Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ous bottom-feeding, I'd probably be pissed off, too, when people wandered into my work-
shop with cameras. Whatever the source of the bad vibes, Guiyu sounded unfriendly. I had
heard stories of journalists being screamed at, chased, pelted with bricks.
Guiyu isn't the only weirdly specialized place in Guangdong Province. Only two hun-
dred miles down the coast is the “special economic zone” that is the city of Shenzhen,
one of the most concentrated areas of electronics manufacturing in the world. (It was to
companies in Shenzhen, Mr. Han said, that he sold his recycled components.) Shenzhen is
home, for instance, to the famous “Foxconn City,” the giant complex where iPhones and a
million other things are built.
From waste recycling to questionable industrial processes to simple carbon emissions,
Guangdong is a land to which we outsource not only our manufacturing but also our pol-
lution. The environmental reporter Jonathan Watts put it best, in his book
When a Million
Chinese Jump:
“This is where the developed world dodges its own rules.”
Then you have Gurao, the Bra Town of Guangdong, just up the road from Guiyu.
Passing through Gurao on the bus, I saw billboard after billboard of semi-nude lingerie
models. Colossal women in bras looked down from the facades of factory buildings. One
lounged next to a violin. Nearly all the models were Western; full hectares of white flesh
went by. A rippling male abdomen crowned a pair of tumescent briefs—the work of the
Guangdong Puning Unique and Joy Clothing Co. Hanging from the streetlights, where an-
other town might fly banners celebrating a holiday or a music festival, there were pennants
with more white people in their undies. The children of Gurao must grow up thinking that
without their city to stand in the breach, the Westerners of the world would go completely
naked.
I saw bras, but Cecily smelled a story. Cecily was my fixer and translator, a young
Chinese reporter whom I had hired in Beijing. She was intrigued by Bra Town. She wanted
us to pose as entrepreneurs interested in importing bras to the United States. That way, she
thought, we might get a look inside one of those factories.
That we would consider working undercover to get an inside look at the presumably
legal underwear industry was symbolic of a broader problem: in China, I was not supposed
to be a journalist. My tiresome habit of telling myself I wasn't one anyway made no differ-
ence. Several people, professional reporters with years of experience in China, had advised
me to travel on a tourist visa, not to be open about my agenda as a writer, and not to do
anything that could draw the attention of local authority figures or media, not to mention
those unfriendly guys with the bricks in Guiyu.
As for Cecily, she said I should specify that she was a tourist guide and wasn't doing
any journalistic work. (She was a tourist guide. She did no journalistic work.) And there
were larger things afoot. The Chinese government had been spooked by the revolutions of
