Country Driving [181]
For his part, John D. Rockefeller inspired Little Long to switch cigarette brands. After reading about the difference between a waiter and an oil baron, Little Long decided to be more thrifty. So he quit smoking Profitable Crowd cigarettes and began buying a brand called Hibiscus. Hibiscus are terrible; they cost a cent and a half each, and the label immediately identifies the bearer as a peasant. But Little Long was determined to rise above such petty thinking, just like Rockefeller. Every time he smoked a pack, he saved 37.5 cents, and money like that was bound to add up over time. Someday he’d have enough to fulfill Mao Zedong’s prophecy on the dormitory wall:
A PERSON CAN BECOME SUCCESSFUL ANYWHERE;
I SWEAR I WILL NOT RETURN HOME UNTIL I AM FAMOUS.
IN LISHUI, I OFTEN found myself talking about the outside world, although I never met a foreign buyer or investor. There wasn’t much reason for them to come to the development zone, which was home to relatively few factories funded by overseas investment. And a remote place like Lishui tends to make things that are a step or two removed from the finished product. Rings are shipped elsewhere to be attached to bras; pleather eventually becomes handbags or car seats in bigger Chinese factories. Other goods are sold in bulk in Yiwu, a Zhejiang city whose wholesale malls attract hordes of foreign buyers. But such people don’t bother traveling to Lishui, and whenever I drove around the city, glimpses of the foreign tended to be odd and slightly disorienting. The first gym to open downtown was called The Scent of a Woman. In the development zone, the Geley factory turned out crates of Jane Eyre light switches. A block away, at the front gate of Lishui Sanxing Power Machinery Co., Ltd., the owners had posted a huge sign that was supposed to be in English. But they had written the letters from right to left, the way the Chinese traditionally do with characters:
DTL, .OC YRENIHCAM REWOP GNIXNAS IUHSIL
And yet the people in Lishui—the migrants, the bosses, the entrepreneurs—made many products bound for the outside world, and they liked to talk about foreign things. They searched out self-help books with supposed American themes, and their curiosity was boundless. When I met somebody like Little Long, his energy and determination reminded me of other places, other times. This was China’s version of the Industrial Revolution: rural people were moving to cities, and they had a gift for self-invention that rivaled anything in Dickens. And they practiced a no-holds-barred version of capitalism that would be recognizable to any American historian. At the bra ring factory, when I heard the tale of how Liu Hongwei memorized and copied the Machine, I thought of Francis Cabot Lowell, who performed the same trick in the early 1800s. Back then, the United States was the upstart society, and the British carefully guarded the designs for their water-powered Cartwright looms. But Lowell visited the mills of Manchester under false pretenses, and he used his photographic memory to rebuild the machinery in Massachusetts, where his company became the foundation for the American textile industry.
The sheer pace of change in China also has similarities to boom times