Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [41]
Workers can spend their days without venturing beyond Yue Yuen’s guarded gates, and many of them do, saying the world outside is luan—chaotic, dangerous. Yet life inside Yue Yuen’s walls can be turbulent too. Petty theft is rampant; workers are banned from dorms during work hours in an effort to reduce such crimes. Factory-floor quarrels carry over into the dorms, where workers on the same production line are required to room together for the sake of efficiency. Gangs thrive inside Yue Yuen. Some rob workers of their wages on payday; others focus on stealing shoe parts. The gangs practice a vertical integration of their own. One group may spirit shoelaces out of the factory, while another smuggles out soles. The parts are assembled into shoes and distributed in other parts of the city. In the universe of Chinese counterfeiting, theirs is a distinctive sub-specialty—the illicit assembly of authentic parts. The gangs are organized along provincial lines, and the ones from Hunan are most feared.
Love triangles and extramarital affairs are common, as are out-of-wedlock pregnancies and abortions. A few years ago, a young woman committed suicide over a failed love affair; another gave birth in her dorm bathroom and threw the baby into the toilet. The baby died, and the young woman was sent home. “We have seventy thousand people. It is a city,” says Luke Lee, a Yue Yuen executive who oversees worker health and safety. “Whatever problems a city has, we have in the factory.”
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On weekends when the production lines shut down, the mood inside the Yue Yuen compound changes. Girls who walked with purpose and poker faces during the week turn slow and languorous. They stroll hand in hand with girlfriends, their factory IDs on straps around their necks or on chains linked to their belts, like American school janitors. They talk loudly in their native dialects; they show skin. They wear tank tops and jeans, or black party dresses with high heels; sometimes several friends step out in identical outfits, announcing their shared loyalties to the world. They eat ice-cream cones and sit barefoot on patches of grass in twos and threes, reading magazines or sharing confidences. Sometimes one girl sits alone staring dreamily at nothing.
The dorms offer no privacy. Girls stand in doorways combing their shampooed hair in hand mirrors; girls in shorts and flip-flops lug buckets of water to mop the dormitory floors. Residents of the upper floors lean on bare arms over balcony railings, checking out the goings-on at ground level and calling out to friends many stories below. A pop ballad blasts from a tape deck into the muggy morning. I love you, loving you, as a mouse loves rice. The air smells of laundry hanging out to dry; bleach, detergent, and damp are the perpetual scents of the Yue Yuen factory.
On a Sunday morning in June 2004, several young women lay chatting in their bunks in Building J, Room 805. The room had the disheveled feel of the last stage of a slumber party, and the girls lounged in their pajamas although it was already eleven o’clock.
“When you meet a man outside the village,” one girl said, “you don’t know his real character and you don’t know about his family.”
“If you get a boyfriend while you are outside, your parents will have no face at home.”
“You may make friends with someone, then you go home and lose touch.”
“When you go home, you find out people know all sorts of things about you.”
Ten girls lived together in J805, an eighth-floor room measuring two hundred square feet with two rows of metal bunk beds. The room smelled, like everywhere else at Yue Yuen, of wet laundry. Each girl was