Country Driving [184]
But eventually he returned to Shenzhen and the other cities of the far south. Years later, he spoke most fondly of this region, because in Shenzhen he attended private classes during the late 1980s. “The class started at eight o’clock, and we used to hurry over right after finishing our shift at the factory,” he remembered. “The class cost five yuan and it was forty-five minutes long. They covered electrical wiring, machine tooling, welding—anything that’s useful. The teacher was from Beijing; he was retired and he was really good. The class was in a room about this size, but there were more than two hundred people every night. It was packed because that teacher had such a good reputation.”
Back then, Master Luo worked sixty hours a week, but he still found time to attend night school. The financial investment was significant—he earned only five hundred yuan per month, and yet he was willing to spend five yuan every time he attended a lesson. In development zones, private schools and tutorials are common, because motivated workers know they can rise from the assembly line. During his twenties, in his spare time, Master Luo also improved his reading and writing, until finally he became fully literate. In Shenzhen he passed a state-administered exam that granted him a vocational high school diploma.
Apart from his native intelligence and determination, Master Luo had few natural advantages. He had grown up in poverty, and he wasn’t good-looking by Chinese standards. He was short, and he had freckles, which are considered blemishes in China. He had a heavy brow and a long nose; his teeth were bad. But there was an openness to his expression, and he smiled easily, with soft lines of age fanning out across his temples. He had the air of somebody who’s experienced a great deal without becoming too cynical, and over time he became the factory worker I knew best. His vision was broader than most—he had the instinctive curiosity of the self-educated man. And as a Big Master he often found himself positioned between ownership and labor. In the city of Shantou, he had helped manage workers as well as machinery, and the experience left a deep impression.
“I took care of all the registration forms at the factory, and I noticed that many workers couldn’t write,” he said. “There are still so many uneducated people in China! But you know, sometimes these people are very smart. In Shantou I knew a man who worked as an elevator operator at the Blue Sky Hotel. He hadn’t gone to school, and he couldn’t read or write, but he was naturally intelligent. Once, the hotel’s generator broke and the electricians couldn’t fix it. After they failed, the elevator operator said to the boss, ‘Let me look at it.’ The boss said, ‘You don’t understand something like this.’ But finally he let him try and the man fixed it within an hour. After that, the boss gave him more responsibility, and then another boss hired him for 2,800 yuan per month. This worker, he was from Sichuan, and he was very honest. He said, ‘I can’t read or write, how can I make that much money?’ The boss said, ‘I don’t care as long as you understand things.’ Eventually another boss hired him for four thousand. He basically couldn’t write his name, but he could fix anything. He couldn’t explain it, but he could do it.”
In the Shantou suburb called Chaonan, Master Luo made his own rise in the factory world. During the late 1990s, he found a job at Shangang Keji, one of the early plants to manufacture bra rings. Master Luo learned to repair the Machine, and by 2002 he earned nearly two hundred dollars every month, an excellent wage. Meanwhile, other Chaonan bosses heard about the profits from bra rings, and one of them came calling. Initially the boss didn’t say anything about a job, but he invited Master Luo to dinner at an expensive place called the Peace Restaurant. “We had crabs, squid, and lobster,” Master Luo remembered. “And he ordered the kind of beer that’s eighteen yuan per bottle. They gave me