Moby-Duck (34 page)

As we join the crowds streaming to and from the quays, Tong gestures toward an old man and woman hurriedly packing manila-wrapped parcels into a little wheeling cart. The cart's wire basket is lined in plaid nylon. “Smugglers,” Tong says. After that, I notice them everywhere, those little plaid carts, those manila parcels. I ask Tong why the border guards let them through. He shrugs. Probably there are simply too many of them.

This isn't what I'd expected the Chinese border to be like. I'd expected vigilance. I'd read stories of foreign journalists shadowed by government officials, or deported for traveling on a tourist's visa, as I was. A request for a journalist's visa takes weeks or months to process, and the request itself is an invitation to surveillance, I'd read. Pretend you're a tourist, acquaintances of mine had advised—sound advice for most journalistic visitors to China. My personality, however, presented a problem: Interrogated by authority figures, I am fabricationally challenged. Interrogated by authority figures, confessions come burbling unbidden to my lips.

Hoping to elude suspicion, I'm wearing a sport coat and khakis rather than my usual adventure wear, doing my best to pass as an American businessman on holiday. I've also left my implicating voice recorder back in my hotel. As we approach customs, Tong and I part ways, he heading to the queue for Hong Kong citizens, I into the queue for foreigners. The line shortens. I ready myself to be cross-examined about the nature of my visit. Instead, when my turn comes, the customs officer glances once at my face, stamps my passport with the bored, silent efficiency of a grocery store cashier, and sends me on my way, to meet up with Henry Tong.

It might be different elsewhere in China, but here in the Pearl River Delta the entropy of the marketplace has overwhelmed much of the bureaucratic order, for better and for worse. The crime rates in some of the Delta's boomtowns, among the highest in China, are almost downright American, and so, almost, are the freedoms.
²²

If anything, it's piratical capitalists not bureaucratic Communists that one has to worry most about in the Pearl River Delta.
²³
The previous June, when a business correspondent for the
New York Times
paid a surprise visit to the RC
₂
Industrial Park in Dongguan that had produced those leaded toy trains, a factory boss held him hostage for several hours, refusing to surrender him even after government officials arrived to negotiate his release. And a few months after my trip across the border with Henry Tong, a Guangzhou newspaper called the
Southern Metropolis Daily
would uncover a child-labor ring in the factories of Dongguan, factories not far from the one to which Tong and I, once again in the backseat of a chauffeured minivan, were now bound. Taking custody of more than a hundred children, most of them between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, Chinese police would speculate to the press that there might be hundreds or even thousands more yet to be found. Corrupt employment agencies enticed or abducted the children from impoverished towns in Sichuan Province and auctioned them off to employers who paid them wages well below the already penurious legal minimum. According to the Chinese government, some were forced to work three hundred hours a month.

On the highway to Dongguan, billboards appear, advertising varieties of molding machines and plastic—PP, PET, PVC. It occurs to me that I have never seen plastic of any variety advertised before. The day is unseasonably warm. A gray haze hovers at the horizon, but overhead the sky is clear. I've been trying to learn a little Cantonese and ask Henry Tong to help me with my pronunciation. We start with “thank you,” the single most important word for linguistically challenged travelers to pick up. My guidebook spells the word
doh je
, but when I utter these syllables Tong snickers. He says the word, smiling widely on the long
a
of
je.
I do my best to imitate him, smiling widely on the long
a
, but my efforts evidently remain comical.

We pass vacant lots where rag-and-bone pickers are bundling recyclables into bales. Then comes a vast field of idle backhoes, hundreds of them, their jointed shovels pointing upward in yellow, blue, and green triangles, a strangely beautiful forest in the midst of this industrial sprawl. A little farther we pass an outlet selling office supplies. The outlet is several stories tall, festooned with red plastic flags, and every square foot of its facade has been papered in poster-size photographs of brand-name office equipment—Canon printers, Panasonic faxes, Xerox machines. Three decades ago, this freeway didn't exist, and the Pearl River Delta was still mostly farmland. Peasants still cultivate what little undeveloped land remains, growing banana trees among warehouses, cabbages under highway interchanges. We pass silos and smokestacks, soot-streaked factories and soot-streaked housing projects stretching densely in all directions.

The street level scene in Dongguan is livelier. Outside an open garage, a mechanic is repairing upside-down bicycles. Outside an eatery, a woman is stir-frying something in a wok poised over a fire in a rusty barrel. An old man pedals past on a kind of oversize tricycle loaded with empty straw baskets. There is a public park at the center of town, and all the apartment buildings around it look spanking new. Trimmed hedges line the sidewalk. Even the laundry hanging in the windows looks cheerful. Finally, on a side street, we turn into the gated entrance of a three-story complex of buildings encircled by a high wall along the top of which embedded shards of glass sparkle menacingly, and prettily, in the late-morning sun. On the gate, painted in red, a pair of Chinese characters spell the factory's name: Po Sing, or “Treasure Star.”

A gatekeeper rolls the gate open, and we enter a courtyard where bicycles crowd beneath a sheet of corrugated tin elevated atop four poles. The factory reminds me of a postwar American elementary school in some district deprived of tax revenues. Through an open ground-floor window, I spy a Ping-Pong table and a television—a rec room for the workers, currently unoccupied. From the main entrance emerges factory boss Tony Chan, grandson of Po Sing's founders. Trained as an engineer at the City University of New York, Chan is a middle-aged, squarejawed man whose sartorial tastes tend, purposefully it seems, toward the managerially forgettable—chinos, button-down, etc. His black hair is so carefully cropped and combed that it looks detachable. He leads us up a dingy flight of stairs to the factory's main office, a tiled room, noticeably lacking in secretaries, furnished with wooden benches, a great big desk, and a display case with sliding glass doors. The contents of the display case appear to have been curated by a toddler. Jumbled about on the glass shelves are plastic flowers, plastic water pistols, plastic knockoffs of the Floatees (the red beaver replaced by a red fish), plastic rings of the sort that babies like to stack onto cones. From the bottom shelf, Chan extracts, proudly, several unopened packages of Floatees, including one identical to those that fell overboard. I ask him if I might be permitted to take photographs. Henry Tong shoots him an anxious, apologetic glance, but with an it's-all-right wave of the hand Chan consents. I snap away and, as if on safari, keep my camera out.

At the pre-Christmas peak, Po Sing employs around a hundred laborers, who, unless they are married, live in an adjoining dormitory. Today, during the post-Christmas lull, only forty or so are at work. I ask Chan where the other workers go during the slow season. Some, he says, have returned home early for Chinese New Year. Others have sought work elsewhere. If he has to lay workers off, Chan says, he gives them one month's pay as severance. One month's pay is eight hundred renminbi, around $115, the legal minimum wage in Dongguan. It's getting harder and harder to find and keep good workers, Chan tells me, now that the demand for labor in the Pearl River Delta has at last begun to exceed the supply. Many workers move from factory to factory until they find the job and boss they like best. As a result, Chan's labor costs have been creeping up, “but it's still cheap compared to the U.S.,” he says, as if to reassure me.

Today, most of the remaining workers are upstairs, seated on long benches at tables strewn with yellow and red plastic tubes. They glance up when we enter, their expressions quizzical but emotionless, and then return silently, methodically, to their work. Clearly, they've received visits from strange white guys in sport coats before. With little bladed tools, the workers scrape away excess plastic by hand, one tube at a time. The tubes are components for a construction set, Chan explains. He plucks a yellow one, tugs at each end, and with a little crackle it lengthens, accordion style. He contracts it and expands it a few times for show. Snapped together, the tubes look like red and yellow sausage links. “You can build many different things with these,” Chan says, “a home, a car, a spiderweb.”

Finishing and packaging take place up here. Molding takes place downstairs, in a long corridor of a room where a couple of dozen machines are evenly spaced, a few feet apart, along either side of a central aisle. The machines look like antiquities, vestiges of a variety of industrialism that predates the space age and the information age. Some are wrought-iron black, others a metallic bronze green. They cast spindly shadows on the concrete floor. Only four are in operation today. At one, workers are “overmolding” handles for Dr. Brown-brand baby-bottle brushes. Overmolding, a technique for combining different colors of plastic into a single part, is a more time-consuming, labor-intensive process than regular molding, but it makes painting unnecessary. Inspecting the white plastic cores of brush handles cooling in a vat of water, I experience a shiver of recognition. “I own one of these brushes!” I tell Chan. “It's suctioned to the counter beside my sink back home!”

“So,” he says, happily, eyes twinkling through his glasses, “you are one of my customers.” He fishes out one of the little bobbing cylinders with his finger and, shaking the water off, presents it to me as a gift.

I'm not sure what to make of my own excitement. The thing is totally worthless, the cheap component of a cheap product that I already own, and yet for a moment it's as though some breach in my universe has been repaired, as if the arc between two oppositely charged poles has been jumped by an invisible surge. The air stills, the room grows quiet, even tensely ceremonial. Then I notice that the workers I've interrupted are watching me, a stranger mesmerized by a piece of plastic. It's clear that they understand nothing that Chan and I have said, and judging from their expressions, I'd guess that no one has explained to them who I am. Presumably, they mistake me for a customer, a toy importer from abroad. I nod hello. I try to say
doh je.
Either Cantonese is to their ears almost as foreign as it is to mine, or more likely, my pronunciation, despite Henry Tong's tutorials, still sucks: they respond by looking away.

At the fourth machine, an extrusion blow-molder, a worker is turning out yellow plastic ducks, one of which hangs from a wire in a plastic sack above his head. I climb onto a stool and peek into the hopper, an inverted pyramid that funnels yellow nurdles of LDPE (low-density polyethylene) resin down into the heated, spiraling barrel of the machine. From the barrel's other end emerges a yellow sock of goo, known in the trade as a parison. Seated there on a backless stool, the worker reminds me of a farmer milking his cow. Young, in his late teens or early twenties, he is dressed in a yellow T-shirt and shiny blue track pants with Adidas stripes running up the legs. Rhythmically, stoically, as if some strange American and his factory boss weren't ogling him, he milks his machine, yanking a lever that claps the alloy mold onto the parison, toeing a foot pedal that produces a blast of air, then yanking the mold back open. Out the yellow ducks drip, one by one. Every so often the worker pauses, tears off a ribbon of ducks, rips the remnant parison away, and tosses the ducks into the big cardboard box beside his stool. Three hours into the morning shift, the box is almost full. Considering its yellow contents, I find myself wishing that I could equip each toy with some sort of homing device and track their wayward journeys through the global economy, from this poorly lit factory floor to the slippery, hygienic bathtubs of America.

Tony Chan has a surprise for me. From storage, in anticipation of my visit, he's retrieved a zinc-alloy die-cast mold. He places it on the floor, open, so that the two halves mirror each other, one cross-section of a duck floating on its reflection. Chan's late father machine-tooled this particular mold. Machine-tooling molds is the most skilled and expensive part of the production process, Chan tells me. From my shoulder bag I brandish the yellow duck that Curtis Ebbesmeyer loaned me back in Seattle. Then I squat down and plug the thing into one of the zinc-alloy concavities in which, sixteen years before, with a single pneumatic blast, it had undergone a metamorphosis, transforming from yellow polyethylene goo into a hollow icon of childhood; from polymerized chains of carbon molecules into a marketable plaything. For a moment I half-expect some sort of cosmic magic to occur—rays of yellow light to come shooting from the mold, a portal to open in the space-time continuum. Instead, I just stand there muttering, idiotically, “Wow . . . Wow,” while behind me Po Sing's perplexed managers look on and beside me an antiquated extrusion blow-molding machine operated by a youthful proletarian drips out new ducks one by one:
psssht, clamp
;
psssht, clamp
;
psssht, clamp.

A zinc-alloy die-cast mold like this one, Chan explains, can produce 100,000 toys, three or four per minute, before it wears out. Steel molds, more expensive than alloy, can produce 500,000 pieces. Back in the autumn of 1991 when Po Sing received the order for that ill-fated shipment of Floatees, Chan's family made a profit margin of around 10 percent. Now the margin is “much, much less.” Although he hasn't made Floatees for several years, he estimates that a set of four plastic animals blow-molded from LDPE would wholesale today for around eighty cents. More than forty cents of that would go toward raw materials. The cost of materials has doubled in the past five years, Chan says, due largely to the rising price of plastic resin, a derivative of oil. The packaging is now, in January 2008, sometimes more expensive to make than the product. A plastic blister package can eat up 20 percent of production costs; a plastic clamshell, 50 percent. Rent in Dongguan is also on the rise. Chan's family moved their plastics factory from Hong Kong to the mainland in the 1980s, but several years ago, when his lease expired, he had to relocate the factory again, to its current location. “First they invite us,” he says. “Then they make us move.”