Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [35]
Min returned to the table. “If you do well, you will move up.” She added, still defensively, “Our salary is not high either: eight hundred yuan. If you have overtime, you may get more than me.”
“But I would be tired to death!” Huang Jiao’e said.
“There are different ways of being tired,” Min said. “In my job now, my body is tired and my heart is tired.” She was moving up in the world. Her new responsibilities included pouring tea for visiting clients, and she had enrolled in a weekly English class for the factory’s managers. “Do you know what ‘pardon’ means?” Min asked Huang Jiao’e, saying the single word in English. She looked disappointed when her friend said yes.
MIN’S OTHER NEWS did not emerge until after repeated prodding from Huang Jiao’e. A boy from home had come out to Dongguan and found a job as an assembly-line worker. He and Min had dated briefly in middle school, but she had not seen him in three years. The previous week, he had come to visit.
“There is still feeling between us,” she announced. Then, immediately—“But he is very short: only 1.65 meters.” She reported the details: “He smokes, he drinks, and he gets into fights. His family situation is not good. He has a stepmother.”
“What does his family do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to know. In the end we must rely on ourselves.”
The two of them had spent the day together. At lunch, Min poured tea for her former boyfriend while he stared at the television set mounted somewhere above Min’s head. In cheap Chinese restaurants, there is always a television playing at top volume, and the eyes of the patrons and wait staff are usually glued to it.
“Why don’t we talk?” Min prodded him. “Why do you keep looking at the television?”
After he left, Min sent him a message on his mobile phone. How did you feel about our day together?
I feel a lot of pressure, he wrote back. My feelings are very complicated.
They had talked on the phone the night before. Min got right to the point. “Do you think we have a future together?”
He told her he needed three days to think about it.
“So I will have my answer in two days,” she said. “Whatever he answers is fine with me.” But she was already spinning her dreams around the boy, who had some training as a cook. “We could go home and start a small restaurant,” she said. “There is no future in this migrant work.”
“Do you want to get married?” I asked her. The entire conversation astonished me.
“That’s not what this is about,” she said impatiently. “I’m eighteen years old now. I don’t want to waste my time. If he’s not serious about me, I want him to tell me now.”
IN THE END, everything was decided for Min. Three days after the conversation with her former boyfriend, she got a message on her mobile phone at seven in the morning: I’m here at the factory gate. She didn’t believe it and ran downstairs to see. He had gotten off the night shift and taken the bus straight to her factory. Min had to work, so the boy waited outside from eight o’clock until noon. The two of them ate lunch together, then he left and Min returned to work.
“Did he say you have a future?” I asked.
“No,” said Min. “But because he came, I knew.”
She had recently taken the bus—a two-hour ride—to spend an afternoon with him. “He is not tall, he is not handsome, he has no money, his job is not good,” Min said.
I waited for something to follow this declaration of shortcomings.
“But you like him,” I said at last.
Min didn’t say anything, but she smiled.
Now the boy was leaving Dongguan because his father wanted him to work closer to home. No sooner had Min found a stable prospect than he was disappearing too, but she was unfazed. “We will keep in touch by mobile phone,” she said. She was not staying put either. Later that month, her boss approved her departure and returned her two months’ back pay. Min went to the talent market again. She had worked in her factory’s human resources department for exactly twenty-four days, and on that she could build a new career.
* * *
In an unforgiving city, the Dongguan talent market