Country Driving [145]
PLEASE DON’T USE THE APPLIANCE
IF YOU HAVE THESE SITUATIONS.
1. The one with the bleeding wound and fester inflammation.
2. The one with serious eyes inflammation (if not serious, please cover some wet cloth and cotton balls on the eyes).
3. The one is burned seriously within 4 months.
4. Prohibited for the advances man, pregnant woman, baby.
5. Prohibited for the one with serious sick, dangerous patient.
6. Some people have the temperature taboo, please use it under the direction of doctor.
7. Don’t put pets into appliance.
8. Prohibited for the drunk man.
In the city of Lishui I finally found what I was looking for. It was located seventy-five miles from Wenzhou, where Highway 330 was in bad shape. The drive from the coast usually took at least three hours, and accidents often caused delays; it was too remote for businessmen, at least until the new expressway was completed. The surrounding mountains were the highest I’d seen thus far, with green peaks rising a thousand feet above the city. Lishui lay at the intersection of the Da and the Hao rivers, and people still farmed within a mile of downtown—fruit orchards were everywhere in the suburbs. When I asked what Lishui manufactured, people laughed and said, “Tangerines.” One local entrepreneur told me earnestly, “This is the Tibet of Zhejiang.” Here in bustling southeastern China, within a few hours’ drive of the coast, it was an oxymoron—like calling a place the Alaska of New Jersey. But there was no doubt that Lishui was isolated by Zhejiang standards. When I first visited, it had the lowest per capita urban income of any city in the province, and industry was so young that Lishui had yet to settle on a local product. From an economic standpoint, it was still a blank slate: a place without buttons or playing cards or jungle gyms.
But already changes had begun. South of town, where the new expressway would soon have an exit, the government was building the Lishui Economic Development Zone. Until recently this region had all been agricultural, as timeless as any farmland in China—a quiet place where peasants followed the regular cycles of seasons and months, planting and harvest. But now the fields were being replaced with a sprawling industrial park, and the government hoped to attract investors from the coast. Once the new road was finished, the three-hour journey from Wenzhou would be reduced to little more than sixty minutes. In the future, that was the kind of time that would matter to Lishui: the hours and minutes of a businessman’s schedule.
ON MY NEXT JOURNEY to Lishui, three months later, I noticed a man in new clothes standing beside a half-built factory in the development zone. His outfit caught my eye: stiff black jeans, black sweater, thin-soled leather shoes with a square front. The shoes identified him as a Wenzhou native: the city is famous for its shoe factories and often local bosses adopt the export fashions. That year, a European-style loafer with squared toes was everywhere in Wenzhou, and the moment I saw the shoes I knew the man was not from Lishui.
It was also unusual to see somebody so clean in the development zone. Roads were still dirt, and most buildings were covered with scaffolding; very few factories had started producing. Virtually everybody outside was a construction worker dressed in a grimy military uniform, carrying a sledgehammer or saw. But this man’s clothes were spotless and he held nothing but a black fake-leather money bag. His white Buick Sail was parked nearby. He looked