Farther Away: Essays (18 page)

The week before, when I'd arrived in Shanghai, my first impression of China had been that it was the most
advanced
place I'd ever seen. The scale of Shanghai, which from the sky had presented a dead-flat vista of tens of thousands of neatly arrayed oblong houses—each of which, a closer look revealed, was in fact a large apartment block—and then, on the ground, the brutally new skyscrapers and the pedestrian-hostile streets and the artificial dusk of the smoke-filled winter sky: it was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, “Does somebody want to get into some really unprecedentedly deep shit?” and this place had raised its hand and said, “Yeah!”

One afternoon, I'd ridden north from Shanghai in a rented car with three homegrown Chinese birdwatchers. The artificial dusk had been gathering for hours, but night didn't actually fall until the moment we all piled out of the car, on the fringes of Yancheng National Nature Reserve, and followed the bird guide known as M. Caribou down a little farm road. The temperature was below freezing. The only colors were various dark bluish grays. An utterly unidentifiable bird flushed out of some weeds and flew deeper into the night.

“Some kind of bunting,” Caribou speculated.

“It's pretty dark,” I said, shivering.

“We want to use the last light,” the beautiful young woman who called herself Stinky said.

It got even darker. Right in front of me, the young man named Shadow flushed what he said was a pheasant. I heard it and looked around wildly, trying to distinguish shapes. Caribou was leading us past the car, where our hired driver sat with the heat blasting. We ran blindly down an embankment into a grove of sticklike trees whose pale bark made the undergrowth even darker.

“And what are we doing here?” I said.

“Could be woodcock,” Caribou said. “They like wet ground where the trees aren't too close together.”

We crashed around in the dark, hoping for woodcock. Up on the road, thirty feet away from us, minibuses and small trucks rushed by, swerving and honking and raising dust that I tasted but couldn't see. We stopped and listened intently to a twittering song that turned out to be the bearings of an approaching bicycle.

Stinky and Shadow and M. Caribou all went by their Web names when speaking English. Stinky was the mother of a five-year-old and had taken up birding two years ago. Via e-mail, she and I had arranged to visit Yancheng, the largest nature reserve on the Chinese coast, and she had talked me into avoiding official guidance and employing her friend Caribou, who charged seventy dollars a day to find birds. I'd asked Stinky if she really wanted me to call her Stinky, and she'd said yes. She'd come to my hotel wearing a black fleece hat, a nylon shell, and nylon adventure pants. Her friend Shadow, a biology student with a borrowed wildlife camera and time on his hands, was dressed in a down parka and thin corduroys. The first half of our drive took us up through the heart of the Yangtze River Delta, which had lately accounted for nearly twenty percent of China's GDP. One vast plain of industry and medium-rise housing and isolated shards of agriculture was succeeded by another. Always, on the southern horizon, mirage-like in the winter light, was some mythically outsize structure—some power plant, some glass-clad temple of finance, some steroidally bulked-up restaurant-hotel complex, some . . . grain elevator?

Caribou, in the front seat, was scanning the sky with a vaguely irritable alertness. “The word
eco
is very popular in China now, you see it everywhere,” he commented. “But it's not real eco.”

“There was no birding at all in China until four or five years ago,” Stinky said.

“No—longer,” Shadow said. “Ten years!”

“But only four or five years in Shanghai,” Stinky said.

North of the Yangtze, in the region known as Subei, we drove through crowded, run-down urban outskirts for a long time before I understood that these weren't outskirts, this was just what Subei looked like. The houses were blocky, unpainted, blatant; only in the rooflines, which never failed to end in a vestigial Far Eastern upturning, was there a breath of aesthetic relief. We drove alongside canals frosted with thick layers of floating trash and lined on either side with even thicker deposits; white and red were the leading trash colors, but there existed sun-bleached plastic equivalents of every other major color as well. Very rarely did I see a tree more than eight inches in diameter. Vegetables were planted in tight rows on road embankments, in the aisles between the regiments of stick trees, on traffic triangles, and right up to the walls of every building.

When even Caribou had admitted that night had fallen, we left the reserve and drove into the village of Xinyanggang. The buildings there were two-story and made of unadorned concrete or brick. The light consisted mainly of spillage from low-wattage fixtures inside open-fronted stores. Over dinner, in a room where a ceiling-mounted heater blew freezing air, Caribou told me how he'd come to be one of the first professional bird guides born in the People's Republic. As a kid, he said, he'd liked animals, and as a college student he'd sometimes sketched birds and e-mailed his nature notes to his classmates. But it was impossible to be a real birdwatcher without a complete, illustrated field guide to Chinese birds, and the first of these, by John MacKinnon and Karen Phillipps, wasn't published until 2000. Caribou bought his copy in 2001. Two years later, he took a job as an air-traffic controller in Shanghai. “It was a
great
job,” Stinky told me. But Caribou himself hadn't thought so. He'd hated the long nights and the constant arguing with pilots and airline directors; he'd even had to argue with passengers who called him on their cell phones. His biggest complaint, though, was that the job was incompatible with full-time birding. “Sometimes, for a week or even two weeks,” he said, “I wouldn't get any sleep at all, it was just birding and work.”

“But you could fly to other cities for free!” Stinky said.

This was true, Caribou admitted. But his schedule had never allowed him more than one full day in any given city, and so he'd quit. For the last two and a half years, he'd made his living as a freelance bird researcher and guide. Stinky, who had recently discovered Facebook, was trying to get Caribou to set up a page to advertise himself abroad. A lot of Europeans and Americans, she said, were unaware that there was even such a thing as Chinese birdwatchers, let alone Chinese bird guides. When I asked Caribou how many days he'd worked as a guide in 2007, he frowned and calculated. “Less than fifteen,” he said.

At six-thirty the next morning, after stopping for a breakfast of noodles and rice buns filled with savory greens, Stinky and Shadow and Caribou and I headed back to the reserve. Like many Chinese reserves, Yancheng is divided into a highly protected “core area” and a larger “outer area,” where visitors with binoculars are tolerated and local people are permitted to live and work. There is very little pristine habitat anywhere in eastern China, and certainly none to be seen in Yancheng. Every last hectare of the outer area seemed to be in use for fish farming, paddy building, road grading, ditchdigging, reed cutting, house rebuilding, and miscellaneous major earthmoving and concrete pouring. Caribou led us to red-crowned cranes (bushy-tailed, majestic, endangered), reed parrotbills (tiny, funny-faced, threatened), and, by my count, seventy-four other species of bird. We searched for buntings along a channel that was being widened and paved by a brigade of workers who buzzed up on motorcycles and asked if we were hunting pheasants. This is a common question in China, where birders also get used to being mistaken for surveyors, to being informed, “There are no birds here,” and to being asked, “Is the bird you're looking at expensive?”

We saw a Chinese gray shrike near a billboard ominously urging
DEVELOP THE LAND, PRESERVE THE WETLANDS, CONTRIBUTE TO THE ECONOMY
and a peasant digging a barn foundation with a shovel. We invaded the yard of a family that had come outside to watch two men tinker with an electrical substation while, twenty feet away, near a pile of cinder blocks, a fantastic, prison-striped, crazily crested hoopoe foraged in dead grass. At the site of a reservoir where, just two months earlier, Caribou had seen waterfowl, we pulled up face-to-face with a very handsome man who sat straddling his motorcycle and smiled at us implacably while Caribou determined that the site had been bulldozed for fish farming and was now devoid of birds. We ended the day by combing through trees and brush near the reserve's tourist center. Here, for free, on one side of the road, you could see a solitary ostrich, while, on the other side, for four dollars, you could see a few tame red-crowned cranes, listless in a pen, with yellow grass and dirty water, and climb a tower from which the reserve's core area was distantly visible.

“It's a wasteland, not a wetland,” Caribou said bitterly, of the visitor center. “The problem with nature reserves in China is that local people don't support them. People who live near them think, We can't get richer, we can't build factories, we can't build power plants, because of the protections. They don't know what a reserve is, or what a wetland is. Yancheng should open part of the core area to the public, to get them interested. To help them get to know the red-crowned crane. Then they can support it.”

The fine for trespassing in the core area is nominally forty dollars but can run as high as seven hundred dollars, depending on the mood of the policeman. In theory, the core area is closed in order to minimize human disturbance to rare migratory birds, but if you were to go ahead and enter it anyway, some morning in late February, you would see long, loud convoys of blue trucks bouncing down networks of dirt roads in clouds of dust and diesel exhaust. The trucks go in empty and come out stacked house-high and road-wide with harvested reeds. You'd have an easy time finding threatened species like the reed parrotbill, because their populations are driven into narrow strips of vegetation beside vast mud flats—square miles of them, stretching to the horizon—that have been clear-cut to the ground. If you're lucky, you might also see one of the world's two thousand or so remaining black-faced spoonbills, feeding in shallow water alongside endangered Oriental storks and endangered cranes, while, on a spit of land directly behind them, workers pitch bundles of reed onto a truck.

According to an administrator at the reserve, local regulations allow reeds to be cut before and after migratory birds come through. When the reserve was established, in the 1980s, the central government hadn't given it enough funds to operate, and it had charged peasants a fee to cut reeds; nowadays, the cutting is justified as a fire-prevention measure. “Global NGOs want China to do conservation the Western way, but they don't want every Chinese to drive a car,” the director of another coastal reserve told me. “That's why we have to do things the Chinese way.” It wasn't obvious to me that fire posed a greater risk to Yancheng's red-crowned cranes than the semiannual clear-cutting of the core area, but I knew that much of China still operates under the national watchword of the eighties, “Development first, then environment.” I asked Caribou if, as China's economy continued to expand, things were simply going to get worse for birds.

“Definitely,” Caribou said. He listed some of the species—Baikal teal, scaly-sided merganser, Baer's pochard, black-headed ibis, Japanese yellow bunting, hooded crane—that bred or wintered in eastern China and were disappearing. “Even just ten years ago, you could see much bigger numbers of them,” he said. “The problem isn't just poaching. The biggest problem is habitat loss.”

“It's a trend, there's nothing we can do about it,” Stinky said.

Down the road from the visitor center, in near-darkness, Shadow called out that he'd found four teals and a snipe.

Stinky was officially looking for a job in marketing or PR, but she wanted a job that didn't require overtime, and in China nowadays every job required overtime. She and her husband had lived for two years in the United States. Although they'd ultimately found life there too boring and predictable, compared with China, they now felt less “flexible” than the friends of theirs who never left. “It's a little harder for the two of us to abandon our principles,” Stinky said. “For example, in both China and the U.S., people say that family is the number-one priority. But in the U.S. they really mean it. In China, everything is about career now and getting ahead.” She and her husband had already bought a retirement apartment in the Sichuanese city of Chengdu, where people have a reputation for knowing how to relax and enjoy life, but for now the husband was working long hours in the city of Suzhou and getting home to Shanghai only a few nights a week, and Stinky was scarcely less industrious in pursuing her new hobby. In the two years since she'd gone on a walk sponsored by the Shanghai Wild Bird Society, she'd kept financial records for the society, managed several of its outreach projects, become an active online poster of local bird counts, and, last summer, in Fujian Province, seen one of the world's rarest species, the Chinese crested tern.

I joined her on a Sunday morning at the annual meeting of the Shanghai Wild Bird Society. Forty members, including a dozen women, had gathered in a classroom on the nineteenth floor of a Forestry Bureau building. It was easy to spot the newest members—they were the shy ones trading little glossy stickers of common birds. Stinky, in stylish black jeans, her hair thick and loose on her shoulders, detached herself from a cluster of friends and gave a clear, polished financial report, using spreadsheets decorated with a cartoon of coins tumbling into a cute-faced piggy bank. (Funding in 2007 had consisted primarily of a nine-hundred-dollar gift from the Hong Kong Bird Society to pay for Shanghai's annual birding festival.) This year, for the first time, the society's board of directors was being elected directly by the membership rather than being appointed by its governmental sponsor, the Shanghai Wild Animal Protection Bureau. An older member stood up to offer roastlike mini-bios of nine nominees, including “a supermodel” (Stinky), “a student who is extremely young” (Shadow), and “a nice guy, very easygoing” (the best amateur birder in Shanghai). Members smiled for a camera as, one by one, with half-joking ceremony, they dropped pink ballots into a slotted box.