Country Driving [161]
IN CHINESE FACTORY TOWNS, late winter is the season of the job search. Many migrants return home for the Spring Festival holiday, when the Chinese New Year is celebrated, and afterward they board buses and trains bound for cities with development zones. It’s a restless time—a month when people finally act on long-held plans to leave the village, or switch jobs, or try a new city. Even the cautious are spurred to action, and a decision made during this period often shapes the rest of the year. Occasionally, a decade later, a migrant will look back and realize that her entire career was sparked by one chance interview during a February morning long ago.
All of this was new to Lishui. Locals told me that 2006 was the first year the development zone would have a significant number of working factories, and yet somehow the news had already gone out to migrants. They poured out of the local train station, and they clogged the bus terminus; on the new expressway most traffic consisted of long-distance buses catering to job seekers. In China, where the migrant population grows by an estimated ten million every year, countless bus routes run from the provincial interior. Usually their destination is the coast, but sometimes they find their way to less established places like Lishui. That first year in the development zone, migrants dragged their bags along unfinished roads—people without jobs, newly arrived in a place without proper streets. But they knew some factories were already buzzing, and others would soon follow, and there was an advantage to arriving early.
Some migrants visited the Lishui “talent market,” the local job-search center. The building was located downtown, and it featured a huge digital screen that scrolled an endless list of jobs. Young people stood in packs, necks craned upward, watching careers flash past in the terse jargon of the Chinese job listing:
BREAKING ROCKS.
MALE, GOOD HEALTH, WILLING TO EAT BITTERNESS.
40 YUAN PER DAY AND MEALS INCLUDED.
ORDINARY WORKERS NEEDED, FEMALE.
MIDDLE SCHOOL EDUCATION.
DIGNIFIED APPEARANCE, 1.55 METERS OR TALLER.
Jobs often listed height requirements, an obsession in Chinese society. This is especially true for women, whose career opportunities are sharply defined by looks:
SUPERMARKET CASHIERS NEEDED.
FEMALE, MIDDLE SCHOOL OR TRADE SCHOOL EDUCATION.
1.58 METERS OR TALLER.
SKIN FAIR AND CLEAR, GOOD APPEARANCE.
Women are also paid less—a detail that was noted openly in listings, along with regional preferences:
MALE WORKERS NEEDED FOR 35 YUAN PER DAY,
FEMALE WORKERS NEEDED FOR 25 YUAN PER DAY.
AVERAGE WORKERS NEEDED.
PEOPLE FROM JIANGXI AND SICHUAN NOT WANTED.
The listings were like telegrams—companies paid by the word, so they kept things brief. They described only the most necessary qualities, condensing human beings to whatever feature seemed most compelling to the boss. Sometimes they omitted the job description entirely, creating an odd sense of mystery. What exactly would people be doing that required only these characteristics?
FEMALE WORKERS NEEDED.
1.58 METERS TALL, GOOD APPEARANCE.
600 TO 800 PER MONTH.
WORKERS NEEDED.
EYESIGHT MUST BE 4.2 OR BETTER.
800 TO 1,200 PER MONTH.
Many factories didn’t bother with the talent market. They simply posted signs on their front gates and assumed that migrants would do the legwork. During that first February in Lishui, people wandered the district in packs, and it felt like an extension of the Spring Festival holiday. Everybody was young; they wore new clothes; their voices rose in excitement as they cruised the factory strip. People from the same region tended to stick together, and often two groups met in the street to exchange information. Down the road from the bra ring factory, I joined a crowd of thirty who had gathered at the front gate of Jinchao Synthetic