Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [38]
“No,” she agreed.
The boss smiled. “When you have to speak,” he said, “you should speak. If you don’t have to speak, don’t speak.” That was the secret rule of Chinese workplace survival, but no one had ever shared it with Min.
This time she handled her parents more adeptly. She didn’t tell them she was quitting her job. Instead she found a new one, wired home $120, then called her parents with her news; the cash transfer was a preemptive strike that stunned them into silence. “They don’t know how things are outside,” Min told me. “So I do something first, and then I tell them about it.”
Everyone she knew was in flux, and many were on their way up too. Her sister in Shenzhen had been promoted to executive secretary; her cousin was now a manager in Guangzhou. Her two friends from the old factory had scattered. Liang Rong had gone home to marry someone of her parents’ choosing. Huang Jiao’e, who had moved over to Min’s factory, quit the same day Min did and landed a job as a production clerk elsewhere in the city. And Min’s old boss was back in Dongguan. He had returned from Beijing to work in a Taiwanese socket factory, but Min refused to see him. Workers in her old factory said he was romantically interested in her. She went through his old phone messages to her—Your big brother misses you—and decided it was true. The only adult who had been kind to her was not to be trusted, after all.
Small factories had their own problems, and Min soon discovered what they were. The workplace was disorganized, and her own responsibilities were never made clear; she scrambled to keep up with all the tasks thrown her way. Her new boss, like her old one, was insecure and status-conscious. Min was learning that many Chinese men had this flaw. He didn’t like it that Min did not get his approval for everything she did. He didn’t like it that she was friendly with the security guards. His response was to begin interviewing candidates for her position—a colleague, rival, or replacement for Min—without telling her. She heard about it from the office receptionist.
In August 2004, two months after she arrived, Min collected her pay and left without telling anyone. A former colleague had joined a factory in Shenzhen and invited her to go work for him, and she decided to go. She spent the night in a hotel near her factory; while she slept, someone broke the lock on her door. The thief took nine hundred yuan and Min’s mobile phone, the only place where she had stored the numbers of everyone she knew in the city: the excolleague who was her only link to her new job, the friends she had made since going out, and the boyfriend who had gone home.
* * *
The mobile phone was the first big purchase of most migrants. Without a phone, it was virtually impossible to keep up with friends or find a new job. Letters between factories often went missing, and calling up a worker in her dorm, where a hundred people might share a single hallway phone, was difficult. Office phones inside factories were often programmed not to allow outside calls or to cut off automatically after several minutes. Anyway, people jumped jobs so often that dorm and office numbers quickly went out of date. In a universe of perpetual motion, the mobile phone was magnetic north, the thing that fixed a person in place.
I learned all of this painfully. In my early days in Dongguan, I befriended many new arrivals who did not have mobile phones yet, and I lost track of them, one by one. When I met Min, I decided to buy her a pager, but that industry had collapsed so suddenly and completely in the past few years that salesmen in electronics stores just laughed at me when I said I wanted one. I gave Min a mobile phone so I would not lose her too.
In the migrant world, the mobile phone was a metaphor for the relentless pace of city life. An executive at a shoe