Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [29]
Once when her cousin was in town, he took us to McDonald’s. Min took a long look at her Big Mac, lowered her face down to the table until it was eye-level with the sandwich, and ate through it layer by layer—bun, tomato, lettuce, beef. She had never been to McDonald’s before. When I gave her two small picture frames one birthday, I had to show her how to open the back to slip a photograph inside. Once she asked me what a stock was. She was completely uninterested in the affairs of the nation. During a meal with two older coworkers from her factory one afternoon, the conversation turned to growing up in the 1970s under Mao Zedong. “We were always hungry,” one of the men recalled. “It wasn’t until the 1980s that we stopped being hungry.”
“Who is Chairman Mao now?” Min asked suddenly. “I don’t even know.”
“Hu Jintao,” one of the men said.
A hint of recognition. “Then it isn’t Jiang Zemin anymore?” she said.
I said no, that Jiang Zemin had retired and Hu Jintao had taken his place.
“Oh. I thought Jiang Zemin was dead.” Then she said, “These people seem very far away from me.”
The details of her own life crowded out everything else; almost every time I saw Min, she had something new to tell me. It sometimes felt as if the laws of the physical world did not apply to her, that she had only to think of something—a job switch, a breakup—to make it so. If I didn’t see her for a while, she might forget to tell me that she had quit a factory or gotten a raise, because in her mind she had already moved on. She rarely stopped to take stock of everything she had done since coming out from home, a common trait in Dongguan. Maybe people worried that they would lose momentum if they stopped moving long enough to look backward.
When my first article about Min was published in the Wall Street Journal, I brought her a translated copy when we met up one night in a pastry shop near her factory. Her pound cake and iced mungbean shake sat untouched while she read. On page three, she giggled—“You remember it in great detail,” she said—and again on page four. She read the story through to the end and flipped the last page over, looking for more. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“It leaves you wanting more,” she said.
“There will be more.”
“Really?” she said. “Are you writing it now?”
“You’re living it,” I said. “It’s happening now.” Min gave me an odd look, as if she weren’t sure whether I was joking with her.
She read the article several more times, and afterward she sent me an e-mail. Seeing the self I used to be, she wrote, I realize that I have really changed.
One thing Min never forgot was how hard her year on the assembly line had been. In the factory world, it was common to hear people speak almost nostalgically about their days on the assembly line, a time of few worries and responsibilities. Min did not do that. “Nothing is as hard as being an ordinary worker,” I often heard her say. She never forgot where she had come from. That was one of the things I liked most about her.
* * *
In April 2004, Min got her first two weeks’ pay at her new job, but she did not send the money home. Instead, she went to the mall and she bought a fitted black shirt and white capri pants. She was keeping a promise to visit old friends, and to visit old friends required new clothes. The next morning at eight o’clock, Min and I boarded the bus for a remote district of Dongguan, where she had worked her first year out from home. The bus was packed with migrants on their weekend outings. Young women sat in pairs wearing their Sunday best—white shirts, clean jeans, sleek ponytails—and the overflow passengers in the aisle snaked merrily, like a conga line, with every lurch of the bus. A few carsick young women clutched the railings, their heads bowed and their eyes squeezed tightly, as if to shut out the suffering.