Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
And that is how I began my career in electronics recycling, in the employ of an eight-
year-old firebrand called Lang. Our task was to pull the recyclable plastic off the circuit
boards, which were piled against the wall in a mound almost as tall as I was. We sat at the
foot of the mountain on tiny plastic stools, causing little avalanches each time we grabbed
a new board.
Most of the recyclable plastic in a computer's motherboard, I'll have you know, is in
the slots where sound cards and the like are plugged in. With the use of a screwdriver-size
crowbar and a pair of pliers, these narrow rectangles of plastic can, if you are Lang, be
popped off the board with a few flicks of the wrist. Lang also had a preternatural ability to
move boards around with his feet, leaving his hands free for uninterrupted hammering and
prying. He was wearing a pair of fuzzy brown dog slippers with floppy ears, which created
the illusion that he was being helped in his work by a pair of supremely well-coordinated
puppies. He was a machine. In the time it took me to evict a single battered hunk of plastic,
Lang might have gone through three entire boards, plastic flying from his every touch, the
boards spinning underneath the jumping ears of his little doggies.
I held up a newly won gobbet of plastic. “Check
that
out,” I said with pride.
Lang smacked his forehead. “Bu yao!” he cried, and snatched my board away.
“Cecily!” I shouted to the sitting room. “What does 'buyao' mean?”
“It means 'don't want,'” she said.
It turns out there is no better way to learn a few useful words of Chinese than by taking
part in a little child labor. In addition to
bu yao,
I learned
yao,
meaning “want,” and
hao
le,
meaning “done,” roughly. Like this, Lang and I established a system of communication,
and I began to learn which bits of plastic were worth the prying and which weren't. Some,
I believe, had metal inside them, and so were no good for melting down.
Over the course of several hours, Lang's excitement at getting to boss around an adult
veered into delight at what was becoming an effective collaboration. Soon, when he would
go to get a smoke for his uncle, he would get one for me as well, leaving me with a lit ci-
garette in my mouth before I could even think of saying
bu yao.
The smoke stung my eyes as I worked, making me glad that we were not baking circuit
boards instead. That task was done in the covered entry space between the workshop and
the street, and was a job the Hans didn't do themselves. They reserved it for their lone em-
ployee, who sat in front of a hot plate that held a shimmering pool of molten solder. With a
pair of needle-nose pliers, he would pick up a circuit board and float it on the silvery pool
of solder. As the solder holding the components on the board melted, acrid fumes rose into
a homemade fume hood, which drew them into a chimney and vented them onto the street.
