Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [16]
I pushed past him to the front of the bus and looked for something to throw. I wanted to grab his money belt and toss it out the window, but of course he kept that close to him. There was a dirty towel on the dashboard, and I flung it in the driver’s face. Then I got off the bus and ran. My heart was pounding; I thought he might come after me. Then I stopped running, and I realized how stupid I must have looked.
On a side street, I saw a taxi and asked the driver how much to Dongguan. Eighty yuan—ten dollars. I got in. I was so mad I was shaking. I thought of all the young women I knew who lived here, and how every single one had been cheated, abused, and yelled at by someone just like the skinny Cantonese man, who probably woke up in the morning already angry at the world. There was no recourse but tears and fury at your own impotence. In a confrontation, everything boiled down instantly to brute force, and a woman would always lose. I had money, and with money I could buy my way to comfort and safety. They didn’t have that.
And yet there were also people who were kind, like the woman on the bus who had cursed out the driver on my behalf. You had to focus on that or you would never survive.
* * *
Dongguan might feel like a place without a past, but city officials did not see it that way. In the new downtown, they had erected a museum of history—an immense building of gray stone, as squat and permanent as the mausoleum of a dead dictator. Cabdrivers didn’t know the place—invariably they took me to a commercial exhibition center down the street—and the museum was deserted all three times I went in the summer of 2005.
Chinese history museums are troubled places. Ancient civilization was great, or so the official narrative went, but it was feudal and backward. Modern China was ravaged by foreigners, but the Chinese people were heroic in humiliation and defeat. China stood up in 1949 when the Communists came to power, but there were other years since—1957, 1966, and 1989 in particular—that went prominently unmentioned. Everything that was jumbled and incoherent and better left unsaid must be smoothed into a rational pattern, because the purpose of history from the time of Confucius has been to transmit moral lessons to later generations.
In Dongguan, the museum’s yawning lobby was a monument to wasted real estate and powerful air-conditioning. Signs pointed to History, straight ahead, and Economy, second floor. On my initial visit, I entered History. The first room stretched from prehistoric marine fossils to the Qing Dynasty, with glass cases displaying what looked like piles of rocks. On closer inspection, they were piles of rocks with incomprehensible English captions: Whetstone appearing from Haogang shell mound remains. A room-size diorama of women weavers illustrated Dongguan’s early talent in handicrafts. A tape of the scraping sound of the loom played in a continuous loop and haunted me through the rooms.
More piles of rocks followed, and then history lurched forward with startling accuracy. The population increased and reached 150,378 by the sixth year of the Tianshun reign of the Ming Dynasty (1462 A.D.). Markets developed; the salt industry flourished; agriculture thrived. In a large open room, a fake tree cast its shadow over a fake lake, a fake rowboat, a fake arched footbridge, three fake geese, and two fake ducks. The continuous loop quacked.
That was another difficulty of telling about the past. Every place had to reflect the continuity of five thousand years of Chinese history, but in most places little had been recorded and nothing concrete remained. Valuable artifacts would have been claimed by Beijing or lost in wars and political campaigns, so museums were forced to invent the rest. They forged cannons and bells and suits of armor, and printed texts of old documents on Formica tablets and hung them on the walls.