It begins as a short story by Stephen King. In Beijing, a public telephone, obsolete in the age of cell phones, started ringing. Again and again. Almost without a break. No one was paying attention that Saturday afternoon in July, NPR says. Only the following Saturday, the same phone rang again at the same time for about two hours. And the Saturdays after that too.
The sequel looks less like Stephen King. The most curious passers-by, eager to see if it was, for example, a strange curse or a desperate call from a kidnapped person, finally picked up the phone to answer it. At the end of the line, a voice described situations of distress and isolation of certain residents of the country. “The air is permeated with a heavy odor reminiscent of almonds. At home we can hardly breathe freely. I have a sore throat, as if someone was strangling me,” could be heard on the other end of the line at the end of July, for example.
The voice speaking these words is that of Hong Yu, a Chinese citizen who lives with 2.7 million other people in a coastal city in northern China, Huludao, nicknamed Pumpkin Island. The population there can no longer stand it: They suffer from the severe environmental pollution caused by a zinc factory, but also by several companies that produce or use pesticides and other chemical products.
Mobilizations and petitions were ineffective: the complaints of Gourd Island residents went unanswered. But the Chinese artist Nut Brother, known for his absurdist performances against the background of ecological activism, did not remain deaf. We owe him the idea of converting the old phone booth into a hotline for victims of pollution.
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Nut Brother then organized a system of calls from the people of Gourd Island, all routed to this public phone in Beijing, more than 400 kilometers away. The phone calls took place every Saturday from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. No curse, then, other than the very real one afflicting the inhabitants of this coastal town for which he wanted to be spokesman.
If the militant and artistic installation had consequences, they did not live up to the expectations of the Huludao people. A few weeks after the experiment started, Hong Yu was detained for 24 hours. Shortly after, she released a TikTok video in which she appeared energetic and claimed to have made up the zinc pollution news. She ended up apologizing, adding that “life on Gourd Island is actually good.” Weakness.
Journalists Aowen Cao and Emily Feng, who covered the story for NPR, add that they dialed the infamous phone booth in September and didn’t get a dial tone. So the Chinese authorities seem to have masked the affair, not only by silencing their protagonists, but also by simply getting rid of the object through which consciousness could have finally arrived.