Country Driving [146]
“I’m waiting for my partner,” he said. “We’re opening a business here.”
He introduced himself as Gao Xiaomeng, and he was thirty-three years old. His partner was his uncle, a man named Wang Aiguo who was also from the coast. Boss Gao said they were involved in the manufacturing of “clothing accessories” he didn’t go into detail about what they produced. This afternoon they were supposed to design their new factory, but Boss Wang was late. He was stuck on Highway 330—a common occurrence on the narrow road, where accidents sometimes backed up traffic for an hour. Until the new expressway was finished, and the four lanes opened for traffic, nobody would be able to predict how long it took to drive from Wenzhou.
Every five minutes Boss Gao checked his cell phone. Every fifteen minutes he lit another cigarette. We stood in the shade of the half-built factory, chatting idly; we exchanged business cards and discussed the Lishui weather. By the time Boss Wang finally showed up, Boss Gao introduced me as a friend. In the development zone it was easy to meet people; everybody was an outsider and nobody knew what to expect from this place. It felt wide open—most structures were empty shells, and the half-built roads were bordered by blank billboards still waiting for sponsors. The silver surfaces reflected the sky, advertising nothing but late October sunlight.
AT 2:30 IN THE afternoon, after Boss Wang had finally arrived, the men started designing the factory. The two bosses were joined by a contractor and his assistant, both of whom were natives of Lishui. There was no architect, no draftsman; nobody had brought a ruler or plumb line. The only tools carried by the men were disposable lighters, and Boss Gao’s first act was to distribute a round of State Express 555 cigarettes. After everybody lit up, he rummaged in his bag for a crumpled piece of scrap paper. He smoothed it atop the surface of a cheap folding table, and then he began to draw.
Apart from the table, the room was empty: white walls, bare floors, untouched pillars. Naked lightbulbs dangled on cords from the ceiling like unripe fruit. The plumbing had been installed, but the water was still off; the front door had no lock. On the blank page, Boss Gao sketched the room’s walls in the shape of a rectangle, and then he added two lines in the southeastern corner. They represented walls to be constructed: someday that space would enclose a machine room. Boss Gao turned to the contractor. They spoke Mandarin—in Zhejiang, local dialects are so difficult that businessmen use the national language whenever they go to another town.
“What’s the standard width for a door?” Boss Gao asked.
“Usually about one and a half meters.”
“I want it wider. Can you do two and a half?”
“That won’t work. If you want to use standard doors, make it one and a half.”
Boss Gao returned to the paper, sketching fast, and four more rooms took shape: a chemist’s laboratory, a storage closet, two additional spaces for machines. Boss Wang leaned over to study the diagram. “We don’t need this room,” he said to his nephew.
“Don’t you want two more for the machines?”
“One is enough. Put them all together.”
Boss Wang took the pen, scratched out a line, and the planned room disappeared. The older man was more conscious of money, and he knew that every new wall only meant higher costs. He had been in business for twenty years, and many of the best opportunities had passed him by, but his nephew still had the nervous eagerness of youth. Boss Gao’s previous endeavor had been a moderate success, and he dressed the part, with a sort of understated coolness. He was proud of his Buick Sail—when we first met, he made sure to tell me that he drove an American car. In fact the Sail is based on the platform of the Opel Corsa, which gives it the distinction of being an Opel-engineered car built by Chinese workers under the brand of a troubled American automaker. But such details