Country Driving [198]
Some of it was simply the eternal restlessness of the development zone. People in such places become accustomed to moving and adjusting; their instinct is always to tinker. And often a little success proves to be more unsettling than satisfying. After the bosses began to earn money, they became obsessed with cutting costs. Their staff of twenty employees was overstretched, and often the crew worked late into the evening, but the bosses refused to hire new people. They complained about rent, because their factory space was so big. Their initial plans for the business had been overly ambitious; they had hoped to make a major expansion within six months. But after a year the growth had proven to be smaller than expected, and much of the empty space on the top floors was wasted.
Whenever the bosses discussed important business between themselves, they spoke in their local dialect, so the workers wouldn’t understand. And they rarely gave anybody a sense of their plans. But during the fall they asked Master Luo how much time he would need, in the event of a factory transfer, to disassemble the Machine and put it back together again. He told them it would take ten days total. After that, they didn’t ask him any more questions, and he couldn’t tell whether they were serious about the possibility of moving. He believed they wouldn’t try something like that before the end of the year, because business was just starting to boom and a transfer involved risks. But Master Luo admitted that after all the years he’d spent in Chinese factory towns, he still couldn’t predict the snap decisions of a boss. People rarely planned carefully, especially in a place like Zhejiang. From Master Luo’s perspective, the region was even more chaotic than Guangdong, where he spent so many years. “They build things differently there,” he told me. “It’s more logical. In Guangdong the first thing they do is build the road, and then they build the factories. But here it’s the opposite. They build factories first and then they worry about finishing the roads and everything else.”
At the end of autumn, Master Luo decided that it was best for his wife and baby to return to her hometown in Guizhou Province. He wasn’t sure if the factory was going to move, and the bosses were still withholding part of his salary; there was a chance he’d make a job search after the Spring Festival holiday. In either case, mobility would be crucial, and such things are harder with a small child. Like so many migrant families, they decided to live apart until Master Luo’s job situation was more stable.
Cheng Youqin packed up as much as she could carry, and she took their new Canon digital camera. This was the family’s most valuable possession—after the baby’s birth, they spent one hundred and fifty dollars on the camera. With all of her bags and the baby, Cheng left from the Lishui bus station, eventually transferring to a train to Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province. It was an overnight journey and they arrived before five in the morning. At the Guiyang train station, a friendly young woman approached Cheng and asked where she was going. The friendly woman said she knew somebody with a van that was also headed in that direction, and she offered a good price, so Cheng accepted. Her hometown was in the countryside outside of Guiyang, more than an hour away, and usually she had to connect with a couple of public buses in order to get there.
She followed the young woman outside the train station, but once she saw the vehicle she became nervous. It was dingy and cramped,