Apologies to My Censor (14 page)

Tom and I climbed the stairs inside to Eighteen Sauna. We were greeted by an attendant—twenty years old at most, with a brush cut and a baggy suit—who handed us laminated menus with peeling corners. A “Taiwan Model Massage,” the most expensive item on the menu, went for $1,914 Hong Kong dollars—about $250—followed by Korean, Chinese, and Filipino massages, at varying prices. About halfway down the list was a “Mongolian Massage,” for HK$1,705.

“We want to see the girls first,” Tom said.

“No problem,” the young attendant replied.

He grabbed Tom by the elbow and escorted us down a short hallway to the dimly lit bathhouse. The circular room, lined with shower stalls along the wall, smelled of soap, while steam rose from a large, peanut-shaped hot tub in the center of the room, where a few dozen men—mostly Chinese, with a few foreigners—waited, wrapped in red towels.

To electronic music, a line of about seventy women wearing lingerie were paraded before the men, circling the hot tub. Each woman had a number pinned to her bra. I was surprised at how beautiful some of them were. Others seemed drained and withdrawn, and several had bruises on their legs.

The men were quick to choose, walking down the line to stand opposite their preferred girl. They touched and flirted. They had one hour.

Tom and I watched from the doorway, the attendant standing behind us.

“This is even more depressing than I thought,” Tom whispered.

The attendant leaned in between us.

“Fifteen percent government tax,” he said, tapping his thin index finger on the menu. “Hand jobs are cheaper.”

W
e spent a few more days in Macau, visiting more saunas posing as customers and attending a conference on human trafficking, at which Naran spoke. We had everything we needed and decided it was time to go back to Guangzhou, where we planned to report another story.

On our last day in Macau we took a cab to the Cotai Strip, home to most of the major casino-hotels, including the Venetian, the biggest casino on the planet. We walked around the hotel's cavernous halls; I bought a magazine from a souvenir shop and ate a fifteen-dollar slice of lukewarm pizza from the food court. There was a fake canal snaking through the hotel, with depressed-looking Middle Eastern men rowing gondolas. They offered us rides to nowhere, and we politely waved them off.

For a few minutes the three of us stood on a bridge over the canal and watched it all happen. I thought about the women we'd seen over the last few days. What were they doing right now, I wondered, the girls from the saunas? Did their parents know where they were? Did they have friends here? They were young girls. Did they have plans for the future? Where would they go next—to one of the brothels of Erlian? To Maggie's in Beijing?

I took some coins—a few Macau pataca—from my pocket, made a wish, and tossed them in the water below.

“Let's get out of here,” I said.

11

Chocolate City

W
e wandered the streets and alleys and garbage-strewn crevices of central Guangzhou, the southern Chinese metropolis once known as Canton, on the Pearl River delta, and marveled at what was for sale.

Everything.

There were oversized stuffed animals, Christmas decorations, fake plastic trees, neon signage, buttons, and bulk candy. There were paper, plastic, and reusable bags; stationery, sneakers, and scooters; Jay-Z T-shirts and LeBron James jerseys and pleather jackets. Butchers sold parts of animals I couldn't identify. One shop had the flattened, dried-out face of a dead pig dangling from its awning, like some macabre Halloween mask.

We arrived in Guangzhou from Macau in the middle of the week. We shared a room in a hostel on the south side of the Pearl River. I was on a tight budget, living off my one and only check from
Asia Weekly
and some money I had borrowed from my parents.

That morning, we set out exploring. It was a humming city, the Asia of my imagination. Beijing could be chaotic, but Guangzhou was different: the hot, humid, sweaty mayhem of a southern Chinese city. In the old part, the narrow streets were warrens of chaos lined with palm trees. Overhead, elevated freeways clogged with traffic offered views of apartment towers with barred balconies strung with drying laundry. The new areas displayed the city's growing wealth, featuring soulless apartment complexes, wealthy residents with spotless Audis and Mercedes, and high-rise buildings plucked from the Hong Kong skyline.

Tom, Jim, and I wandered the city that first day, stopping for noodle soup, drifting in and out of shops, and asking the prices of things we'd never buy. My Chinese was lower-intermediate now and I enjoyed the broken banter with shop owners: I feigned anger when they blatantly tried to rip me off, and I walked away once I'd haggled them down to a tenth of the original price.

Guangdong province was nicknamed “the World's Factory.” In the fall of 2008, when we visited, it was home to 28,000 industrial firms, including 15,000 overseas-funded businesses. It made 75 percent of the world's toys and 90 percent of its Christmas decorations (in a country that doesn't celebrate Christmas). In Guangzhou, the provincial capital, it was all available directly from the source and at a discount.

Over the years, this access to cheap goods had attracted traders from around the world. When it was known as Canton, the city was China's first port opened for trade with foreign countries. The British, Americans, French, and other world powers settled on a small island called Shamian, and evidence of Guangzhou's colonial history remained in the form of ornate European-looking buildings that housed overpriced, mediocre restaurants, and a Starbucks filled with American couples waiting to adopt Chinese babies.

By 2008 the most visible foreign community in Guangzhou was African. These were the people we had come to meet. What had been a small group of a few hundred traders a decade earlier numbered as of 2008 as high as twenty thousand, according to the few articles we could find. The Africans living in Guangzhou dubbed the community “Little Africa,” or “Chocolate City.” Its residents came from Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola, Tunisia, and elsewhere. They came to buy jeans, shoes, fake iPods, wigs, makeup, and whatever else they might be able to sell back home.

We thought it was a great story, one of the “big” stories Tom and I were after. Tom had read about the community in a Hong Kong newspaper, but we found that the story hadn't been covered much internationally. It was interesting, counterintuitive, and timely. Trade between Africa and China had been soaring, but most stories focused on the other direction: Chinese involvement and investment in Africa. Both Tom and I were surprised to hear of the scope of Guangzhou's African community. We planned to sell the story to a top-tier publication—the
New York Times
,
Time
, the
Guardian
. Somebody, we figured, would buy it.

Little Africa was actually in two areas near the city center, both surrounding large markets. One area was predominately Muslim, the other Christian. The men (most of the traders we would meet were men) who frequented the markets bought bulk goods that they shipped back to their home countries, where a relative or a friend would distribute them. For the most part, the communities had been allowed to thrive. The markets that catered to them were fully stocked and bustling, and nearby were African bars and African restaurants, unregistered African churches, and African mosques. Many of the traders had lived in Guangzhou for years. Some had settled down with Chinese wives.

But the rising cost of goods, currency inflation, and a faltering world economy had put pressure on Little Africa. Business was suffering. More crucially, China had been granting African traders only short-term visas or denying them outright. Africans who allowed their visas to expire were often imprisoned or forced to pay hefty fines. And the community was facing increased persecution at the hands of police, a crackdown that coincided with a growing number of Africans—eight that year—being sentenced to death for smuggling drugs into China.

We were clueless about how to approach the story. We had no contacts in the city and had done little in the way of preparation. During the afternoon of our first day in the city, we took a taxi to Tian Xiu market in the mostly Muslim area of Little Africa. The market was several stories high and wig shops dominated the ground floor. Barack Obama–wear was popular. He had been elected president a few weeks before, and several shops sold T-shirts and hoodies with a picture of the president-elect, and the words in English, “The First Black Man to Sit in the White House.”

We stopped for coffee nearby and debated how to make inroads with the traders. Three white guys wandering a market filled with black guys was enough to draw suspicious glances. We deployed Jim back in the market to take photos, and Tom and I went out to the quieter side streets adjacent to the market to scout out a few people to interview.

On a leafy street just around the corner, two African men were loading large boxes into the back of a van. One was tall and wearing a black T-shirt; the other short with a goatee and a navy sweater. Tom and I walked up and watched them work.

“Hey, what are you guys doing here?” I said, and as soon as I did, I winced, realizing that it was a stupid question, something a cop might say to a suspect in the movies. “I mean . . . what are you up to in Guangzhou?”

They looked at each other. The stocky man in the navy sweater said, “Who are you? Why you want to know?”

“We're journalists, living in Beijing,” Tom said. “We're down here doing a story about African traders like yourselves.”

They both laughed. “Why you want to do a story?” the man in blue said. “There's no story.”

“Maybe. But we're just curious. So what are you guys doing this afternoon?” Tom asked.

“Working,” the taller one said.

“What's in the boxes?”

“Why?”

Tom and I exchanged glances. We tried a few more questions and got nothing. This was going nowhere.

“Okay,” I said, “thanks for your time.”

Tom and I walked back toward the market. We stopped outside a convenience store, bought bottles of water, and sat down on the curb outside.

A tall African man walked by and asked for a lighter.

“Sorry, don't have one,” I said. He started walking away and I called out. “Hey, where are you from?”

His name was David and he was from Mali. We talked for a few minutes and he invited us into his store, which was in an alley around the corner from Tian Xiu market.

We took seats on fake leather chairs inside, and he offered us bread and a sugary orange drink. David had a lanky frame and dark skin, and wore baggy jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. I sat back in the pleather chair and took notes while Tom asked questions.

David had lived in Guangzhou for four years. He liked living there, he told us, and he liked working with Chinese. But rising prices were killing him. He bought whatever he could sell, whatever he could afford.

“G-Star is popular. Diesel. Depends. Depends if you can get the cheap price,” he said.

He picked up a folded pair of dark G-Star jeans and tossed them on my lap.

Guangzhou was changing, David said. His friends were leaving. He could only get one-month visas these days, and so he had to leave town every few weeks for Macau or Hong Kong in order to renew his visa. The costs added up.

“It used to be more fun living here, yeah,” he said. “This time is not easy. There are many problems, yeah. Sometimes business is good. Sometimes not good. This is business, you know.”

We thanked him and exchanged numbers. Tom and I walked back down the street to the market, where Jim was still busy taking pictures. We wandered up to the second floor and browsed the stores.

In one shop, a man sitting relaxed in a chair—the chair back leaning against a wall and his foot resting on a stool—called us into the store. He was a small man with a large, round head, a trimmed goatee, and mini-Afro. He chewed a toothpick.

“You want to buy anything?” he said.

I looked around the store: it had the same hip-hop clothes and Obama shirts as every other store on the floor.

“Not really,” I said, running my hand through the hair of a curly black wig.

He laughed. He told us his name was Kimba and he was from Niger. He said he also owned a leather goods store nearby that we should check out.

Tom asked him how his business was doing.

“Look, see for yourself. There are no customers. It's shit.”

We asked him why things were so bad, and he blamed the visa crackdown.

“Every night police come and check passports. They go to people's homes and break down doors. They said after the Olympics they'd normalize regulations. That's bullshit.” He sat upright in the chair and played with his toothpick. “When I arrived here a year ago, they were welcoming. And you know, there are a lot of Chinese in Africa. In Africa, they are welcomed and they get visas, no problem. But here, it's completely different now.”

We thanked Kimba for his time and continued around the market. I thought about what he'd said. While China had been cracking down on visas for all foreigners since before the Olympics, racism did seem to be at play in Guangzhou. At the time there was a current of racism against Africans in China; several times Chinese had told me that they like foreigners “but not
hei ren
”—black people. Before the Olympics, when police were trying to clear Sanlitun of drug dealers, they did so by indiscriminately rounding up African-looking people in the bar district, including the son of Grenada's ambassador.

The next morning we went to Canaan Export Clothes Wholesale Trading Center, in the Christian African neighborhood. The market had opened six years earlier to cater to African traders. It was busy, but several of the shops were closed.

In the loading area we met Chuks, who was counting stacks of jeans with his business partner. Each month the twenty-nine-year-old bought bulk clothing that he shipped back to Nigeria, where his brother sold the goods at a markup. For two years Chuks had run a successful business and created a comfortable life for himself in Guangzhou.

He was well muscled, dressed in a formfitting navy sweater and patterned white vest. He smelled of cologne and had a Stringer Bell confidence to him. He had done well in China, but as he sorted a pile of stonewashed denim, he told us that his good run might be coming to an end. Rising costs were eating into his profits, and the visa crackdown, which traders claimed was often being violently enforced, was making it difficult to do business. He was thinking about going home.

“It's getting worse every day,” he told us. “Maybe some Chinese think Africans aren't good. They don't want too many Africans in their country.”

Jim took some photos of Chuks, and Tom asked him and his partner more questions. I went into a nearby store that sold coats and asked the owner, a Cantonese man, if I could take a seat and have a rest. Across from me was a young African, leaning back in a chair, his legs stretched out. He was thin and had a shaved head. He nodded as I sat.

The owner offered me a can of Sprite, and I asked the two men how they knew each other.

“Business partners,” the Cantonese man said.

The African man nodded again.

“How long have you lived in Guangzhou?” I asked him.

“Few years.”

“You like it?”

“I like the girls, man.”

“You have a Chinese girlfriend?”

“I have Chinese
girlfriends
. It's too easy, man.”

He told me his name was Chris, and he went on to explain, in great detail, how much he liked Chinese women. Eventually I steered the conversation back to his work, and he told me he was thinking about going back to Africa or somewhere else in Asia. He said a friend of his who had let his visa expire had been forced to go into hiding out of fear of the police. The friend had no options—he couldn't work, he couldn't leave. He was worried about going to jail.

“It's fucked, man,” Chris said.

It was a sobering experience for me talking to men like Chris. Having lived through the highs of the Olympics, and experienced the ease and riches of the Western-foreigner lifestyle in Beijing, it was startling to see how greatly the lives of Africans in Guangzhou contrasted with mine. These were the dark sides of the foreigner experience in China, which could be too easily ignored amid the constant circus of expat Beijing.

I exchanged numbers with Chris and thanked the owner for the Sprite. I met Tom and Jim and we continued talking with traders in the market. In interview after interview, we heard the same story, one we would hear over and over again throughout our week in Chocolate City. In markets, mosques, churches, and chicken shacks, the traders told us the same thing: they were getting screwed.