Country Driving [191]
Over the summer, the factory dormitory had acquired its youngest resident. Boss Wang’s wife and two-year-old son often lived in the building for weeks at a time, and now the place also became home to Master Luo’s newborn baby. Before the child was even two months old, his mother, whose name was Cheng Youqin, had taken him across China, traveling more than twenty hours by bus. In the dormitory the family lived together in an unfinished room on the third floor. They had a simple wooden bed, a hot plate, a few cooking utensils, and a cardboard box where they stored their clothes. Apart from that they had almost no possessions. Cheng told me proudly that the baby could already sleep through the sound of the machinery.
On the fiftieth day after the birth, I invited the family out to dinner. In China, people often mark such days, with a baby’s hundredth being particularly important. We met in the dormitory; Master Luo was smoking a Profitable Crowd cigarette while he changed his son’s clothes. The baby’s head had been shaved recently, because of the heat in the factory, and he had his mother’s pretty eyes. Fat cheeks, full lips, a nose that could have come from Buttontown: this was a good-looking child. Master Luo put him in my arms.
“How’s his big brother doing?” I asked. I assumed the older child was still in the village, being cared for by grandparents or other relatives. But the moment I asked the question, Master Luo’s face fell, and his wife gave him an uncomfortable look.
“There’s something I should tell you,” Master Luo said slowly. “This is actually our first child. When Boss Wang and Boss Gao hired me, I told them I already had a son so I could ask for a higher salary. I didn’t want to lie to you, but they were around when we were talking. I was afraid they’d overhear, so I never told you the truth. I should have told you before I left, but I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
I told him not to worry. In any case, the phantom child had already returned to haunt Master Luo once, when Boss Wang refused to let him go home for the birth of his real child. At that time, the boss had insisted that the event wasn’t important, because it was a second birth. I asked if now he knew the truth.
“No,” Master Luo said. “It’s too late to tell him now. I just act like there’s another boy at home.”
I hardly considered it a lie, because such stories are so common in boomtowns. When people negotiate with bosses, they find any advantage they can, and I understood the value of a nonexistent child. Even now he might still play a role. If Master Luo decided to quit the Lishui job and find something else, he could create a phantom sickness for the phantom child, and that would give him reason to ask for leave.
ON SUISONG ROAD, WE met a friend of Master Luo’s, an entrepreneur who sold cheap clothes from a nearby stand. He said a new hotpot restaurant down the block was celebrating its grand opening. At hotpot places, diners sit around cauldrons filled with oil and spices, and a gas flame heats the stuff to a boil. Customers cook the food themselves, dropping raw vegetables and meat into the oil, and often the main ingredients are pig intestines and other innards. Much of the appeal is social: it’s a good meal for drinking beer, and restaurants are always steam-filled and noisy, the way Chinese people like it on a night out. Hotpot is also the last meal to which I would take a baby celebrating his fifty-day anniversary, but nobody was asking me for child-care advice.
The appearance of the restaurant marked another stage in the neighborhood’s progress. Hotpot isn’t cheap, and it appeals to the middle-class of the development zone, the managers and the technicians. This was the second hotpot joint to open on Suisong Road within a month, and the entrance had been decorated with flowers to mark the occasion. They were setting off fireworks,