Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
SIX
IN SEARCH OF SAD COAL MAN
Guiyu.
The smell of burning solder. Capacitors underfoot. Shattered components spilling from
beneath a closed gate. Cellphone faceplates in heaps three feet tall, leaves raked up in au-
tumn. We turn a corner. Ten-foot-tall drifts of gray computer plastic lie waiting to be sorted
and recycled, like dirty snow dumped by a plow.
Old keyboards stacked on pallets, cube on cube, bales of electronic cotton. A warehouse
of keyboards, a soccer field's worth of keyboards. A four-foot stack of identical keyboards,
grimy and half crushed. I recognize the model; I used to own one. Has my old keyboard
come through this place, for its keys to be ripped off, its metal extracted, its plastic melted
down? I pry a key off and put it in my pocket.
A team of men shovel hay from the bed of a large truck, tossing it over the side into a
heap. The timeless gesture of bodies shoveling hay, but it's not hay. They're shoveling cir-
cuit boards. Naked and green, the clattering square fronds pile up by the wheel of the truck.
Women toss piles of scrap aluminum into the air with shallow baskets, separating the
wheat from the chaff. With broad, circular sieves, a family shakes out resistors and capa-
citors of different sizes. Did they come here from the countryside? Did they use these tools
on the farm?
We did, said Mr. Han. We would use them for corn, back on the farm in Sichuan. Now,
though, farms use machines to process the corn, and we just use sieves like these for sort-
ing components.
Mr. Han had his own business. He and his wife had both grown up on farms in the
Chinese province of Sichuan, to the northwest. They had met while working in an electron-
ics recycling workshop here in Guiyu, near the southeast coast, and after marrying, they
had opened a workshop of their own. They specialized in motherboards—the central cir-
cuit boards of personal computers. Mr. Han bought them in large bales three feet on a side,
imported from overseas, likely North America.
Together with his wife and her sister and his wife's sister's husband, he sorted and pro-
cessed every component of the motherboards. They cut out the valuable CPU chips for
resale, pried off recyclable plastic, melted down and collected the solder that attached the
