Country Driving [170]
The troupe was easygoing and talkative, and after the first night’s show I had dinner with them beside the truck. The skinny MC was named Liu Changfu, and he had been performing for fifteen years. He had a fourth-grade education and he was blunt about his limitations. “I’m basically illiterate,” he said. He had no illusions about the show, either. “It’s stupid,” he said. “Our level is really low; we don’t even have real costumes.”
The lack of quality was one reason they generally changed location every day. “After people see the show, they’re probably not going to pay to see it again,” Liu explained. Whenever possible, they set up near factories, because assembly-line workers represented the ideal audience: they’re bored and they have low expectations. And development zones make for good campsites. Each year, the Red Star troupe followed new highways across coastal China, stopping at one factory town after another. Recently they had started in Jiangsu Province, near the city of Nanjing, and now they were working their way south. Just last week they had been kicked out of Yongkang, the town famous for making electric scales.
That was another reason they kept moving: the performance was illegal in a half dozen ways. They hadn’t registered with the Cultural Affairs Bureau; their customized truck had not been approved; they didn’t have a single driver’s license among the eleven members. They performed a strip show, which is strictly banned in China. On this current trip they had also been kicked out of Nanjing and Hangzhou.
“Whenever we run into trouble,” Liu explained, “I just say, ‘Well, we’re so small, what does it matter? We don’t want to bother the Cultural Affairs Bureau!’ Usually that works and they leave us alone.”
Increasingly, though, their main problem was competition. Entertainment troupes and concerts were becoming more common in development zones, and here in Lishui, on the night they set up near the pleather factories, another opera troupe had performed down the street. Liu believed it affected sales, and the following day the Red Star troupe drove to the far southern edge of the development zone, hoping to find a better location. After half an hour they parked their truck at a place where the factory strip met the farmland. Someday soon this would be another construction site, but for the time being locals were using it as a trash dump. There were piles of garbage and swarms of flies; the air smelled foul. Above us the sky was tinged pleather-brown. But Liu was pleased with this place. “There’s a village there, and another village there,” he said. “And there are factories on that side.” He pointed to a series of blocky buildings: a pleather plant, a chemical factory, a stainless steel company. To Liu, it all represented potential customers, and the filth was a bonus—it guaranteed that expectations would be kept to a minimum.
After they started erecting the tent, a couple of villagers wandered over. Liu’s father asked one of the farmers if there had been other performances recently, and the man nodded. “Lots of them!” he said. “And there’s a singing concert tonight.”
Everybody froze. The father asked what kind of concert.
“A free concert,” he said. “China Mobile.”
Their faces fell—nothing dismayed a variety show performer more than potential competition from China Mobile. After a hurried conference, the troupe decided to send the father on a recon mission. The rest of the players continued setting up the tent, but now they also looked up at the sky, whose color had changed from pleather to something more ominous. China Mobile and rain—the only way things could get worse was if the cops showed up.
Last night they had cleared less than one hundred