Made in China

Modern day China is probably most notorious for its immense number of factories that are pumping out copious amounts of goods using such cheap labor that it's bordering on slavery. No wonder that I was pretty excited when I was told, that I was going to work in one of these infamous beasts for a couple of days. 

The work mainly consisted of me trying to tell the Chinese workers how to assemble the machine our company designed. Some might say, that a minor flaw in the concept was that I'm not an engineer - I don't even know how to assemble a kinder surprise toy, let alone a state of the art parking device. On top of that, I don't speak a word in Chinese. The first part was solved by the arrival of a couple of engineers who knew the deal (more or less). The second part was not solved at all, which did not help to speed up the assembly process, but brought a fair amount of light entertainment to the grey routine of the workers' everyday life. The days passed, and I ended up working there for two weeks, so I had plenty of time to observe the unique microcosmos of the factory, which turned out to be rather different than expected...

First of all it's not that bad to be a factory worker in China - or at least not worse than anywhere else. Most of us heard about the inhumane conditions labourers have to withstand at places like Foxconn, but I could not see any trace of this at the plant I was working in. In fact, their schedule was rather lax - at noon sharp the workers had a 90 minutes lunch break, giving them ample time even for a refreshing nap. Not even us could work during lunch break, as we would have woken up the sleeping manpower. One of the most uncanny abilities I have ever seen in a man was how these workers knew exactly when their shift ended - 17:30, and not a minute later - without a single glance to any watch, and shut down the whole complex in seconds when it came, being completely indifferent to any plead to work a little more. We managed to convince them to stay overtime only once, even then we had to take the whole crew out to dinner, before they were willing to lift a single hammer! They are not exactly cheap either - a basic worker, who's job is to do the same four-move-sequence the entire day, brings home around 350-500$ a month. That might not sound too much, but it's around the same wage as in Hungary, a member of the European Union. A skilled craftsman can double this figure, and 12 grand a year after tax is a pretty neat sum of dough, especially if you consider that a lot of them are illiterate - not so unexpected in a country where you have to be familiar with at least 3000 characters to be able to read the papers.

The other surprise was that the workers weren't the kind of mindless drones, westerners tend to imagine they are. Actually we would have welcomed a little more mindlessness on their part. Whenever we told them, for instance, to put a screw somewhere, it initiated a long chain of actions that just never seemed to end. Instead of simply putting there the bloody screw, they had a lengthy debate among themselves in rapid, anxious Cantonese for about 20 minutes, then told us that we didn't even need a screw there. We would tell them that yes, we do indeed ... another 30 minutes of chatter ... they are sorry, but the drill they would need is currently used by someone else, we have to wait ... we wait ... wait some more ... the drill arrives, but it turns out that they are out of screws, so it can't be done until the next day, when they get more supplies. You also have to explain them everything at least five times, for them to actually do it. Oh, they understand it crystal clear the first time as well, but they want to be absolutely sure they got it right. Which would be a nice thing, only they screw it up all the same. You get the feeling that whenever you tell them to do something, they do something - it's not what you asked for, but it is something, and you should be satisfied with it. Things like that burn time and energy, and when you put it together with the kind of not so pleasant conditions that reign inside the plant - not unlike the core of a dying star filled with sticky iron dust and screaming sounds from hell, that makes your eardrums want retire to the back of your head and never come back - well, it makes the whole thing a bit of an agony. And of course there's also the big question whether they are this way because A, of their culture B, they are idiots C, they think we are idiots? My money is on C...

A very important thing to note for everyone who is about to work in China, is that your Chinese colleagues will take the side of the other Chinese, rather than the company's. In our case when the factory workers screw something up, our Chinese colleagues start to make excuses for them, instead of shouting their heads off. The best interest of the foreign company that they too work for, is second to the the one of their fellow Chinese. This is not to say that they aren't grand people - only that for them blood ties stronger than contracts. It's also worth remember, that here every deal seems to involve some people washing each other's backs - I'm quite certain that we ended up in the factory where we did, because of some shifty agreement between some obscure people who happened to know each other from way back. In China networking is everything!

What Chinese manufacturers are amazing at, however, is reproduction! Once they manage to do something right, they can recreate it anytime! As much as this amazes us, it's somewhat worrying as well. We are not quite sure what's there to stop them producing thousands of our machines for their own ends. Especially in China, where the concept of patent law is still viewed as a fancy of the silly west. It's exactly because of this that we have to use separate factories for different phases of the work, so not one of them will know the whole procedure. Clever, innit? Not all plants were, to put it nicely, quite up to the task either - at one we approached the most high-tech appliance they had, was a hammer which was well past its prime. What they lacked in cutting edge technology, however, they made up in optimism, as they promised to finish the assembly in no more than two days - a job that took us two weeks in a normal factory.

Even in the factories where they managed to evolve further than prehistoric technology, the idea of health and safety regulations were yet to reach maturity, or indeed exist. Helmets, earplugs, any kind of protective wear or such useless things were nowhere to be seen. We did find some welding shields, but they were as untouched as my high school math teacher. Who needs them anyway, when you have your eyelids to keep you from getting blind as a bat? The only protection they seemed to use were simple plastic glasses, surrounded by newspaper - against the sparks I guess. In two weeks I couldn't find out their policy on when to use this rather creepy ad-hoc mask, and when just stare right into the searing light. 

They did, of course, have 'No Smoking' signs all over the place, due to the large number of tanks and tubes filled with highly unstable, explosive gasses and liquids that upon catching fire would most likely cover half the city with a poisonous, flash eating angry cloud. Signs, however, seemed to only challenge the workers, as they were smoking even when carrying around the damn tanks, waving the burning end of their fags only inches away from the valve. Other minor hazards involved cases such as the truck that almost hit me while going backwards (the truck, not me); or the huge load of BBQ sets that tumbled crashing down from a fork lift a few metres away from me. I thought these things were scary... until the typhoon broke out. Now, a full-scale typhoon is a pretty horrifying experience in itself - but when you are in a barely water sealed plant, full of naked high-voltage cables, it's a whole other level. Where the windows should have been, the raging storm was blowing in vaporised rain right on the cables that were lazily hanging from the roof. The water was pouring down on the walls, onto the electric boxes and sockets, making me vaguely remember something from science class about how water and electricity doesn't combine nicely. I was expecting the factory to turn into a Tesla experiment in any minute, and I had one of the very few religious experiences of my life, when I started to pray to God... any God. The workers, however, were not bothered at all, and continued to idly smoke around the gas tanks.

Luckily, being there for two weeks made it possible for me to catch some beautiful little moments and details, that otherwise would have escaped me. Like that man and woman that had to work on the same machine every single day - and by each passing day, they grew fonder and fonder to each other, until on my last day I saw them going home together holding hands. Or the huge monster of a machinery that had an old, faded photo of a pretty young girl in a wedding gown, right where the worker who spent half his life sitting in front of it, could see it all the time...

If you had told me a few month ago, that I would spend weeks of my summer to work in a Chinese factory, I would have thought that you are a peculiar one, and avoided further interaction. But life has some mysterious twists, and early July found me shouting through the rumble of a thousand machines to some Chinese workers who didn't understand a word I was saying anyway, and probably wouldn't cared even if they did. Even though most of the time we felt like swimming against the stream, this experience did provide some valuable lesson about how challenging it is to overcome the culture gap when working on the other side of the globe, and how good it feels when you finally succeed...

The drilling machine of love

 Bonus: The hardest working member of the factory!

Little Market of Horrors

Even though I’ve been in Guangzhou for two weeks now, since I have to work pretty much all day, I barely had any time to properly look around. You can imagine that, when I finally had a chance, I wanted to jump right into the deep water. Which was way deeper than I’ve ever imagined…

Qingping Market – which translates to Peaceful Market (in a bit, you too will see why this is a completely bizarre choice of name) – is one of Guangzhou’s most notorious spots, and trust me on this one - for a very good reason! The market is basically selling all sorts of… wait for it… food. Well that’s not so bad now, is it? The only problem with that is, the good people of China tend to consider as food pretty much anything that is capable of dying – or at least wont run/swim/fly/crawl/dig/wobble/etc. away when poked by a chop-stick. The scenery is - or at least up until very recently, was – filled with clusters of flayed puppies, chopped up kittens, bats waiting for their grim fate, snakes on sticks and the sorts. Whatever takes your fancy, let it be scorpions or owls, Qingping market provides. Or so I learned, it used to provide. With the SARS outbreak, certain measures had been put into place –so the market today is somewhat tamer than a couple of years back. I still wouldn’t call it tame though. Anything but tame actually…

I don’t actually know what is or isn’t sold as food at the market nowadays, as I did not bump into the part where they sell food per se. It might not even exist anymore – I couldn’t really find out, I’ll have to go back and look around again. What I did find however is not, by any means, less bewildering than the aforementioned gruesomeness. As anyone enlightened enough should very well know, that fucked up things can be consumed in various ways other than as culinary delicacies – we shall now venture into the obscure depths of the traditional Chinese medicine – which is based on the rule of thumb, that if something is too repulsive for even Chinese people to eat, then it should be dried completely, and used as medicine.

I don’t even know how to say this… You can get the dry remains of creatures that don’t even exist, or at least not to the best knowledge of modern science they don’t. You can even get axolotl, an animal that only lives in a certain cave in Mexico! As I was standing there dazzled, trying to document the scene, I took a careless step without looking, and something unthinkable gave a loud, nasty crack under my foot. At that moment I had a really clear insight, what it must feel like when you know that you’ve just stepped on a landmine. I slowly looked down, expecting the worst, but it turned out to be only a nut. Phew, I got away this time, but let this be a warning for everyone who dares to wander into the grittier parts of China – mind your step! Anyone who goes to the market should not be fooled by the handful of merchants around the edge, selling dried flowers as remedies. They just want you to let your guard down, thinking – Why, how pretty flowers! Lets see what’s over there… - and just like this, its done: your innocence taken, your soul crushed, your dreams withered… what’s left is an empty shell, incapable of seeing the light in the world anymore.

I can’t and I won’t attempt to give a comprehensive list of the critters that can be found on display. Hell, half of them I didn’t even recognize (it’s probably better this way)! Some of the ones that I did recognize are: seahorses, starfish, giant millipedes, caterpillar fungi, frogs, snails, hooves of something, sea cucumbers and turtles. My personal favorites, I shit you not, were the flying lizards crucified on sticks. Whether they are used as aphrodisiac or kites, I do not know…

As I said, I’m not aware of the fate of the food selling parts of the market, but one possible answer is that they just stopped selling their merchandise as food, and now they are selling it as pets instead, as I did find a pet market at the spot, where according to the map the original horror bazaar should have been.

What really surprised me - even more than the unique merchandise itself – is that this little market district, that only consists of a handful of streets and alleys, is wedged between heavy-duty avenues, and glamorous shopping high-streets. It’s like a tiny island that decided to stay in the 18^th century, despite the constant bullying of its rapidly developing surroundings. I managed to steal some little moments, that really took me back a few hundred years – made me catch a bit of the taste of how China might have been in a past era, that’s not so past after all. An old man let me into his cottage where he was playing some kind of oriental domino with his ancient friends, in front of the shrine of a guardian spirit – which I was not allowed to take a picture of. Or there was the merchant who seemed to be smoking something that can only be described as a didgeridoo, and was lazily smiling at me through the heavy daze of whatever exotic substance was burning inside. You can imagine that it came as a bit of a shock when close to him, I saw a couple of kids playing on a brand new iPad… Talking about the clash of cultures.

I’m confident that Guangzhou is swarming with little gems like this one, and I’m prepared to go after them, however unsettling they might prove to turn out. Luckily violent theft doesn’t seem to be a typical free time occupation of the locals, so that’s one less thing to worry about - since as a white guy with a big ass camera I attract a lot more attention than I would prefer, this comes as a relief. That means that only my short amount of free time can hold me back from digging up some more mysteries! I’m already excited about the next surprise this place is holding for me!

Panda Conspiracy

Ever wondered, what's the deal with the pandas? How come they are so unreal? Do you even know anyone who has seen one? Of course you don't. Because they don't bloody exist!


That's right, they don't! They are just a nasty hoax, created by some obscure masterminds in the
Chinese communist party for whatever deranged ends! Maybe they wanted the decadent imperalists to believe that China - only China - has the cutest fluff balls on Earth. How could we ever believe they existed? Just look at them! These oversized rodents look like as if a polar bear and a killer whale found comfort in eachother in the vast, lonely nothing of the Antartica. And somehow a bunny also got mixed up in the business. Come on, nothing that has survived thousands of years of brutal, violent evolution, has any right to be so damn cute! And don't even get me started on them not having sex in captivity!
In captivity, all they should do is to have sex! They don't have to worry about nothing wild animals have to - food, predators, poachers - all they have to do is shag! Like a panda Big Brother! If nothing, they should have sex out of boredom, like my girlfriend does with me...

I had this suspicion for a while, but today it got confirmed. Being in China, I thought I should check those giant pests out, and so I went to the Zoo. Guess which animal's house is being reconstructed? That's right. What a strange coincidence, innit? I'm pretty sure, that if I come back in 5 years, the panda house would still be under construction, as it would in any other Chinese zoo, because the buggers are not real!

You have been deceived my freinds! You were living in a lie, dreamed by the Chinese illusion machine! But your eyes are opened now, and so you should open the eyes of others, to free the world of this nightmare called 'Panda'!

Taste the difference…

The notion of ‘food’ is somewhat looser in China, than in the West – it pretty much includes everything that was at some point (or still is) alive. Here in Guangzhou there’s a saying: ‘They eat everything that has legs, but it’s not a table, and everything that has wings, but it’s not a plane”. That sums up nicely the Chinese approach to the dualistic division of the world into edible and non-edible things. The second group is virtually non-existent.

One of the first things I’ve done in China was to go to a supermarket - the experience has scarred me for life. There were deep-frozen starfish, dried seahorses, pre-packed chicken feet (they eat it as candy here, yumm), sea cucumbers, live eels and frogs, and a whole galaxy of slimy swamp beasts of every ungodly shape and colour. Things, not even Bear Grylls would ever consider to eat. And this wasn’t even in a sketchy back-alley market, but in an ultramodern, state of the art shopping mall! This doesn’t mean of course that you can’t find the same things on the street as well. Every morning on my daily trip to the office, I have to pass a couple of vendor’s who are in the live turtle business. The cleaver and the thick cutting board are there to ensure that they don’t stay alive for long (the turtles, not the vendors). I had the “pleasure” to see how the little fellas are being liberated from their shells, and I have to say, it’s a rather messy procedure. Not exactly surgical, but various tools are involved as well. To spare those with weaker constitution, I won’t share the details - but if you imagine going to the dentist, who starts to work on your skull with a rusty screwdriver, you wouldn’t be far from what it was like.

(Un)lucky stars

Dogs, however are not on the menu in Guangzhou – they actually take care of their pets with such fervor, that it’s bordering on the perverse – unlike in other parts of China, where puppies go right in the pot. Along with the rats, who are roaming freely on the streets of Guangzhou in large packs, apparently carefree and well fed - their only nemesis being the massive hairy spider, which we found in our building the other day. Insects are also not very popular around here, but I heard that they sometimes eat deep-fried bees. They are crunchy I’ve been told, divine with a bit of honey.

The only insect I’ve seen being sold in large quantities is, in fact, not consumed as food, but rather as aphrodisiac. It’s also, coincidentally, the weirdest shit, I have ever had the luck to come across with. It’s the Chong Cao, or the Winter Worm, which is a sort of parasitic fungus that gets into the living larvae of the ghost moth, kills it and mummifies the poor sod. Then from its forehead out the little fungus comes, like a twig. These little charmers are sold for a sky-high price, and actually have some scientifically proven benefits. Can’t imagine what those benefits might be, but they have to at least grow back limbs for me to ever try this delicacy.

Worming up

And there’s the deal with the heads. They always leave the head of the birds on, let it be chicken, duck, goose or even pigeon. The main thing about a bird’s featherless head is that it’s absolutely hideous. It’s got bones sticking out of it, gaping holes all over and beady little purple eyes staring into nothing – in short, not something I would consider an appetizing addition to my plate. The Chinese also have the tendency to ruin a perfectly good chicken by simply boiling it in whole, and thus turning it into something that looks like a drowned heroin addict. It goes without saying, that no organ or intestine can avoid its dark fate of being eaten – my favourite dish that I will neverever try is ‘boiled goose miscellaneous’.

I’m being unfair; however, as Guangzhou is what every foodie imagines how heaven must be like! Being relatively close to Hong-Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and more or less to Japan – one can find everything that Asian cuisine has to offer! Anything that happens not to be completely freaking weird is actually so delicious, that you can’t wait for the next meal to come. It’s like a culinary swinger party full of swimsuit models, with the occasional creep skulking around the corner. Curry, seafood, sushi, noodles you name it, they make it ten times better than at the sad little take-away at the end of your street. It’s cheap too, so cheap that I would spend more if I cooked for myself. This means that I’ll have quite an extensive knowledge of the local gastronomy by the end of my stay, possibly filling a couple of more posts.

 Mr. Eel is having a bad day

Speaking of which: as we more or less covered what they eat here, we are yet to talk about the second half of the story – namely, how they eat! Fear not, it’s at least as bewildering as a big fat winter worm, so bear with me as I unravel the mysteries of the East in the posts to come!

First Impressions

Before coming to China, I imagined it as some sort of other dimension, bearing only a loose resemblance to the world as I knew it. When two days ago I first looked around in Guangzhou - a booming southeast Chinese metropolis – I had to admit that it was pretty much like any other big city, only with even more Chinese people than usual. Then I looked around a second time and realized that it is a completely different dimension indeed…

It seems like, even the Chinese can feel the huge difference between them and everyone else, only, of course, from their point of view – of the many expressions they could opt to use for foreigners, they choose to use the word “alien” in any official context, such as on the entry-card, that every visitor has to fill out upon arrival to the country. Charming. I’ve only been here for two days, so I don’t want to draw a conclusion yet, but so far I never felt like being treated as an alien however, rather like an honourable guest.

But we are different for sure. Our cultures differ so much that even a simple conversation (assuming that they speak English, which they seldom do) is what I imagine a football game for blind people must be like – while interacting we have absolutely no clue whatsoever of where we are headed, and we constantly expect to get hit by something nasty that we failed to see coming. We have no idea what’s rude or interesting to say, or indeed how to greet one another - bow, shake hands or a kiss on the cheek? We just shoot in the dark, and hope for the best. Social norms that we spent our life learning, and rely on a lot more than we think we do, are suddenly not there to save us from being completely awkward when around other people. If a Spanish and a German would try to communicate, they might not understand each other’s words, but they would understand pretty much everything else – gestures, body language etc. Here the mind panics, and like a drowning man to a rotting driftwood, it tries to hold on for dear life to any sign of communication that seems familiar.

Fortunately the Chinese are trying just as hard to comply with my western ways, as I do with theirs. For example a female colleague of mine at lunch, as small talk asked me how old I was – then she blushed immediately and corrected the question to ‘in which year were you born?’ It turned out that it’s rude to ask one’s age, but it’s totally fine to ask their birth date. If the person being asked is more on the elderly side, then they usually ask his zodiac sign, which in China only repeats every 12 years, thus allowing for a pretty confident guess regarding his age. Another colleague’s icebreaker question was inquiring whether the price of goat was going up or down in my country – not something I would have asked for the first time (or ever), but that’s what I love about diversity – as long as I can be surprised at least every day, I will be a happy man!

China is, of course, gigantic in every way - so in this couple of months I don’t even stand a chance to get to know more than just a tiny fraction of it. Guangzhou - formerly known as Canton, now known as my city of residence - is a tropical metropolis with roughly 16 million people, 35-40C^o heat and humidity off the charts. Along with Hong-Kong and Macau (which are both pretty close) it played a central role in the Opium Wars, but it has been a busy international port ever since the western merchants set sail to the mystical orient, and was already the flourishing capital of the surrounding province in 220BC. Even now it’s swarming with people from every cast and creed, especially Arabs and Africans (I regret to say, but every black person I’ve seen so far here, was pushing dope). On the corner of my street there’s a Irish pub bar, with latin music and all sorts of people.

Being quite far for from the communist regime’s headquarters, Beijing, the atmosphere in Guangzhou is pretty laid back, and it took me some time to remember, that ,in fact, I’m in a country that’s ruled by an iron fisted dictatorship. As such the Chinese government is not such a huge fan of free speech, as you can imagine - so it set up the ‘Great Firewall’, which pretty much bans half the Internet in China, especially the networking sites like facebook, and the blogging networks, like blogspot. They even ban youtube, which they replaced by its Chinese version ‘youku’, neatly collecting the revenues that otherwise would have gone to youtube. I can’t help but feel, that behind these bans, along with censorship, there’s a strong commercial incentive as well. For everything they ban, there is a heavily censored Chinese version as well. That suspicion is supported by the fact, that completely legally for 30$ you can connect through an American VPN, and unlock the whole internet. So until I figure out how to do that, I literally have to smuggle my posts home by email, so my girlfriend can post them for me – thanks baby! :) Sadly, the pictures will probably have to wait a little, possibly until after I get back to Europe.

Oh yeah, regarding the articles - as China is so full of weird, heavy-weight surprises, I decided not to wait with certain topics until I can write a 10 page article about them, rather just write down everything as they come up. This way, hopefully, I won’t forget to post you about anything important in this whirlwind of impulses. I admit, I’m a little overwhelmed by this siege of information and new experiences, it’s not easy to neatly organize my thoughts as they are buzzing like a bee hive high on coke. You can expect a cacophony of hectic posts, without a proper stream of subjects or narrative, jumping from one thing to another, but hey – at least you’ll get a little bit of the jist of how things are in good ole’ China!