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By Root 3907 0

One afternoon, standing on Suisong Road, I shut my eyes and listened, picking out the song of every product. Punch-hisss, punch-hisss, punch-hisss—that was the pneumatic wheeze of the metal press that pounded out unfinished bra rings. Crussshhhh, crussshhhh, crussshhhh—the throb of a polycarbonate grinder making Jane Eyre light switches. Whir-r-r-ring, whir-r-r-ring, whir-r-r-ring—industrial spools wrapping copper wire for Geley Electrical Company. All of the machines sang together—punch-hisss, punch-hisss; crussshhhh, crussshhhh; whir-r-r-ring, whir-r-r-ring—and then I realized the other way in which these noises were different from those of construction. The factory sounds did not stop. Each was steady as a heartbeat, as reliable as breathing, and that was how the neighborhood finally came to life.

II

AFTER THE FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL CAME TO WORK AT the bra ring factory, she made no attempt to hide the secret of her age. In fact, she brought her older sister to the plant, explaining that this was the person who actually owned the ID card that said “Tao Yuran.” The real TaoYuran, of course, also needed a job. With the name already on the books, and the woman standing there eager to work, the bosses could hardly do otherwise; they gave her a position on the Machine’s assembly line. Meanwhile there was the issue of what to do with the fake Tao Yuran. Her name was actually Tao Yufeng, and she wouldn’t be sixteen for almost a year; Chinese law forbids factories from hiring people so young. But in practice it’s common, especially in cases where applicants use false IDs. What else can you do when somebody wants to work so badly? And so the bosses kept the girl, training her on the assembly line for underwire.

The next Tao to materialize was Tao Fei. He was the patriarch of the clan, and he looked the part: tall and big-boned, with the erect posture of a soldier. His hair was white and he kept it shaved close to his head. He had an angular face defined by gaunt, sunken cheeks, and he chain-smoked West Lake cigarettes. There was little about this man that could be recognized in his daughters, at least on the surface. The girls both had soft, childlike features, and they lacked their father’s stately carriage. But there was a flicker of resemblance when the man smiled—a certain quickness of eye that he shared with his daughters. It was a type of native intelligence combined with sheer determination, and this sharp-eyed look was the quality that all three Taos brought to the factory.

Originally the family had farmed in Anhui Province. They came from Taihe County, the village of Taolou—literally the place name means “Manor of the Taos.” Virtually everybody there was a Tao, and despite the Manored name most of them were dirt-poor. In the past, Mr. Tao and his wife farmed less than an acre and a half of corn, wheat, and soybeans. They had three children, and this line of offspring followed a classic rural progression: daughter, daughter, son. Like many peasants, Mr. Tao and his wife had evaded the planned-birth policy, paying fines after each subsequent child, until at last they were satisfied with a boy.

In recent years, as everywhere in rural China, young people had been leaving the Manor of the Taos. Often the older generation stayed at home, farming and benefiting from money remitted by their children in the factories. But Mr. Tao and his wife wanted to work, too, so they decided to migrate en masse, as a family. In Lishui they rented a room in a farmer’s home for a little more than twenty dollars a month. It had mud walls, a cheap tile floor, and a total area of less than one hundred and fifty square feet. All five Taos lived there, and they also used the place to stock their goods at night. The parents were among the entrepreneurial pioneers who had settled near the bra ring factory, where they ran a small dry goods stand. It consisted of a long wooden table covered with plastic tarp and arranged with cheap products that catered to factory workers: low-end batteries, plastic razors, shampoo, and other basic toiletries.