Country Driving [183]
Each speeding ticket added points to a driver’s record, and finally I accumulated so many that I was required by law to take a remedial driving course. But the manager at the car rental company told me it wouldn’t be necessary if I made a personal visit to the Lishui police station. At the station, an officer called up my outstanding violations on a computer. He printed out a series of forms and instructed me to pay at the Bank of China, which was conveniently located across the street. The most recent tickets came to a total of about sixty dollars.
“What about the points?” I asked.
“I erased them,” the officer said. “As long as your fee goes through, it won’t be a problem.”
At the bank I joined a special line dedicated to traffic violations. A half dozen yuppies were already waiting, and one by one we made our way to the front, where a clerk efficiently handled our money. It was February; a big English banner in the lobby said “Merry Christmas.” That same week I noticed a new sign on the expressway:
DRIVE SAFELY!
26 PEOPLE HAVE DIED ON THIS ROAD!
BY THE END OF July, the factory still had only four customers, and they had accumulated over a million bra rings in storage. The Machine stood silent for days at a stretch, and now the factory was clearly in serious trouble. They stopped calling the part-time assembly-line workers, and they slashed the salaries of all high-level technicians. Little Long’s wages were cut by 40 percent; Master Luo’s salary was reduced by half. This violated the men’s contracts, and in theory they could have complained to the local labor bureau, but Chinese workers rarely take such a step. They generally have little faith in government—“You have to handle these things yourself,” as Master Luo often said. He told me that for the time being he’d be patient, and if things didn’t turn around he’d search for another job.
Master Luo had worked with bra rings for so many years that he dreamed of them at night. When he slept, he saw rings coming off the Machine’s conveyor belt, and he had visions of piles of rings waiting to be sorted and bagged. His nightmares usually featured long pointless arguments with bosses. Once, while we were chatting in the Machine room, Master Luo described the dream that had woken him up the night before. “We had just gotten a shipment of nylon powder and it wasn’t any good,” he said. “But Boss Wang said it was fine. I said, no, it won’t work. He said it was fine. I said, no, you’re talking farts!”
In the factory world, Luo was the kind of person known as a Da Shifu, a “Big Master.” He was only in his late thirties, but twenty-three of those years had been spent working in plants across China. And like virtually all masters of his generation, he had grown up on a farm. His parents raised cotton outside of Songzi, a small city in central China’s Hubei Province. In the late 1970s, rural schools were terrible, and Master Luo didn’t receive much formal education. “We had only two textbooks,” he remembered. “Chinese and mathematics. That was it.” By the start of middle school, he was still functionally illiterate, but his parents decided to stop paying school fees. “They said they needed money, so it would be better if I went out to work.”
In 1984, at the age of fourteen, he found a job in a toy factory in Hunan Province. He worked there for a year, sending home much of his twenty-five-dollar-a-month salary. Soon he made his way to Shenzhen, the special economic zone in the far south that began to boom in the 1980s. For a while, Master Luo worked in a textile factory, and then he changed jobs again. It became his pattern: over the course of a decade, he jumped from city to city, factory to factory, product to product. He manufactured screws in Hubei, and he worked in a paint plant in Xinjiang. He made plastic bowls in Guangzhou. He did trade in Yunnan Province, near the Burmese