The Chinese Lingerie Venders of Egypt | Hacker News Reader

The Chinese Lingerie Venders of Egypt

newyorker.com

46 pointsnichtich25 comments

"While Lin and Chen were building their small lingerie empire, they noticed that there was a lot of garbage sitting in open piles around Asyut. They were not the first people to make this observation. But they were the first to respond by importing a polyethylene-terephthalate bottle-flake washing production line, which is manufactured in Jiangsu province, and which allows an entrepreneur to grind up plastic bottles, wash and dry the regrind at high temperatures, and sell it as recycled material.

“I saw that it was just lying around, so I decided that I could recycle it and make money,” Lin told me. He and his wife had no experience in the industry, but in 2007 they established the first plastic-bottle recycling facility in Upper Egypt. Their plant is in a small industrial zone in the desert west of Asyut, where it currently employs thirty people and grinds up about four tons of plastic every day. Lin and Chen sell the processed material to Chinese people in Cairo, who use it to manufacture thread. This thread is then sold to entrepreneurs in the Egyptian garment industry, including a number of Chinese. It’s possible that a bottle tossed onto the side of the road in Asyut will pass through three stages of Chinese processing before returning to town in the form of lingerie, also to be sold by Chinese."

Heh. Awesome.

One thing I always notice when you see documentaries of travels in under-developed countries, that there's always a lot of rubbish sitting around, and also a lot of people sitting around. I always wonder why they don't just start by picking up their trash? I don't pretend to understand the dynamics of a place through a TV show, but keeping your own area tidy would seem to be a simple thing to do to improve your own quality of life, and it can cost virtually nothing.

What do you with the trash after you pick it up? The kind of underdeveloped countries with piles of trash sitting around also have no functional municipal garbage collection, at least in those areas with piles of trash sitting around.

Yes I believe this is the main reason for not picking it up, and for it lying around in the first place. However if there is a way to profit from it, that could mean the private sector can turn things around.

Even just burying it, burning it or keeping it in a single pile would seem better than having it lying all over the place.

I am from India and so I can comment on this. A lot of places in India are filthy from many generations. So, people naturally grow into it. To keep a public place clean, you have to educate lots of uneducated/uncouth people, you have to impose fines, you have do identify land for dumping and for operations. Who will pay the money? Though city govts charge garbage disposal fees most of this goes into corrupt politicans pockets. Almost no one India votes the politician who says he will keep your neighbourhood clean. So, no fines for littering. Most college educated people like yours truly have thought about but did not do anything considering that we have to deal with bureaucracy and that it is a constant struggle for atleast one generation. Plus there is social stigma/unsexy in handling garbage.

Middle class and rich neighbourhoods maintain a basic level of cleanliness(move the garbage to a corner/alley). Cities simply dump the garbage in neighbouring villages (which are poor).

Tldr: Its much easier to put up rather that do something about it.

I live in China. It relies on three things - having a poor enough underclass of people to do the scavenging; a high enough price for it to be worthwhile; and readily a available facilities for recycling. If one of these is missing, it's absolutely pointless.

In Egypt, specifically Cairo, it is more complicated than that. There is an entire pre-modern recycling system where a sizable group of the Christian minority who are lower class or below the poverty line live in neighborhood known as Muqattam (or to Egyptians, Mu'attam مقطم). They take piles of garbage, feed garbage to the pigs, and sort anything, and I mean anything, recyclable for reuse and for profit selling it off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokattam

Also notes there is a church of stunning beauty inside this community. Almost all hipster study abroads, yours truly included, visit this once in their time in Egypt.

samaanchurch.com/en/miracle_en.php

They are frequently the focus of Western NGO work, specifically the children, and at one time a documentary and NGO project was initiated to teach them modern recycling techniques to implement abroad.

http://garbagedreams.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_Dreams

And a general note. And I do mean, general, not just to brc. I see a lot of comments, and I still, as an American of an overly privileged upbringing, that people have trouble with their cultural lense. It is incredibly easy to see "there's always a lot of rubbish sitting around, and also a lot of people sitting around," when in fact the situation is more complicated. These people have been doing recycling in a very dangerous way (to their health) and making a meager living long before such practices, in more sanitary ways, took off in the West.

From Egypt, I still miss the smell of burning garbage, as awful as it sounds, when I ride the ring road between a major suburb to downtown Cairo to get to school. It creates strong nostalgia in me, so I had to say something, as unrelated as this comment is.

I specifically noted in my comment that I know you cannot understand the underlying problems by watching TV.

And hence I commented, in kind, with not addressing this at you. There is a wide and diverse audience in HN, and I wanted to point out they need to travel and see the world to better understand their culture and themselves, and the biases through which they evaluate the world.

I am not being critical of you, I just wanted to give a good example of a deeper look at this particular example. I upvoted you and I am glad you gave space to such opinions, as tangential as they are to the article.

I have travelled extensively, and my experiences in places where rubbish piled up - in tourist areas as well, like coral reefs - made it very hard to understand for me. I pick up rubbish in my own neighbourhood if I see it.

I agree that travel is a great way to look back though your own lens and see how you see the world.

Oh man, do we have a lot in common. I happen to spend a lot of time in the Gulf at the moment. Recycling is new, and the divide between Westerners long since acclimdated from their own environs and the stark opposite is amusing.

Here, fully industrialized recycling has caught on, but white man's guilt is a special problem, as people like you and I only help to fill facilities overflowing with recyclables that cannot ship-and-sell locally, regionally, or globally.

http://dohanews.co/qatar-dumps-400-tons-waste-daily-landfill...

The stigma from childhood in the US stays bad enough for me, I sometimes avoid tossing things and leave in the car 1-2 days just to recycle it at a rare recycling facility in my housing complex.

Oh, and ironically no one in desert recycles glass. Intentional?

Made me see the world a little differently. “The Chinese will sell people anything they like. They don’t ask any questions. They don’t care what you do with what they sell you. They won’t ask whether the Egyptians are going to hold elections, or repress people, or throw journalists into jail. They don’t care. The Americans think, If everybody is like me, they’re less likely to attack me. The Chinese don’t think like that. They don’t try to make the world be like them. Their strategy is to make economic linkages, so if you break these economic linkages it’s going to hurt you as much as it hurts them.”

the modern chinese philosophy is to mind your own business, and survive, generate wealth for your children. Try to co-exist, and try to not make enemies (which doesn't mean you make friends), ut if you're troublesome, then stay the hell away.

"The most important word in the lingerie dialect is arusa, or “bride.” The Chinese pronounce it alusa, and they use it constantly; in many Cairo neighborhoods, there are Chinese who go door-to-door with sacks of dresses and underwear, calling out “Alusa! Alusa!” In Chinese shops, owners use it as a form of address for any potential customer. To locals, it sounds flattering and a little funny: “Beautiful blide! Look at this, blide! What do you want, blide?”"

really? Is this stereotype actually true, or is this embellished? This just seems over the top.

Especially considering that Mandarin Chinese differentiates between R and L sounds; Japanese is the one that doesn't[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_...

The immigrants in the story are from Zhejiang, so they likely natively speak a Wu dialect that does indeed not have an /r/ sound:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzhou_dialect#Phonology

And even the sound we write "r" when romanizing Mandarin is pretty distant from an Arabic /r/ (ر).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese#Initials

Thank you for the correction. I stand corrected.

Standardized mandarin differentiates, but a lot of people don't speak very standard mandarin, and R and L become confused. The R is also not exactly the same as an English R - it's somewhere in the middle of R, L and a bit of a Zzz.

Peter Hessler is the author of (among other things) "Country Driving", whose insipid title hides a fascinating story of China's evolution viewed from the ground level.

http://www.amazon.com/Country-Driving-Chinese-Road-Trip/dp/0...

I feel Egypt's "Zabbaleen" should be mentioned here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zabbaleen

There was an excellent documentary on them a few years ago :

http://www.garbagedreams.com/

As it happens, in addition to writing the article under discussion in this post, Peter Hessler also wrote another New Yorker piece about one of the zabbaleen:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/tales-trash

My wife and I just visited Egypt for two weeks. It was quite interesting to walk down a street in Cairo and look at hijab/niqab shops right next to seriously raunchy lingerie shops. We though it might be a cosmopolitan thing, but we noticed it even in the more conservative towns we visited.

It's a fascinating read! I released my app a while ago and found most users are Arab. I am eager to learn more about my customers and this article provides great insights.

Great read. Now I know not to try a manufacturing business in Egypt. Unfortunately.

Such a riveting read!

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