Country Driving [154]
Eventually, I was even shown the plans for the stolen Machine. They were held in the city of Guangzhou, at the Qingsui Machinery Manufacture Company, which had custom-made the equipment according to Liu’s specifications. “His schooling wasn’t really very good, so it was hard to get the assembly line to work,” the manager at Qingsui told me. “It took us two months to make all the adjustments.” The manager was friendly and open, and I sensed that he showed me the blueprints because he hoped to sell me a Machine, even though I told him repeatedly I was a writer. His most recent deal had been with Boss Gao and Boss Wang.
At the Lishui factory, where the first test of the equipment ended in failure, Master Luo eventually realized that the Machine still had a major design problem. He spent two weeks taking the thing apart and replacing key sections. He adjusted the gas burners closer to the conveyor belt, and he tinkered with the design of the oscillator. He jury-rigged some sections of the Machine with plywood and string, and he never bothered to reattach the handle that had melted off. By the time they started production, the Machine was already bruised and battered—there was a big gash where the handle used to be, and the adjusted burners had left black scorch marks across the steel. Master Luo told me the support pillars were needlessly thick because Liu Hongwei hadn’t paid so much attention to that part of the design. “The blueprints still aren’t very good,” he said.
Master Luo believed that Liu Hongwei was a false name, and he described his former coworker in many of the same terms I heard from others. People said Liu Hongwei was tall and thin, with the dark-skinned appearance of a peasant. He was poorly educated. He supposedly had a wife and child, although nobody had ever met them. And despite the impressive bounty offered by Third Boss, the twelve thousand dollars were never claimed, because Liu successfully disappeared without a trace. He was jiaohua, tricky—that’s the word most closely associated with Liu Hongwei. I heard it again and again, in all the places where bra rings are made, in Lishui and Shantou and Guangzhou; everywhere people shook their heads and said Liu was jiaohua. Nobody had the slightest idea where the man had gone.
BY THE TIME THE Machine was working, in January of 2006, the Jinliwen Expressway had opened. It consisted of two lanes in each direction, and shoulders were broad; the median had been meticulously landscaped with bushes that blocked the headlights of oncoming vehicles. All along the road, at an interval of every thousand meters, stood a free emergency phone—a detail that would have seemed extravagant in the United States, and one that’s hardly necessary in China, where cell phone coverage is excellent. Along the Ou River, mountains are so steep that in many places the highway crews had to blast straight through the cliffs. From Wenzhou to Lishui, there were twenty-nine new tunnels, the longest of which stretched for over two miles. The only detail still lacking involved maps. On government-published atlases, the expressway’s route hadn’t been marked out yet, but Chinese maps always lag behind construction. Sometimes it seems as if people can build things faster than they can draw them.
For a driver in China there is no greater pleasure than a new highway. The first few times I took the Jinliwen Expressway, traffic was light, because many local ramps had yet to open. It was possible to drive the seventy-five miles from Wenzhou to Lishui, but you couldn’t exit or enter along the way, and often I cruised for dozens of miles without seeing another vehicle. Some sections of the highway were elevated, passing right above factory towns like Qiaotou. The new road stood so close to the warehouses that