Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [23]
To some extent, this deep-rooted sexism worked in women’s favor. Many rural parents wanted a grown son to stay close to home, perhaps delivering goods or selling vegetables in the towns near the village. Young men with such uninspiring prospects might simply hun—drift—doing odd jobs, smoking and drinking and gambling away their meager earnings. Young women—less treasured, less coddled—could go far from home and make their own plans. Precisely because they mattered less, they were freer to do what they wanted.
But it was a precarious advantage. If migration liberated young women from the village, it also dropped them in a no-man’s-land. Most girls in the countryside were married by their early twenties, and a migrant woman who postponed marriage risked closing off that possibility for good. The gender imbalance in Dongguan, where 70 percent of the workforce was said to be female, worked against finding a high-quality mate. And social mobility complicated the search for a husband. Women who had moved up from the assembly line disdained the men back in the village, but city men looked down on them in turn. Migrants called this gaobucheng, dibujiu—unfit for a higher position but unwilling to take a lower one.
The migrant women I knew never complained about the unfairness of being a woman. Parents might favor sons over daughters, bosses prefer pretty secretaries, and job ads discriminate openly, but they took all of these injustices in stride—over three years in Dongguan, I never heard a single person express anything like a feminist sentiment. Perhaps they took for granted that life was hard for everyone. The divide between countryside and city was the only one that mattered: Once you crossed that line, you could change your fate.
* * *
Moving up came easily to Chunming. In 1995, she jumped to a factory in a remote part of Dongguan that made water pistols and BB guns. She finally learned to speak Cantonese. Within a year, her monthly salary increased from three hundred yuan to six hundred and fifty, then eight hundred, then one thousand yuan. She discovered that the department heads above her made more money though she did the same work. If you don’t increase my salary to 1,500 yuan a month, she wrote her boss, I refuse to do this anymore. She got what she wanted; no one in the factory had ever received a five-hundred-yuan raise before. But the promotion did not satisfy Chunming. It cast her into a new world where there was so much to learn.
Her dealings with other people immediately became more complicated. In the village, relations between people were determined by kinship ties and shared histories. In school and on the assembly line, everyone was in the same lowly position. But once a person started to rise in the factory world, the balance of power shifted, and that could be unsettling. A friend could turn into a boss; a young woman might be promoted ahead of her boyfriend.
March 26, 1996
My promotion this time has let me see the hundred varieties of human experience. Some people cheer me, some envy me, some congratulate me, some wish me luck, some are jealous of me, and some cannot accept it . . .
As to those who envy me . . . I will only treat them as an obstacle on the road to progress, kicking them aside and walking on. In the future there will be even more to envy!
Making a good impression on strangers became important. Chunming studied the higher-ups in her factory, as intent as a