Country Driving [151]
Together the bosses searched far and wide—well, at any rate they thoroughly explored the brassiere. From the Wenzhou perspective, the product represents a vast world unto itself, since the final assembly of each bra consists of twelve separate components. The bosses started their search at the bottom, with the underwire, and then they worked their way up the bra, weighing the possibilities of each separate component. They thought about thread; they looked at lace; they considered the clasp. When they reached the top, where tiny 0-and 8-shaped rings adjust the straps, they found what they were looking for.
To a consumer, a bra ring seems simple to the point of invisibility. It consists of thin steel coated with nylon, and it weighs only half a gram; the average bra contains four such rings. They connect to nylon straps, and hardly any woman in America or Europe gives the objects a second thought. But in fact the rings are the most technically complicated component of the garment. In order to coat a steel ring evenly with high-gloss nylon, a manufacturer must have an assembly line with three distinct stages, each of which heats the ring to over five hundred degrees Celsius. All of it must be computer-controlled: the temperature, the oscillating mechanism of the powder mixer, the speed of each conveyor belt. Such machinery can’t be cobbled together from spare parts, and it’s not cheap: Boss Gao and Boss Wang purchased their assembly line for sixty-five thousand dollars. In the past, neither entrepreneur had spent even a tenth as much on a piece of equipment, and all of their plans depended on this assembly line working smoothly.
The Machine sat on the ground floor, in the first room that Boss Gao had designed. It was a squat, sullen-looking thing: the exterior had been painted seasick-green and the two main assembly lines stretched fifty feet long. They were arranged one on top of the other, double-decker fashion. The conveyor belts were made of polished steel and they gleamed mirror-bright beneath bare lightbulbs. The whole thing weighed six tons, because the belts were propped up by unbelievably thick pillars of steel. These supports easily could have hoisted a house—there’s no logical reason why the manufacture of tiny bra rings requires such thick pillars. But steel, like cement, is one of the basic construction materials that tend to be overused in urban China. It’s an economy of scale: in such a massive country, at a time of incredible growth, companies turn out raw materials so fast that the prices are relatively cheap. Foreign architects often comment on the staggering amounts of cement and steel that go into a typical Chinese building project.
I visited the factory on the day they first tested the Machine. A technician named Luo Shouyun hit a switch, and gas burners ignited blue flames; the conveyor belts lurched forward. A digital console tracked the temperature. The room itself was cold—outside it wasn’t much above freezing, and the bosses, like most people in Zhejiang, didn’t heat their factory. But soon the digital numbers began to rise as the gas flames warmed the Machine. It hit ninety degrees Celsius, then 150. Within fifteen minutes the temperature had broken 400. The number topped out at 474, and then it suddenly plummeted. The Machine needed to sustain a level of at least 500 degrees before production could begin.
“Maybe it’s because it’s colder here than in Guangdong,” Luo Shouyun said. In the far south of China, he had spent most of a decade working on bra rings, and everybody called