Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [13]
Six months after I started coming to Dongguan, I interviewed the deputy mayor. His name was Zhang Shunguang and he was a Dongguan native: my first. We sat in a big reception room in a city government building and drank tea out of tiny paper cups. Several of his assistants gathered, speaking to one another in Cantonese. I had never met a Dongguan person and here they all were, inside the government.
“Do you speak Cantonese?” one assistant asked me.
“Sorry, no,” I said. No one in the city had ever asked me this question before.
“Is this your first time in Dongguan?”
“No, I’ve been here many times.”
“Oh, were they all secret trips?”
“Is it a secret if you don’t know about it?”
We already disliked each other. In the middle of the interview, I looked over at the assistant and he stared blankly back at me. The young woman next to him had fallen asleep. The phrase mutual contempt popped into my mind.
The interview was useful: Without seeing for myself, I never would have believed how completely the government ignored the migrants. The deputy mayor did not have an accurate count of the migrant population—that was up to the national census, not his department. He admitted that the local government lacked the resources to check conditions in the factories. “If I inspected one factory a day,” he said, “it would take me fifty years to inspect all the factories. So we must rely on the companies to police themselves.”
The deputy mayor then talked of a plan to “lift the quality of the Dongguan people,” but the effort excluded those who were not native-born. Like all city people, he had a reflexive contempt for waidiren, outsiders, the common term for migrants. “The quality of migrant workers is not high,” he said, “but this is the responsibility of the companies. They should be running classes for workers.”
I asked the deputy mayor why there were no Dongguan people in the factories, even at the highest levels, and he contradicted what he had just said without missing a beat.
“The people from outside,” he said, “have higher quality and lower wages.”
After the interview, the deputy mayor shook my hand and praised my knowledge of the city. I didn’t tell him my informants were all teenage girls—migrants of low quality and even lower wages.
AFTER A YEAR of visiting the city, I rented a one-bedroom apartment downtown for $160 a month. The high-rise complex was called Dongguan City Holiday, and it targeted single women; hot-pink billboards around town advertised one PERSON’S HOUSE, ONE PERSON’S SPLENDOR. I thought I would meet young women and hear their stories, but no one ever said a word to me in the lobbies and elevators, and I never saw a single person in the common room. People were too busy with their own lives to bother with anyone else’s. I got most of my news from the bulletin boards in the apartment complex, which portrayed a community of petty crime and round-the-clock construction.
FOR THE PEACE OF RESIDENTS, RENOVATION WILL STOP ON JANUARY 1. IT WILL RESUME ON JANUARY 2.
WHEN A PERSON KNOCKS ON YOUR DOOR, DO NOT CASUALLY OPEN IT UNTIL YOU HAVE CONFIRMED THE PERSON’S IDENTITY.
ANYONE WITH INFORMATION ABOUT THE THEFT RING IN THE NANCHENG AREA SHOULD CONTACT THE POLICE.
My landlady had moved to the city years before from rural Guangdong. She often showed up at my apartment in pink pajamas and house slippers to collect the rent, and I once heard her say “Fuck your mother” on the phone to her husband because he had just told her he was returning late from a business trip. She worked the night shift at a hotel, doing sales. I wondered what kind of sales had to be done between midnight and six o’clock in the morning, but I never found the courage to ask. My landlady had a way of deflecting questions.
“How did you have two children?” I asked her once. Most urban families were limited to one.
“How do you think I had two children?” she answered.
The retail environment outside my apartment was in constant flux. On the day I moved in, I was excited