I get, no one’s going to accuse me of being a Fobbit slacker.

While I’m thinking all this, Daisy’s apparently doing some thinking of her own.

“Okay.” She reaches into her purse—a fake Gucci. Gets out a wallet. Opens that and from an interior pocket pulls out a piece of folded paper.

“This,” she says. “This is what he give me.” She holds on to it for a moment, smoothing the creases, keeping it neat. Then she puts it on the table in front of me, careful to avoid the ring of water left by my beer.

I pick it up. Unfold it.

There are three names, written in pen, in messy, back-slanted print—

“Modern Scientific Seed Company, Dali

Bright Future Seed Company, Guiyang

New Century Seed Company, Guiyu
”

—and what I think are the Chinese translations next to them.

“So what is this?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes. “Names of seed companies.”

I am so wanting to smack this girl. “Yeah, I see that, but why did David give it to you?”

“Don’t know,” she says, doing her best to sound indifferent. “Just something he is interested in. You know, he’s always talking about these … these bad seeds.”

Bad seeds?

“He ask me to keep this paper,” she continues. “And if the right person comes, to give it to him.” She shrugs. “I guess that person is you.”

G
UIYU IS ABOUT AN
hour and a half’s drive from where I’m staying. After I have a late breakfast, I decide to hire a taxi to take me there. There are buses, but I don’t know the territory, and from what I can find out on the Web, it looks confusing and complicated. Guiyu is a collection of villages that just sort of grew together, and though I have an address for New Century Seed Company, it doesn’t say which village.

“I need to go to this place,” I tell the first taxi driver who stops for me, showing him the paper.

He looks at the paper and shakes his head, waves his hand. “Don’t know it,” he tells me.

I recognize these gestures. He knows, but he doesn’t want to have anything to do with it.

“Do you know where this is?” I ask the next taxi driver.

He looks at my paper. “Sure,” he finally says, in heavily accented Mandarin. He looks at the paper another moment, and then he looks at me. “Why you want to go there?”

I get why he asks. I did a little research on Guiyu last night, after I met with Daisy.

“Business,” I say.

My answer must be good enough. He nods, and we negotiate a price.

Guiyu is pretty notorious. It’s the largest e-waste site in the world, apparently—where old computers go to die and get recycled, scavenged for their valuable components. Copper. Microchips and RAM. Workers, mostly poor migrants, dismantle the units by hand, sort the parts into huge plastic bags of the same rough weave you see in flour sacks and peasants’ tote bags, burn the circuit boards to extract metal. There’s a
60 Minutes
segment on Guiyu, but I couldn’t access it, even with my proxy. Just a few articles here and there, from Greenpeace mostly.

So what’s a seed company doing in Guiyu?

And why does Jason care about it?

I searched all three of the names, first using the pinyin. I only got one hit, on Modern Scientific Seed Company. They specialize in “maize seed, rice seed, wheat seed, and cotton seed,” along with “spraying tomato powder.” According to Modern Scientific’s Web site, the company is listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange; was named “one of the top fifty in Chinese seed industry;” and “it was awarded as High-tech Enterprise and it is the enterprise which abide contract and has high credit level awarded by the State Administration for Industry & Commerce.”

“We have established and maintained stable and long-term business relationship with many customers at home and abroad on the basis of mutual benefit,” the About Us page concludes. “We warmly welcome friends of the same trade from abroad and home to collaborate with us. Let’s sow the seed of good wish and harvest the bright future!”

Right.

The other two companies, I could only find hits in Chinese. I don’t read Chinese well enough to make much sense of it, but Google Translate helps me figure out they sell seeds. In the case
of Bright Future Seed Company, rice wheat, corn, millet. The one I’m going to, New Century Seeds, has the least information of all. Just the same address I already had and a phone number, which I wrote down. When I called it, I got voice mail. I didn’t leave a message.

“Y
OU A REPORTER
?”
THE
taxi driver asks me. Like a lot of the people here in Shantou, he speaks Mandarin with an accent—it’s not his first language. As much as the government’s tried to make Mandarin the “national language,” you still find plenty of Chinese who don’t speak it well. But in cities like this, where there are lots of people from other parts of China, businessmen and migrants and factory workers, most people get by.

He’s a young guy, short and slight, the most prominent things about him his teeth and his hair, cut in that shaved-sides, long-top style that resembles a mushroom.

“No.”

He nods. “I didn’t think so. You don’t look like reporter.”

We drive awhile in silence. He fiddles with his radio, finding a station playing Cantonese pop. I stare out the window. It’s pretty at first. We head out on a busy road that runs beside a broad river. A delta, I guess you’d call it. Onto a long bridge over the water, to a highway on the other side. Across a smaller river. Through farmland and trees.

“So … an environmentalist?” he asks.

It takes me a minute to figure that one out—the term he uses translates to “environment protector.”

“No.”

“Really? Almost all Westerners who go to Guiyu are reporters or environmentalists. You just missed film crew from a foreign news show. The bosses threw them out after a few days.”

By now we’ve been on the road over an hour. The air is
getting really bad, a yellow-grey haze, and I can smell it: Burning wire. Melting plastic.

“A lot of pollution,” I say.

“Guiyu is famous for its pollution.” He grins. “The world’s second-most-polluted place.”

“Second-most?”

“First is somewhere in Russia.” He shrugs. “I don’t remember the name.”

We’ve reached Guiyu proper, I guess. Another anonymous Chinese city with chunky buildings, most of them under six stories, made of cinder block, concrete, and white tile. There are tall plastic signs advertising something about electronics, but I can’t read the rest of the characters fast enough to get what.

We continue driving, out of the main commercial district. There are bicycle and donkey carts piled high with woven plastic bags, filled with things I can’t see.

I unroll the window so I can see better.

This cart has computer casings. Just empty computer casings. Stacks of cracked beige plastic. The next one, the one hauled by a donkey, has monitors piled five high, barely held in place by black plastic ropes.

Along the street are little workshops. I can’t really see what goes on in them. But out in front more piles of electronic junk. Here’s a random mound of tangled, twisted wire. Farther along, a hill of telephone handsets. Next, a mountain of keyboards.

I can’t take it all in.

People cluster on the sidewalks, like in any other Chinese town. Buy their snacks, walk arm in arm, scold their kids, do their business.

“The place you want to go, what’s the address again?”

I tell him.

“Ah, okay.”

We drive out of this center—whatever it is—down a road lined with fringes: dilapidated storefronts, more piles of junk. Now we’ve reached a canal, or a stream. The water is black. There’s trash floating on the oily sludge. A couple of teenagers hang out on a little arched bridge over it, leaning against the faux-marble rail. We pass weed-choked fields, remains of rice paddies. Smoke from random fires forms low-hanging clouds. The air is so thick with chemicals that my nose and throat feel like I’ve been snorting chili powder.

None of this is helping my bad mood.

“I think it’s up here,” the cab driver says.

Another cluster of buildings, more solidly built, like it’s the town center in another village. A broad dirt street. There are huge mounds of … I don’t know, electronic crap, everywhere. Plastic. Cathode tubes. Metal scraps, partly covered by a ripped blue tarp.

“Here,” the cabbie says. He points across the street, to a two-story building, grimy white tile with pink accents.

“You’re sure?”

He shrugs. “It’s the address.”

“I’ll go ask.”

I sling my daypack over my shoulders and get out. The front of the building is open, except there are thick, round iron bars, like a prison, that run from from top to bottom into the surrounding structure. Workers sit in a row facing the street, six of them, four women and two men. I can see their heads and torsos above the low wall that frames the opening. Smoke billows from inside, blown out by a couple of industrial fans embedded in the wall.