Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [31]
Min was disappointed. “I want you to say I’m more mature than I used to be.”
Liang Rong and Huang Jiao’e went into the factory to pick up their wages; apparently the boss was in such a good mood that he had consented to pay his workers that day. Min waited outside the gate, peering in at the tile buildings and a mountain of dirt in the middle of the yard. The factory was expanding.
“How do you think it looks?” Min asked me.
“It looks okay,” I said.
“It looks all right from the outside,” she said, “but you never see the inside until you’ve agreed to work there. And then you have nowhere else to go.”
______
IN THE AFTERNOON, the girls met up with two other friends from the factory and went to a nearby park. Part of being a migrant worker was having no idea how to spend leisure time. At Tangxia Park, they watched a girl of about six aiming pebbles at the head of a turtle squatting in a shallow pool. But most entertainments at the park cost money. Visitors could use air rifles to shoot fish in a pond; Min looked at the few skinny fish awaiting execution and said solemnly, “This is what happens when you don’t have freedom.” A cable car brought passengers to a nearby hilltop, but that cost fifteen yuan. The girls sat at a picnic spot far below and watched the cars pass overhead.
Huang Jiao’e had enrolled in a computer class. She wanted to leave the factory, go to the talent market, and find a better job, as Min had done. “I have already made plans,” she said shyly.
“Do you know how to go online yet?” Min asked.
“I haven’t been online yet.”
“I’ll teach you.” Min looked at her watch; it was four o’clock. “Maybe not today, though—next time.
“Just try to learn what you can,” Min advised. “If you learn something, you can always take it with you to your next job. At least that has been my experience,” she concluded modestly. Somewhere during the course of the day, she had realized she could do little to help her friends. Finding the courage to leave a factory was something a person had to do alone. It was as the migrants always said: You can only rely on yourself.
At five o’clock, the girls parted with the most casual of goodbyes. “I’m not tired yet,” Min said as we found seats on the bus. “I’ll be tired later. Right now I’m too excited.” But as the bus passed through the towns of her job searches, now falling into evening, Min’s mood darkened. She had visited her old life and knew it was past. Yet her new life, too, was somehow wanting. On the street outside, the lights in the factories started to come on, and shadows moved soundlessly against the windows; even on Sunday night, people were going to work. “If I only go to school, come out and do migrant work for a few years, then go home, marry and have children,” Min said, “I might as well not have lived this whole life.”
IN THE BLUE LIGHT OF EVENING, Min and I stood outside the gate of her factory. An electrician friend of hers was joining us for dinner, and we waited while he changed his clothes. A good-looking security guard in camouflage pants—1.7 METERS OR ABOVE, CAN PLAY BASKETBALL A PLUS—passed by with the flash of a smile and tossed Min a bunch of keys; she had given them to him for safekeeping. People trickled back to the factory from their Sunday outings. Min called out to a young woman, who peered into the shadows and barked roughly, “I’m starving to death!” She went into the factory without coming by to say hello.
Min seemed taken aback by her rudeness. The woman had recently tried to abort a pregnancy using herbal medicine, Min told me, but it didn’t work. Min had gone with her to the hospital for surgery. “She’s one of the people I pretend to have good relations with, but really we are not friends,” she said.
An older man with glasses and a potbelly walked past us into the factory. “Was it you who left the office door open?” he asked.
“I’ve been out all day,” Min shot back.
That was Min’s boss; she hated him. “He is very proud,” she said. “Not a single person in the factory likes him.” Her boss passed by again a few