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By Root 1307 0

to see a BRICK OVEN PIZZA sign beside the entrance to my building, a welcome taste of home. By my next visit, that had morphed into the GREAT AMBITIONS MOBILE PHONE DIGITAL SUPERMARKET. Just what China needed: another store selling mobile phones. Over the following two weeks, the space below my apartment transformed from an empty shell with cables dangling from the ceiling into a full-on mobile-phone store, with robotic salespeople and music blasting from giant speakers into an empty parking lot. On my next stay, marketing had begun, in the form of a young woman who stood at the store entrance and read phone model numbers and prices into a microphone, one after another. Another sign had materialized in front of my building: HAVE KFC AS YOUR NEIGHBOR! EARN 8% ANNUAL INTEREST WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING. I wasn’t thrilled to have KFC as my neighbor. The only constant in the neighborhood was the Nescafé plant across the street. On summer days, the smell of coffee enveloped me as soon as I walked outside, a warm bath at once sweet and bitter.

When you lived in Beijing, you were shielded from many things, but in the hinterland cities you could see the strains of China’s development up close. Public buses often diverged from their routes to fill up on gas; fuel shortages were common, so an open station was worth a stop even with a load of passengers. Full-day power stoppages were regular events, and factories had to juggle their production schedules because of government rationing. Among the notices on my apartment bulletin board was one that never varied: THE ORIGINAL POWER SUPPLY TRUNK LINE CANNOT KEEP UP WITH THE NEEDS OF DEVELOPMENT AND MUST BE CHANGED.

During the summer of 2005, the power went off for at least one day on each of my trips to Dongguan. With some advance notice I could plan ahead, but sometimes the power went dead without warning, consigning me to a day indoors in ninety-degree heat and as little movement as possible. I would call the building’s management office, fuming, but it was not their fault. It was not anyone’s fault. China’s economy was growing by 10 percent a year, faster in the south, and it was a miracle that things were holding together as well as they were.

* * *

I took the bus everywhere. In part this was to see as much of the migrant world as I could, but it was also practical. Taxi drivers were some of the biggest cheats around—more than once I found myself speeding down a dark highway while a cabbie threatened to leave me by the side of the road if I didn’t give him more money. Another high-speed negotiating tactic was to offer to take a passenger partway to his destination for a smaller fare; drivers were such short-term thinkers that they would rather earn less money but get paid sooner. Even honest cabdrivers suffered the shortcomings of peasants: Once they left the patch of turf they knew, they were as lost as I was.

The employees of the bus system worked in pairs: The driver was usually a local man, the ticket seller a female migrant. Sometimes they shouted conversations the length of the bus over the heads of passengers, and sometimes there was a small television screen mounted in the dashboard so the driver could watch TV as he drove. When approaching a stop, the ticket seller leaned out the door while the bus was still moving and called out destinations in a hoarse voice. The waiting people were usually susceptible to pressure; if they were yelled at long enough, some would get on.

The young men on the bus smelled of gamy sweat, the scent of people who walked long distances outdoors and never enjoyed the luxury of air-conditioning. The young women were immaculate: They never smelled, and their hair was always sleek and shiny. On every bus there were several migrants holding plastic bags to their mouths and throwing up quietly. Motion sickness was the terror of people from the countryside, who were not accustomed to car travel. Brown plastic bags hung from bus ceiling hooks in bunches, like overripe bananas beginning to go bad. Passengers on buses carried an amazing variety of things;