Word: qiu
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...only place the town's booming soundtrack can't be heard is the site of the soon-to-be towers. There, near a concrete hole reminiscent of an open-pit mine, clusters of laborers pour cement and lash lengths of bamboo. Director of Construction Qiu Juping says it will take 1,500 workers five years to finish. These workers, imported from across the country, join 25,000 other migrant laborers to keep Huaxi afloat. They know building the tower will be tough, and potentially dangerous, but say they're proud to be part of something big. "I feel honored...
...Consider Qiu Haiyan, 22, from Henan, a province in central China with an average per capita income of $1,100 per year. She first found her way here working on a barge that carries bricks up the river that flows past our house. Qiu has the build of an Olympic weight lifter, with thick, powerful legs, and she and other work-gang members would offload the bricks on a wide wooden plank attached to a rope that they would sling across their shoulders. The subcontractor who built our development estimates he used about 70,000 bricks at Emerald Riverside. Qiu...
...lugging bricks 12 hours every day, in Shanghai's suffocating summer heat and stinging winter's chill, Qiu earned 1,500 renminbi (about $200) per month before she managed to get a job - and a raise - at a construction site not far from Emerald Riverside. Now she makes about $220 per month and, she says, the work is not as backbreaking. "We work about 12 hours a day," she told me one recent evening, sitting outside a big worker's camp, "and get one day off a week." I asked if she, like so many migrants, has family back home...
...entrance of Emerald Riverside. The developments here aren't exactly gated communities, but all of them are guarded, and for a legitimate reason: the fault lines between the migrants and the middle class are very real. Petty crime - theft, primarily - is common; and rarely do the two groups interact. Qiu, the young woman who loaded bricks, told me I was the only "rich" person she had ever had a long conversation with since she started working here two years ago. The only thing that unites the two groups is China's continued growth. My middle-class neighbors, like Yu Xiang...
...Mandarin Dress, Chen has retreated further than ever from day-to-day policing, and, perhaps inevitably, the novel's crime plot often gets enjoyably lost in a thicket of Chinese history, literature and food. Yet Qiu also adeptly follows the genre's conventions and, when Inspector Chen's investigation gains momentum, the mystery of the women in the red dresses predictably returns to a buried crime from the Cultural Revolution: the sins of the nation's past revisited upon the present. Already, Qiu says, he's at work on the next novel in the series, which will...