【纽约客 20151010】情趣内衣方言
【中文标题】情趣内衣方言：中国商人和他们的全球化之路
【原文标题】Learning to Speak Lingerie
【登载媒体】纽约客
【原文作者】Peter Hessler
【原文链接】http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/10/learning-to-speak-lingerie
陈亚英和刘军（他们给自己起名字叫琪琪和约翰）在他们位于亚西乌特的女士内衣店，旁边是他们的埃及助理拉赫玛•麦德哈特。
亚西乌特这座城市坐落在上埃及的中心，是尼罗河沿岸一片新月形的地区，河西岸有一所大学、一座火车站和大约40万人口。还有三家中国人开的商店，向当地人出售色彩艳丽的女士内衣。这些商店并不难找。我第一次来亚西乌特时，在市中心叫来一辆出租车，问司机是否知道哪里可以找到中国人。他毫不犹豫地把车开到尼罗河滨海路，穿过一个又一个小巷，然后指着一个牌子让我看，上面用阿拉伯语写着“中国女士内衣”。另外两家商店“中国之星”和“诺玛中国”就在旁边一条街上。这三家店铺的店主都是来自中国东南部的浙江省人，他们出售的东西都差不多，大部分都是廉价、俗不可耐、没有实际用途的物品。这里有连体紧身衣、只遮住半边胸脯的女士睡衣、用羽毛作点缀的丁字裤，还有用塑料亮片装饰的透视上装。品牌有“女孩之笑”、“朦胧达克斯内衣”、“热恋意大利”和“性感时尚网眼诱惑”。
上埃及是这个国家最保守的地区。几乎所有的穆斯林女性都戴着头巾，身着罩袍的女性也并不罕见，也就是一个黑色的长袍遮挡住全身，只露出两只眼睛。在大部分的城镇里，我找不到可以交谈的游客，工业少得可怜，亚西乌特是埃及最贫穷的省份。除了少数叙利亚人偶尔在市场中出现，很难想象会有外国人在这里做生意。但是我却发现了一些中国内衣销售商散布在这个地区。在贝尼苏韦夫的一个叫做叙利亚集市的露天市场上，两个中国内衣卖家与几个叙利亚人攀谈起来，他们在寻找一些廉价的服装和小饰品。在南部城市明亚的一个商场中，有一个中国内衣专柜，入口处写着一句古兰经的诗句，警告人们不要嫉妒。在偏远的城镇麦莱维，一对中国夫妇在麦莱维博物馆废墟的对面销售拖鞋和睡衣。在中国人来这里之前的不久，这家博物馆被伊斯兰暴徒劫掠一空并焚毁。
在绵延300英里的一片狭长地带，共有24家中国内衣经销商：4个在索哈杰、12个在亚西乌特、2个在麦莱维、6个在明亚、3个在贝尼苏韦夫。我就像是在地图上标记大型猫科肉食动物的地盘：在尼罗河谷，中国内衣经销商基本上是每隔三十到五十英里就会出现，规模与当地的人口数量成正比。大城市开罗有数十家。商人董卫平在首都有一家内衣工厂，他告诉我，他在埃及有40多个亲戚，都在销售他的产品。其他中国人为多如牛毛的埃及人商店供货。对中国经销商来说，这是他们通往埃及的大门。他们的作息时间与内衣的生产和销售相吻合，晚起晚睡。他们不过春节，在斋月期间夜幕降临之后生意兴隆。冬季的销量好于夏季，母亲节简直就是内衣节。但什么也比不上情人节，所以今年的情人节我和妻子告别，开了4个小时的车来到亚西乌特，亲眼看到人们直到午夜还在中国之星商店抢购内衣。
中国之星就在伊本哈塔卜清真寺旁边，在晚祷告的钟声响起之前不久，一位族长来到这家商店。他又高又胖，脸庞粗壮、黝黑，穿着一件天蓝色的长袍，头上整齐地盘着头巾。跟在他后面的是两个穿着罩袍的女人。族长就站在门口，两个女人在货架和模特间不紧不慢地浏览货物，时不时拿起一件物品给他看。族长通过挥舞手臂的不同角度来发表他的意见。
情人节是一年中仅有的几个男人光顾中国之星的日子之一。通常情况下，只有女人会光顾这里，她们经常会购买一些廉价、合体的服装，中国经销商把这些东西叫做“随意”。上埃及地区的女人不会在公开场合穿这种衣服，但在家可以。这种服装之所以会盈利的原因就在这里：埃及女人通常需要两个衣橱，一个是公开场合的服装，另一个是居家生活的服装。有时候，她们还需要第三个衣橱，专门装那些性感的服装。穿着罩袍的两个女人很快选好了族长批准的几件商品：颜色搭配的人字拖和贴身、透明的女睡袍，一件红色、一件蓝色。
族长开始和陈亚英讨价还价。她和丈夫刘军在埃及给自己起名字叫琪琪和约翰，他们身材小巧，琪琪的身高只能到族长的胸部。她今年24岁，理论上不再是青少年了，她戴着一副方框架的眼镜，梳着一个马尾辫。“这是中国货，”他用口音浓重的阿拉伯语说，“质量好！”她把价格降到了160镑，相当于20美元多一点，但是族长只愿意支付150镑。
我不知道他和这两个穿罩袍的女人是什么关系。我们交谈时，他说他为宗教捐赠事务部工作，负责照看清真寺。当我提到情人节时，他并没有表现出不快——一些虔诚的穆斯林不愿意庆祝这个节日，但是我始终没有找到一个比较有技巧的方法了解那两个女人。在上埃及，直截了当地问男人有关他妻子的事情并不礼貌，尤其是当女人穿着罩袍。男人往往会解释，说罩袍的目的就是为了阻止别的男人有非分之想。但是在西方人看来，罩袍起到了相反的效果。由于缺乏最基础的信息——年龄、面目表情——我因此不由自主地用自己的想象来填补空缺。这两个女人是族长的妻子吗？在情人节这一天，会不会一个穿红色睡衣，另一个穿蓝色睡衣？
当晚祷的第二次钟声响起时，族长和琪琪还在为价格争执不休。他说：“我得走了，”把钱交给他，“我是族长，必须要祈祷。”但是琪琪用钱轻轻拍打他的手臂，坚定地说：“还有十镑。”族长的眼睛因遭遇挫折而睁得很大，他开始夸张地表示效忠麦加。他闭上眼睛，手臂摆出祈祷的姿势，就在内衣店里，他开始吟诵“Subhan’allah wal’hamdulillah……”
“好吧，好吧！”琪琪边说边跑开接待另外一位客人。族长离开时面露微笑，两个女人尾随着他。当天晚上，琪琪告诉我，她觉得其中一个女人是族长的母亲。在我看来，这个信息彻底改变了整个故事情节，但趣味不减。但是琪琪对后来的事情并不十分感兴趣，买卖做成了，她的任务就算完成了。
中国商家很少对他们的埃及顾客有任何猜想，即使是那些常客。琪琪说，有当地的女人每个月都来光顾两到三次，他们买了一百多套睡袍和短衬裤，中国之星因此每两个月都要改变一次库存。当我问他们这种需求的原因是什么，他们一般会说埃及男人喜欢性生活，而且公开场合的限制太多。亚西乌特的一位店主陈焕泰说：“从来没有机会公开展示自己漂亮的一面，心理上会受到影响。她们在外面不得不穿那么多衣服，所以在家的时候就需要这些衣服来展示自己漂亮的一面。”
但是总体来说，中国的店主们对这个话题不感兴趣。他们当中很少有人受过正规教育，而且并不把自己当作文化交流的媒介。在宗教问题上，他们是彻底的不可知论者：他们似乎没有任何先入为主或者后天习得的态度，他们对于信仰的评价完全取决于个人经历。一位中国商人曾经问我：“带十字架的那些人，是穆斯林吗？”他已经在明亚生活了4年，这里曾经爆发过激烈的宗教冲突，几座科普特基督教堂被武装暴徒用燃烧弹焚毁。在一次谈话中，我发现他以为戴头巾的女人和戴面纱的女人信奉不同的宗教。他有自己的道理，不同的服装和不同的行为是可以被观察到的，所以他以此得出信仰不同的结论，一个巨大的“伊斯兰”标签对他没有任何意义。总体来说，与基督教徒相比，中国商人更喜欢穆斯林。部分原因在于穆斯林是比较忠实的内衣消费者，还因为他们不大计较价格。科普特基督教徒是在财务上相当精明的少数人，他们讨价还价时毫不留情。这就是中国商人最关心的问题，对他们来说，宗教只是划分消费者人群的一个标准。
起初，我一直搞不懂这些内衣商人对于身边的文化大环境一无所知，怎么能把生意做好。我遇到中国人的一个最贫困的地区是麦莱维，一位名叫叶达的店主邀请我去他简陋的公寓中吃午饭，结果发现他在肉铺买到的是骆驼肉。他和妻子搬到麦莱维，是在这座城市经历了上埃及历史上最暴力的政治动乱之后不久，2013年8月，暴乱导致18人死亡。这对夫妇的家中只有一本书，是中文的《你是自己最好的医生》。他们几乎不会说一点点的阿拉伯语和英语，家里没有中阿词典、日常会话手册，也没有语言课本——实际上，我在所有内衣店主的家中都没有发现这些东西。阿拉伯语和中文不同，男女的发音有不同的腔调。中国店主的语言学习全靠耳朵，往往是捡起女顾客的只言片语。我开始把这种语言当作是一种内衣方言，中国男人操着一口女性阿拉伯语，往往会让人放松警惕。
在内衣方言中，重要的一句话是“这件衣服有大号”，中国店主经常说这句话。埃及人普遍体格魁梧、喜欢幽默、富有魅力，就像在中国之星店里的族长。与此相比，体格娇小、态度严肃的中国人总是处于公众的焦点以外。这种差异造就了一个完美的内衣交易场所。中国店主是小个子、一无所知、漠不关心——这些特点让埃及顾客感到放松。
这些商店经常会雇用当地的年轻女孩做销售助理，她们和老板几乎没有任何交流。尽管如此，这些女孩对于中国人表现出无限的忠诚。在上埃及，女人外出工作并不常见，而且这些女孩并没有什么叛逆的表现。在中国之星，琪琪和约翰雇用了一个18岁的埃及女孩拉赫玛•麦德哈特。她戴着头巾，但是两只手上都有纹身，其中一个是骷髅头和交叉的骨头。这是一个科普特教堂的作品。在埃及，基督教徒有在右手和手腕上刺青十字架的传统，教堂也往往是城市中唯一配备刺青设备的地方。作为一个穆斯林，纹身明显是骇人听闻的行为，拉赫玛用带有些许满足的语气这样告诉我，说他的父母极为愤怒。他们反对她在内衣店工作，她的前任女助理也是因为家庭问题才离开。约翰告诉我，他一直搞不懂发生了什么事情，但曾经注意到女孩的面部和胳膊上的瘀伤。有一天，他的父亲来到店里，就在中国之星门前的人行道上殴打女儿。
但是，大部分助理出来打工的原因都是她们糟糕的经济状况。在明亚的中国内衣专柜，一个名叫拉莎•阿卜杜勒•拉赫曼的27岁女孩告诉我，她在十年前就开始外出打工。她的母亲已经去世，父亲在一次车祸中残废。拉莎有4个妹妹，她挣来的钱已经让3个妹妹结婚。以前，她为另外一个中国商人打工，她说她决不会为埃及人工作。在她看来，中国人直率、坦诚，而且她期望有一个脱离当地人闲言碎语的环境。她说：“她们会保守秘密。”
拉莎通过翻译继续对我说，当地男人销售内衣永远比不上中国男人的效率。“我不知道该怎么描述，但是他们可以直截了当地把衣服交到女人手里，就这么简单。埃及男人看着那件衣服，再看看女人，或许会说几句笑话，或者嘲弄几句。”在谈到前任中国老板时，拉莎满怀深情：“做生意时他们毫无杂念。当你买东西的时候，可以感受到店家的思想，但是中国人的头脑里不会浮现出女人的身体。”
内衣方言中最重要的一个词是“阿如萨”，也就是“新娘”。中国人把这个词读成“阿鲁萨”，它的使用频率非常高。在开罗的很多住宅区，有中国人挨家挨户地推销服装和内衣，他们大声说“阿鲁萨！阿鲁萨！”在中国人的商店里，店主对所有潜在的客户都这么称呼。在当地人听来，既有讨好的意味，也有一些滑稽：“漂亮的新良！看看这个，新良！需要点什么，新良？”
情人节那一天，族长离开之后不久，中国之星迎来了真正的一位新娘。她19岁，婚礼安排在下半年。陪新娘一起来的是她的未婚夫、她的母亲和16岁的弟弟。琪琪开始把商品从货架上陆续拿下来，她拿出一个盒子，说：“新良，喜欢这个吗？”盒子上的标签写着“女士长袜春天蝴蝶”。新娘首先研究了一下长袜，然后交给未婚夫，之后交给母亲，最后传到弟弟手里。盒子前后有两张图片，是看起来像是斯拉夫的模特，穿着高跟鞋站在摆满皮质书籍的一个书架前。模特从头到脚裹在带有蕾丝花边的紧身衣里，穿着丁字裤，脸上一副空洞的表情。弟弟花了很长时间研究那个盒子，然后把它放到批准购买的那一堆商品中。
在埃及的婚礼中，新郎需要购买一套房子，并配备家具。新娘需要准备一些小电器、厨房用品和衣服，包括内衣。内衣市场自2009年与中国达成一项贸易协定之后蓬勃发展，服装类商品的进口更加方便，内衣店在埃及的各个城市如雨后春笋般出现。作为开罗最大的经销商之一，董卫平告诉我，他每年进口十个集装箱的女士内衣，再加上他在埃及本地工厂的产品。在中国之星，新娘和她的家人花了一个多小时，挑选了25件睡袍套装、10条内裤、10件胸罩和一支长袜。母亲支付了360美元，她告诉我，在婚礼之前他们还会采购两到三次。当琪琪拿出一件透明上装和一条丁字裤的时候，她说：“这个怎么样？”一行人情不自禁地欢呼起来。未婚夫说：“W’allahy, laziz！真主啊，太漂亮了！”他是亚西乌特的一名律师，新娘在大学学习法律。她的言语得体、年轻漂亮，但穿着一条没有线条的牛仔裤和深绿色的外套，头巾用传统的方式紧贴着他的脸颊。
让我印象深刻的是，作为一个传统、守旧的中产阶级家庭，他们对这次购物之旅没有丝毫的不适之感。弥漫在商店里的是单纯和愉悦的气氛，新娘没有表现出一点点的尴尬情绪。我敢肯定，即使是最自信的美国女人，如果让她和自己的未婚夫、母亲、弟弟一起在内衣店购物，也无法逃脱窘迫和尴尬，更不用提还要面对两个中国店主、他们的埃及助理和一个外国记者。但是我在上埃及的其它商店里也看到过类似的场景。新娘身边总是围绕着家人和朋友，这种购物仪式在人们的头脑中似乎与性完全没有关系。
有关新娘需要观众的这个问题，还有一些事情值得一提。中国的店主有时候告诉我，埃及女人之所以买这些东西，是因为他们在晚上会给丈夫跳舞。这个理论在我看来，多半是受电影中那些肚皮舞场景的影响，而不是真实的状况。但是从比喻层面上来看，说不定也的确如此。每当我看到新娘和家人、朋友在内衣店购物时，我都有一种感觉，这个女人即将陈列给众人，她是在为未来的角色做准备。在中国之星，我问那位母亲，她的女儿在结婚之后是否会做一名律师。她说：“当然不会，她会待在家里。”语气里有掩饰不住的自豪感，我经常会听到埃及男人用同样的语气讲述自己的家庭主妇。在埃及的阿拉伯语中，“阿如萨”的另一个含义是“娃娃”，就是孩子们穿衣打扮的玩具。
在亚西乌特，中国社区的开拓者是琪琪的父母——林宪飞和陈才敏。林生长在浙江省的一个农民家庭，贫困迫使他读完五年级之后辍学。上世纪九十年代，他在北京做小本服装生意挣了一点钱。2001年，他听说家乡的一些人到埃及去赚钱。于是他研究了地图之后，决定到亚西乌特落脚，因为他认为那是上埃及地区人口最多的城市。（实际上，卢克索是更大的一座城市。）
林告诉我：“我知道这里只有我一个中国人，所以机会更多。”他在亚西乌特的一个露天市场摆了一个小摊，刚开始的时候出售他用行李箱带来的三种商品：领带、珠子和内衣。他不在乎埃及人是否真的需要这些东西，唯一在意的是商品的尺寸。“行李箱很容易就能装下这些东西。”
林很快发现，亚西乌特的人对珠子不感兴趣，他们也不会在长袍外面系领带，但是他们喜欢女士内衣。于是他开始专营内衣，很快，他的妻子从中国赶来帮忙。在开罗和埃及北部，中国的女士内衣进口商和生产商网络迅速扩张，林和陈最终在亚西乌特租下一间店铺。他们请来亲戚和朋友，在当地又开了两家商店。当林和陈在拓展他们小小的内衣帝国的同时，他们发现亚西乌特的街道上露天堆满了垃圾。他们当然不是最早发现这个现象的人，但是他们最早做出了反应。他们进口了一台聚苯二甲酸瓶体清洗流水线，这台由浙江省出产的设备可以把塑料瓶研磨成颗粒状，在高温环境中清洗并烘干，最终形成可回收利用的原材料。
林说：“我看到瓶子到处都是，所以决定回收它们赚钱。”他和妻子没有任何经验，但是到了2007年，它们在上埃及建立了第一个塑料瓶回收加工厂。工厂位于亚西乌特以西荒芜地带的一小片工业区中，目前雇用了30名工人，每天可以研磨4吨塑料制品。林和陈把处理过的原材料卖给开罗的中国人，制成纱线，再转卖给埃及的制衣厂，其中也有很多中国人。所以，丢在亚西乌特路边的瓶子经过三批中国人的加工和转手之后，有可能会以内衣的形式回到城市里，依然由中国人卖给当地人。
林告诉我，工厂每年的盈利在5万美元到20万美元之间。他的成功吸引了亚西乌特的一个埃及商人，他窃取了林的一些技术，今年年初也开设了一家加工厂。尽管如此，林和陈的生意依然兴隆，但是他们依然住在工厂楼上的小公寓中，整天伴随着机器的轰鸣声。林今年五十岁出头，但看起来像六十多岁的人，疲惫的眼神和时常闹毛病的胃都是生意人过多的社交饮酒和大鱼大肉的后遗症。他很少提到对当地文化的看法，但是有一次，当我无意间提到他认为埃及这个国家最大的问题是什么，他强有力的回答出乎我的意料之外。
“男女不平等，”他毫不迟疑地说，“这里的女人只会待在家里睡觉，如果埃及想要发展，必须先解决这个问题。中国在革命之后就是这样做的。这是对人才的浪费。看看我的家庭，你可以看到我的妻子是怎么工作的，没有她，就不会有这家工厂。我的女儿在经营商店。如果我们是埃及人，根本不会这么做。”
几个月之后，我再次来到亚西乌特。工厂里只有陈在，她的丈夫回中国去看胃病了。一天下午，工厂门口来个两个附近村子的年轻人，开着一辆卡车，上面用巨型麻袋装满了塑料瓶子。其中一个人叫奥马尔，他告诉我，他在5年前，12岁时开始捡拾废品，就是因为中国人开了这家工厂。现在他与一位卡车司机搭档运送塑料垃圾，还让当地的孩子帮助他们收集废品。奥马尔说他一般每天可以挣至少100镑——差不多13美元，相当于当地体力劳动者平均收入的一倍。
我们正在交谈，陈冲出工厂大门。她穿着一个印花的围裙，上面印着“好伙伴”，脸上全是愤怒的表情，“瓶子里为什么有水？”她喊到。她把几个一升装的瓶子丢向奥马尔和他的伙伴，两个人躲在卡车后面。“坏蛋！”她用结结巴巴的阿拉伯语喊到，“阿里巴巴，你，阿里巴巴！我很生气，生气，生气！不干净，不干净！”
陈在麻袋的底部发现了几个装满水的瓶子——奥马尔似乎是想以此来吃重量。他继续喊叫——你，阿里巴巴！——我终于明白她指的是《天方夜谭》中的四十大盗。我在埃及从未听到有人以这种方式使用“阿里巴巴”，但这或许是陈的回收业方言。奥马尔躲得远远的，直到她怒气冲冲地回到大门里。
“真主保佑，我希望有辆汽车撞死她！”奥马尔说，“她有一次还向我们丢砖头。”
工厂的领班穆罕默德•阿卜杜勒•拉希姆说，奥马尔把装水的瓶子藏在麻袋里，活该被丢砖头。
“不是我干的！”奥马尔说，“是那些孩子们干的，就是拣瓶子的那些孩子。”
穆罕默德对我说：“他做了什么自己心里清楚。”他说麻袋里不可避免地会掺入乱七八糟的东西，陈和林也一定会发现。过了一会，陈穿着“好伙伴”围裙又走出来，又是一连串的阿里巴巴诅咒，然后坐下来与两个人激烈争论每公斤瓶子的价格。最后算出来，一卡车瓶子的价格是801镑，相当于100美元多一点。奥马尔和他的同伴坚持要求一镑也不能少，陈把一枚硬币丢在桌子上，就像打出一张麻将牌。年轻人查看了一下手里的纸币，认为有一张50镑的纸币破损太过严重，不能接受。
“穆斯林钱！”陈说，但还是给他们换了一张纸币。两个年轻人一出门，她的怒气立即烟消云散了，在工厂里，她似乎也学到了埃及人演戏的本领。她把头发盘成发髻，露出一张农民式的、宽阔、饱经风霜的脸，还有一副内敛、谦逊的表情。有一次，我说她来到亚西乌特这样的地方非常勇敢。她不愿接受我的赞扬，说她只是无知。“我不识字，我会写自己的名字，但是字很难看。我没有上过学，一天也没去过。”
到了星期五，工厂关门休息，陈和林开车到亚西乌特与琪琪和约翰共度周末，他们已经有了一个两岁大的女儿。有一次，孩子的眼皮突然发生了严重的浮肿，当时我正在城里，约翰请我陪他们到附近的医院，帮忙做翻译。医生的诊断结果是感染，或许是由于卫生条件不好引起的。约翰说，这是她女儿出生后第一次来医院看病。这家人似乎没有一个对亚西乌特的生活条件有畏惧感，而且他们并不认为自己是成功者。陈和林经常说他们的工厂只是个小作坊。但是，每次当我来到这里，都会不自禁地想到：在埃及这个2500万人口的大城市里，在这个西方持续几十年不断派出援助工人、倾入大量援助资金的地方，南部第一个塑料品回收中心解决了30个人的就业问题，大幅度减少了垃圾存量，而且利润可观。那么它的建立者怎么会是两个本想做内衣生意的中国移民，而且一个是文盲，另一个只读过5年书？
我在埃及从未遇到过试图改变这个国家的中国人。他们总是谈论自己发现的一些缺陷——人民好逸恶劳、政府制度混乱——但谈论的方式与很多西方人截然不同。其中带有沮丧的意味，中国人似乎认为事情就是这个样子了。他们并没有愧疚之感，因为中国从未在这个地区有殖民的经历，而且他们的政府与以色列和巴勒斯坦都有交情。中国业主经常满心欢喜地说起埃及人的友好和愿意对陌生人施以援手的性格，他们认为自己国家的人最缺少这两种品质。他们似乎从未表示过对埃及革命的失望，并不是因为他们相信阿拉伯春天会带来一个更好的埃及，而是因为他们对此根本不屑一顾。
2012年，穆罕默德•穆尔西在革命之后被选为总统，他第一个出访的国家就是中国。第二年，他在军事政变中被赶下台，继任者阿卜杜勒•法塔赫•塞西也很快出访中国。也就是说，埃及的内部剧变并未让中国政府感到不安。一天晚上在开罗，我遇到了另外一个亚洲国家的一位外交官，我向她讲述了我在上埃及遇到的中国内衣经销商的故事。她说，他们的行为和见解在她看来就是外交官的行为和见解。“只要人们喜欢的东西，中国人都会出售，”她说，“他们不提任何问题，不关心你怎么使用买来的东西。他们不会问埃及是否要举行大选，是否在压迫人民，是否把记者丢进监狱。他们根本不关心。”她继续说：“美国人会想，如果所有人都像我一样，他们就不会攻击我。中国人不这么想，他们不会试图把世界变成自己的模样。他们的策略就是建立经济纽带关系，如果这个关系被破坏，你和我都会遭受严重的损失。”
中国在过去的二十年里与非洲形成了这样的关系。霍华德•弗朗兹在2014年出版的书《中国的第二片大陆》中说，有超过100万中国人在非洲生活，中国与非洲的贸易额是美国与非洲贸易额的一倍还要多。弗朗兹观察到，中国在非洲的很多地方实际上就是在步殖民者的后尘，榨取资源的行为引起了当地政府的不满。但是在埃及，情况完全不一样。这个国家并没有中国所需要的那些自然资源。去年，埃及到中国的出口额仅相当于埃及进口中国商品总额的十分之一，这个差距还在不断拉大。直接投资额乏善可陈，中国在埃及的外国投资排名中位列第20，在这个国家居住的中国人大约也就1万人。尽管如此，埃及在中东扮演着举足轻重的政治角色，而中国石油进口量的一半来自这个地区，中国与欧洲的大部分贸易商品都要经过苏伊士运河。而且，大约2000名中国学生在埃及的大学读书，大部分是穆斯林。中国政府担心这些学生受到宗教极端思想的影响，这也是他们认为必须保证埃及的繁荣和稳定的另外一个原因。
所以，中国对埃及采取的策略不仅仅是简单的经济纽带关系，而是有严密逻辑和原则性的策略。中国正在试图把开罗大使馆的面积扩大一倍，美国的中东政策的失败让中国官员意识到这是提升自身可见度的机会。但是对价值观和使命感的抽象定义似乎并未直接让中国政府受益。那位亚洲的外交官告诉我：“坦率地说，我觉得中国人自己也不知道他们遵循的是什么样的意识形态。”即使中国有一些可以传播的价值理念，他们也缺少像日本和韩国那样的软实力，这两个国家的行事方式与西方政府更加类似。中国人在开罗开设了一家孔子学院，本意是推广中国的语言和文化，但是规模很小，埃及宗教当局有意抵制这样的行为。
由于没有明确的战略，中国只好求助于邓小平所提倡的本能思维：不知道该怎么办，建工厂。在一个叫做埃因苏赫奈泉的不毛之地——这里距离红海与苏伊士运河的交界处不远——一家中国国有企业泰达建立了中埃苏伊士经济贸易合作区。口号是“合作让世界更美好”，它覆盖六平方公里未开发的处女地，宽阔的街道把这里分割成标准的网格状。周围是一片沙漠，距离最近的城市苏伊士有一个小时的车程，但是道路的名称有天津路、重庆路和上海路。工人的宿舍已经建成，旁边的场地堆放着空空如也的集装箱，箱体明亮的颜色在沙漠的几英里之外都可以看到，就像是乐高积木融化在烈日下。这里有一家中国餐厅、一家中国商店和一家中国理发馆。中国人似乎对发型有苛刻的要求，不管哪里有中国移民聚集，即使在靠近红海的沙漠中，也必须要有一个理发馆。
泰达贸易合作区看起来就像是在中国无数小城市中出现的开发区的翻版，这样的移植行为在全世界各地开花。今年早些时候，政府宣布计划在50个国家建立118个经济开发区。中国人希望鼓励本土企业走出国门，部分原因是为了应对国内自然资源的日益稀缺问题。泰达贸易合作区可以为入驻企业提供房租津贴和基础设施，目前已经有50家企业入驻，大部分是中国小型企业，包括几个前内衣经销商开办的公司。但是几乎所有与我交谈过的中国企业老板都在抱怨同一个问题：他们找不到好的工人，尤其是好的女工人。
徐欣开办了一家手机工厂，他直言不讳地告诉我：“我不能用男工人。”他在中国摩托罗拉公司工作多年，之后来到埃及，希望为本地市场生产廉价的移动通讯设备。“这个工作需要严格的纪律性，”他说，“一部手机有一百多个部件，只要出现一点错误，整部设备就不能使用。埃及的男人太毛躁，他们喜欢跑来跑去，不能集中精神。”他本想聘请女工人，但是很快发现他只能找到未婚的女性。离职率非常高，大部分工人在订婚或者结婚之后就会离职。更糟糕的是，徐发现年轻的埃及女人不能住在宿舍里，因为晚上不和父母在一起被认为是不正当的行为。女员工必须每天坐车进出苏伊士，要花费三个多小时。徐无法在流水线上安排多个班次，一年之后，他关闭了这个企业。
其他人也在为同样的问题纠结。我遇到了王卫强，他在中国东部有一个庞大的企业，生产沙特人和海湾地区的阿拉伯人使用的头巾。十多年之后，王决定把生产线转移到埃及。“我有质量非常好的埃及棉布，”他说，“我有现代化的机器，这个工厂的投资超过一百万美元。但是这两年以来，我损失了很多。问题在于劳动力，也就是工人的想法。我的工厂需要每天24小时运作，不仅仅是一个班次。在埃及，我不得不雇用男性工人，但是他们真的很懒。”他继续说：“现在，90％的男性应聘者都会被我拒绝，我只使用女工。她们是非常好的工人，但问题是她们只能在白天工作。”他计划引进更先进的设备，期望在短短的白天时间加大产量。“这个问题真让我发疯。”他说。
二十多年前，中国经济刚开始发展的时候，企业老板喜欢雇用年轻女工是因为她们对薪资要求比较低，相比于男人，更容易管理。但是，在一个传统上女性处于受支配地位的社会中，女人很快变得非常积极，经过多年的发展，她们的角色和声望发生了巨大的变化。如今，虽然在上层阶级依然存在着巨大的性别差异——中国企业高级管理层和重要的政府机构中，女性占比依然很低，但是职业女性的经济影响力非常强大。你经常会遇到中国的农村人说他们更想要女儿，这在以往是非常罕见的。
埃及也同样存在这种可以激励女人比男人更加努力工作的不平等现象，但是这里的传统观念更加根深蒂固。2013年12月，泰达宣布开发区的面积将会增加一倍，但很难想象谁来把这里填满，目前只有六分之一的企业入驻。缺少了中国工厂周边昼夜不停的机器噪音，整个地区显得了无生气。到了晚上更是一片死寂，没有夜班机器的轰鸣声，没有成群结队穿着工装的中国工人说笑声。在工业园的路边，空旷的街道上堆着沙子。在一条路上，我一共发现了232盏坏掉的路灯。无论是在古代还是现代，埃及的沙漠中都出现了宏伟、令人不可思议大型建筑项目，而泰达是其中最奇怪的一个：撒哈拉沙漠中一座遗失的中国工厂，法老之梦因女人不能离家而破碎。
在埃因苏赫奈泉，我认识了一个年轻的工厂老板，他叫武志成，为埃及市场生产廉价的塑料餐具。他雇用了大约20名女工在流水线上工作，工人的离职率很高——通常，女工只工作了一两个月就会订婚，或者结婚。以前，武在中国管理工厂的运作。他看到很多年轻的中国女人外出打工，都是抱着一种离开家庭和村庄的模糊的目的。在迈出第一步之后，她们融入了工厂和宿舍的新环境，她们的想法慢慢成熟起来，变成追求个人的独立和成功。但是武说，埃及女工的出发点不一样：“她们并不想逃离什么，工作仅仅是为了挣钱。”
武的工厂中的很多工人都在为购买类似内衣这样的物品，或者为了结婚而专门攒钱。在流水线上操作塑料冲压机的24岁女孩索阿德•阿卜杜勒•哈米德说：“我今年就要结婚了，但是似乎婚期要推迟，因为我还没有买够东西。”她说，如果某人采购的东西不完整，婚姻往往会被推迟，甚至取消。她打算在结婚之后辞掉工作，与我交谈过的所有人都这样想。只有两个例外。
即使那两个例外，也不能说是传统价值观的挑战者。其中一个是五十多岁的女人法蒂玛•穆罕默德，她是工厂里唯一一个已婚的女人。她告诉我，多年来她一直想要离婚，但是他的丈夫不同意，说离婚之后不会给她生活费。2000年之后，埃及女人有权提出离婚的主张，但是法蒂玛决定不这么做。她说：“我的兄弟们说，还是别离婚了，因为我们的传统认为这不是一件好事。我们是上埃及人，思想太封闭。”法蒂玛只有一个工友认为女人结婚之后还应当继续工作，是个名叫艾思玛的女孩。从前，她有一份更好的工作，在距离苏伊士的家比较近的一个工厂里负责整理产品清单，她的未婚夫也在那里工作。后来他们分手了，艾思玛的父亲强迫她辞掉这份工作，因为一个年轻女孩与前未婚夫在一起工作是不恰当的行为。她说：“在埃及，如果父母下了命令，你最好要遵从。”所以，她现在不得不每天坐4个小时的汽车，去做一份薪水更低、前景不大明朗的工作。
武对于埃及女性工人的结论很简单——只要她们依然缺少逃离家庭的动力，那么她们就不大可能彻底改变自己的命运。对于埃及这个国家，他也有类似的看法：“如果他们不推翻穆巴拉克，日子或许还会好过一点。”我经常从中国企业家那里听到类似的评论，在西方人看来，这样的说法似乎是没有道义感的，因为外部世界普遍希望看到埃及发生变革。
但是从某种程度上说，中国人或许更加聪明，因为他们从埃及这个国家的自身情况出发看待问题，而不是期望它会变成什么样子。在2011年革命期间，西方人都相信他们正在目睹一场强大的、自下而上的社会运动，但是在埃及的中国人看到的是一个弱小国家的崩溃。对于中国的企业家来说，他们的社交范围都是带有极强地方色彩的务实群体，他们对于国家政治运动和宗教倾向不感兴趣。他们从不讨论政治和穆斯林兄弟会，而往往是女性社会地位的话题，因为这个问题深刻影响到了埃及各个层面所发生的现象。一些中国人，比如内衣经销商，在性别问题上找到了精明的牟利模式，而另一些企业家苦苦挣扎的原因是他们在没有考虑到埃及社会基本特点的情况下草草建厂。在中国人看来，埃及的根本问题不是政治，也不是宗教和军事，而是家庭。丈夫、妻子、父母和孩子：在埃及，这些关系并未因阿拉伯春天而改变。在这一方面没有突破，讨论一场革命完全没有意义。
去年年底，中国人突然决定在开发区建造四座主题公园。在国际钻井材料制造有限公司的马路对面，泰达建造了一个所谓的恐龙世界。里面有大型电动生物模型，比如暴龙和异龙，但是史前世界的主题中也掺杂了不少年代错乱的东西：海盗船、太空飞船和空中吊椅，上面还有青蛙图案的装饰。开发区的几位企业家告诉我，他们怀疑中国的娱乐产业试图采取这种方式来消化过剩的产能。泰达公司里没有人愿意接受我的采访，但是有一位员工说，公司希望以此来引起公众的关注，这样可以吸引更多的工人。“这样，人们就会来公园玩，到了这里他们就会了解这个开发区。”他略显一厢情愿地说。
三月的最后一个周末，泰达邀请开发区的所有人免费体验游乐园里的设施。那是一个燥热、多风的天气，空气中的沙尘让人们无法接近建在只有一半工人入住的宿舍楼对面的水上世界。另外两个主题公园是糖果世界和汽车世界，那里的卡丁车和碰碰车极受公司老板们的欢迎。生产塑料餐具的武志成来了，为沙特人生产头巾的王卫强也来了，还有原来销售内衣，现在制造棉线的张炳华。泰达公司的十几位高管也出现在现场，他们身着黑色西装，把膝盖挤进儿童尺寸的玩具车里。这些干部大多来自天津。中国人在碰碰车里互相撞击，在卡丁车里呼啸而过，然后排队再来一次。汽车世界的内部整修似乎很成功，没有人看出这座两层楼的建筑物原来是一家因为缺少女性工人而倒闭的手机厂。马路对面，所有的电子恐龙都活了。它们张开巨口，用微型扬声器发出它们的嘶吼，肢体机械地移动，似乎为突然发现自己出现在沙漠中央而感到震惊。
原文：
The city of Asyut sits in the heart of Upper Egypt, at a crescent-shaped bend in the Nile River, where the western bank is home to a university, a train station, approximately four hundred thousand people, and three shops in which Chinese migrants sell racy lingerie to locals. These shops are not hard to find. The first time I visited Asyut, I hailed a cab at the entrance of the city and asked the driver if he knew of any Chinese people in town. Without hesitation, he drove along the Nile Corniche, turned through a series of alleyways, and pointed to a sign that said, in Arabic, “Chinese Lingerie.” The two other shops, China Star and Noma China, are less than a block away. All three are owned by natives of Zhejiang province, in southeastern China, and they sell similar products, many of which are inexpensive, garishly colored, and profoundly impractical. There are buttless body stockings, and nightgowns that cover only one breast, and G-strings accessorized with feathers. There are see-through tops decorated with plastic gold coins that dangle from chains. Brand names include Laugh Girl, Shady Tex Lingerie, Hot Love Italy Design, and Sexy Fashion Reticulation Alluring.
Upper Egypt is the most conservative part of the country. Virtually all Muslim women there wear the head scarf, and it’s not uncommon for them to dress in the niqab, the black garment that covers everything but the eyes. In most towns, there’s no tourism to speak of, and very little industry; Asyut is the poorest governorate in Egypt. Apart from small groups of Syrians who occasionally pass through in travelling market fairs, it’s all but unimaginable for a foreigner to do business there. And yet I found Chinese lingerie dealers scattered throughout the region. In Beni Suef, at an open-air market called the Syrian Fair, two Chinese underwear salesmen had somehow embedded with the Syrians who were hawking cheap clothes and trinkets. Minya, the next city to the south, had a Chinese Lingerie Corner in a mall whose entrance featured a Koranic verse that warned against jealousy. In the remote town of Mallawi, a Chinese husband and wife were selling thongs and nightgowns across the street from the ruins of the Mallawi Museum, which, not long before the Chinese arrived, had been looted and set afire by a mob of Islamists.
All told, along a three-hundred-mile stretch, I found twenty-six Chinese lingerie dealers: four in Sohag, twelve in Asyut, two in Mallawi, six in Minya, and two in Beni Suef. It was like mapping the territory of large predator cats: in the Nile Valley, clusters of Chinese lingerie dealers tend to appear at intervals of thirty to fifty miles, and the size of each cluster varies according to the local population. Cairo is big enough to support dozens. Dong Weiping, a businessman who owns a lingerie factory in the capital, told me that he has more than forty relatives in Egypt, all of them selling his products. Other Chinese people supply the countless underwear shops that are run by Egyptians. For the Chinese dealers, this is their window into Egypt, and they live on lingerie time. Days start late, and nights run long; they ignore the Spring Festival and sell briskly after sundown during Ramadan. Winter is better than summer. Mother’s Day is made for lingerie. But nothing compares with Valentine’s Day, so this year I celebrated the holiday by saying goodbye to my wife, driving four hours to Asyut, and watching people buy underwear at the China Star shop until almost midnight.
China Star is situated next to the Ibn al-Khattab Mosque, and not long before the first call sounded for sunset prayer a sheikh arrived at the shop. He was tall and fat, with strong, dark features, and he wore a brilliant blue galabiya, a carefully wrapped turban, and a pair of heavy silk scarves. He was followed by two large women in niqabs. The sheikh planted himself at the entrance of the shop while the women searched purposefully through the racks and the rows of mannequins. Periodically, one of them would hold up an item, and the sheikh would register his opinion with a wave of his hand.
Valentine’s Day is one of the few times of the year when most China Star customers are male. Usually, it’s only women in the shop, and often they buy the lightweight, form-fitting dresses that Chinese dealers refer to as suiyi, or “casual clothes.” No Upper Egyptian woman would wear such garments in public, but it’s acceptable at home. This is one reason that the market for clothing is so profitable: Egyptian women need two separate wardrobes, for their public and their private lives. Usually, they also acquire a third line of clothing, which is designed to be sexy. The two women in niqabs quickly found two items that the sheikh approved of: matching sets of thongs and skimpy, transparent nightgowns, one in red and the other in blue.
The sheikh began to bargain with Chen Yaying, who runs the shop with her husband, Liu Jun. In Egypt, they go by the names Kiki and John, and both are tiny—Kiki barely reached the sheikh’s chest. She’s twenty-four years old but could pass for a bookish teen-ager; she wears rectangular glasses and a loose ponytail. “This is Chinese!” she said, in heavily accented Arabic, holding up the garments. “Good quality!” She dropped the total price to a hundred and sixty pounds, a little more than twenty dollars, but the sheikh offered one-fifty.
It was still unclear what his relationship was with the two women in niqabs. When we chatted, he said that he monitors mosques for the Ministry of Religious Endowments. He wasn’t bothered when I mentioned Valentine’s Day—some devout Muslims believe that the holiday should not be celebrated. But I couldn’t find a tactful way to learn more about the women. In Upper Egypt, it’s not appropriate to ask a man too directly about his wife, especially if she’s wearing a niqab. Whenever I’ve got to know a man whose wife wears the garment, he usually explains that it’s supposed to prevent other men from thinking about her. For a Westerner, though, it often has the opposite effect. I can’t pick up basic information—how old somebody is, what expression she has on her face—and inevitably my imagination starts to fill in the gaps. Were both these women the sheikh’s wives? Was one to be dressed in red, and the other in blue, for Valentine’s Day?
The sheikh and Kiki were still separated by ten pounds when the second call to prayer sounded. “I have to go,” he said, and handed Kiki his money. “I’m a sheikh! I have to pray.” But Kiki slapped him lightly on the arm with the cash. “Ten more!” she said sternly. The sheikh’s eyes widened in mock surprise, and then, with a flourish, he turned to face Mecca, closed his eyes, and held out his hands in the posture of prayer. Standing in the middle of the lingerie shop, he began to recite, “Subhan’allah wal’hamdulillah . . .”
“Fine, fine!” Kiki said, and rushed off to deal with other customers. The sheikh smiled as he left, the women trailing behind him. Later in the evening, Kiki told me that she thought one of the women was the sheikh’s mother. From my perspective, this changed the narrative significantly but didn’t make it any less interesting. Kiki, though, had nothing more to say about it: as far as she was concerned, the story had ended the moment the sale was made.
Chinese dealers rarely speculate about their Egyptian customers, even the ones they see frequently. Kiki told me that some local women visit two or three times a month, and they acquire more than a hundred sets of the nightgowns and panties, so China Star changes its stock every two months. When I pressed the Chinese to analyze the demand, they often said that it’s because Egyptian men like sex, and because there are so many restrictions on public attire. “If you never have a chance to look nice, it’s hard on you, psychologically,” Chen Huantai, another dealer in Asyut, told me. “And they have to wear so many clothes when they’re outside, so they have these other things to look prettier at home.”
But on the whole this subject doesn’t interest Chinese dealers. Few of them are well educated, and they don’t perceive themselves as being engaged in a cultural exchange. On issues of religion, they are truly agnostic: they seem to have no preconceptions or received ideas, and they evaluate any faith strictly on the basis of direct personal experience. “The ones with the crosses—are they Muslim?” one Chinese dealer asked me. He had been living for four years in Minya, a town with sectarian strife so serious that several Coptic Christian churches had been damaged by mobs armed with Molotov cocktails. During one of our conversations, I realized that he was under the impression that women who wear head scarves are adherents of a different religion from that of those who wear the niqab. It was logical: he noticed contrasts in dress and behavior, and so he assumed that they believe in different things; a monolithic label like “Islam” meant nothing to him. In general, Chinese dealers prefer Egyptian Muslims to Christians. This is partly because Muslims are more faithful consumers of lingerie, but it’s also because they’re easier to negotiate with. The Copts are a financially successful minority, and they have a reputation for bargaining aggressively. This is what matters most to Chinese dealers—for them, religion is essentially another business proposition.
Initially, I wondered how the lingerie dealers can succeed despite having so little curiosity about their larger cultural environment. The poorest place in which I found any Chinese was Mallawi, where a dealer named Ye Da invited me to his decrepit apartment for lunch, only to discover that he had bought camel meat by mistake at the butcher’s. He and his wife had moved to Mallawi shortly after it experienced some of the worst political violence in Upper Egypt, in August, 2013, when riots resulted in eighteen deaths. The couple’s home contained a single book, which was subtitled, in Chinese, “You Are Your Own Best Doctor.” They spoke almost no Arabic or English. They didn’t have a Chinese-Arabic dictionary, phrasebook, or language textbook—in fact, I’ve never met a lingerie dealer who owns any of these things. Unlike Mandarin, Arabic is inflected for gender, and Chinese dealers, who learn the language strictly by ear, often pick up speech patterns from female customers. I’ve come to think of it as the lingerie dialect, and there’s something disarming about these Chinese men speaking in the feminine voice.
In the lingerie dialect, one important phrase is “I have this in a wider size.” Chinese dealers use this phrase a lot. Egyptians tend to be big, and they’re often good-humored and charismatic, like the sheikh in China Star. In contrast, the diminutive, more serious Chinese have a way of receding from the center of a scene. These differences seem perfectly matched for the exchange of lingerie. The Chinese dealers are small, and they know little, and they care even less—all of these qualities help put Egyptian customers at ease.
The shops often employ young local women as assistants, who in many cases can barely communicate with their bosses. Nevertheless, these women tend to be fiercely loyal to the Chinese. In Upper Egypt, it’s unusual for a woman to work, and a few of the assistants seem to be engaged in acts of rebellion. At China Star, Kiki and John are currently assisted by an eighteen-year-old named Rahma 麦德哈特, who wears the head scarf but also has tattoos on both hands, including one of a skull and crossbones. She had this done at a Coptic church. In Egypt, Christians traditionally have a cross tattooed onto their right hand or wrist, and the church is often the only place in town with a tattoo gun. For a Muslim, it makes the act of getting a tattoo even more outrageous—Rahma told me, with evident satisfaction, that her parents had been furious. They had also opposed her working in the lingerie shop, where she had replaced another young woman who had had family problems of her own. John told me that he had never fully understood the situation, but he had noticed bruises on the young woman’s face and arms, and one day her father came and beat her on the sidewalk in front of China Star.
Most assistants, though, have been driven to work because of difficult economic circumstances. At the Chinese Lingerie Corner, in Minya, a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Rasha Abdel Rahman told me that she had started working almost a decade ago, after her mother died and her father was crippled in an auto accident. Rasha has four sisters, and she’s been able to earn the money necessary to help three of them get married. In the past, she worked for another Chinese dealer, and she told me that she would never accept employment from an Egyptian. In her opinion, the Chinese are direct and honest, and she appreciates their remove from local gossip networks. “They keep their secrets,” she said.
Rasha told me that local men can’t sell lingerie as effectively as Chinese men. “I can’t describe how they do it,” she said, speaking through a translator. “But they can look at the item and give it to the woman, and that’s it. An Egyptian man would look at the item, and then look at the woman, and then he might make a joke or laugh about it.” Rasha spoke of her previous Chinese boss fondly. “He didn’t have anything in mind while he was selling,” she said. “When you buy something, you feel the thoughts of the person selling it. And with the Chinese their brains don’t go thinking about women’s bodies.”
The most important word in the lingerie dialect is arusa, or “bride.” The Chinese pronounce it alusa, and they use it constantly; in many Cairo neighborhoods, there are Chinese who go door-to-door with sacks of dresses and underwear, calling out “Alusa! Alusa!” In Chinese shops, owners use it as a form of address for any potential customer. To locals, it sounds flattering and a little funny: “Beautiful blide! Look at this, blide! What do you want, blide?”
On Valentine’s Day, not long after the sheikh left, a genuine arusa walked into China Star. She was nineteen years old, and the wedding was scheduled for later in the year. The arusa was accompanied by her fiancé, her mother, and her sixteen-year-old brother. Kiki began picking items off the racks. “Alusa, do you want this?” she said, producing a box labelled “Net Ladystocking Spring Butterfly.” First, the arusa studied the Ladystocking, which was then passed to the fiancé, then to the mother, and finally to the younger brother. The box featured two photographs, front and rear, of a Slavic-looking model who stood beside a bookshelf of leather-bound volumes in high heels, a neck-to-ankle lace bodysuit, a G-string, and a vacant expression. The brother studied the box for a long time. It went into a pile for approved items.
In an Egyptian marriage, the groom is expected to buy an apartment and furniture, while the arusa acquires small appliances, kitchenware, and clothing, including lingerie. The market has boomed since 2009, when a trade agreement with China made it easier to import clothes, and lingerie shops suddenly became more prominent in Egyptian cities. Dong Weiping, one of the biggest dealers in Cairo, told me that he imports ten shipping containers of women’s underwear every year, in addition to the items that he makes in his Egyptian factory. At China Star, the arusa and her family spent more than an hour picking out twenty-five nightgown-and-panty sets, ten pairs of underwear, ten brassieres, and one Ladystocking. The mother paid the equivalent of three hundred and sixty dollars, and she told me that they planned to make two or three more shopping trips before the wedding. At one point, the group broke into spontaneous applause when Kiki produced a nightgown. “What do you think?” she said, holding up another transparent top with a pink G-string. “W’allahy, laziz!” the fiancé said. “By God, it’s beautiful!” He worked as a lawyer in Asyut, and the arusa studied law at the university. She was well spoken and pretty, although she wore shapeless jeans and a heavy green coat. Her head scarf was wrapped tightly under the chin in a conservative style.
They impressed me as a traditional, provincial middle-class family, and nothing seemed awkward about this shopping expedition. If anything, the mood was innocent and joyous, and the arusa didn’t appear the least bit embarrassed. I was certain that even the most self-confident American woman would be mortified by the idea of shopping for lingerie with her fiancé, her mother, and her teen-age brother, not to mention doing this in the presence of two Chinese shop owners, their assistant, and a foreign journalist. But I had witnessed similar scenes at other shops in Upper Egypt, where an arusa is almost always accompanied by family members or friends, and the ritual seems largely disconnected from sex in people’s minds.
And there’s something about the status of an arusa that demands an audience. Chinese dealers sometimes tell me that Egyptian women buy this stuff because they dance for their husbands at night, a theory that I suspect has more to do with movie images of belly dancing than it does with actual behavior. But it may be true in a more figurative sense. Whenever I see an arusa shopping for lingerie with friends or family, I have the feeling that the woman is on display, and preparing for a future role. At China Star, I asked the mother if her daughter would work as a lawyer after the wedding. “Of course not!” she said. “She’ll stay at home.” She spoke proudly, the same way that I often hear Egyptian men tell me that their wives spend their days in the house. In Egyptian Arabic, another meaning of arusa is “doll”—children use this word for the toys that they dress and undress.
In Asyut, the small Chinese community was pioneered by Kiki’s parents, Lin Xianfei and Chen Caimei. Lin grew up on a half-acre farm in Zhejiang, where poverty forced him to leave school after the fifth grade. In the nineteen-nineties, he found modest success as a small-time trader of clothes in Beijing, and then, in 2001, he heard that some people from his home town had gone to Egypt to seek their fortunes. He studied a map and decided that he would settle in Asyut, because he believed it to be the most populous city in Upper Egypt. (In fact, Luxor is bigger.)
“I knew I’d be the only Chinese person there, so the opportunity would be better,” Lin told me. In Asyut, he set up a stall in a ma’rad, a kind of open-air market, and initially he sold three products that he had carried in his luggage: neckties, pearls, and underwear. He didn’t worry about whether Upper Egyptians actually wanted these things—the key factor was size. “They were easy to pack in a suitcase,” he explained.
Lin quickly realized that people in Asyut cared little for pearls and they did not wear neckties with galabiya. But they liked women’s underwear, so he began to specialize, and soon his wife came over from China to help. In Cairo and northern Egypt, the network of Chinese lingerie importers and producers quickly grew, and eventually Lin and Chen rented a storefront in Asyut. They invited a relative and a friend to open the two other shops in town. While Lin and Chen were building their small lingerie empire, they noticed that there was a lot of garbage sitting in open piles around Asyut. They were not the first people to make this observation. But they were the first to respond by importing a polyethylene-terephthalate bottle-flake washing production line, which is manufactured in Jiangsu province, and which allows an entrepreneur to grind up plastic bottles, wash and dry the regrind at high temperatures, and sell it as recycled material.
“I saw that it was just lying around, so I decided that I could recycle it and make money,” Lin told me. He and his wife had no experience in the industry, but in 2007 they established the first plastic-bottle recycling facility in Upper Egypt. Their plant is in a small industrial zone in the desert west of Asyut, where it currently employs thirty people and grinds up about four tons of plastic every day. Lin and Chen sell the processed material to Chinese people in Cairo, who use it to manufacture thread. This thread is then sold to entrepreneurs in the Egyptian garment industry, including a number of Chinese. It’s possible that a bottle tossed onto the side of the road in Asyut will pass through three stages of Chinese processing before returning to town in the form of lingerie, also to be sold by Chinese.
Lin told me that the factory makes between fifty thousand and two hundred thousand dollars a year in profits, and this success inspired an Egyptian businessman in Asyut to poach some of Lin’s technicians and open a second recycling plant, earlier this year. Nevertheless, Lin and Chen’s business continues to thrive, although they still live in a bare apartment above the factory floor, amid the roar of machinery. Lin is in his early fifties and looks a decade older, with the tired eyes and troubled stomach of a Chinese businessman who has shared a lot of heavy meals and drink with associates. He rarely says much about local culture, but once, when I asked casually what he considered to be the biggest problem in Egypt, the forcefulness of his response surprised me.
“Inequality between men and women,” he said immediately. “Here the women just stay home and sleep. If they want to develop, the first thing they need to do is solve this problem. That’s what China did after the revolution. It’s a waste of talent here. Look at my family—you see how my wife works. We couldn’t have the factory without her. And my daughter runs the shop. If they were Egyptian, they wouldn’t be doing that.”
A couple of months later, when I made another visit to Asyut, Chen was running the plant because her husband had travelled to China to see doctors about his stomach. One afternoon, I stood at the factory gate while two young men from a nearby village delivered a truckload of plastic bottles in huge burlap sacks. One of the men was named Omar, and he told me that he had started scavenging five years ago, at the age of twelve, because the Chinese had opened the factory. Now he partners with a truck owner to haul the plastic, and they subcontract to local children who collect bottles on their behalf. Omar said that he usually earns at least a hundred pounds a day—around thirteen dollars—which is double the local day wage for a laborer. While we were talking, Chen burst out of the factory gate. She wore a flowered apron that said “My Playmate,” and her face was a picture of pure rage.
“Why are you bringing water?” she screamed. She hurled a couple of one-litre bottles at Omar and his companion, who scurried behind the truck. “You’re bad!” she shouted, in broken Arabic. “Ali Baba, you Ali Baba! I’m angry, angry, angry! This isn’t clean! Not clean!”
Chen had discovered the full bottles at the bottom of a sack of empties: the recyclers were trying to tip the scales. She kept screaming—you Ali Baba!—and finally I understood that she was referring to the forty thieves of “The Arabian Nights.” I had never heard anybody in Egypt use “Ali Baba” in this way, but it’s part of Chen’s own recycling dialect. Omar stayed out of range until she stalked back inside the gate.
“By God, I hope a car hits her!” Omar said. “She threw bricks at us once.”
A factory foreman named Mohammed Abdul Rahim said something to the effect that Omar deserved to be pelted with whatever he hid in the bottom of his sacks.
“I’m not the one doing this!” Omar said. “The little kids do it—the kids who collect the bottles.”
“He knows what he’s doing,” Mohammed said to me. He explained that invariably some foreign object was hidden in the sacks, and just as invariably Chen or Lin discovered it. After a while, Chen reappeared in the “My Playmate” apron to engage in another round of Ali Baba abuse, and then she finally sat down and negotiated heatedly with the bottle collectors for a price per kilo. The total for the truckload came to eight hundred and one pounds, a little more than a hundred dollars. When Omar’s partner insisted on receiving the last pound, Chen slammed the coin on the table like a rejected mah-jongg tile. The young man made a show of searching through the bills to find a fifty that he claimed was too tattered to accept.
“Muslim money!” Chen shouted, but she replaced it. The moment the bottle collectors were gone, her anger evaporated—here at the factory, she seemed to have adapted to a certain Egyptian theatrical quality. She wore her hair pulled back in a bun, and she had the broad, weathered face of a peasant, as well as the reflexive modesty. Once, when I mentioned that she had been brave to move to a place like Asyut, she brushed aside the compliment and said that she was simply ignorant. “I can’t read,” she said. “I can write my name, but it looks awful. I didn’t go to school at all, not for one day.”
On Fridays, when the plant closes for the weekend, Chen and Lin drive into Asyut and spend time with Kiki and John, who have a two-year-old daughter. Once, I was in town when the child was suffering from a nasty-looking abscess on her eyelid, and John asked me to accompany them to a nearby hospital, to help translate. The doctor’s diagnosis was an infection, and he said that it had probably developed because of unclean conditions. John remarked that this was the first time that his daughter had seen a doctor since she was born. Nobody in the family seems intimidated by life in Asyut, and they don’t consider themselves successful; Chen and Lin often say that their factory is just a low-level industry. But, whenever I visit, I can’t help thinking: Here in Egypt, home to eighty-five million people, where Western development workers and billions of dollars of foreign aid have poured in for decades, the first plastic-recycling center in the south is a thriving business that employs thirty people, reimburses others for reducing landfill waste, and earns a significant profit. So why was it established by two lingerie-fuelled Chinese migrants, one of them illiterate and the other with a fifth-grade education?
I’ve never met Chinese people in Egypt who express an interest in changing the country. They often talk about what they perceive to be weaknesses—a lack of work ethic among the people, a lack of system in the government—but the tone is different from that of many Westerners. There’s little frustration; the Chinese seem to accept that this is simply the way things are. There’s also no guilt, because China has no colonial history in the region, and its government engages with both Israel and Palestine. Chinese entrepreneurs often speak fondly of the friendliness of Egyptians and their willingness to help strangers, two qualities that the Chinese believe to be rare in their own country. They almost never seem disappointed by the Egyptian revolution. This is not because they believe that the Arab Spring has turned out well but because they had no faith in it in the first place.
In 2012, when Mohamed Morsi was elected President after the revolution, his first state visit was to China. The following year, he was removed in a military coup, and his successor, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, also quickly made a trip to China. There’s no indication that the abrupt change in leadership disturbed the Chinese government. One evening in Cairo, I met with a diplomat from another Asian country and described my experiences with Chinese lingerie dealers in Upper Egypt. She said that their behavior and outlook reminded her of what she observed as a diplomat. “The Chinese will sell people anything they like,” she said. “They don’t ask any questions. They don’t care what you do with what they sell you. They won’t ask whether the Egyptians are going to hold elections, or repress people, or throw journalists into jail. They don’t care.” She continued, “The Americans think, If everybody is like me, they’re less likely to attack me. The Chinese don’t think like that. They don’t try to make the world be like them.” She continued, “Their strategy is to make economic linkages, so if you break these economic linkages it’s going to hurt you as much as it hurts them.”
For the past twenty years, China has created such connections throughout Africa. In “China’s Second Continent,” published in 2014, Howard French estimates that a million Chinese live on the continent, and China does more than twice as much trade with Africa as the United States does. French observes that in many places the Chinese are essentially stepping into old colonial patterns of resource extraction, which causes resentment among locals. But in Egypt the terms are different. The country has few natural resources that the Chinese need: last year, Egyptian exports to China were roughly a tenth the value of Chinese imports, and the trade gap is widening. Direct investment is low—China is only the twentieth-largest investor in Egypt, and the number of Chinese in the country is estimated to be around ten thousand. Nevertheless, Egypt plays a disproportionately large political role in the Middle East, which provides China with half its oil, and much Chinese trade to Europe passes through the Suez Canal. In addition, Egyptian universities are home to approximately two thousand Chinese students, most of them Muslim. The Chinese government is concerned that these students will acquire radical religious ideas, which is another reason that they feel they have a stake in Egypt’s stability and prosperity.
And so Chinese statecraft in Egypt calls for something more strategic and principled than simple economic pragmatism. China is currently doubling the size of its Cairo Embassy, and officials realize that the failure of U.S. policies in the Middle East creates an opportunity for China to increase its stature. But the process of identifying values and goals in the abstract doesn’t seem to come naturally to the Chinese government. “To be honest, I think that even within China they don’t know what kind of ideology they’re going after,” the Asian diplomat told me. Even if the Chinese had some idea that they want to promote, they lack the soft-power tools of neighbors like Japan and South Korea, which fund development work in ways similar to those of Western governments. In Cairo, the Chinese have set up a Confucius Institute, which is supposed to advance Chinese language and values, but the scale is modest, and Egyptian religious authorities tend to be resistant to such endeavors.
Without a clear strategy, China has turned to a basic instinct of the Deng Xiaoping era: When in doubt, build factories. At a place in the desert called Ain Sokhna, not far from where the Red Sea meets the Suez Canal, a Chinese state-owned company called TEDA has constructed the China-Egypt Suez Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone. The motto is “Cooperation Makes the World Better,” and the zone consists of six square kilometres of virgin desert that have been carved into a grid of straight, wide streets. It’s surrounded by wasteland—the nearest city of any size is Suez, an hour away—but the zone has a Tianjin Road, a Chongqing Road, and a Shanghai Road. Worker dormitories have been constructed, along with yards for piling up empty shipping containers, whose bright colors are visible for miles across the desert, like stacks of Legos melting in the sun. There’s one Chinese restaurant, one Chinese market, and one Chinese barber. The Chinese tend to be fastidious about hair, and wherever migrants gather, even in the desert near the Red Sea, a barber is sure to materialize.
The TEDA zone looks as if it could have been uprooted from almost any small Chinese city. Such transplants are springing up all around the world: earlier this year, the government announced that it plans to build a hundred and eighteen economic zones in fifty countries. The Chinese want to encourage domestic industry to move abroad, in part as a way of dealing with diminishing natural resources in China. The TEDA zone offers subsidized rent and utilities to entrepreneurs, and more than fifty companies have become tenants. The majority are Chinese, and they tend to be small; a couple are owned by former lingerie dealers. But almost every Chinese boss whom I talked to complained about the same problem: they can’t find good workers, especially good female workers.
“I just can’t hire men,” Xu Xin, who had started a cell-phone factory, told me bluntly. After many years with Motorola in China, Xu had come to Egypt in the hope of producing inexpensive phones for the local market. “This work requires discipline,” he said. “A cell phone has more than a hundred parts, and, if you make one mistake, then the whole thing doesn’t work. The men here in Egypt are too restless; they like to move around. They can’t focus.” He had wanted to hire women, but he quickly discovered that he was limited to those who are unmarried. Turnover was high: most workers quit whenever they got engaged or married. Even worse, Xu discovered that young Egyptian women can’t live in dormitories, because it’s considered inappropriate to be away from their parents at night. Female employees have to be bused in and out of Suez, which adds more than three hours to the workday. This prevented Xu from running multiple shifts on his assembly lines, and after a year he shut down the plant.
Others are struggling with the same problem. I met Wang Weiqiang, who had built a profitable business in eastern China producing the white ghotra head coverings worn by Saudis and other Gulf Arabs. After more than a decade, Wang decided to start an operation in Egypt. “I have very good-quality Egyptian cotton here,” he said. “My machinery is very modern. My investment is more than a million dollars for the factory here. But during these two years I’ve lost a lot. It’s all the problem of labor—the mentality of the workers. Our factory needs to run twenty-four hours a day; it’s not just for one shift. In order to do this in Egypt, we have to hire male workers, and the men are really lazy.” He continued, “Now I reject ninety per cent of the men who apply. I use only girls and women. They are very good workers. But the problem is that they will work only during the daytime.” He intends to introduce greater mechanization in hopes of maximizing the short workday. “It drives me crazy,” he said.
More than two decades ago, at the start of the economic boom in China, bosses hired young women because they could be paid less and controlled more easily than men. But it soon became clear that, in a society that traditionally had undervalued women, they were more motivated, and over the years their role and reputation began to change. Nowadays, there’s still a significant gender gap at the upper levels—women are badly underrepresented on Chinese corporate boards and powerful government bodies. But among the working classes women have a great deal of economic clout, and it’s common to meet rural Chinese who say that they prefer to have daughters, a sentiment that was rare in the past.
Egypt also has the kind of disparity that can motivate women to work harder than men, but traditions are much more deeply entrenched. In December, 2013, TEDA announced that it would almost double the size of the development zone, but it’s hard to imagine who will fill all that space, since only a sixth of the current area is occupied. In the meantime, the place feels lifeless, without the hum of a real Chinese factory town. It’s especially dead in the evening—no sounds of night-shift machinery, no packs of laughing young workers in uniform. Along the edges of the industrial park, the sand drifts across empty streets; on one road, I counted two hundred and thirty-two street lights that weren’t working. Egypt is full of grandiose and misguided projects in the desert, both ancient and modern, and TEDA is one of the strangest: a lost Chinese factory town in the Sahara, where Ozymandian dreams have been foiled by a simple failure to get women out of their homes.
At Ain Sokhna, I got to know a young boss named Wu Zhicheng, who produces inexpensive plastic dishware for the Egyptian market. He employs about twenty women on his assembly line, although the turnover is high—usually, workers stay for only a few months before they get engaged or married. In the past, Wu managed factories in China, where he observed that young rural women often come to work out of a vague desire to get away from their families and villages. After taking that first step, they enter new communities in factories and dormitories, where their ideas might mature into a more coherent desire to be independent and successful. But Wu said that the starting point for Egyptian women workers is different. “They aren’t trying to escape something, like the girls in China,” he told me. “Here they’re doing it just for the money.”
A number of Wu’s factory workers are saving money specifically so that they can buy things like lingerie and enter a traditional marriage. “I’m supposed to get married this year,” Soad Abdel Hamid, a twenty-four-year-old who operates a plastic press on the assembly line, told me. “But it seems that I won’t, because I haven’t finished buying my stuff.” She said that marriages often get delayed or even broken off if somebody can’t purchase the expected objects. She plans to quit work after she marries, which is true of every employee I talked to, except for two.
Even these two exceptions can’t be considered opponents of traditional values. One is a woman in her fifties named Fatma Mohammed Mahmoud, who is the only married woman in the factory. She told me that for years she’s wanted to get divorced, but her husband, who refuses to support her financially, will not agree to end the marriage. Since 2000, Egyptian women have had the right to initiate divorce, but Fatma has decided against it. “My siblings tell me not to, because for our traditions it’s considered bad,” she said. “We’re from Upper Egypt. The minds are closed.” Fatma has only one co-worker who also insists that she will continue to work after marriage, a young woman named Esma. Previously, she had a better job, handling inventory at a factory near her home in Suez, where her fiancé was also employed. But they broke up, and Esma’s father forced her to quit the job because it’s inappropriate for a young woman to work in the same place as her ex-fiancé. “As Egyptians, when your parents give you an order, you have to follow it,” she told me. So now she rides a bus for four hours a day in order to work a job with less pay and less potential.
Wu’s conclusion about Egyptian women workers is simple: as long as they lack a basic desire to escape the familiar, it’s unlikely that they will change anything fundamental about their lives. He sees Egypt in similar terms. “It would have been better if they hadn’t removed Mubarak,” he told me. I often hear such comments from Chinese entrepreneurs, and to a Westerner they sound cynical, because the assumption is that any outsider wants to see Egypt reformed.
But in certain ways the perspective of the Chinese may be clearer, because they see Egypt for what it is, not for what they hope it might become. During the revolution of 2011, Westerners usually believed that they were witnessing the rise of a powerful social movement, whereas the Chinese in Egypt tended to perceive the collapse of a weak state. For Chinese entrepreneurs, the contact is so local and pragmatic that they aren’t obsessed with national political movements or religious trends. They rarely talk about politics or the Muslim Brotherhood, but the issue of women’s status often comes up, because it profoundly affects any activity in Egypt. Some Chinese, like the lingerie dealers, have found clever ways to profit from the gender issue, while other entrepreneurs have struggled because their factory zone was planned without consideration of this basic feature of Egyptian society. And, from the Chinese perspective, the fundamental issue in Egypt is not politics, or religion, or militarism—it’s family. Husbands and wives, parents and children: in Egypt, these relationships haven’t been changed at all by the Arab Spring, and until that happens there is no point in talking about a revolution.
At the end of last year, the Chinese suddenly decided to build four amusement parks in the factory zone. Across the street from the International Drilling Material Manufacturing Co., Ltd., which makes pipes, TEDA constructed something called Dinosaur World. It features large electric-powered models of creatures like Tyrannosaurus and Allosaurus, although the prehistoric theme has been stretched to include some anachronisms: a pirate-ship ride, a spaceship ride, and a Skyride, which is decorated with happy frogs. A couple of entrepreneurs in the zone told me they suspected that somebody in the Chinese amusement industry was dumping over-produced goods. No TEDA official would speak to me on the record, but one employee explained that the company wants to generate publicity that will make it easier to attract factory workers. “This way, people will come for the park, and while they’re here they’ll learn about the development zone,” he said, hopefully.
On the last weekend in March, TEDA invited everybody in the zone to attend a free test run of the amusement parks. It was a hot, windy day, and sand in the air kept most people away from Water World, which has been built next to some half-empty worker dorms. The other two parks are Candy World and Auto World, whose go-karts and bumper cars were particularly popular with the factory bosses. There was Wu Zhicheng, who manufactures plastic dishware, and Wang Weiqiang, who makes head coverings for Saudis, and Zhang Binghua, who once sold lingerie and now produces thread. A dozen high-ranking TEDA officials also showed up, all of them in dark suits, their knees cramped against the steering wheels of the child-size vehicles. Many of these cadres had flown in from Tianjin. The Chinese rammed each other in bumper cars and spun around the go-kart track, and then they got back in line and did it again. The interior of Auto World had been remodelled so successfully that there was no sign that this two-story building once housed the cell-phone factory that went out of business for lack of female workers. Across the street, all the electric dinosaurs came to life. They opened their jaws, and roared through tinny speakers, and moved their limbs spasmodically, as if shocked to find themselves in the middle of the desert.
中国人的生存能力非常强! tcczxhj 发表于 2015-10-27 10:01
中国人的生存能力非常强!
这颗蓝色星球之上，几乎没有中国人存活不下来的地方。 Q39)
小钱钱真心甜呀。 在宗教观念较强的中东国家卖情趣内衣，容易招惹麻烦。 很长的一篇文章，在看的时候我也在思考。当西方推行普世价值的时候，从来不会去考虑一个国家的现实，更不会去考虑历史。不改变基本的人际关系，所有的普世也只不过是沙上的塔。
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