Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [42]
Back home on the farm it was the busiest season of the year, the time for the summer harvest and the summer planting. But the global cycle of shoe manufacturing was slowing down. The girls in J805 worked in the Yue Yuen Number 8 factory, which made shoes for Adidas and Salomon. Now they were working only ten and a half hours a day plus half or full days on Saturdays; in the world of Dongguan manufacturing, that was considered the slow season. Some of the girls were planning to go home on leave, but their paths diverged depending on which part of the shoe they made. The ones who worked on shoe soles could leave. Cutters and stitchers had to stay on.
Jia Jimei, a twenty-one-year-old Henan native who worked in the sole department, rushed into the room from a shopping trip and showed off her purchases: snacks for the train ride and a cassette player for her family. She had just been granted a one-month home leave. “I haven’t been able to sleep these past two nights,” she said. “Once you know you’re going home, you can’t think about anything else.” She had a snub nose and wide-set eyes in a round face that turned softer when she smiled. She sat down on her lower bunk, clutching a stuffed panda bear to her chest.
Zhang Qianqian, a young woman from Anhui Province who was visiting from down the hall, watched the going-home preparations. She was solidly built, with broad shoulders and a hard unsmiling face; she wore jeans and a black sports watch that made her look tough. She was a cutter, so she was staying. “When I go home, I’m bored to death,” Qianqian said. “There’s no TV and no cassette player. And almost everyone from home has gone out, so I’m all by myself all day.
“My grandmother gets up at dawn to make breakfast,” she continued, “and calls me to come eat, and sometimes I’m still sleeping. Then my father says, ‘You’re lying in bed and won’t even come to eat breakfast your grandmother has made for you.’ At home they are always criticizing you.”
“When you go home, you can’t stay,” agreed Li Xiaoyan, a roommate from Hunan who was also a cutter. The girls had a complicated relationship with home. Out in the city, they were tired and lonely and talked constantly of going home; once home, they quickly grew bored and longed to go out again. If a girl decided to leave the factory, it sent ripples of shock and uncertainty through everyone around her. To be a migrant was to be constantly abandoned by the people closest to you.
Qianqian was a veteran of departures and returns. She had come out from home three years before, worked at Yue Yuen for a year and a half, quit because of conflicts with her boss, and gone home for a while. Back in Dongguan, she joined a small electronics factory where conditions were much worse than at Yue Yuen. She quit and went home again, this time for her grandmother’s eightieth birthday. Four months ago, she had rejoined Yue Yuen. “I’ve moved here and there, and I always seem to end up in this factory,” she said.
Jia Jimei was less certain. “I may return to Yue Yuen but I’m not sure yet,” she said. She left for home a week later without telling her roommates if she was coming back.
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China is a quarter century into the largest migration in human history, and the profiles of the people on the move are changing. Those who came out from their rural villages in the 1980s and early 1990s were heading into the unknown, often driven by a family’s need for cash and the desire to build a house back home. It was considered risky, even shameful, for a single woman to go out on her own. These early migrants often found seasonal work, and the seasons were those of the farm. They returned home