Country Driving [196]
They had purchased bottles of Double Deer beer for the men. The older Ren sister’s boyfriend was there—he had just finished a twelve-hour shift at a pleather plant—and Old Tian came from the factory. Old Tian was the foreman on the underwire assembly line, where he monitored Tao Yufeng, the fifteen-year-old who had lied about her age during the factory’s first hiring. Tonight the girl targeted Old Tian as soon as the beer was uncapped.
“Old Tian, drink a glass,” she said. She topped off the man’s shot glass with beer and filled her own cup with Sprite. They both drank, and Yufeng immediately followed with a refill.
“Drink again,” she said sternly.
“Wait a minute,” Old Tian said. “I need to rest.”
“Drink it!”
“Wait.”
“Now! Drink it now!”
The moment the glass was empty she poured another.
“Now it’s your turn,” she said, pointing to Ren’s boyfriend. “Make him drink. I want him drunk so he can’t boss me around at work tomorrow morning.”
“I won’t boss you around!”
“Make him drink!”
After the boyfriend obliged, she turned to me. “You go next,” she instructed. “Make Old Tian drink.” I didn’t hesitate—I knew better than to get in the way of Yufeng. From the moment she lied her way into the job, Yufeng had established herself as a force of nature in the factory. She had a young, boyish face, with chubby cheeks and short-cropped hair, but she had more attitude than all of the adult workers combined. Nobody else was nearly as fast with underwire, and she refused to be intimidated by the bosses. Once, when Boss Wang told Yufeng there wouldn’t be any work for a few days, she cursed him and stormed out of the factory. “That g-g-girl has a temper,” he said mildly, after she was gone. Like the other men at the plant, he seemed more bemused than anything: nobody knew how to handle a woman so young and yet so sharp.
In particular, OldTian was no match for the girl. He barely weighed one hundred pounds, with a gentle, elflike face, and he lived according to a two-sentence motto: “Pass Every Day Happily! A New Day Begins from Right Now!” This had been his catchphrase ever since he first set out from rural Sichuan in the mid–1980s. Back then, he earned a good living as a wristwatch repairman, setting up stands on the streets of development zones. Soon, however, he found himself overtaken by the pace of progress. In the early 2000s, cell phones suddenly became cheap enough for even low-income consumers, who also used the devices to tell time; Old Tian’s trade in wristwatches became obsolete. Like so many people in China, he learned that it was impossible to be complacent with new knowledge; he had already shifted from farming to watches, but now it was time to learn something else. He took it all in stride, the eternal optimist: A New Day Begins from Right Now! In the Wenzhou region he found jobs as a factory technician, eventually specializing in the production of underwire.
He earned a good wage, roughly a third of which was spent on lottery tickets. In China, the state-run Welfare Lottery funds social programs, and Old Tian contributed more than his share. The man was obsessed—he kept track of winning numbers, writing them across the walls of his dormitory room. He slept in a windowless chamber on the first floor, where the bare plaster walls had been covered with his motto about passing days happily, along with dozens of mysterious lottery calculations:
95 1.3.17.20.21.24 + 16
97 1.5.9.13.15.33 + 14
97 11.14.15.20.26.27 + 12
98 6.7.10.11.15.23 + 16
99 7.12.18.23.24.27 + 5
Every worker in the plant nursed some secret dream for the future. Yufeng told me that eventually she wanted to start a shoe factory, and Little Long talked about raising rabbits