Country Driving [197]
At the birthday party Old Tian’s face quickly turned red from the beer. Yufeng bullied him into a few final shots before relenting, and he sank onto the bunk bed in the corner of the room. The girls started talking about factory jobs. They mentioned the rumors that working with pige, or pleather, causes birth defects, and Yufeng said shoe plants are better.
“They have toxic fumes, too,” Ren Jing said. “It’s the same problem.”
“The fumes aren’t the same,” Yuran, the older sister, corrected her. “The problem with shoes is that they use a type of glue that’s bad for you. But it’s not as bad as the pige fumes.”
Yuran was only seventeen, but she was worldly when it came to factories; this was her third assembly-line job. Previously she had made shoes and dress shirts. Ren Jing, the birthday girl, had technically come of legal working age only today, but she was already onto her second job. At the age of fourteen she had started as a seamstress in a low-end garment factory. “They paid by the piece,” she told me. “This job is better, because I get paid by the hour. It’s more relaxed.”
“I liked the clothes factory where I used to work,” Yuran said. “The boss was really nice. One night we had to work late, because of an order, and he came and brought drinks for all of us. Nobody asked him to do that.”
“Boss Gao wouldn’t do that.”
“Boss Gao is too cheap.”
“The boss at the clothes factory cared about the workers.”
“Boss Wang is nice. He’s just too worried all the time.”
“Look at Old Tian!”
The girls laughed—the tipsy foreman had fallen asleep on the bunk bed. The cake had all been eaten, and a small pile of gifts sat on the table: a toy pig, a little cow, a floppy cloth dog. Ren Jing loved stuffed animals, and like all the girls she sometimes seemed younger than her years. They never mentioned boys, at least not in mixed company, and they obeyed their parents with a readiness that would have been unimaginable to an American teenager. But in other ways they were remarkably mature. In the United States, few girls could prepare a seven-course banquet for a sweet sixteen birthday party, and almost certainly such an event would not feature a fifteen-year-old bullying her assembly-line foreman into drinking too much. But some teenager qualities are the same everywhere, and once the Anhui girls started talking, their faces lit up and they couldn’t have been happier. For an hour Ren Jing sat with her friends, chatting about old jobs and new bosses and which factories are the best.
ONE EVENING THAT FALL, while driving from Wenzhou to Lishui on the new expressway, Boss Gao lost control of his car. It was pitch-black and raining hard; he was going faster than eighty miles per hour. On a curve, he hit a patch of water and locked the brakes, and then he hydroplaned. He was driving his aptly named Buick Sail. The car spun a full three-sixty, skidded across the highway, and slammed into a guardrail. Many sections of the Jinliwen Expressway are elevated, and often the road is bordered by cliffs, but Boss Gao was fortunate in the location of his accident—the guardrail held. It was nearly midnight and the road was empty. Afterward, when the car came to a stop on the shoulder, Boss Gao smoked a State Express 555 until his nerves calmed. But the damage to the car was relatively minor, and he was able to continue driving to Lishui.
Both bosses still had homes near Wenzhou, and they made the round-trip journey two or three