Esquire Magazine has a lengthy profile of Shenzhen:
I thought about how in America we’ve been breaking ground for new buildings with actual machines for like a hundred years. Shenzhen is a brand-new city, a social explosion, with buildings blasting up out of the rock everywhere you look, with everybody being from someplace else and they all just got here. Chances are these guys were farmers not long ago, and they definitely have some old-school ideas about digging up dirt. And they dug and they dug with their backs and their little tools, digging a hole all the way to America. I wonder if that’s what Chinese kids do at the beach. You see this a lot in this part of China, something very modern mixed with something very old. Not far from here, just after I walked by a Bentley dealership, I saw a man fiercely pounding a fish the size of my thigh onto the concrete, trying to break its head so that it’d stop flopping around.A few days later I went back to the construction site. The men were gone, and the ground they’d been pounding on was gone, too. Where they’d stood was now a huge hole about fifteen feet deep and fifteen feet wide. [Full text]
[Image via Esquire]
