“I wonder if there’s protocol for this in the Daily Bruin’s ethics policies,” I thought as I squatted in front of a numerologist whom I had just handed 20 yuan so that he would answer some questions about the factory compound behind him.
I was in Dongguan, a city in Southeast China, with a field worker from China Labor Watch, an organization promoting labor rights for Chinese workers.
We had just walked through the area outside a cluster of factories, after having lunch with a factory worker in a private room above a restaurant, where we hoped we would be able to speak freely.
Ms. Li, the field worker, wanted to ask the numerologist questions about some of the rumors she had heard circulating around the area: that a young male worker had jumped to his death from the dorms within the compound after having disputes with supervisors, and that two young women had also died earlier in the year.
Even as I was trying to figure out whether I would be able to quote the numerologist, I was sure there were ethical problems in paying for information. I wondered if it made a difference that the transaction was meant to make us appear as regular customers and to draw less attention to us from the busy sidewalk.
I also wondered, briefly, if it was half as unethical when he handed me back 10 yuan in change.
Finding our story
Though I didn’t end up using the numerologist as a source, the ethical questions that arose while we spoke were representative of the challenges of reporting in China. I often wondered whether we were putting the people who met with us in any kind of danger.
In April, Jessica Chou and I pitched a photojournalism series analyzing the UCLA label’s role in China from two different angles: from the perspective of the consumers who could afford to buy the high-end clothing sold in the Chinese domestic market and from the view of the factory employees who worked long hours to produce the clothes sold both in China and the U.S.
Though we had an idea of what we were looking for, Jessica and I also knew that we wouldn’t be able to fully understand our story until we got to China.
We visited UCLA boutiques in Shanghai and Beijing, and we also spent a week stationed in Shenzhen, meeting with workers in the city’s industrial Longgang District, as well as in neighboring Zhongshan and Dongguan.
When we began speaking with people ““ factory employees, workers’ rights activists, students, store clerks, the chatty taxi drivers who shuttled us around ““ we became more and more aware of how connected the different aspects of our story were.
We also realized that our own identities were going to play a role in our narration.
Nearly everyone we spoke to asked where we were from, and everyone who asked had an opinion about whether we were authentically Chinese ““ Jessica was born in Taiwan, but left before she was 6 months old, and I was raised in California by parents who had immigrated here from Taiwan in their 20s.
I found myself offering as much information as I could, hoping to spark longer discussions and gain more insight into the lives of the people we met.
Our trip began in mid-October, and the effects of the financial crisis were weighing heavily on everyone’s mind. It was clear that the globalization of manufacturing has made our world smaller than ever, and Jessica and I decided that we would not be able to focus on just UCLA or just apparel.
Although a few international labor rights organizations are focused solely on garment workers, the reality for Chinese workers is that they are just as likely to be on an assembly line for electronics or sewing machines as to be on one for ball caps and T-shirts.
The workers’ rights groups we met with in China certainly didn’t make those distinctions; in their view, all workers need to be protected.
Before I left, my parents and a few aunts kept insisting that Jessica and I couldn’t expect to go into China and be able to understand the political situation there. I think for them, the concern was that we would publish a harsh critique of China that ignored the nuances of what is an extremely complex situation.
Just a bit paranoid
During the 15 days we were in China, I kept wondering if I was being too paranoid, or not paranoid enough. Before the Olympics, Jessica and I had listened in on a conference call about reporting in China, sponsored by the Asian American Journalists Association.
The panelists advised reporters that they should expect to be monitored, that police sometimes check journalists’ hotel rooms, and to remember that expectations of privacy were vastly different.
A few days before I left, a friend told me about a National Geographic series about travelers who are imprisoned while abroad.
“It always ends with someone crying,” she told me cheerfully. “Because their friends are all dead, and they’re the only left to tell the story.”
The idea of landing in a Chinese prison was at the back of my mind when we arrived in Shanghai and the customs official spent just enough time looking at my passport to make me nervous.
To be fair, my paranoia ““ or sense of self-preservation ““ was not entirely unjustified. The first time we visited factories was with Ivy, a coordinator for the labor organization Worker Empowerment. As we walked around, Jessica took pictures as discreetly as possible, and I had a small notebook and was jotting down notes.
Before I had even noticed him, Ivy yelled at a man who had been recording us with his cell phone from a distance. She didn’t really tell him to stop, she just said she could see what he was doing.
Another time, as we began a three-hour bus ride from Shenzhen to Zhongshan, the ticket seller recorded the faces of all of the passengers with a digital video camera.
A few days later, as we were walking back to our budget hotel in Shenzhen, a man sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked car stuck his arm out of the window as we walked by, and Jessica saw that he was pointing his cell phone at us.
We weren’t sure if he had recorded us, or if it would matter if he had, but we spent the next few hours holed up in our hotel room, anyway.
And then there was the black-ops phone call.
Jessica and I were in a taxi on the way to meet with Ivy ““ the ride in itself was a bit of an adventure; we were told to head toward Longgang, then to call again when we were closer so she could give the driver more specific directions.
About half an hour after we set out, Jessica got a phone call. She had called the offices of China Labor the day before and was told that someone would be in contact.
After a minute or so, Jessica handed me the phone, since my Mandarin listening comprehension is marginally better.
The voice on the other end of the line started giving me instructions about when and where to board a bus the next day, and that we would be able to meet workers after they left work at 5:40 p.m.
I scribbled notes on the back of an envelope, hoping I was spelling things correctly in Pinyin, the romanization of Chinese characters.
Just before she hung up, I remembered to ask for the voice’s name.
“Ni men ke yi jiao wo “˜Li Xiao Jie,'” she responded ““ “You can call me “˜Ms. Li.'”
It wasn’t until after I hung up that I realized the absurdity of the entire situation. Naturally, I laughed.
The next day, we followed the directions from our clandestine phone call to what we hoped was the right bus depot. It took a few more calls for Ms. Li to find us ““ she had expected us to “look like wai guo ren,” like foreigners.
In fact, both Ivy and Ms. Li agreed to take us to the industrial areas where factories were clumped only after meeting with us, since they hadn’t expected us to be able to blend in.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel conspicuous at 5 feet 8 inches tall, silently blaming my father’s height for ruining my journalistic ambitions.
A tale of two countries
A few days into the trip, Jessica turned to me in a taxi and said, “The one thing I’m starting to realize about China is it’s very big.”
As simplistic or obvious as that statement might sound, it was an important observation. The sheer size of China and its population have a profound impact on the political climate, the culture and mindset of the people and the migrations associated with its ongoing industrial revolution.
Jessica’s aunt, who moved to Shanghai from Taiwan more than a decade ago, joked that she and her children decided where to go on family trips by considering how many other people would be there. Generally, wanting to avoid crowds eliminated most of their options.
As a very big country ““ and one that has modernized at an exponential rate ““ China also has room for jarring contrasts and shocking economic disparities.
In the course of a single day, we would visit high-end boutiques in glitzy, air-conditioned shopping centers, and then endure hours of public transportation to get to the run-down areas where factories were located.
At the Shenzhen Coastal City Mall, the UCLA boutique was offering a black blazer with a UCLA label sewn into the front flap. It was priced at 2,880 yuan, just over $420.
The factory workers we spoke with earned between 1,200 and 1,500 yuan every month.
At one of the many Starbucks we visited ““ there’s practically one on every corner ““ we spent 63 yuan on an iced tea and a pumpkin scone in order to take advantage of the free wireless.
Two days earlier, we had eaten a complete breakfast for 6 yuan, less than a dollar.
That breakfast was in Suzhou, a city known for its preserved pagodas and stone bridges. As we wandered through the cobbled streets full of dynastic-period buildings, we snacked on sweet and savory bing, hot off the griddle, and split a hard-boiled duck egg sold by a kind older woman toting a basket full of them.
Our project took us back and forth across these lines and borders, between modern and ancient, wealthy and working class, Western and so-called Oriental, running into questions of language, culture and identity.
For me, the highlights of the trip were when we found people willing to share their stories with us, and each of their complex, personal tales added pieces to the large, abstract puzzle that our project became.
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E-mail Kuo at akuo@media.ucla.edu.