Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [28]
Let our ancestors take life’s last journey in the most civilized, dignified, and stately way.
Guangdong alone has more than one million dead each year.
For our company’s regular pagoda spots, the July 1995 price of 3,500 yuan has grown to 5,600 yuan today.
We offer a full line of services (from cremation to entering the pagoda, including the expiation of sins of the dead and so on).
Our operating time is from July 11, 1994, to July 10, 2044.
Chunming was on a more abbreviated schedule. In late 1997 she jumped again, to a chuanxiao company that charged new members one thousand yuan for a box of traditional Tibetan medicine. It was a pyramid scheme, pure and simple, and Chunming got in early enough to make some real money. She recruited a dozen people, all proven earners, and within a few months she headed a network of ten thousand people. By then Chunming was making forty thousand yuan a month—about five thousand dollars, an astronomical sum in the Pearl River Delta in 1998. The company began laminating her weekly pay slips in sheets of clear plastic so she could show them to recruits as a motivational tool. On a visit home, Chunming gave her parents thirty thousand yuan to renovate the family house, install tile floors, and buy new appliances and a twenty-nine-inch television set. Her success in the city had made her famous beyond her village. “Everyone living in our area had heard about me,” she said.
But the industry was getting out of control. In a town called Danshui, about forty miles from Dongguan, a Taiwanese scheme to sell foot vibrators had become all the rage. To join the enterprise, a participant had to buy a foot vibrator for 3,900 yuan, or almost five hundred dollars—about eight times the market price. Participants were told they would receive 40 percent of the admission fees of anyone they recruited. Migrants flocked to Danshui; some sold their houses, furniture, and oxen to pay the admission fee. But it turned out that selling 3,900-yuan foot vibrators in a poor town was not easy, especially when thousands of other people were doing the same thing.
When the scheme collapsed, some defrauded members assaulted the people who had recruited them, while others demonstrated in front of government offices to get their money back. Police were called in to quell the crowds, restore order, and send migrants home. By then, the organizers had moved inland to a town in Hunan Province, where they set up the same operation and recruited about thirty thousand participants before that scheme, too, fell apart.
In April 1998, the cabinet of Premier Zhu Rongji ordered all chuanxiao companies to cease operations. More than two thousand companies shut down, and an industry that had resisted government regulation for years collapsed in an instant. Chunming found herself out of a job; her life as a wealthy person had lasted exactly two months. She took the blow hard, and she knew who was to blame. “After Zhu Rongji came on,” she said, “he wouldn’t allow network sales anymore, so I stopped.” In the freewheeling Pearl River Delta, where Chunming had learned to talk, where commerce was king and everyone was a winner and to die poor was a sin, the long arm of the government had touched her life, astonishingly, for the first time.
4 The Talent Market
In the evenings after Min got off her shift, I would take the bus to meet her at the front gate of her factory. Dongguan came to life after the sun went down; as the day’s wearying heat evaporated, the darkening streets would be flooded with young people getting off work—changelings, turning before my eyes from dutiful workers back into eager teenagers again. Min and I would walk the few blocks around her factory and choose a cheap restaurant for dinner. She always ordered a meat dish, stir-fried greens, a whole fish for the two of us that invariably turned out to be mostly bone; if