Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [36]
RECEPTIONIST. SWEET VOICE. GOOD APPEARANCE AND DISPOSITION. KNOWS OFFICE SOFTWARE AND CANTONESE.
LATHE WORKER. 18- TO 22-YEAR-OLD MALE, EXPERIENCE AT A FOREIGN FACTORY. NOT NEARSIGHTED. NO SKIN SENSITIVITY.
SALES SPECIALIST. CAN EAT BITTERNESS AND ENDURE HARDSHIP. OPEN TO MEN AND WOMEN WITH RURAL RESIDENCY. NO ONLY CHILDREN.
On a busy Saturday, Dongguan’s biggest job fair might draw seven thousand visitors. By midmorning, all these people would have congealed into a single bloated mass, making individual movement all but impossible; occasionally, a group would break off and swamp a certain booth, though it was unclear what suddenly made one job more desirable than all the others. The most popular booths featured airbrushed posters, usually of long, windowless buildings set in concrete landscapes; a simple booth consisted of a man or a woman with a clipboard. The talent market stretched a full city block and filled a four-story building that had once housed a karaoke lounge and a bowling alley. Trading in the futures of people, it turned out, was a more lucrative business than entertainment.
SECRETARIES. 18 TO 25, 155 CENTIMETERS OR TALLER, REGULAR FEATURES.
SECURITY GUARDS. 20 TO 26, 172 CENTIMETERS OR TALLER.
Discrimination was the operative rule. Bosses liked their clerks female, pretty, and single, and they would only consider men for certain technical jobs. One factory might impose a blanket ban on people from Henan Province; another could refuse to hire anyone from Anhui. Sometimes an applicant’s entire family would come under scrutiny, because people who had siblings were deemed more likely than only children to chiku nailao, eat bitterness and endure hardship. Being less than 160 centimeters tall, or about five feet three inches, guaranteed a frustrating day at the talent market.
Height was a universal Chinese obsession. In a country that had experienced malnutrition and even famine in living memory, height signaled fortune, and it functioned as a proxy for class: On any construction site, the armies of peasant workers were a head shorter than the city people whose homes they were building. Manual laborers in the West might be larger than their white-collar counterparts, but in China the opposite held true—the educated could literally look down on the lower classes. For women, height requirements were attached to the more glamorous trades. “If I were only ten centimeters taller,” a young woman who worked in a hair salon told me once, “I could sell cars.”
Age was another liability—in the talent market, that meant anyone over thirty-five, which was the upper age limit for many positions. “People over thirty-five are inferior in their thinking and drive,” explained a factory manager in a promotional newspaper put out by the company that operated the market. The paper’s advice to this demographic: “Don’t always talk about your past experience. You must have a mentality of starting from zero.” In a perverse way, age limits were evidence of upward mobility. At the booth of a company that made headboards for beds, the list of jobs and target ages seemed to be a timetable for career advancement:
COST ACCOUNTANT: 25
MARKETING DEPARTMENT MANAGER: 30
PRODUCTION DEPUTY MANAGER: 35
The most common openings were for clerks, receptionists, salespeople, security guards, and cooks, with mold design and machine repair also in high demand. One company was looking for people “skilled in operating Mitsubishi and Fujitsu machinery.” Job titles were specific and sometimes bewildering: PATTERN GROUPERS. APPLIQUE WORKERS.