Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
This is why the streets of Guiyu smell of cooking circuits. Nearly every building has one
of these smokestacks.
After frying for fifteen or twenty seconds, the circuit board's connections would melt.
The worker would pick up the board with his pliers, invert it, and smack it violently on
a hunk of concrete to the right of the stove. The components would fly off (along with a
spatter of tin and lead, depending on the solder) and go tumbling into an ever-growing pile.
He would then toss the board into a heap of newly naked circuit boards.
There was gold in those boards. Printed circuit boards use copper for their circuits, but
the copper must be protected from corrosion with some kind of coating or plating, often in
the form of a microscopically thin layer of alloyed gold. It takes a lot of circuit boards to
accumulate a significant amount of gold, but a lot of circuit boards is exactly what Guiyu
has. Once Mr. Han had accumulated a sufficient batch, he would give the boards to a con-
tractor to extract the gold. This was the dirtiest part of the entire process. I had heard tales
of acid baths and toxic bonfires. Naturally, I wanted to see it for myself.
Don't, said Mr. Han. Don't try to find those people. They operate illegally, and they're
very suspicious. You could get in trouble. Please don't try to find them.
Not that I had time anyway. I was focused on my work, on improving my turnaround
time for each motherboard. Brand names cowered under my crowbar: Intel, Acer, Foxconn,
Pentium, Philips, Virtex, Blitzen. Each time I had a CPU to unplug from a board, Lang
would hold up the collection bucket for me, and I would shoot a three-pointer, and he would
smile like we had won the championship.
A drag on my cigarette and I'd pull over another board to wreck out the plastic, pausing
to point when I wasn't sure.
“Yao?” I would ask.
“BU YAO!” Lang would scream.
“BU YAO!” I would scream back.
And then, if I thought I was done, I would ask, “Hao le?”
“Hao le,” Lang would say, sounding almost philosophical. Then, with a look of what
I hoped was respect, or at least camaraderie, he'd pause his helper-dogs and slide another
board in front of me, the little slave driver.
A storefront with a small glass case full of integrated circuits. It was a tiny shop, one room,
run by two young brothers. Three feet behind the display case was a bunk bed. They lived
