Last year I sold a story called “The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu” to Strange Horizons. It was all about the hard lives of electronic waste recyclers in Guiyu, China and for some reason I crossbred that background with an interest I had at the time in parasites, in particular the toxoplasma gondii which is able to alter the behavior of rats (driving them to leap into the jaws of cats) so it can reproduce. I was really proud of it, but now I’m disappointed.
One of Guiyu’s rivers.
A street in Guiyu.
I wrote “Guiyu” in English with Cantonese inflection and phrasing, and overall that worked out better than I had hoped; I’m happy with the writing in the story. What I’m deeply unhappy with is the politics. In the story, the trash pickers of Guiyu work for local Chinese companies who exploit them to the hilt in order to squeeze every cent from their labor. The big bosses are one part factory owner, one part gangster, which I think is accurate. But I left the issue there, and that’s where I failed. It’s like I wrote a story about Dahomey and Oyo slave traders competing to sell their enemies into slavery at Porto Novo on Africa’s West Coast and I ended the story before those slaves were exported overseas.
One of the many electronics polluting Guiyu.
These local Chinese companies are recycling electronics for companies like Foxconn, which makes electronic gadgets for overseas customers. Foxconn, and many other companies in the same business, are pretty lousy places to work (although they’re better than Guiyu) and there have been so many worker suicides at Foxconn that their buildings are now surrounded by “suicide nets” to catch jumpers. The computer I’m typing this post on is a MacBook Pro and it has roots that reach right back to the cyanide-and-lead-laced muck that covers Guiyu. I ended my story before I implicated myself in the hideousness that I was writing about.
Foxconn factory floor.
Sweatshops, and sweatshop-style labor, bring enormous economic benefits to the countries in which they’re located, but they’re also inhumane and morally indefensible. Economists have written that they provide a better employment option than the alternatives in some countries, which means that justifying a sweatshop is justifying the exploitation of someone’s lack of choice. William Gibson said that the future was already here, it just wasn’t evenly distributed yet, and he’s right. So what do those of us who are living in the future do when we encounter people living in the past, without rule of law, without their rights being protected, without good options? Do we just assume that a period of exploitation is a painful and unpleasant, but necessary, growing pain? Do we try to profit from their misfortune? Or do we intervene and try to let them skip some of the abusive steps we experienced in our own pasts?
Picking apart circuit boards in Guiyu.
When science fiction writers tell stories about generation ships, and moon bases, and rockets I always want to know: who built them? Was it a union shop? Because we have always journeyed into the future on a highway made of slaves. And by slaves, I mean both technical slaves and people who are paid below what we pay our own citizens and who don’t enjoy the same protections as our citizens. You can’t have two equitable systems of labor: one for your citizens, and one for the people who build the things your citizens use. That’s slavery by another name.
One of Guiyu’s lakes.
America, one of the greatest democracies in human history, had its infrastructure built by African slaves, and its infrastructure is maintained today by undocumented Mexican, Central and South American slaves. Ancient Greece was also slave-supported. China saw many of its architectural marvels built by slaves. The plenty we enjoy today is often made by overseas slaves. Is there any reason to assume that our future won’t be built by slaves? Because we’re building it right now, and slaves are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. With “The Bright and Shining Parasites of Guiyu” I dropped the ball, and wrote a story that did a lot of things, but it didn’t tell the truth. I missed out on the more interesting long story, in favor of focusing on what was right in front of my face.
I don’t think that every work of fiction has to have a “correct” moral message, but I do think that fiction has to be interesting, and I think that I missed a more interesting and fraught story because I was ignorant and possibly uncomfortable with its implications. When you get out on the diving board, look down at the cold water and chicken out, that’s always a failure. And that’s what I did.
More stuff:
A video presentation about Guiyu. Way more interesting than what I wrote.
Hello!
I just found out about GuiYu! I may have a solution for them but you think they could be interested? I say this because of your description of the company bosses.
Btw, I am from Singapore and I have a waste management system, that not only clear wastes, including electronic wastes, but can also help recover the metal that they are looking for. We have sold one unit into China to help rid medical and toxic wastes. Doubt we will reach GuiYu any time soon… 8(
Just to share..
PS: depressing just looking at the photos and the implications on health of the children.. poor things..
Well, to put myself in the odd position of defending a story against its own author, I think the analogy to the competing Dahomey and Oyo slave traders is quite well taken. If you did in fact write such a story, almost every educated reader would know that in the background, just off the page, was the vast pull of the European empires’ (and their New World spinoffs’, principally the US) hunger for slaves. And the same is true here; certainly I read it knowing where that tech junk came from, and where it was probably going.
I think your point is well taken, and there are certainly stories to be told with a broader view, where the whole supply chain is in focus, and you should not neglect them. But I thought this was a terrific story, and I don’t know that it would have been improved by a broader view. You could, certainly, have included some minor reference to the West as the ultimate destination and beneficiary of their labors, and that might have soothed precisely the twinge of conscience you articulate above. But in doing so, you would have had to expand MC Master Kicks’s perspective, to give him a more sophisticated critique of how the global operations of captialism determine his world. And I’m not sure that actually serves the character or the story. Kicks’s naivete is central to his arc; his sense that all he needs to do is get to Beijing, and next thing he’ll be opening for Eminem, is precisely a naively eager, willfully blind flattening of the distance that oppression imposes between him and a poor white kid from Detroit. His disinterest in Guiyu as more than a way station on his road to riches, his puzzlement at Catshit’s geeky interest in what’s actually going ON there, is a part of the same portrait of him as a fundamentally naive, self-centered, materialistic, incurious, superficial, gullible kid resting his thin ego on his pretensions of future glory and glamor, and that’s precisely what gives his heroism at the end its edge. You’ve already got your operations of Western hegemony in the story where it matters, in the fact that his whole vision of escape and success is something he borrowed from hip-hop videos. He’s idolizing Eminem while Eminem is texting on an iPhone built from the trash that’s poisoning him, and his fantasy that they are about to be buddies is juxtaposed with this — like a field slave picking cotton and bragging all the while that at any moment he’ll be summoned to London for an audience with the Queen.
Kicks’s world is claustrophobic, it’s small, and the fact that when he strikes back, the highest he can punch, the biggest evil he can imagine, is Mayor Yuen, is just exactly right. We know that Mayor Yuen is not anywhere near the top of the totem pole, that if Mayor Yuen doesn’t deliver regulation-free capitalism for the local party cadres he’ll be discarded because if they can’t attract factory owners who can please Western investors and sell to Western consumers, they’ll be discarded. We know that the totem pole goes far higher than Mayor Yuen, all the way up to Eminem and Jay-Z (and you and me, insofar as we represent dollars). But Kicks doesn’t know that, and, I would argue, he shouldn’t. The narrow slice of the world he gets to see, the limits of his vision as well as his power, are part of what make his radical seizing of moral agency all the more telling. He does what he can with what he has; do we?
Your qualms are great qualms and they’re great if they fuel you to write the next story, to focus on the thing you left out. But I don’t think you should let them diminish your pleasure in the accomplishments of this one.