Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
But though they looked just like the guy in the picture, there was something different
about these sad coal men. They weren't all that sad. At worst, they seemed kind of…bored?
They were between shifts when we walked into the work area, I think. Maybe they were
waiting for something to be fixed down below. So instead of working, the not-so-sad coal
men were lounging and chatting, resting in the sun, and playing with a visiting toddler.
That was incongruous, I thought, a child toddling among the coal carts. Some of the nearby
buildings, we learned, were housing for the aboveground workers. One of their wives had
brought the toddler for a workplace visit, commuting from about thirty feet away.
Our presence had yet to raise an eyebrow, which I found disorienting. I had gotten used
to being noticed. And although the attention that comes with sticking out in a foreign coun-
try makes me uncomfortable, I had lived with it for long enough now that this absence of
discomfort felt pretty awkward itself.
We leaned against a girder and observed the spectacular lack of activity. Nothing came
out of the mine. Nothing happened. Behind us, a woman tossed a shovelful of coal into a
fire under a pot of boiling water.
“This is a state-run coal mine,” Cecily said.
“In the United States there's a stereotype that government jobs are very stable,” I said.
“Very easy.”
She nodded. “Same thing. It's why people work for the government. My parents always
wanted me to work as a civil servant. We call it the
iron bowl.
Because you'll never break
it.” She shook her head. “Boring!”
A supervisor in a trim blue blazer wandered over to us and offered me a cigarette. The
offering of cigarettes was a ritual that almost took the place of shaking hands around these
parts, and I had bought a pack of my own in order to participate. But because my reflexes
had yet to develop, I was always too slow on the draw. I had tried to ramp up my smoking
skills before I got to China, as a sort of lung-destroying backup plan, but hadn't had the
discipline. By the time I fumbled the pack out of my coat and shook it in the supervisor's
face, he had already lit a cigarette of his own and offered me another in that perfect way,
three filters artfully peeking out of the pack.
The supervisor happened to be from Henan Province, where Cecily had grown up. That
was our in. Like any large country that hasn't had its native people replaced in the past five
hundred years, China is not actually a country but a collection of subcountries, and this
allows for the on-the-fly formation of much stronger alliances than come about when two
people discover they're both from Cleveland. Cecily told me her Henan dialect was rusty,
but clearly it was still good enough to ingratiate us with the supervisor, who gamely let us
