Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [45]
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The streets around the Yue Yuen factory teemed with opportunities for spending or self-improvement. On weekend afternoons, the Hopeful Computer Training Center was crowded with workers sitting at computers learning Word and Excel. (A sign outside advertised, in English, MICROSOFT WORB.) A shop sold men’s white dress shirts for twenty yuan, and a photo studio offered a choice of aspirational backdrops: Pastoral Landscape, Corinthian Columns, Suburban Villa. Retailers catered to the homesick with geographically specific offerings. HENAN ZHOUKOU SESAME CAKES. WUHAN BARBER. One store consisted of a row of plastic phone booths crammed along the wall, an enterprise that existed only in migrant towns. Pasted to the opposite wall was a train schedule to cities all over China: twenty-five hours to Ningbo, forty to Chengdu. The Shangjiang City Health Station advertised one-minute pregnancy tests, venereal disease cures, and abortions. The hospital inside Yue Yuen also performed abortions, but almost no one went there. The sidewalk clinics offered the same procedures and no one had to know.
Outside the gates of Yue Yuen, I once saw a man speaking rapidly, like an old-time carnival barker, into a microphone headset. “If you have stomachache, if you have backache, if you have rheumatism, this is for you.” The air reeked sourly of alcohol, and a blanket spread out on the sidewalk displayed preserved snakes, a starfish, and bottles of brownish liquid the color of strong iced tea. Several snakes, apparently dead, were entwined in a plastic bucket; the man stirred them with a stick, like a stew. He was a chain-smoker with a hacking cough, and he did not look in the least qualified to be giving out medical opinions. Yet a crowd of young men and women clamored for the flyers he was handing out.
SNAKE WINE TO NOURISH KIDNEYS
Prescription: This product’s main components are king cobra, krait, silver-ringed snake, and so on, in all seven types of poisonous snakes and many kinds of herbal medicines. Usage: Mornings and evenings take half or one liang.
Another day on the same stretch of sidewalk, a man lay on his stomach with his crippled legs curled under him, writing on the pavement with a stub of chalk. A crowd of young migrants gathered to read his story: His wife had died, his son was sick, and he had traveled far from home to beg for money. The man had some bills in his cup already, and two more people gave money as I watched.
From the main street in front of the Yue Yuen factory, alleys ran straight back at intervals between the stores. These passages were strewn with garbage and the walls of the buildings were plastered with ads for gonorrhea and syphilis clinics; in China these flyers broke out like rashes wherever prostitution thrived. Down one of these alleys, I once looked through the window of a single-story building. Young women were sitting in the shadows with their heads bent over, sewing. That was a factory too, the worst kind.
The girls who worked at Yue Yuen seldom ventured down this way. The alleys did not open onto more streets of computer schools and hair salons: They ended in farmland. Just beyond the border of the factory world, men and women past middle age worked in fields of leafy green vegetables, under a cloudy sky that did not protect them from the glare of the sun.
THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE calendar divides the year into twenty-four segments and gives farming instructions for every two-week interval. The year begins with lichun, the start of spring on February 4 or 5 and the time for spring sowing. The calendar dictates when to plant melons, beans, coarse cereals, beets, and grapes and when to harvest rice, wheat, apples, potatoes, radishes, and cabbage. It predicts heat and heavy rains. It sets the proper time to protect crops from the wind, to kill pests and collect manure, to weed