Minnesota junkyard boy far from home

Once upon a time, a long time ago in a classroom not too far from here, a young man was a student in a class I taught. He became a Shanghai-based journalist. (He is one of two Shanghai-based journalists I got to know when they were students, but that's a story for another time.)

The young man grew up helping to run the family business, a "junkyard" in north Minneapolis, not far from where my parents grew up, but that's also a story for another time.

Adam Minter started his career writing about the junkyard/scrapyard/recycling business in China. I had no idea there were specialized journals about such obscure topics. Goes to show what I know.

I caught up with Adam Minter a few years ago, when I ran into an article he wrote for The Atlantic. Then I found his blog -- about the scrapyard business in China. It seems he wrote enough episodes in his blog to convince someone (maybe Minter himself) to write a book about the topic. My friend Eric Johnson had just read it and mentioned it one morning. When I claimed acquaintance with the author, Eric loaned me the book the next day.

 Junkyard Planet, Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade was published last year. It's been noticed far beyond the scrapyard/recycling world and it's earned good reviews globally.

The reason it's been noticed is that this goes beyond telling stories about the entrepreneurs in China who have built a business dependent upon importing cast offs from the USA, Europe, and Japan (although those stories are often interesting).

Minter offers abundant data on the vast scope of the global trade in trash and the ways it is changing. He also explains the mysterious processes used to extract value from trash (like harvesting copper wire from discarded strings of Christmas lights which are sent to China in huge bales that fill many shipping containers).

But he forcefully makes that point that much of the value in trash from Japan and the USA comes not from recycling, but from reuse. Old cell phone screens become screens for hand-held video games. Discarded computer chips become the hearts of new game counsels. Discarded computers and monitors become affordable computers for Chinese homes.

In fact, Minter repeatedly makes the case for the importance of reuse and how reuse is more important for our futures than recycling.

Minter writes well. He circles his topics and keeps coming back to his main points. His data seems as complete as it would be for a term paper. Luckily, he doesn't write like a student. Junkyard Planet, Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade is an enlightening book. I encourage everyone to read it. It's important stuff. At least catch up with Adam Minter's blog, Shanghai Scrap or his Twitter posts, which you can follow on Facebook.

Have you read Junkyard Planet? Write and tell this little bit of the world what you thought about it.

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• Bloomsbury Company, the publisher
• Erica Grieder's review in the Wall Street Journal
• Isable Hilton's review in The Guardian
• Susan Jakes' review in the Los Angeles Review of Books
• Interview with Adam Minter on NPR's Terry Gross onFresh Air
• Kenny Mah's interview with Adam Minter in The Malay Mail Online

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Singaporean detective

Looking for a new series of mysteries?

Danny Yee, an Australian whose recommendations have been good in the past, has this:

Inspector Singh Investigates by Shamini Flint

A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder

A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul

The Singapore School of Villainy

A Deadly Cambodian Crime Spree

A Curious Indian Cadaver

A Calamitous Chinese Killing

Inspector Singh is a Sikh working for the Singapore police, whose investigations so far have taken place in Malaysia, Bali (Indonesia), Singapore, Cambodia, India and China. The series is tied together by Singh's character and the foreign settings, in which he usually ends up working unofficially, with some help from elements of the local police... 
 
"What makes these novels a success, however, are their individual stories. These are entertaining and well-paced, with a bit of suspense and some surprises, and they have a good cast of characters — in almost all of them families and family connections play key roles. And Flint may not have literary pretensions, but she writes straightforward and effective prose... "

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Mystery set in China

Way back when, Chip Hauss recommended the mysteries written by Qiu Xiaolong. He's a comparative literature professor in St. Louis who has lived in the US since 1989. (Do you remember why that date is significant?)

Qiu's novels are good. They are also filled with poetic references, most of which I miss. In A Loyal Character Dancer, the only one I caught for sure was on the last page. It was a reference to one of my favorite lines from T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland. No matter. The story is good even if the telling seems slow because of all the poetic references, quotations, and descriptions.

The story has its origins in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) when just about everything was turned upside down and inside out. It was a time for true believers, like the woman who is the focus of the story. She was a dedicated Red Guard who gladly went to learn from the peasants. As a "loyal character dancer," she held aloft symbols of her dedication to Chairman Mao while heading for life among the poorest of peasants. It was also a time for opportunistic characters like the man who raped and later married her.

The contemporary story involves Chinese organized crime, the triads that have recreated themselves in the economic chaos of "socialism with Chinese characteristics." These guys are the opportunistic characters of today.

The plot involves the police work of Qiu's Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau and U.S. Marshall Catherine Rohn who are assigned the task of finding the former Red Guard and sending her safely to the U. S. Interestingly, like Qiu, both Inspector Chen and Marshall Rohn "majored" in literature as undergraduates. Rohn speaks some Chinese and knows some Chinese literature; Chen has studied Western and Chinese poetry. That sets the stage for insider quips and quotes most of which meant nothing to me.

In spite of the poetic interruptions, the story is well told. The main characters are intriguing, and if the forbidden romance of the priest and the lawyer in Margaret Coel's novels is interesting, the forbidden romance between the Chinese Inspector and the American Marshall is, I think, more interesting. So, I recommend A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong. If you read or have read it, write and tell this little bit of the world what you think (thought) of it. And in the poetic reference contest, you can point out those references I missed.

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• Profile of Qiu Xiaolong at January Magazine

• Sudheer Apte's review of A Loyal Character Dancer at Mostly Fiction

• Charles Foran's review at Asian Review of Books

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Protest Literature

In an attempt to raise the quality of literature mentioned here and transfer some of the best of the old ReadingOnTheWeb to this venue, I dug up this oldie. I wrote this in another lifetime (in June of 2001).

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Back in the strange times of the 1960s, I had an inspiring teacher of Russian history. Russian politics were as mysterious then as they are now; the stakes don't seem quite so high these days (though they probably are). I got intrigued with Russian literature and then with Soviet literature and then with dissident literature. (I even tried teaching myself the Russian alphabet so I could hear the poetic words of Babi Yar.)

The protest literature was wonderful: full of allusions and analogies and insiders' jokes insults and attacks.

It was a window into a world of large and petty injustices, absurdities and tyrannies. And, in spite of being a creative sign of life and hope, the books seemed to express hopelessness--the hopelessness of the individual pitted against totalitarian government, true believers, and culture. (The Cancer Ward comes to mind just now.) Even the funny ones were depressing (The Fur Hat, for example.)

Well, I got back into that "world" when I read Zhang Jie's As Long As Nothing Happens Nothing Will.

• The stories may be about China in the 1970s and '80s.
• Zhang Jie (a 60-year-old writer who sacrificed literature for the country and Party by studying economics, and who was sacrificed by the Party and country during the Cultural Revolution and who didn't begin writing until the 1970s) may be a popular Chinese novelist.
• She may have won "China's most prestigious literary award" [book jacket blurb].

But she's writing exactly the same kinds of stories the Russian dissidents did.

• There's the peasant village artisan whose craftsmanship entrances a wealthy tourist from the Philippines. When she invites him to Manila for an exhibit of his work, he becomes the toast of the provincial town near his village--until the invitation falls through.
• There's the story of the "free" cat and its "unfree' master.
• Another about the struggling doctor whose invitation to a medical seminar to learn surgical techniques is transformed by the machinations of politics into a trip to England for the hospital's Party cadre.
• And when an timid-but-critically-thinking professor does get to go abroad, his bladder infection makes it impossible for the Party chaperone to keep track of both him and the rest of the group.

The stories bring to mind Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil."

They suggest also something from Kathleen Norris: the smaller the community and the stakes, the more vicious the infighting.

The worst part was that the stories kept reminding me of school.

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See also: Zhang Jie

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