Country Driving [203]
It was the first time I had met a local who seemed concerned with the fundamental issues behind the dam, and he had refused to accept his cash settlement out of principle. He was well dressed and he carried an expensive cell phone; I asked how he supported himself. “I do business,” he said. “I have shops in this area, including one here.”
I asked him what the shops sold.
“Floor tiles,” he said.
He had rejected the government payoff, and he was trying to get the story into the press, but meanwhile he profited from the construction work that occurred in the exit towns. I wasn’t about to blame him for hedging his bets—at least he was trying to figure things out, and perhaps someday more Chinese people like him would find a way to press fundamental issues. Maybe the education system would improve, and citizens would gain a broader vision that could be combined with their practical skills. In the development zone I was most heartened by signs of individualism—ways in which people had escaped the group mentality of the village, learning to make their own decisions and solve their own problems. But it would take another major step for such personal lessons to be applied to society-wide issues. Perhaps the final motivation would be economic—often I sensed that China needed to reach a point where the middle and upper classes felt like the system prevented them from succeeding. But that hadn’t happened yet, not even in the exit towns, where there was still good money to be made from floor tiles.
AT THE BEGINNING OF November the bosses decided to move the bra ring factory. They didn’t say when the transfer would happen, or where they were going, and they probably didn’t know themselves. Periodically Boss Gao headed to the expressway in his Buick Sail, returning a day later to confer quietly with Boss Wang. Master Luo believed they were still searching out a new site, most likely near Wenzhou, but even he didn’t know for certain. And it was characteristic of the bosses to keep such information quiet. If they announced a moving schedule, the lower-wage workers would either demand raises or immediately look for new jobs. With business still improving, the bosses couldn’t afford to lose labor, so they simply said that they would move sometime in the distant future.
Boss Wang made one initial foray into negotiations with Mr. Tao. By this point, Mr. Tao had established himself as the spokesman for roughly one-quarter of the factory’s workforce: himself, his two daughters, the Tao cousins who occasionally did part-time work, and Ren Jing, the sixteen-year-old who was also from Anhui Province. Boss Wang despised dealing with the man, but there was nothing he could do about it, and the girls were valuable workers. One day he asked Mr. Tao if the family would be willing to move.
“Where to?” Mr. Tao said.
“N-n-not sure yet,” Boss Wang said. His stutter always emerged when he dealt with Mr. Tao. “But it won’t be very far.”
“Well, then I’m not sure either,” Mr. Tao said. “You have to tell me where, and then I can answer.” Boss Wang wasn’t willing to give more information, and that was as far as they got—nothing more than a spark, but that was how the slow-burn negotiations always got started.
Nobody else in the factory could bargain like Mr. Tao. In the evenings, after the assembly-line work was finished, he managed the family’s dry goods stand, and he was good at that, too. He stocked hundreds of books and magazines,