Country Driving [159]
We walked together to the line of Cats. Mr. Mu stood in the shadow of one of the vehicles, and he set the detonator atop the parked treads. The detonator had two switches labeled “Charge” and “Explode.” A command crackled over Mr. Mu’s radio—“Charge!”—and he flipped the first switch.
“Get out there where you can see it better!” he said. Nervously I stepped away from the Cat’s shadow, looking out at the silent hillside. On the radio, a countdown began at five and ended with another command: “Explode!” Mr. Mu hit the second switch. For the briefest instant, before the mountain roared, a web of electric sparks flickered across the rocks, like lightning come to earth.
ON FEBRUARY 9 OF 2006, a week after the Chinese New Year, Boss Wang blew up two big boxes of fireworks outside the factory. In Zhejiang that’s a traditional ritual for opening a business. Bigger companies hire dragon dancers to perform at the front gate, but a small entrepreneur like Boss Wang couldn’t afford the troupe fees, so he limited himself to fireworks. He also paid a fortune-teller to determine the optimum date for his opening. On the lunar calendar, it was the eighth day of the first month, and eight is the luckiest number in China.
Like many Zhejiang entrepreneurs, Boss Wang was deeply superstitious. In China, religion is stronger in the south, and Christianity has become particularly popular in the regions around Wenzhou, where many people associate the foreign faith with development. But Boss Wang wasn’t religious; he never spoke of Jesus or Buddha. He believed in feng shui, and he believed in fortune-tellers: he never scheduled an important business event without first having the date analyzed. Boss Wang was forty years old, and he made a much less polished figure than his partner and nephew, Boss Gao. The older man had short hair, a gentle smile, and wide-set eyes that often bore a slightly pained expression. He spoke with a stutter—his eyelids fluttered whenever he struggled with a phrase. His clothes tended to be stained with grease. “The big bosses don’t mess with machines,” he told me once, while repairing a metal punch press in the factory. “But I’m only a small boss, so I have to do everything I can. If a general doesn’t have enough soldiers, he has to fight, too.”
Boss Wang had made a career out of manufacturing odds and ends. His parents had been farmers, and in the early 1990s he first went into business by producing sections of plastic piping. After that, he made steel parts for bicycle bells, and it was the metalwork business that introduced him to bra underwire. He had never grown truly rich from any of these endeavors and he often spoke regretfully of the past. He told me that in high school he had just missed the cutoff for university admission. “It was a lot harder back then,” he said. “From my generation, out of one hundred people, maybe one or two went to college.” He had grown up in Longwan, one of the Wenzhou coastal regions that developed into an early factory district. “For a while they were famous for making pens, but I never made pens,” Boss Wang told me. “Then they became famous for shoes, but I didn’t make that either. Shoes were the best way to make money. So many of my friends went into that business, and now they’re all rich. They sometimes ask me if I wished I had made shoes, too. And I have to admit that I have some regrets. A lot of those guys now have tens of millions.”
Boss Wang planned to invest most of his life savings in the bra ring factory, a total of over ninety thousand dollars. In China that’s a great deal of cash, and the average person would be thrilled to have such resources. But the frame of reference is all that matters, and in Longwan Boss Wang had always been surrounded by greater success. Even after coming to Lishui he found himself dwarfed by his new neighbors. Boss Wang and Boss Gao rented their factory space from Geley Electrical Company, which had been founded by a man named Ji Jinli. Ji had started out