Country Driving [150]
The man’s name was Tian Hongguo, and originally he had come from Sichuan Province. He was in his late thirties, an advanced age in the factory world; everybody called him “Old Tian.” He was tiny, weighing just over one hundred pounds, and he had an elflike face: pointed chin, big ears, wide mouth. He grinned at my question.
“We’re going to make two things,” he said, and he took samples out of a box. One was a ring so small that it wouldn’t fit around my little finger. The other was a larger band of steel, razor-thin and covered with plastic at both ends. It was bent in the shape of a wide-open U, and Old Tian handed me a couple, in different sizes. One was just large enough for a billiard ball to pass through. The other was about the size of a softball. I asked Old Tian what they were for.
“It’s for women’s clothing,” he said.
He held the band to his breast so that the tips faced up, like a smile. Suddenly it dawned on me—these were support structures for brassieres.
“It helps women dress more beautifully,” Old Tian said. “We have different sizes, too. Some are small and some are big. Some are really big.” He gestured with his hands, forming the shape of an object roughly the size of a basketball. I couldn’t imagine he was still talking about bras, so I figured those wires must have a different function.
“The ones that are that big,” I asked, “what are they used for?”
“For Russians,” Old Tian said.
FOR THE PAST DECADE Boss Gao had manufactured obscure pieces of clothing. He had grown up in the marshlands south of Wenzhou, in the region known as Ouhai, where his father grew rice and taught in the local middle school. Boss Gao attended two years of trade school, studying machinery, and in the mid-1990s he opened a small workshop with his family. They manufactured lining for trousers—the cheap white fabric that’s attached to the beltline. Like so many Wenzhou products, it required very little in the way of labor or technology. Initially the Gaos invested less than four thousand American dollars, and the family represented the entire work force: Boss Gao, his parents, and his two sisters. They sold to local clothing factories, and their profit margin in the early years was roughly 50 percent. They made enough money to expand, buying new machinery and hiring a half dozen workers.
In the beginning there were only five or six other workshops in the region that made the same product. But soon others in town noticed the Gao family’s success, and new factories began to spring up. By 2003, their neighborhood had become home to twenty different producers of nonwoven fabric, and profit margins had plummeted to 15 percent. That year, Boss Gao gave up on trouser lining. He was still making money, but he didn’t want to ride the industry all the way to the bottom.
“It was a lot easier to do business in the 1990s,” he told me once. “There weren’t so many people starting factories back then.” He often spoke fondly about that time; for Boss Gao, who was all of thirty-three years old, the 1990s were the good old days, when competition wasn’t so intense. “Back then it was the product that mattered,” he said wistfully. “It used to be that you’d try to find a product that nobody else was making. But now everything is already being made by somebody in China. No matter what you make, you’re going to have competition. So now it’s not the product that counts. It’s the volume.”
After abandoning trouser lining, Boss Gao partnered with his uncle, who produced underwire for brassieres. It’s another product with a low cost of entry: all it requires is an electric