Chapter 598: The Concrete Road Through the Reed Marshes

Three and a half years later.

Mid-October 1990. Shanghai, Pudong, Waigaoqiao.

At nine in the morning, before the morning mist over the Huangpu River had fully cleared, the wooden trestle bridge at the Takahashi Ferry Station was already packed with crowds of people crossing the river.

Thirty-four-year-old construction worker Lu A’gen crouched beside an iron mooring bollard on the ferry’s forward deck, a canvas toolbag packed with trowels, plumb bobs, and a change of clothes resting by his feet.

With a five-cent Feima cigarette dangling from his lips, he squinted at the hazy gray mudflats on the river’s east bank, unable to hold back his grumbling to the coworker beside him.

“Old Zhang, don’t you think the bosses at our company have lost their minds? They took us away from a perfectly fine hotel expansion project over in Jing’an Temple and dragged thirty of us all the way out to this godforsaken place in Waigaoqiao.”

“They claim it’s to build a factory for some big Japanese company, but my hometown is just north of Chuansha. That riverbank in Waigaoqiao is nothing but reed marshes and mud pits. Even a wild hare would lose half its life trying to run through there—how on earth is that a place to build a big factory?”

“Quit your complaining,” said Old Zhang, the carpenter beside him, wrapping his worn jacket tightly around himself. “Didn’t the dispatch office director tell us the day before yesterday? This is a key foreign investment project the city just approved this year, called ‘Saionji’ or something. They spent tens of millions of US dollars just buying the land.”

“We’re working for foreigners, and the daily stipend is an extra yuan and a half. Who cares what they’re building? As long as they pay up, that’s all that matters, right?”

The ferry sounded its whistle, docking heavily against the wharf on the Pudong side.

However, when Lu A’gen and his coworkers hoisted their toolbags into an open-bed Jiefang truck sent to pick them up and bounced along for a full forty minutes to the so-called “Plot B-07” construction site, the truckload of workers—who had still been relatively optimistic—were utterly dumbfounded.

What key foreign investment project? What modern factory?

As far as the eye could see, there wasn’t even the shadow of a single brick-and-tile room!

An endless stretch of tidal mudflats spread out along the Yangtze River Estuary. Withered yellow reeds taller than a person rustled loudly in the October autumn wind, interspersed haphazardly with over a dozen long-abandoned fish ponds and drainage ditches.

An autumn rain had fallen just two days prior, and not a single decent gravel road could be found on the site. The truck’s tires rolled over a muddy dirt path laid down years ago by the local township, sinking nearly half a foot into black slush and splattering mud all over the truck bed panels.

Only a few blue-and-white striped rainproof canvas sheds stood in the center of the flats. Several drilling rigs that had just been brought in stood planted in the mud, while a few Japanese technicians from Saionji Construction, wearing white hardhats and tall rubber boots, trudged unevenly through the reeds holding spirit levels and leveling rods, pulling measuring lines for their survey.

“Good lord…”

Lu A’gen hopped down from the truck, his rubber boots sinking into the soupy mud with a squelch so deep he could barely pull his feet out.

“This is the treasure land they spent tens of millions of dollars on? Could that Japanese boss have been swindled?!”

Complaints aside, the work still had to be done.

The first task assigned to their advance construction crew was to coordinate with Saionji Construction’s surveying team to drive stakes and erect a barbed-wire perimeter fence along the red line boundary of Plot B-07’s 520 mu, and to level several abandoned fish ponds on the north side with bulldozers to clear space for building materials.

The first two days went smoothly enough. But on the morning of the fourth day, trouble arrived.

Along the northern edge of the site ran a dirt ridge path about two meters wide, which happened to cut diagonally across the northwest corner of Plot B-07.

According to municipal planning blueprints, since this entire parcel had been leased to Saionji Group, the dirt track through it naturally had to be blocked and leveled.

Yet the moment the construction crew drove the barbed-wire fence stakes into the middle of the dirt path, Lujiayan Village, two li to the west, erupted in an uproar.

In less than half an hour, more than thirty local villagers carrying shoulder poles and pushing wheelbarrows swarmed around the barbed wire fence. The elderly men leading them shouted at the top of their lungs, smacking their bamboo baskets and yelling at the bulldozers.

“What’s the meaning of this?! This path is the old road our village has used for decades to go to Takahashi Town to sell vegetables and catch the ferry! If you block it with barbed wire and make us detour three li south through muddy ponds, how are we supposed to push our wheelbarrows?!”

Saionji Construction’s on-site construction supervisor, a middle-aged Japanese man named Toda, hurried over with a young translator freshly graduated from a foreign languages institute.

The young translator was a northerner who couldn’t understand a word of the fast, sharp local Pudong dialect, and was sweating profusely in his anxiety. Seeing the foreigner gesturing with blueprints, the villagers assumed they were trying to force them out, and several young men shoved their wheelbarrows loaded with vegetables right in front of the bulldozer tracks, bringing things to an immediate standoff.

“Lu A’gen! Aren’t you a local Pudong boy? Get over here and lend a hand—help talk them down!”

Catching sight of Lu A’gen behind the crowd, the Chinese construction team leader quickly dragged him over.

Lu A’gen braced himself and walked forward, only to groan inwardly—the old man in the blue cloth shirt blocking the very front happened to be his cousin on his distant grand-uncle’s side!

“A’gen? You’re working under these foreign devils too?!”

The cousin grabbed his sleeve the moment he recognized him.

“You be the judge! Sure, the government leased the land to foreigners, but they haven’t even built a new road around here and they’re already cutting off the old path our ancestors walked! Are they expecting us to sprout wings and fly?!”

Caught in the middle, Lu A’gen couldn’t please either side.

Offering cigarettes all around with an apologetic smile, he turned to the Chinese foreman and the translator with a grimace.

“Leader, this really is a tricky situation. Lujiayan and the two villages to the north rely entirely on this dirt ridge road to get to the ferry station. If we block it by force, the ridge to the south is so narrow you can’t even push a bicycle through. The villagers will never agree…”

Based on what Lu A’gen had seen on other construction sites, when dealing with this kind of rural dispute, the construction party would either ask the township government to send a couple of neighborhood patrol officers to clear the site by force, or slip a couple of cartons of good cigarettes to the village chief and provide a few hundred yuan as road maintenance compensation. Either way, it would drag on for at least ten days to half a month.

Just as he was thinking that today’s work would surely grind to a halt, the Japanese supervisor, Toda, listened to the translator’s explanation, slightly furrowed his brow, and raised his hand.

“Wait a moment.”

Toda did not order the bulldozers forward, nor did he send for the township cadres.

Glancing down at the boundary topographic map in his hand, he looked back toward the muddy path pointed out by the villagers and spoke directly to the translator:

“Please ask that elderly gentleman to lead the way. I want to inspect the bypass field ridge they usually walk.”

Everyone present was taken aback.

Yet Toda had already set off in his tall rubber boots, walking south along the ridge path. Lu A’gen and his cousin exchanged a bewildered glance and hurriedly followed behind.

The walk took a full half hour.

The mud on the tidal flat in mid-October was as slick as if it had been greased. The so-called alternative ridge to the south ran flush against a drainage creek; at its narrowest, it was barely a foot wide, dropping straight off into waist-deep reed mud pits.

Let alone pushing a wheelbarrow—even Toda himself slipped as he walked, sinking his trouser leg halfway into the black mud.

After climbing back up, the Japanese engineer showed no sign of irritation. Instead, he pulled out a small notebook, used a tape measure to gauge the width of the creek and the depth of the soil layer, and looked up to survey the layout along the north side of Plot B-07.

Returning to the canvas shed on the construction site, Toda conferred with two other Japanese structural engineers over the geological drilling charts for less than fifteen minutes before stepping out to announce a decision that caught Lu A’gen and all the villagers completely by surprise:

“The perimeter fence at the northwest corner will temporarily pull back eight meters. Before internal construction across the industrial park fully commences, we will pave a new access road for the village along the outer edge of Plot B-07’s northern red line!”

After hearing the translator’s words, the villagers dispersed, half-convinced and half-skeptical.

Lu A’gen breathed a sigh of relief as well, thinking to himself: These Japanese folks are decent enough. Having a bulldozer level a dirt path along the creek and dumping a few truckloads of cinders and broken bricks won’t take more than two or three days.

Yet the next morning, when Toda handed the cross-sectional construction diagrams he had drawn overnight over to the construction crew, Lu A’gen and several veteran masons nearly had their eyes pop out of their heads.

“Excavate to a depth of 1.2 meters and replace with a sand-and-gravel cushion layer? Lay geotextile underneath, install two rows of blind drainage pipes, and pour a twenty-five-centimeter-thick C30 double-layer reinforced concrete pavement seven meters wide?!”

Holding the blueprints, Lu A’gen’s hands actually trembled.

“Foreman, how is this a footpath for country folk to push wheelbarrows on?! Even the asphalt roads our city buses run on don’t have a foundation this thick!”

“For a stretch of over six hundred meters, just the high-grade cement and rebar alone will swallow several hundred thousand yuan! Do these Japanese have so much money they don’t know what to do with it?!”

Yet Saionji Construction wasn’t joking in the slightest.

That very afternoon, more than a dozen heavy-duty dump trucks rumbled into Waigaoqiao, loaded with premium crushed stone, yellow sand, and high-grade cement brought in from Baoshan and Northern Zhejiang; immediately following them, two high-horsepower excavators and heavy road rollers entered the site simultaneously.

For ten full days, before a single brick was laid for any factory building in the 520-mu industrial park, Saionji’s site bustled with fervent activity along the northern edge of the desolate mudflat, building a straight, wide reinforced concrete thoroughfare!

Working his shovel on the roadbed day after day, Lu A’gen watched truckload after truckload of rebar and cement bought with cold, hard cash being poured into the muddy ditch, his heart aching so much that he couldn’t stop sucking his teeth.

Not until the evening of the eleventh day, when the final truckload of concrete was smoothed and finished, did the Chinese technician in charge of on-site dispatch pat his shoulder with a chuckle as he crouched by the curb lighting a cigarette:

“A’gen, did you really think those Japanese had more money than brains and spent hundreds of thousands just so your distant uncle could push vegetables across?”

Lu A’gen paused.

“Then what was it for?”

The technician blew out a smoke ring and pointed at the seven-meter-wide concrete road, which stretched from the north side of the construction site to connect the road to the west directly with the Huangpu River shoreline to the east:

“Mr. Toda filled us in the day before yesterday. There’s over twenty meters of pure silt beneath this ground. Next, Saionji is going to drive over a thousand special steel pipe piles more than forty meters deep, and build a deep-water pier along the river that can dock ten-thousand-ton ships!”

“After the New Year, one hundred and twenty pieces of heavy machinery dismantled and shipped from Japan, along with hundreds of tons of gantry crane components, will all be hauled in along this very road on thirty-ton heavy flatbed trucks!”

The technician stomped on the iron-hard concrete shoulder beneath his feet, marveling with a click of his tongue:

“With this single move, they did a favor for the neighboring villages to prevent anyone from causing trouble during construction later, while simultaneously rushing the completion of the freight artery for their future heavy vehicle convoys!”

“Just you watch—judging by how lavishly these Japanese are splashing cash to pave roads, what they’re planning to do in Waigaoqiao is enormous!”

…

The sun sank in the west, casting an orange-red glow across the broad surface of the Huangpu River.

As the whistle ending the workday blew, Lu A’gen washed the mud from his hands and took his aluminum lunchbox, sitting side by side with a dozen coworkers on the newly set concrete curb to eat dinner.

An evening breeze swept across the boundless reed marshes, stirring up wave after wave of white reed blossoms.

Several villagers from Lujiayan Village tentatively pushed bicycles and wheelbarrows laden with vegetables onto the brand-new, smooth concrete road. The wheels rolled across the surface without the slightest bump or speck of mud, prompting the villagers to keep glancing back in wonder the entire way.

“Good heavens, this road is grander than the main street in our Chuansha County seat…”

Old Zhang, the carpenter, shoveled a big mouthful of rice into his mouth and shook his head as he gazed at the still-desolate and open 520-mu reed marsh behind them.

“Who knows what this mud pit will actually turn into in the future.”

“Who cares what it turns into?”

Lu A’gen took a bite of the braised pork chop from his lunchbox, rubbed his shoe against the solid, sturdy concrete pavement beneath his feet, and chuckled.

“All I know is—this Japanese company called Saionji is genuinely loaded!”

“Before there’s even a sign of a factory building, they’ve already dumped this much rebar and cement into the mud. Looks like our work here in Pudong won’t be wrapping up in three or five years!”

The workers burst into a roar of laughter.

The laughter traveled far along the newly paved concrete road, startling a few roosting egrets in the reed thickets, which flapped their wings and took flight into the twilight sky above the river.