Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [32]
“Tomorrow he’ll ask me who you are,” Min said. “I know he will. I’ll tell him you’re a friend, that’s all.” Privately she called him Liu Laotou, “Old Fogey Liu.”
In ten minutes by the factory gate, I felt as if I had seen Min’s world: the easy friendship with the guard, the young woman’s coldness and her botched abortion, the gratuitous cruelty of bosses. The fact that she stood her ground.
MIN’S ELECTRICIAN FRIEND APPEARED—he had muscular arms, an open face, and a shy smile—and we went to a street-side restaurant for grilled beef, braised fish, and beer. At the end of a long day, Min’s discontent poured out all at once. “In my old factory, I cried once for half an hour and my friends tried to console me but couldn’t,” she said. “Since I’ve been at this factory I’ve cried twice, but no one even knew.”
The electrician looked into his bowl of rice and didn’t say anything.
Min’s fury turned to the two friends who had gone to the park with us that afternoon. “We’re not close. We just pretend to be friends,” she said. “The fatter one? All she cares about is trying to find a boyfriend. When she gets paid, she doesn’t send any money home. She’ll just pay her boyfriend’s mobile-phone bill or invite boys out to dinner. And she isn’t even good-looking! The other one had a boyfriend but she broke up with him when she found out he was cheating on her. He gave her a watch and she still wears it.
“Do you see how they are all unhappy when they get their month’s pay? They are all thinking: I work so hard and this is all I get? To work every day in the factory is so hard.”
And then she turned on me. “You can’t know what it feels like,” she said. “Only someone who has experienced it knows.”
* * *
Min tired of things she had so recently wanted. The thrill of joining an office gave way quickly to the realization that she was the lowest person in it. Everybody dumped work on their newest and youngest colleague, and Min’s only workplace ally had disappeared: Two weeks after she arrived, the kindly man who had hired her decamped to a better job in Beijing. Left on her own, Min learned about the complicated politics of the white-collar world. Her new boss, the man with the potbelly, had been fired from the factory the previous year for keeping a mistress—because no one respected him, it made things harder for Min. Her coworkers appeared eager to see her fail: When she entered a room, conversations stopped, and no one helped her in her new job. She discovered that a person could say one thing and mean another, and that she must learn this skill too. “In the office, they may be very friendly to you, but they say things behind your back,” Min told me. “You can’t have a single friend in that factory.”
Crossing the class divide added to her loneliness. The workers on the assembly line were closest to her in age and background, but she was no longer of that world. Her office colleagues were older, many of them married, and they had nothing in common with her. The dorm room emptied out on weekends when the others visited their boyfriends or husbands. Min pretended not to care, and she never let anyone see her cry.
In April, her former boss called from Beijing to offer her a job. He was assembling computer parts to sell in the provinces, and he needed someone to mind the store. He was in his thirties, had attended elite Tsinghua University, and was the only adult in Dongguan who had shown her any kindness: That was all she knew. She decided to go.
She phoned her older sister in Shenzhen.
“What will you do there?” her sister asked.
“Mind the store,” Min said.
“How much is the salary?”
“I don’t know. But it must be better than here.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Yes.”
“Be careful.”
Min sent me a letter about her plans:
I have decided to go to Beijing after all, to give myself an opportunity. I will handle these feelings between “Big Brother”and “Little Sister” well. But having gotten used to this work here at last, I am really