Travel Reference
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The most important part of his job, though, was to smoke and eat and drink without
cease. He drank and smoked much more than before. Nothing got done in Shanxi without
drinking, he said. It was a hard job. His family didn't like it.
The conversation had somehow turned, and suddenly, instead of telling us about his abil-
ity to manage the personalities of truculent coal men, Jun was talking about how depressed
he was.
He had taken a test on the Internet, he told us. A score above fifty meant you were de-
pressed. He scored eighty.
He was under a lot of pressure, he said. He wanted to keep making his salary. He was
making five times what he had hoped for when he graduated, and had bought a house for
his parents, but he was too busy to enjoy life. He couldn't relax. He had no time to social-
ize, and was starting to lose friends. They assumed he was avoiding them, that he thought
he was better than them, because of the money he made. But that wasn't it. He was just
busy. The only people he really talked to, he said, were friends he had made online, whom
he would never meet in person.
He wanted to have a plan for the future, he said. He wanted to get married. But he didn't
have time to think about himself, to think about his “self-strategy.” The only time he could
think about such things was late at night. Or while sleeping.
He lit another cigarette. All he knew was that, if he left the car business, the connections
he had built in Linfen's industrial community would be valuable, whatever he did. Rela-
tionships weren't important just for selling Audis.
I wanted an audience. I wanted to smoke and eat and drink with one of the coal princes
of Shanxi. I wanted Jun to help me get a glimpse of the top of the food chain.
He shook his head, a faint smile on his face. It's impossible to meet those people, he
said. Then he got the check, and we rose from the table to go. But before we left, I took
another bite of shredded rabbit. You have to eat the year, or it will eat you first.
The closest I got to meeting a coal boss was Liu, the driver who had picked us up at the air-
port in Yuncheng and driven us to Linfen, and whom we had hired again several times. A
middle-aged man with a sleepy expression and a wry smile, Liu and his family had started
a coal mine of their own. Only in Shanxi, perhaps, does a taxi driver start a coal mine on
the side. Before the recent spate of shutdowns and consolidations, the province had been
riddled with small, illegal coal mines.
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