Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
in the shop. To the left was a table arrayed with a hundred small cups for sorting their
wares. One brother, wearing a red pleather jacket and a striped button-down shirt, watched
with cautious amusement as I took pictures of his display case.
I wanted to buy a small baggie of chips as a souvenir. He was confused. What did I want
it for? The kind of chip I should buy depended on the intended use. When he finally under-
stood, he refused to let me buy one, insisting that I accept it as a gift.
On a busy market street, a nail salon with six young women in black tights and high-
heel boots. All the young or youngish women in Guiyu dress this way. They chattered as
they bent over their work. It was of course not a nail salon but a circuit shop. Each woman
held a handful of chips. Using tweezers, they would pick up a single chip and dip each of
its two rows of contacts into a pool of molten solder on a shared hot plate, working with
the speed and economy of motion that comes from day upon day of precise repetition.
We asked if we could take a picture of them working. They tittered. One of them, in the
second it took her to pick up her next handful of chips, waved her free hand in front of her
face and smiled. Please don't.
We wandered the streets, passing over small canals choked with trash. But trash-choked
waterways are like sunsets. They're great to look at, but they may not mean that much.
More interesting are the many smells present in Guiyu, the many shades of water and air
that complement the clouds of fried circuitry. At the river, drifting stains and a reek of
sewage. Near the bus station, a generalized fetid-toxic smell hanging over a canal by the
road. On the bridge, an inky stink of exhaust coming from a passing tractor-tricycle. I
watched with some dismay as the choking plume approached us. But then, as the driver
passed by, he throttled down for a moment, sparing us the worst. Even in Guiyu, courtesy
lived.
Through a back alley we came upon a crew working through pallets of Motorola Broad-
band Media Centers—cable boxes. A man had stacked about fifty of them along one side of
the work area, forming a wall of identical metal boxes, and was going from one to the next
with a screw gun, unscrewing the same four screws on each. Behind him his coworkers
made tidy piles of tops, of sides, of brackets, of LCD screens that trailed ribbon cables—a
tangle of color on a dreary afternoon.
Trucks belched along with loads of semiconductors. A motorcycle cart passed us carry-
ing a pile of strange, green objects. With a start, I saw they were cabbages.
We paused by a truck, its bed loaded high with bulging sacks. The corners of cleaned
circuit boards peeked out from the bags. Raw material, about to be hauled off to the mys-
terious gold extractors, wherever they were. The men loading the truck smiled and asked
where I was from.
