Wei-Dong shrugged, back on familiar territory. “The future’s a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids. Look at gold-farming, how weird is that?”
She grinned. “No weirder than making rubber bananas for Swedish department-store displays. That was my first job when I came here, you know?” She rolled up her sleeves and showed him her arms. They were crisscrossed with old burn-scars. “Then making cheap beads for something called ‘Mardi Gras.’ Boss Chan liked me, liked how I worked with the hot plastic. No complaining, even though we didn’t have masks, even though I was burned over and over again.” She twisted her forearm and he saw that she had the Nike logo branded backwards, in bubbled, wrinkled scar there. “Afterwards, I worked on the same kind of machine, in a shoe factory. You see the logo? Many of us have it. It’s like we were cattle, and the factory branded us one at a time.”
“Are you going to talk to the people again?”
She slumped. Slipped in her earwig. Began to prod at the computer. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I must. As long as they’ll listen, I must.”
Matthew wept as he walked, pacing the streets without seeing. He’d been one of the first ones out of the building when the police raided, and he’d slipped through the cordon before they’d tightened it, slipping into another handshake building, one he’d played in as a boy, and running up the stairs to the roof, where he’d lain on his belly amid the broken glass and pebbles, staring down at the street below as the police chased down and caught his friends, one after the other, a line of Webblies face-down on the ground, groaning from the occasional kick or punch when they violated the silence and tried to speak with one another.
The police began to methodically cuff and hood them, starting at one end, working in threes—one to cuff, one to hood, and one to stand guard with his rifle. It seemed to go on forever, and Matthew saw that he was far from the only person observing the sick spectacle: the laundry-hung balconies of the handshake buildings shivered as people piled out onto them, their mobile phones aimed at the laneway below. Matthew got out his own phone, zooming in methodically on each face, trying to get a picture of each Webbly before he was hooded, thinking vaguely of putting the images on the big Webbly boards, sending them to the foreign press, the dissident bloggers who used their offshore servers.
Then, sudden movement. Ping was thrashing on the ground, limbs flailing, head cracking against the pavement hard enough to be heard from Matthew’s perch six stories up. Matthew knew with hopeless certainty that it was one of his friend’s epileptic seizures, which didn’t come on very often, but which were violent and terrifying for those around him. The cops tried to grab his arms and legs, and one of them got a hard kick in the knee for his trouble, and then Ping’s arm cracked the hooded prisoner beside him, who rolled away, stumbled to his feet, and the cops waded in, rifle-butts raised and ready.
What happened next seemed to take forever, an eternity during which Matthew struggled not to scream, struggled on the edge of indecision, of impotence, of being driven to run to the street below for his comrades and of being too scared to move from the spot.
A policeman cracked the hooded Webbly who was on his feet across the kidneys, and the boy screeched and staggered and happened to catch hold of the rifle-butt. The two grappled for the gun while the boys on the pavement shouted, other policemen closing in, and then one of them unholstered his revolver and calmly shot the hooded boy in the head, the hood spattered and red as the boy fell.
That was it. The boys leapt to their feet and charged, warriors screaming their battle-cries, unarmed children scared and brave and stupid, and the police guns fired, and fired, and fired.
The cordite smell overpowered his senses, a smell like the fireworks he and his friends used to set off on New Year’s. Mingled with it, the blood smell, the shit smell of boys whose bowels had let go. Matthew cried silently as he aimed his phone at the carnage, shooting and shooting, and then a policeman looked up at the crowd observing the massacre and shouted something indistinct, the camera lens on his helmet glinting in the dawn light, and Matthew ducked back as the rest of the policemen looked up, and then he heard the screaming, screaming from all around, from all the balconies.
He pelted across the roof, headed for the next building, vaulting the narrow gap between the two with ease. Twice more he leapt from building to building, running on sheer survival instinct, his mind a blank. Then he found himself on the street, with no memory of having descended any stairs, walking briskly, headed for the center of town, the streets with the fancy shops and the pimps, the businessmen and the internet cafes filled with screaming boys killing orcs and blowing space-pirates out of the sky and vanquishing evil super-villains.
The tears coursed down his cheeks, and the early morning rush of people on their way to work gave him a wide berth. He wasn’t the first boy to walk the streets of Shenzhen in tears, and he wouldn’t be the last. He randomly boarded a bus and paid the fare and sat down, burying his face in his hands, choking back the sobs. He’d ridden the bus for a full hour before he bothered to look up and see where he was headed.
Then he had to smile. Somehow, he’d boarded a bus headed for Dafen, the “oil painting village,” where thousands of painters working in small factories turned out millions of paintings. He’d gone there once with Ping and the boys, on a rare day off, to wander the narrow streets and marvel at the canvasses hung everywhere, in outdoor stalls and in open shops and in huge galleries. The paintings were mostly in European style, old-fashioned, depicting life in ancient European cities, or the tortured Jesus (these made Matthew squirm and remember his father’s stories of persecution) or perfect fruit sitting on tables. Some of the shops and stalls had painters working at them, copying paintings out of books, executing deft little brushstrokes and closing out the rest of the world. The books themselves were printed in Dongguan—Matthew knew a factory girl who worked at the printer—and something about the whole scene had filled Matthew with an unnameable emotion at the thought of all these painters creating work with their artist’s eyes and hands for use by foreigners who’d never come to China, never imagine the faces and hands of the painters who made the work.
And here they were, pulling up at the five-meter-tall sculpture of a hand holding a brush, disgorging dozens of passengers by the side of the road. All around him rose the tall housing blocks and long factory buildings, the air scented with breakfast and oil paint and turpentine.
Matthew came out of his funk enough to notice that many of his fellow passengers wore paint-stained work-clothes and carried wooden paint-boxes, and he joined the general throng that snaked into Dafen, amid the murmur of conversation as workers greeted friends and passed the gossip.
The time he’d visited Dafen, he’d wandered into a gallery that sold contemporary paintings by Chinese painters, showing Chinese settings. He’d never had much use for art, but he’d been poleaxed by these ones. One showed four factory girls, beautiful and young, holding mobile phones and designer bags, walking down a rural village street at Mid-Autumn Festival, the house-fronts and shop windows hung with lanterns. The village was old and poor, the street broken, the people watching from the doorways with seamed peasant faces, pinched and dried up. The four girls were glamorous aliens from another world, children who’d been sent away to find their fortunes, who’d come back changed into a different species altogether.
And there’d been a picture of an old grandmother sleeping in a Dongguan bus-shelter, toothless mouth thrown open, huddled under a fake designer coat that was streaked with grime and torn. And a picture of a Cantonese man on a ladder between two handshake buildings, hanging up an illegal cable-wire. The images had been poignant and painful and beautiful, and he’d stood there looking at them until the gallery owner chased him out. These were for people with money, not people like him.
Now, passing by the same shop, he felt a jolt of recognition as he saw the picture of the four factory girls, arms around each others’ shoulders, in the sho
p’s window. It hadn’t sold—or maybe the painter turned them out by the truckload. Maybe there was a factory full of painters devoted to making copies of this painting.
He became conscious of a distant hubbub, an indistinct roar of angry voices. He thought he’d been hearing it for some time now, but it had been subsumed in the sound of the people around him. Now it was growing louder, and he wasn’t the only one who’d noticed it. It was a chant, thunderous and relentless, with tramping, rhythmic feet. The crowd craned their necks around to locate the disturbance, and he joined them.
Then they turned the corner and he saw what it was: a group of young men and women, paint-stained, holding up sheets of paper with beautifully calligraphed slogans: “NON-FORMULA PAINTING FACTORY UNFAIR!” “WE DEMAND WAGES!” “BOSS SIU IS CORRUPT!” The signs were decorated with artistic flourishes, and he saw that at the far end of the picket there was a trio of painters crouched over a pile of paper, brushes working furiously. A new sign went up: “REMEMBER THE 42!” and then one that simply said “IWWWW” in the funny Western script, and Matthew felt a surge of elation.
“Who are the forty-two?” he asked one of the painters, a pretty young woman with several prominent moles on her face. She pushed her hair behind her ears. “It was three hours ago,” she said, then looked at the time on her phone. “Four hours ago.” She shook her head, brought up some pictures on her phone. “The police executed forty-two boys in Cantonese-town. They say that the boys were criminals, but the neighbors say they were just gold farmers.” She showed him the pictures. His friends, on the ground, heads in hoods, being shot by policemen, reeling back under the fire. The policemen anonymous behind their masks. The girl saw the expression on his face and nodded. “Terrible, isn’t it? Just terrible. And the things the fifty-cent army have been saying about them—” The fifty-cent army was the huge legion of bloggers paid fifty cents—half an RMB—to write patriotic comments and posts about the government.
He found that he was sitting on the dirty sidewalk, holding the girl’s phone. She knelt down with him and said, “Hey, mister, are you all right?”
He nodded his head automatically, then shook it. Because he wasn’t all right. Nothing was all right. “No,” he said.
The girl looked at the sign she’d been painting and then at him. She turned her back on the painting and took his chin, tilted his face up. “Are you hurt?”
“Not hurt,” he said. “But.” He shook his head. Pointed at her phone. Drew out his own. Brought up the photos he’d taken while trembling on the roof.
“The same photos?” she said. Then looked closer. “Different photos. Where’d you get them?”
He said, “I took them,” and it came out in a rasp. “They were my friends.”
She jolted as if shocked, then bit her lip and paged through the photos. She smelled of turpentine and her fingers were very long and elegant. She reminded Matthew of an elf. “You were there?” It was only half a question, but he nodded anyway. “Oh, oh, oh,” she said, handing him back the phone and giving him a strong, sisterly hug. “You poor boy,” she said.
“We heard about it an hour ago, while we were settling in to work. We gathered to discuss it, leaving our canvasses, and our boss, Boss Siu, came by and demanded that we all get back to work. He wouldn’t let us tell him why we were gathered. He never does. It’s like Jiandi says on her radio show—he controls our bathroom breaks, docks our wages for talking or sometimes just for looking up for too long. And when he told us we were all being docked, one of the girls stood up and shouted a slogan, something like ‘Boss Siu is unfair!’ and though it was funny, it was also so real, straight from her heart, and we all stood up, too, and then—” She gestured at the line.
Matthew remembered the day they’d walked out on Boss Wing, a million years ago, remembered the police arriving and taking them to jail, remembered his vow never to go to jail again. And then he picked up the sign she’d been making and gripped it by the corners and joined the line. He wasn’t the only one. He shouted the slogans, and his voice wasn’t hoarse anymore, it was strong and loud.
And when the police finally did come, something miraculous happened: the huge crowd of painters and other workers who’d gathered at the factory joined ranks with the picketers and picked up their slogans. They held their phones aloft and photographed the police as they advanced, with masks and helmets and shields and batons.
They held their ground.
The police fired gas canisters.
Painters with big filter masks from the factories seized the canisters and calmly threw them through the factory windows, smoking out the bosses and security men who’d been cowering there, and they came coughing and weeping and wheezing.
The crowd expanded, moved toward the police instead of away from them, and a policeman darted forward out of his line, club raised, mouth and eyes open very wide behind his facemask, and three factory girls sidestepped him, tripped him, and the crowd closed over him. The police line trembled as the man disappeared from view, and just as it seemed like they would charge, the mob backed away, and the man was there, lying on the ground, then scrambling away. His helmet, truncheon and shield were gone, as was his utility belt with its gun and its gas and its bundle of plastic cuffs.
Now we have a gun, Matthew thought, and from a far distance observed that he was thinking like a tactician again, not like a terrorized boy, and he knew which way the police should come from next, that alley over there, if they took it they’d control all the entrances to the square, trapping the picketers.
“We need people over there,” he shouted to the painter girl, whose name was Mei, and who had stood by his side, her fine slender arm upraised as she called the slogans with him. “There and there. Lots of them. If the police seal those areas off—”
She nodded and pushed off through the crowd, tapping people on the shoulder and shouting in their ears over the roar of the mob and the police sirens and the oncoming chopper. That chopper made Matthew’s hands sweaty. If it dropped something on them—gas, surely, not bombs, surely not bombs he thought like a prayer—there’d be nowhere to hide. Protesters moved off to defend the alleyways he’d pointed to, armed with bricks and rocks and cameraphones. The same funnel-shaped alley-mouths that would make those alleys so deadly in the hands of their enemies would make them easier to defend.
The chopper was coming on now, and the cameraphones pointed at the sky, and then the helicopter veered off and headed in a different direction altogether. As Matthew raised his own phone to photograph it, he saw that he’d missed several calls. A number he didn’t recognize, overseas. He dialed it back, crouching down low in the forest of stamping feet to get out of the noise.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice said, in English.
“Do you speak Chinese?” he said, in Cantonese.
There was a pause, then the phone was handed off to someone else. “Who is this?” a man’s voice said in Mandarin.
“My name is Matthew,” he said. “You called me?”
“You’re one of the Shenzhen group?” the man said.
“Yes,” he said.
“We’ve got another survivor!” he called out and sounded genuinely elated.
“Who is this?”
“This is The Mighty Krang,” the man said. “I work for Big Sister Nor. We are so happy to hear from you, boy! Are you okay, are you safe?”
“I’m in the middle of a strike,” he said. “Thousands of painters in Dafen. That’s a village in Shenzhen, where they paint—”
“You’re in Dafen? We’ve been seeing pictures out of there, it looks insane. Tell me what’s going on.”
Without thinking, just acting, Matthew scaled a park bench and stood up very tall and dictated a compact, competent situation report to the The Mighty Krang, whom he’d seen on plenty of video-conferences with Big Sister Nor and Justbob, snickering and clowning in the background. Now he sounded absolutely serious and intent, asking Matthew to repeat some details to ensure he had them clear
.
“And have you seen the other strikes?”
“Other strikes?”
“All around you,” he said. “Lianchuang, Nanling and Jianying Gongyequ. There’s a factory on fire in Jianying Gongyequ. That’s bad business. Wildcatters—if they’d talked to us first, we would have told them not to. Still.” He paused. “Those photos were something. The forty-two.”
“I have more.”
“Where’d you get them?”
“I was there.”
“Oh.”
A long pause.
“Matthew, are you safe where you are?”
Matthew stood up again. The police line had fallen back, the demonstration had taken on something of a carnival air, the artists laughing and talking intensely. Some had instruments and were improvising music.
“Safe,” he said.
“Okay, send me those photos. And stay safe.”
Two more helicopters now, not headed for them. Headed, he guessed, for the burning factory in Jianying Gongyequ. He hoped no one was in it.
Mr. Banerjee came for them that night, with another group of thugs, but these weren’t skinny badmashes. They were grown adults, dirty men with knives and clubs, men who smelled of betel and sweat and smoke and fiery liquor, a smell that preceded them like a messenger shouting “beware, beware.” They came calling and joking through Dharavi, a mob that the Webblies heard from a long way off. Mrs. Dotta’s neighbors came to their windows and clucked worriedly and sent their children to lie down on the floor.
Mr. Banerjee led the procession, in his pretty suit, the mud sucking at his fine shoes. He stood in the laneway before the door to Mrs. Dotta’s cafe and put his hands on his hips and lit a cigarette, making a show of it, all nonchalance as he puffed it to life and blew a stream into the hot, wet air.
He waited.
Mala limped to the door and opened it. Behind her, the cafe was dark and not a thing moved.
Neither said a word. The neighbors looked on in worried silence.