Peter Hessler is the Beijing correspondent of The New Yorker, but his National Magazine Award nomination for Reporting was bestowed upon a story that appeared in National Geographic, “China’s Instant Cities,” where he’s a contributing writer. Although the title might lead one to think he wrote a sweeping analytical study of the country’s unprecedented urbanization, Hessler instead built his narrative around a year in the short life of a single factory in one of the country’s youngest factory towns. The product of roughly 100 days of on-the-ground reporting, the story will be folded into Hessler’s third book on China, after River Town and Oracle Bones. mediabistro.com spoke with Hessler (who has since moved back to the United States) about his meticulous reporting and writing techniques.
Considering you’re The New Yorker‘s Beijing correspondent, why did this story appear in National Geographic?
I started writing for National Geographic even before I did work for The New Yorker. The first time I wrote for them was in 2000, and I always had a good experience with those stories — it’s a different audience. The New Yorker doesn’t let me write for other people, but occasionally they let me do a story for National Geographic. That [permission] is written into my contract.
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I’ve always felt that, as a writer, it’s nice to have outlets, but you don’t want to have too many because it can be exhausting and you’re juggling relationships. In this case, I just decided these were the two magazines I was interested in. I primarily write for The New Yorker, but this is the fourth story I wrote for National Geographic. It’s a slow magazine as far as producing each issue goes, and sometimes that leads me to do a different type of project for them.
The other reason I embarked on this project is that I wanted to work with a particular photographer who’s a friend of mine, Mark Leong. We worked together on The New Yorker stories, but that’s usually one photo for him, and it’s not shot simultaneously with the story. We were interested in trying to capture — both visually and in the text — the changes in China. I guess it ended up being more ambitious than we originally planned, partly because of the way things unfolded; I happened to stumble on good material and the magazine let me stretch the project out, so I just went from there. That’s the working pattern I often have with The New Yorker — just explore something and let it take its own form.
How did you find the story — or even find the town of Lishui — in the first place?
I had been in China for a long time, and at that point I was planning to leave and only wanted to start projects I was really interested in. One of the gaps in my knowledge was the factory town. I wanted to find something in that area — southeast China — and I wanted it to be something I could follow over time, something that would allow me to return to the same place every year or so and track the changes through that. There was a link to driving — the reason I began to explore this region was because they were building new highways there, and I had always heard about how regions adapted very quickly to new roads. I looked at how a village responded to a new road outside of Beijing, but I thought it would be interesting to see what happens in the factory world. They were building a new highway [outside of Wenzhou] and we knew it would be finished in a few months, so what would happen in the first year or two after it was done? The first thing I did was to fly down to Wenzhou and rent a car.
| “I would take the mechanic out to dinner, and the bosses seemed very nervous about it. I thought, ‘God, this guy has been poached so many times, they can’t trust anyone.'” |
When and how did you meet Wang Aiguo and Gao Xiaomeng, the factory bosses who were the catalysts of the story? And I assume you speak fluent Mandarin, because there never seems to be a language barrier in your reporting.
Before I met them there was a lot of groundwork involved. Mark and I pinpointed this region as a part of China we know has a big factory economy, and we knew a highway was being built along this stretch, heading northwest from Wenzhou. So we started exploring. My first trip down there was very open-ended. I rented a car in Wenzhou and spent two weeks just driving, stopping in towns, talking to people, and looking for a place to focus on. When I passed through Lishui, they had a few things that really jumped out at me. They had a factory zone that was in the process of being built, a new dam, and you could tell it was a place about to boom. And we had found it at this interesting stage of development. So, by the end of that first trip, I decided this town was the focus.
On the next trip, two months later, my goal was to find some people or some particular institution I would be able to follow for the rest of the story, hopefully. It’s a little bit frightening when you go into something so open-ended, but I also kind of liked that because I prefer that to having focused on something too early in the process. It allows me to respond to what I’m seeing.
So I went back, lived in the hotel for a while, and just got up every morning to drive around the region talking to people. I spent a lot of time talking to construction workers because I originally thought I would follow a group of them. I also talked to some government people, and to people setting up little restaurants and shops, and I stopped at the factory district as well, where I happened to meet the young man whose name is Boss Gao.
I was just walking around, and I saw this guy who was dressed pretty nice, which is unusual in a place like that, where everyone is pretty much a construction worker, and they all look like people from the countryside. This guy was different, so I walked up and started chatting with him. He said he was from Wenzhou and had come to open this factory, and he was a little distracted and nervous. People are quite friendly in these areas, and if you’re a foreigner it works to your advantage, because you’re a bit of an oddball and they’re interested in you.
But in this case, he and his uncle showed up, and they were so distracted by what they were doing — they had to set up this factory — that they didn’t care too much about my hanging around. I spent two hours with them — we had no introduction, and they didn’t know me beyond my name. I showed them I was a journalist, but really they were intent on other things, and it was neat to watch.
I felt very fortunate — at that point I had already spent a month in the area, so there had been a lot of investment already. That’s how things work — you can’t predict these. By the end of the trip, that was the most vivid scene I had, so I thought, “Well, maybe this will be promising; let’s see how I do the next time.” I showed up the next time and they were setting up the machines. At that point, they had seen me before, they were getting to know me, and we had a relationship developing. Later, I was closer to their workers than I was to them, and at various points they seemed to get worried about my presence. Often in China, they aren’t nervous when they find out you’re a journalist; they’re concerned later, about what’s going to happen when your story is published, and whether it’s going to get them in trouble.
How did you overcome that and build trust? I would think that any journalist reporting overseas must work twice as hard to build trust and ensure steady access. How did that work with the bosses?
One of the things I had to deal with, repeatedly, was the concern that maybe I wasn’t really a journalist. Maybe I was an investor, or maybe I was a competitor and I wanted to steal the plans, because I was spending a lot of time with their equipment, which, as you can tell from the story, was acquired in a surreptitious fashion. In this world, that’s how things work, and people often say they are people they are not. So I was constantly fighting that battle.
I became very close to the person in the story identified as the mechanic. He was probably my closest friend among those groups, and when I would take him out to dinner, the bosses seemed very nervous about it. I thought, “God, this guy has been poached so many times, they can’t trust anyone.” So I would show them things I had published, copies of my books, and so forth. In the end, they trusted me to a degree, but there were some things they wouldn’t let me see.
The fact that it had developed organically helped a lot. If I had gone through an intermediary and said, “I heard you guys are starting a business and I’d like to follow you for a year,” I don’t think they would have gone for it.
How much time did you put in at the factory? The story spans a year, you’ve mentioned several trips already — how many visits did you make, and how much time and money did you ultimately invest in this project?
I made 10 trips, and spent a total of almost exactly 100 days on the ground. And that doesn’t include any research I did in Beijing. There were a couple of factors involved when it came to expenses. One was that I was living in China, so National Geographic didn’t have to pay for a trans-Pacific flight every time I went. While the flights aren’t cheap, their stories are well-funded. It’s pretty cheap on the ground, however. Renting a car down there costs $25. I stayed in the same hotel in Lishui every time, so I had a relationship with them and they charged me $20 a night. It’s not that much, and meals are dirt cheap.
The larger issue is that it’s not a smart way to spend more than a third of a year on one story. As the project went on, I began to realize this was something that would be part of the book I was working on, and at that point I figured, “Well, even if this doesn’t make sense for a magazine story, that’s fine, I’m going to invest extra time in it.” Even after the story was published, I went back twice to follow up for my book.
The magazine was willing to do it because I’ve done stories for them in the past and they trusted me; I give them a lot of credit for that. We couldn’t tell where the story was going, and I couldn’t tell them until about the third or fourth trip. By then, I could sketch out something I thought was going to happen, but there were points when the factory might go bankrupt, and I didn’t know what that would do to the story.
Well, the factory did go bankrupt in the end, not that it hurt the story. What else did you think was going to happen, and how did you prepare narrative contingencies plans for each?
By the third trip, I had a pretty good sense that it would work, one way or another, and in some sense, it didn’t really matter what the final outcome was. It’s going to tell you something, and it’s nice, in a way, that you can’t choose. I can’t decide if the factory is going to be a success or a failure, and that means I’m not making judgments about that — I’m looking to see how it unfolds. In the meantime, I’m looking at a lot of research on the side, because this narrative is only the skeleton of the story, and you can hang a lot of things along that structure — things like the real estate deals in town and how that works with funding — so you know you have lots of stuff that’s going to contribute to your portrait of this place.
It’s a mistake to look at it, when you’re in the middle of it, and say, “everything depends on this one factory.” It’s never that way; it’s very important that it’s there, but there was lots of stuff I was researching on the side, and I had faith that it would work out. I became very careful about the timing, and I would call people there all the time so I could be there and see things that were happening, whether they were hiring workers or testing a machine, or whatever�.
Did they try to cut off your access at any point? How did you manage to win their trust so completely?
If it had been Nike, this wouldn’t have happened; if it were a big factory, no way. That’s sort of how I envisioned this when I was planning the project — I thought about finding entrepreneurs, but I realized a big plant wasn’t going to give a lot of access. So I had my eye out for smaller entrepreneurs, because I knew that was my best chance. When you’re at that level, the relationship is what matters, so they’re more tolerant of me because we hang out and share meals, and it doesn’t take long for you to talk to 20 people. I know everybody there quite well, ranging from the young women on the assembly line, to the main mechanic, to the bosses.
That must have produced a stupendous amount of material over the course of a year. How did you set about streamlining the story? You ultimately chose a chronological structure, which sounds like the simplest in retrospect, but did you consider any others while you were writing?
There was a lot of material, obviously, so the challenge is focus. But I guess I’ve been through this before, gathering material that’s ready for a book while working on one story, so I just needed to be judicious about it. In this case, I remember that this one came pretty naturally. I was on a tight deadline, because when the factory was moving, I needed to see that, obviously, and the magazine’s deadline was right after that. I made the trip down there, watched them move, and then I immediately flew back to Beijing and went to my place in the countryside and wrote it. But it was relatively easy to write because things had fallen into place and my structure was going to follow a linear narrative, so it was just a matter of whittling down the material and calling out the key themes I wanted the reader to understand.
I thought it was very important for people to understand the seat-of-the-pants aspect of China — this amazing resourcefulness, which can be a type of inefficiency. Everybody in that factory — from the bosses to the lowest worker — came from a farm. It’s really stunning in that it says a lot about what’s happening in China, all these people leaving the countryside. They have to recreate themselves, acquire new skills, and do things they’ve never done before. The other thing I wanted people to think about is all the energy that goes into these products that you’d never pay attention to — a little ring on a bra strap, something you’ll never think twice about.
Three tips for reporting an in-depth feature
1. Shoot low
Hessler knew he wouldn’t have access to a big factory like Nike so he found a smaller one.
2. Build trust
Hessler spent 100 days on the ground reporting, during which he spent hundreds of hours talking with the subjects of his story.
3. Let the story develop
“The fact that it developed organically helped a lot,” Hessler says.
Greg Lindsay is a frequent contributor to mediabistro.com.
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