Country Driving [212]
“Mei shir,” he said. “No problem. It’s tight enough—that tire sure isn’t coming off!”
“But what if it gets a flat? How would I get that bolt off?”
He considered this in silence. “That would be a problem,” he said slowly. “Maybe you shouldn’t drive too fast.”
I thought, So much for the fortune-tellers. The day had the angry look of pleather weather, with gray-streaked clouds sagging low above the development zone. At the bra ring factory, the bosses had hired a forklift, four Liberation trucks, and seven day laborers. The trucks were five-ton flatbeds with open backs, and one of them had already been loaded by the time I arrived. It was packed with cardboard boxes and pieces of machinery, and I asked Boss Gao what they planned to do if it rained.
“It can’t rain,” he said.
“It looks like it might.”
“Mei banfa,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
Since early morning, Master Luo had been taking apart the Machine. He broke down the main assembly line into three sections, and they used the forklift to hoist the heavy steel frame onto a truck. They hauled out the metal punch presses and the underwire machinery. Old Tian and Little Long boxed up the finished bra rings: more than a million total, packaged into ninety-four cardboard crates. By that point, all the major equipment had been moved, and Boss Gao and Boss Wang picked through each floor like gleaners in the wake of a harvest. They salvaged the dirty carpet in the upstairs office; they gathered any scrap of metal that could be sold to recyclers. They unscrewed every single lightbulb in the factory. With a hammer, Boss Gao pounded out and pocketed nails from a pile of scrap wood. A little more than a year earlier, they had ordered the ten-dollar doors from the contractor, and now they took each one off its hinges. They stacked them flat like playing cards in the back of a truck. At midday a few heavy drops fell, and the bosses looked up in fear, but the weather held.
Mr. Tao showed up in the afternoon. For half an hour he stood there casually, watching the trucks get loaded. He didn’t offer to help: as of now he was officially off the clock. During recent days, in addition to keeping the salary negotiations on slow burn, he had secretly embarked on a job search, finding an assembly-line position at the nearby Huadu pleather plant. Because of the reputation for toxic fumes, it paid better than most entry-level jobs: Mr. Tao stood to make fifty-nine cents an hour. In the evenings he’d be able to run the family dry goods stand. As for his daughters—all the talk about their youthfulness and the need for a chaperone had been nothing but a negotiating ploy. Mr. Tao had always known they were capable of surviving on their own, and now they were free to go.
Ren Jing made the same decision for herself. At the end, her mother panicked and pursued the girl all the way to the factory gate, begging her to stay. She was too young; this was only her second factory job; she needed to wait until next year! But Ren Jing was determined: she had packed a small bag with all her possessions, and she waited to catch a ride with one of the moving trucks. She said nothing and she refused to make eye contact with her mother. The woman pleaded until she burst into tears; the girl remained stoic. And finally the mother gave in, shouting, “Leave then, if you want to leave!”
She turned and walked stiff-legged across Suisong Road, crying hard. The moment she left Ren Jing’s side, the girl