Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [21]
As for sleep time, six hours at most is enough.
March 29
We were paid today. I got 365 yuan. After repaying a fifty-yuan debt, I still have three hundred yuan. I want to buy a watch, clothes, and personal items. How will I have any left over? . . . Summer is here and I don’t have any clothes . . . and I must buy a watch. Without a watch, I cannot make better use of my time.
As for sending money home, that is even less possible. Next month after we are paid, I will register at the Shorthand Secretarial Correspondence University. I must get a college diploma. I certainly did not come to Guangdong just to earn this two or three hundred yuan a month . . . This is merely a temporary stopping place. This is definitely not the place I will stay forever.
No one will understand me, and I don’t need others to understand me.
I can only walk my own road and let other people talk!
May 22
A lot of people say I have changed. I don’t know if I have changed or not . . . I am much more silent now and I don’t love to laugh the way I used to. Sometimes when I laugh it is forced. Sometimes I feel I have become numb. “Numb.” Numb. No! No! But I really don’t know what word I should use to describe the me that I am now.
Anyway, I am so tired, so tired.
Really, really, I feel so tired.
My body and my spirit feel so tired.
Too tired, too tired.
I don’t want to live this way anymore.
I don’t want to live this way anymore.
Never to live that way anymore.
How should I live?
* * *
Even as Chunming plotted her rise in the factory world, in her letters home she struggled to be a good traditional daughter.
Mother, I have knit you a sweater . . . If I weren’t knitting a sweater, I could have used this day to read so many books. But Mother, sometimes I think: I would rather be Mother’s obedient daughter, a filial daughter, and even throw away those books I want so much to read.
Mother, I have knit my love for you into this sweater . . . Mother, remember when I was still at home, you always said other people’s daughters knew how to knit sweaters but that I lacked perseverance. But today, do you see that your daughter also knows how to knit? Remember, your daughter will never be dumber than other people!
The expectations of family weighed on her. Young women from the countryside felt particular pressure from home. If they didn’t progress quickly, their parents would urge them to return home to marry.
I finally got a letter from home . . . Other than Father, who else can write me a letter? Mother did not include even a single line to tell me that she misses me . . . In the last letter, she added on a line telling me not to find a boyfriend outside. Although it was only one line, it made me happy, as if Mother were at my side teaching me.
How badly I want to pour out to my mother all the words in my heart, but I cannot. Mother! My mother, why are you an illiterate? It’s all right that you are an illiterate. Why can you not even write a letter? It’s all right that you cannot write a letter. It would be fine if you could write a few words. Even if you made up a few words to say what you wanted to tell me, I would understand your true thoughts.
Mother, I know you have many things to say to me, only that Father did not write them . . .
Father and Mother, it looks like we cannot communicate between us. You will never know and never understand what is really in your daughter’s heart. Maybe you think that I have already found my ideal factory, with three hundred yuan a month. Maybe you think that I will never again jump factories. Maybe your wish is that I never jump factories again, that I work at this factory for two years and then come home to get married, to have a family like all the girls in the countryside. But I am not thinking any of these things . . .
I want to carve out a world for myself in Guangdong . . . My plan is:
1. To study at correspondence university
2. To learn to speak Cantonese
3. With nothing to my name and without any accomplishment, to absolutely