Country Driving [179]
The sudden downpour had stopped and now the air felt muggy. Outdoors it was over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and here in the lab, with the burners and the machines, it was even hotter. After the initial round of dyeing, Little Long had taken off his uniform top, like a playground athlete who’s finished the first game and wants to get serious. Finally I did the same, and both of us stood sweating in the lab, watching the rings spin in an industrial mixer. Virtually all the factory men went shirtless in summer.
Little Long was in his early twenties, and he was the only person in the plant who was not Han Chinese. He was Miao, an ethnicity that’s native to parts of southwestern China, and culturally related to the Hmong of Laos and Vietnam. Little Long’s skin was a shade darker than the Han Chinese, and his face was subtly different, almost girlish: he had full lips and high cheekbones. He was good-looking and slightly vain, especially when it came to his hair. He grew it past his shoulders, dyeing it a shade of red so bright it’s best described in chemist’s terms: Sellan Bordeaux G-P. When Little Long wasn’t busy, he spent much of his time flirting with the Tao sisters and the other girls in the factory.
He had come from a poor farming village in Guizhou Province. His family’s main crops were tea and tobacco, and after finishing the eighth grade Little Long had migrated to Guangdong. Initially he worked for a textile plant, and then he found a job at a bra factory that specialized in exports. “Each country has its own characteristic,” he told me once. I expected him to embark on a series of sweeping generalizations, the kind of conversation that’s common in villages. But Little Long’s worldview was far more empirical: he saw foreign lands through a tight network of straps and rings. “The Japanese like to have little flowers on their bras,” he continued. “They like that kind of detail. The Russians don’t like that—they don’t want flowers and little patterns. They just want bras to be plain and brightly colored. And big!”
Little Long was attentive, and in the bra factories of the south he had learned to specialize. After starting on the assembly line, he moved to the chemistry lab, where he picked up techniques of dyeing. He studied the trade from Big Masters; it was skilled work and the pay was good. In Lishui he had been hired for 2,500 yuan per month, more than three hundred dollars. But he wasn’t satisfied with this status. On the unpainted plaster wall of his dorm room, he had inscribed a sentence:
A PERSON CAN BECOME SUCCESSFUL ANYWHERE;
I SWEAR I WILL NOT RETURN HOME UNTIL I AM FAMOUS.
In the bra ring factory, resident workers often wrote inspirational phrases on their walls. This particular sentence—a Mao Zedong quote—was Little Long’s mantra. Years ago he had read it in a self-help book, and he adopted it as a guiding philosophy. His goal was to save enough money from factory jobs to eventually return home and start a business. Sometimes he talked about raising rabbits to sell to restaurants, and he also had an idea for marketing wholesale goods to small shopkeepers. These plans were vague; it was all in the distant future, and right now his top priority was concentrating on his work and saving money. He avoided taking trips home during vacations, and whenever his will began to flag, he thought of his mother back home on the farm. She was the only family member still in the village—Little Long’s father and two siblings had all migrated to coastal regions. “I think about my mother when I’m tired,” he said. “If I’m discouraged,