From Bangkok to Guangzhou: One Senegalese Man's History of Moving House | "Low-End Globalization" ②

Unlike multinational corporations with deep pockets and large payrolls, this is a kind of "low-end globalization" — it takes only a little capital, sometimes only one person, to pull off.

Mustapha Dieng, 54, was among the first Senegalese to settle in Guangzhou. He has lived here 15 years.

Two clocks hang on Dieng's wall: one set to China, in the UTC+8 zone; the other synced to Senegal, at UTC+0.

As he tells it, coming early meant catching the good times. Visa policy was still loose, countless wholesale markets stocked almost anything you could think of, and prices were low. Chinese people back then still looked at Africans — the first many of them had ever seen — with friendly curiosity. Dieng remembers a man asking him, without a flicker of hesitation, whether he had come to China because Africa was too poor to live in.

French is the common language among Senegalese, but apart from recent arrivals, Dieng and his peers all speak fluent English. They never get the tenses quite right and steer clear of complicated sentences, but it works.

Dieng first picked up English waiting on tables at a café in Thailand. Bangkok was his stop before Guangzhou; he lived there four years. But he truly "mastered" this working language in Guangzhou, through day after day of haggling in the wholesale markets, and in street arguments with taxi drivers.

Counterfeit Nikes made him his first fortune. After that, he packed up every kind of cheap local good and shipped it back to Senegal.

In 2008, Dieng shot a nine-minute promotional film for his company. The camera pans across the goods laid out in his showroom — stereos, electric fans, and satellite TV receivers piled on the floor. In the glass cases along the wall, a shelf of baby diapers sits beside shampoo, and beside that, flashlights. The showroom looks like a supermarket shuffled out of order, with no logic to how anything is arranged. Having "everything" was the part Dieng was proudest of. "Ten years on, I can still tell you which factory made every single item — though some of those factories are gone now."

To match that year's Beijing Olympics, he picked the soundtrack himself: Olympic Dreams, on a loop.

But that year was also the peak of his export business. After the Beijing Olympics, the government began cracking down on counterfeits. Then Alibaba arrived, and trade took a hit. A few years later, the showroom closed for good.

Trade has been slow these past few years, but Dieng switched successfully into logistics. He is now a freight agent with a 3,000-square-meter warehouse, solving shipping problems for other traders.

Dieng has moved house several times in Guangzhou, and never got far from Xiaobei. Most of that time he circled inside one building — Tianxiu Building, on the west side of Xiaobei, completed in 1997. It was still new when Dieng and his wife moved in. The apartment was not only where he lived; it was also his office, his reception room, and his warehouse.

In under three years he moved from a small apartment on a middle floor to the biggest unit on the top floor, a duplex with a wider view. The living room could hold more samples, and the sofa could seat more of his countrymen.

The young men who arrived in Guangzhou a decade later didn't have his luck. Prices had climbed, and visas had grown harder to get. The city has a threshold now, and it keeps getting higher.

I met Dieng at his office one afternoon in late April: a 1.9-meter, heavy-set man in a white shirt and black suit. He explained that the formal outfit was for the Canton Fair; on an ordinary day Guangzhou is too hot, and merchants prefer a shirt or a polo.

Compared with the first Canton Fair he attended, in 2003, just after he arrived in Guangzhou, the fair has been quiet these past two years.

What follows is his account, in his own words:

2000: "Everyone Wanted to Leave Africa"

The year I first came to Guangzhou, I ran into a Chinese man in the wholesale market. He asked me straight out whether Africa was so poor I couldn't survive there, and that was why I'd come to China. I didn't feel offended — I found it funny. That was 2003. I guess it was the first time he'd seen a living, breathing Black person. He even reached out and touched my arm, but there was nothing in his eyes that made me uncomfortable.

I had my Chinese colleague translate for me: "If I were that poor, how did I get to China? Who bought my plane ticket?"

In Africa, anyone who could afford a plane ticket counted as middle class. My father was a civil servant, my mother didn't work, and I had six brothers and four sisters — that was normal then. Families in Africa are much smaller now; a household usually has four or five children.

We lived in a big house in central Dakar, 300 square meters, two stories. Besides us there were relatives too; the "permanent population" of the house was about 20 people.

I was sent to a military academy in Morocco early on. After graduating I went back to Senegal and spent a few years as a combat engineer in the air force. In 1998, at 34, I left the army.

Around 2000, Senegal went through a spell of emigration fever — everyone wanted to leave Africa. Conditions at home were bad; prices were soaring and life had grown hard. Families that could afford it sent their older children abroad to make a living and send money home.

I wanted a job with an airline, but I didn't have the schooling for it. I applied to a few schools in Australia and New Zealand, and never heard back.

Plenty of people thought the way I did — stop worrying about the details, just get out first.

Australia was out, so I went to Asia. I took what money I had, about 20,000 yuan, and flew off to Thailand full of excitement, planning to work while I kept applying for visas and schools. I found out fast that visas were far more complicated than I'd imagined.

20,000 yuan was a lot of money then, but you find out fast that it goes even faster. I stayed in a Bangkok hotel for a week, then moved out and found an apartment with a friend — a tiny place where we had to squeeze onto one bed, 1.4 meters wide.

Internet cafés were just catching on, and I found work as a server at one. The owner happened to be Australian. He couldn't understand why I was so set on Australia. The way he told it, immigrants had a hard time finding work there, and even if you found something, a big share of your monthly wage went to taxes. He told me I'd do better to stay in Bangkok.

There were already a lot of Africans doing business in Bangkok, plus a lot of young men like me who'd had their heads turned by emigration fever. Everyone treated Bangkok as a springboard to Hong Kong, the US, or Europe. But most of them, like me, got stuck on the visa paperwork.

I found myself a job helping them apply for visas, even though I'd never managed to get one myself. I filled out forms for people and led them to line up outside embassies every day.

There were so many clients in those years, and the money came easily. I charged about 100 yuan a head. On the busiest days I could get ten people's visa applications done and not find time to eat.

Later I began learning the export trade from other Senegalese, shipping clothes and jewelry home. The wholesale market is the best classroom, but you also have to be ready to "pay tuition" at any moment.

I still remember my first big client, a Senegalese woman who imported jewelry from Bangkok. My job was to carry her bag, pick out the right goods in the market, haggle, and find a logistics company to fly things out. One day we were looking at goods in a shop. I set the bag down to go through samples with the shopkeeper, and a few minutes later, when I turned around, the bag was gone. Inside it was a batch of jewelry worth 50,000 yuan.

That was in 2000, just after I got married. I'd been planning to send part of the commission from that deal home to my parents in Senegal. Instead I suddenly had to pay 50,000 yuan out of my own pocket. Wholesale markets then weren't what they are today: no security cameras, and the Bangkok police couldn't help you either. That money had taken me nearly two years to save. I don't know how many plates I'd carried or how many application forms I'd filled in to earn it.

But there was no time to feel sorry for myself. The next client was already coming.

I lived in Bangkok four years. Little by little you notice that everything in the market now comes from China. A friend from Mali got to Guangzhou before I did and came back thrilled — the place was amazing! He told me the same goods cost half as much in Guangzhou as in Bangkok.

I went to Guangzhou for the first time for the 2003 Canton Fair.

Tianxiu Building

In 2003 my plane landed at the old Baiyun Airport, not the new one out near Huadu. You probably can't imagine the shock of it — standing on the street, you could look up and see a plane, so close to you, unbelievably modern.

At the Canton Fair I met the woman who would become my first employee, a young woman from Henan who explained the fabric, the prices, and the shipping details of jeans to me in English. When I decided to move from Bangkok to Guangzhou, she was the first person I thought of.

I stayed in a hotel two weeks, and she helped me rent an apartment in Tianxiu Building in Xiaobei — for a long stay in Guangzhou, a hotel is neither cheap nor convenient. I moved in with my wife and my eldest son, who was born in Bangkok. It was a two-bedroom unit with a living room, about 70 square meters.

It was my home, my office, my showroom, and my reception room, all at once.

My family and I slept in the master bedroom, and the second bedroom was where I worked. I wanted to keep it in order and never managed to; it was always a mess. The living room was piled with samples: T-shirts, jeans, women's shoes, sportswear.

I was among the first Senegalese to settle in Guangzhou, so for many of my countrymen my home was their first stop in the city. They'd sit on the living-room sofa looking at goods while my son ran back and forth between the adults' legs.

There was also a balcony of about six square meters. I put a table out there, and my two Chinese employees worked on the balcony. Rent was about 1,500 yuan a month then — impossibly cheap next to today.

The process went roughly like this. For large orders, suppliers shipped straight to a warehouse. For small ones — say 150 T-shirts or 200 pairs of jeans — they shipped to wherever you lived. Small orders always had to be "transshipped" like that: we gathered up whatever we'd found from different suppliers, sorted it, then found a logistics company.

Tianxiu Building's three towers enclose a courtyard, and as more and more Africans poured in, nearly every delivery truck unloaded there. We checked the goods, and once everything was in order, packed them into suitcases and woven bags to carry upstairs.

Tianxiu Building's elevators are a little "poor." Except for Tower B, which is offices, Towers A and C were built only for residents. But plenty of Africans, like me, turned their homes into offices and reception rooms, so the passenger elevators became our freight elevators.

Tower A, where I lived, originally had two elevators. One broke down constantly — it would climb to the 20th floor and then simply "refuse" to go higher, so people on the upper floors had to drag their goods out and carry them up themselves. That left one working elevator, and with so many people using it you often felt it would never come.

The elevator is small. Some Chinese people are warm and will greet you. Others you feel you've run into nearly every day for eight years, and you've never exchanged a single word.

At first I lived on the 15th floor, surrounded by Chinese neighbors. They were all friendly, and my eldest son often played with the Chinese children.

But last month a woman from my country ran into a neighbor in Tianxiu who was flat-out "mean." He wouldn't let her cook in her own apartment, complaining that "African food" smelled too strong. He threatened to call the police and have her taken away as an "illegal overstayer." Some Africans had earlier opened restaurants in residential buildings for convenience, selling food from their home countries (residential buildings aren't built to the construction standards or ventilation a restaurant needs), and those places really did smell strong enough to draw plenty of complaints.

But my friend has legal status. She told the neighbor to go ahead and call the police — she hoped they'd tell him that cooking at home was her "human right." She asked me why Chinese people in Dakar never run into this: never get stopped on the street, or have someone banging on the door at midnight to check their papers.

It isn't quite the curiosity of 2003, when people wanted to touch your skin. Some have grown friendlier; with others, you can read exactly what they're thinking in their eyes. On the subway, on the street, in the elevator, there's always someone who covers their nose as you pass.

People's impression of Africans sometimes comes from a few "bad Africans." Chinese people don't distinguish Senegalese from Nigerian — anyone with dark skin is African. So the moment one person does something wrong, everyone assumes all Africans are the same.

"Before 2008, Those Were the Golden Years"

Not long after I moved into that half-home, half-company in Tianxiu Building, SARS arrived. For about half a year not a single client came through the door, and we even thought about shutting down. Then, at the end of Ramadan in 2004, a huge wave of people came pouring back.

That was when the export business was at its best, right up to 2008. My business grew fast, and I moved from the 70-square-meter place on the 15th floor to the 29th — Tianxiu Building's biggest apartment, over 100 square meters, a duplex. The lower level held my bedroom and office; the whole upper level was my showroom.

Back then it was 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Clients came to look at goods from 10 in the morning, and we kept the door open — otherwise someone was knocking all day. Besides browsing, people liked to sit on the sofa and talk, and at lunch or dinner my wife would feed everyone there together.

Before long I rented a big office nearby in Yidong Building, with a much larger showroom. Clients didn't even have to go to the market. They could find everything they wanted at my place: baby diapers, talcum powder, shampoo, sportswear, electric fans, satellite TV receivers, radios, stereos, and color televisions — this was before flat-screen TVs.

I designed and printed our own product catalog myself. Whatever you wanted, I could find it. I knew where the goods were cheap and good, I could put you in touch with the factories, and I could take you to see them.

Jeans and T-shirts sold best. Before 2003, Senegal imported jeans mostly from the US and Morocco; after that it was all made in China. Some clients ordered thousands of pieces at a time. In the two hottest years, some of the factories I knew took orders only from me, and produced only for my clients.

A few years ago the new hot item was ceramic tile, from factories in Foshan.

I remember as a boy, some 40 or 50 years ago, people simply laid carpets on the ground and sat on them. Ten years ago the rich in Dakar started using tile. Now it's far more common — you find Foshan tile shipped out to remote villages.

It isn't only Senegal; a lot of Africa's building materials come from Guangzhou. You could say that apart from cement and concrete, almost every "part" of a house — a door, a ceiling panel, a floor tile — comes from here.

With the World Cup about to open, merchants shipped flat-screen TVs home from Guangzhou early, and sales are brisk. Senegalese love football, and football boots and sportswear are selling just as well.

A lot of Africans think business only got hard in the past few years, because visa policy tightened and goods got pricier. I think it started earlier — right after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when China began cracking down on counterfeits. And then there was Alibaba.

Before 2008 — those were the golden years.

If in 2000 every African wanted to go to Europe, in those years more and more young people poured into Guangzhou instead.

There were always young men sitting around my home and my office. Like me back then, they had quit their jobs at home in high spirits, hoping to make a fortune in Guangzhou, and they had no experience at all. Some had been tailors, some teachers. Business was so easy in the early years that people thought making money was like picking fruit off a tree. Older people told the young: go to China, go make something of yourself there.

Five years ago there were still plenty of newcomers arriving, with no idea where to begin. I'd go to the market with them, or have a colleague take them to meet clients — the market is the best classroom. These past few years there have been fewer and fewer newcomers.

Those were also Xiaobei's most chaotic days. Once I was walking home from the office, on the phone to Senegal, when a Uyghur man on a motorcycle grazed my shoulder as he shot past and snatched my phone. My arm and face were cut, and my wife was still on the other end of the line, but the phone had already vanished with the motorcycle into the crowd.

Another time my colleague and I were at the wholesale market. I set my bag down on a shop's sofa, and a few minutes later, reaching in for a catalog, I noticed the bag was much lighter than when I came — I'd just been to the bank for cash, and someone had probably marked me the moment I stepped out. My colleague has sharp eyes; he spotted a man walking fast, looking flustered, stealing glances back at us. We shouted, he ran, and in the end people in the market stopped him.

The people in the wholesale market work hard to keep their own order too. If there are too many thieves, nobody will come to buy. That day we went to the police station to give statements, from two in the afternoon to seven at night, five hours, writing countless explanations and answering countless questions. Luckily, exhausted as we were by the end, we got the money back.

Xiaobei is quite safe now. Last month, on Baohan Straight Street, a police officer tapped my shoulder and told me to wear my bag on the front. I don't think that's a bad thing. Young people may find Xiaobei has become "boring," but as long as I have legal status and follow the rules, I can do business here without worry.

Of course the "golden years" are over, and fewer and fewer young people turn up in Guangzhou. Last year the visa process changed: people now have to provide proof of education. Supposedly the more schooling you have, the longer you're allowed to stay; people with less can only stay briefly, or are refused a visa altogether. For young people, the threshold for getting into this city has risen.

"In These Factories, I Saw How China Made Its Fortune"

Popcorn machines have been very popular in Senegal these past few years. Unemployment is high in our country, and higher still in the towns and villages outside Dakar. People send a popcorn machine to an older sister back home, and she can set up a stall near a school and earn money.

That reminds me of myself. In my first years in Guangzhou, besides sending money home, I sent goods. I have a cousin in Canada — I sent him about 1,000 yuan worth of women's shoes, and he found a way to sell them, and supposedly made 2,000.

Three years ago a young man came to me. He'd been a carpenter, with a workshop in Dakar selling tables and chairs he made himself, and his family had pushed him to come try his luck in China too.

I took him to a furniture market, where you can find anything. He was a little stunned, and came back excited, carrying a thick stack of catalogs. But once we were back in my office and he sat down, he turned glum.

Why? Because the same table in Guangzhou came in different styles, sizes, finishes, and colors, and was cheap besides — while what he made was plain, and had no price advantage either. It cost more than the landed price of shipping one from Guangzhou.

He was the eldest son. His father had retired, his mother didn't work, and his younger brothers and sisters were still in school. Staying in Guangzhou, he could earn more. Going back to carpentry would naturally pay less than trading. Many Senegalese carry the same pressure. My Chinese friends tell me you used to have this too — one person holding up a whole family.

I encouraged him to learn from other people's designs in the catalogs. His visa expired soon after and he went home. We never met again, and I don't know whether he made a success of it. Even though we're both Senegalese, you know, that may be the only time you meet someone in your whole life.

Going to factories to inspect goods, I also got to see how things are made. Once my colleague and I went to a "family factory" in downtown Guangzhou, where people sewed school bags. A tiny room, crammed with machines, workbenches, and stacks of bags, the machines loud, a small child doing homework off to one side. My colleague said the place was one of Guangzhou's urban villages.

Seeing that, you start to wonder whether we couldn't do the same. If China built its fortune out of small manufacturing like this, why can't we?

A couple of years ago a friend bought several french-fry machines in Guangzhou and shipped them home. Now you can find his fries in some grocery stores and convenience stores in Dakar.

Another friend already had his own garment factory. For years he came to Guangzhou for a month or two annually, and left with big bags of decorative patterns he could stitch onto fabric. Three years ago he simply bought a machine and began designing and producing in Senegal himself. He still comes to Guangzhou, but not to buy cheap goods anymore — now it's to "research," to see what's new on the market. I hear his business is doing well.

That means more than buying low, selling high, and taking the margin. A few years back my wife and I talked about going back to Senegal to open a factory. But it isn't as simple as I'm making it sound: you need a bank loan, you need land from the government to build on. If everything were as easy as it is in China, we wouldn't be in the situation we're in — Africa has no shortage of timber, and we still import toothpicks from China.

And then there's politics. That's the trouble with our country: you're always dealing with bureaucrats. Young people all want to be civil servants; it's stable and it pays.

"Made in China" Is No Longer Cheap

Things have grown more expensive these past few years.

Suppliers say it's because factories can't find workers, and wages keep going up.

If only one person said this, you could suspect it was an excuse to raise prices. But when everyone says the same thing, you know "Made in China" isn't cheap anymore. It's worst right after Chinese New Year, when clients struggle to get their goods on time; the factories tell us that after the holiday, no worker wants to come back.

We always wanted to skip the middleman and buy straight from the producers, but now the producers' prices aren't cheap either. My colleague tells me a lot of the family factories in the urban villages have closed under government crackdowns. Some factories moved to other Chinese cities, some to Vietnam.

In my business today, trade brings in very little; my steady income is freight forwarding. Trade here is nearly "dead," but as long as people want to ship things, someone has to book the containers and choose the shipping for them. I still have a 3,000-square-meter warehouse in Guangzhou — the biggest of the freight agents serving Africa, I'd say.

We have new competitors too. There are plenty of Chinese in Senegal now doing the tile business. They used to be our suppliers; once they saw how profitable tile was, they started doing it themselves.

While we're still in Guangzhou waiting for Senegalese clients to walk in, merchants from Guangzhou and Foshan have beaten us "back" to Senegal.

Children

Last year I moved out of Tianxiu Building. Now I live nearby in Taojin, in a three-bedroom apartment, about ten minutes' walk from the office. My wife and our four children have all gone back to Senegal.

My eldest son and my daughter went to school in Guangzhou for five years, from kindergarten through primary school, at a French-language school. Most of their classmates were French, or Africans from French-speaking countries, and there were some Chinese children too — I never understood that myself: why would Chinese children go to a French school?

Once my daughter told me someone at school had said something very ugly to her, and it upset her. I told her to believe in herself; other people don't get to decide who you are. But on the whole I think children's world is still simple. Adults are far more complicated. Take Guangzhou taxis: a lot of drivers won't pick up Africans, and even when they let you in, they won't run the meter. Outside Central Huanshi Road and the wholesale markets, you can always see people arguing with drivers.

My third child was born in Guangzhou, in 2011. A friend urged me at the time to give birth in Hong Kong — apparently it was the fashion on the mainland then to have your baby there. I didn't really understand it, and in the end it didn't happen. We just found a public hospital in Guangzhou, and the whole thing went more smoothly than we expected.

But school in China is far too expensive: $10,000 a year per child at the French school. I sent them back to Senegal, and they were unhappy about it, afraid the friends they'd made would forget them. Now they come to Guangzhou for a month or two every holiday, and back in Senegal they talk with their friends here over QQ and WeChat.

In Senegal I send my two older children to a Confucius Institute at a university to study Chinese, twice a week. Even if they never come to China, I still think Chinese matters. I regret it a little myself: my Chinese colleagues in the early years were too good at their jobs, they "took care of me too well," so I never had much chance to learn. Besides "ni hao," I know very few words — the other one is "mafan," trouble.

My eldest son has just started high school, and the youngest is only a few years old. They don't much want to go into business; one day they say engineer, the next day doctor. It's too early to discuss their futures. Study hard — that's the one thing my wife and I agree on. These past few years our lives have revolved around them.

I haven't thought much about "success." For a businessman, "success" always comes with a pile of variables.

In my first years in Guangzhou, I thought that big showroom in Yidong Building counted as success: packed solid except for a path to walk through. One item in the showroom would multiply into thousands and cross the ocean back to Senegal. Later that showroom was gone; with Alibaba, WhatsApp, and WeChat, none of it was necessary anymore.

These past few years the freight-forwarding business has done well, so that big warehouse probably counts as success too. For young people who've only just arrived, earning enough to stay may already be hard enough.

But no one can say where the next stop is, or when it comes.

(Cover image courtesy of photographer Li Dong)