Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [19]
The bus driver dropped her off only partway back to Dongguan. Chunming started to walk, and a man on the street followed her. She spotted a young woman in a factory uniform and asked if she could sneak into her factory for the night. The young woman borrowed a worker’s ID card and brought Chunming in, where she hid that night in a shower stall. In the morning, Chunming stole clean pants and a T-shirt that were hanging out to dry in the bathroom and climbed the factory gate to get out. By then she had not eaten in two days. A bus driver bought her a piece a bread and gave her a lift back to Dongguan, where her cousin and his wife worked.
Chunming did not tell them what had happened to her. Instead she wandered the streets. She befriended a cook on a construction site who let her eat with the other workers, and at night she sneaked into friends’ factory dorms to sleep. Without an ID card, she could not get a new job. After a month of wandering, Chunming saw an ad for assembly-line jobs at the Yinhui toy factory. She found an ID card that someone had lost or left behind and used it to get hired. Officially she was Tang Congyun, born in 1969. That made her five years older than she really was, but no one looked closely at such things.
Chunming worked at the Yinhui factory for a year, mixing vats of plastic that was poured into molds to make toy cars, planes, and trains. She was bold and she liked to talk, and she made friends easily. Her new friends called her Tang Congyun. She had become, quite literally, someone else.
For years after she left the factory, she received letters addressed to Tang Congyun. Chunming never found out who she was.
I HAD KNOWN CHUNMING for two years before she told me this story. It was a Sunday afternoon at the end of 2006, and she was sitting in a Dongguan juice bar after a day of shopping for birthday presents. “I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me then,” she said, sipping her mixed-fruit juice. “When I tell this story it’s like it happened yesterday.”
“Did you ever find out what happened to the friends you left behind in the hair salon?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know if it was a truly bad place or just a place where you could work as a massage girl if you wanted. But it was frightening that they would not let us leave.”
Chunming’s best friend had been among the ones she left behind. They had met in the city on the assembly line, so Chunming didn’t know the name of her friend’s village or how to find her again. Years later, Chunming met a girl who had known the friend; she said the friend had gone home and had later come out to Dongguan again. Chunming had to conclude from that brief account that her friend had turned out fine. But there was no way of knowing for sure; perhaps she had been tricked into a brothel and was never heard from again, just as the people in the village had said. Chunming’s good friend was lost to her, like so many people she had met along the way. A year in Dongguan is a long time, and Chunming had lived in the city for thirteen years.
* * *
May 24, 1994
We start work at seven in the morning and get off work at nine at night. Afterward we shower and wash our clothes. At around ten, those with money go out for midnight snacks and those without money go to sleep. We sleep until 6:30 in the morning. No one wants to get out of bed, but we must work at seven. Twenty minutes to go: Crawl out of bed, rub your swollen eyes, wash your face, and brush your teeth. Ten minutes