As W.H. Wong hugged his family goodbye before leaving for work on a quiet morning this spring, he felt a lump in his throat. He was headed more than 2,500 miles away, to an Indonesian island so remote that locals say it’s one of the places where spirits go to abandon their children.
After two weeks at home in Wenxi, a rural county of 350,000 in China’s northern Shanxi Province, the 39-year-old was once again making the grueling 36-hour journey to his job at the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park, a sprawling compound of metal-processing industries in North Maluku, an eastern Indonesian archipelago.
Indonesia controls more than 40 percent of the world’s identified nickel, and the mountains that surround the industrial park in North Maluku contain the largest known deposit. To get there from China, Wong would first take two flights to cross the South China Sea to Manado, a beach town on the northern tip of Sulawesi, one of Indonesia’s largest islands. From there, he’d catch another flight to North Maluku, then a speedboat to the island of Halmahera. Ano... Read more
