Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [37]
Interviews at the talent market were brief and brutally honest. Recruiters did not pretend that jobs were anything to write home about; candidates freely admitted their ignorance. It was the rare interview that lasted more than five minutes. Hiring was usually done on the spot, and no one checked references.
At the booth of the Hengfeng Molds factory, a young woman sat down.
“Our pay is not high,” the recruiter said immediately. Then: “Have you worked with computers?”
“Yes, I learned computers in school.”
“Well, our pay is only six hundred.”
Another booth, another woman: “What can you do?”
“I keep in touch with customers, mostly through e-mail, and if they come to the office, I can receive them. If the job is more technical, I don’t know anything about that.”
What can you do? In most Chinese cities, where finding a job required a college diploma, money, and connections, that was a rare question. At the Dongguan talent market, you never heard: Where did you go to school? Whom do you know? Or least of all, Are you from around here? It was always: What can you do? Do you know computers? Do you know English? Job listings, which were usually written out by hand on preprinted cards, mocked the standard categories that were provided. In the space for residency, an employer usually specified the sex of the person sought: instead of profession, a company might list height requirements instead.
Not everyone who came to the talent market dared to go inside. Throngs gathered on the sidewalk before a giant electronic job board, like people fated only to look upon a promised land they would never enter. The listings moved upward in a continuous crawl, like stock prices, and the crowd stared, mesmerized.
* * *
Her second time at the market, Min knew exactly what to do. She aimed high, approaching only those companies with jobs in the human resources department. “Clerk is a very low position, so I didn’t look for that.” In her interviews, she asked about employee turnover and company size; she was looking for a smaller factory with fewer superiors to please. She sidestepped questions about why she had left her old job. That was a personal matter, Min said, that she would rather not discuss.
And this time she was not more honest than the others. At the booth of the Shenxing Rubber Products Company, she told the recruiter that she had worked in human resources for a year. “If you say less,” she explained to me afterward, “they think it’s not enough experience.” She was hired with a six-dollar-per-month raise above the salary of the person she was replacing.
Min started work two days later in the human resources department of the company, which made rubber components for mobile phones and computer keyboards. Her workday lasted eight hours, with every Sunday off. Workers at her level slept four to a room, and her room had its own bathroom and phone. She made eight hundred yuan a month, including room and board—the same as her last job, with a chance of a raise if she did well.
In her new job, Min kept track of the employment records, performance, demerits, and salaries of the factory’s four hundred workers. Where she had once looked after machines, now she was in charge of people, and it seemed a better fit. When workers came to the factory gate, she screened them for hiring. Do you have an ID? How long do you plan to stay?
Thank you, she told those who did not answer to her liking. We don’t have jobs right now.
On the tenth of every month, the Taiwanese wife of the factory owner came to pay the workers and seek the Buddha’s blessing. Min would follow the boss’s wife around the factory—to the canteen, the front gate, and each of the dangerous machines—and the two of them would ask the Buddha to protect the workers and let business prosper. Min would silently seek blessings for her family and friends and for her grandparents in the next world, but she didn’t tell the boss’s wife that.
She was getting