This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and The Uproot Project Environmental Justice Fellowship. It was produced by Grist and republished by Rest of World .

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

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