Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [48]
LATER THAT MONTH, the workers were transferred to new dorms. In a factory the size of Yue Yuen, girls who had seen one another every day suddenly did not know how to find their friends again. Many lost touch for good.
After the move, Qianqian disappeared, and I searched for her through September. I visited her new dorm many times—it was four floors down from her old one—but her roommates did not know where she had gone. They asked me for news of other workers they had lost touch with as well. I called Qianqian’s family in a farming village in Anhui; her father told me she was still working at Yue Yuen. According to the factory, Zhang Qianqian, employee 28103, Number 8 Factory, Building B, Second Cutting Group, was still registered as an employee. On paper she was living in the dorm, working on the assembly line, cutting materials for the uppers of Adidas shoes. But in person she had vanished, a disappearance that mocked the rule of schedules and stopwatches that had seemed to order factory life so well.
* * *
From the gate of the Yue Yuen factory, down the main street, and through a maze of dirt roads lined with restaurant stalls and shops, there is a neighborhood of low red-tiled apartment buildings. The doors to the apartments are pieces of sheet metal. The area is pockmarked with vacant lots and half-finished buildings, and it feels at once overcrowded and abandoned. In the relentless delta summer, neighbors sat outside in their undershirts or pajamas playing mahjong, as chickens pecked in the dirt underfoot.
On a Sunday afternoon in mid-October, I was brought here by a young woman I had met in Qianqian’s old dorm. She led me through the alleys, into a red-tiled building, up a flight of stairs, and through a sheet-metal door. We entered a one-room apartment with a double bed, and a poster hanging on the wall above it.
SUCCESS
Success feels very, very far from you, while failure in contrast seems to always follow you. You must bravely vanquish one failure after another, and then success will walk toward you.
Next to this poster was a picture ripped from a calendar of a topless woman holding a Grecian urn. Sitting on the bed, in a T-shirt, cutoff shorts, and bare feet, was Qianqian. When she saw me, she gave me a smile that was fleeting but also reluctant, as if she were not entirely happy at being found.
After payday in August, she had quit the Yue Yuen factory, walking off the line without permission and without the back pay that the company owed her. Since then she had stayed with various friends, including a young woman named Ge Li who shared this apartment with her boyfriend. She was thinking of going home or joining another factory.
“Why did you leave Yue Yuen?” I asked Qianqian.
“It isn’t fun anymore,” she said. And though I asked her several different ways, she would not say anything more.
IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, production pressure in the factory continued to build as Christmas approached. In the countryside it was lidong, the beginning of winter, the time to fix fences for livestock. On a Sunday afternoon in November, I went by the red-tiled apartment building with the sheet-metal doors and asked Ge Li if she had news of Qianqian.
She hadn’t seen her friend in a while. “She’s still trying to decide between going home and rejoining the factory,” Ge Li said.
“What exactly is she trying to decide?” I asked.
Ge Li shook her head. “I don’t know what she’s thinking in her heart. We haven’t spoken about it.” Ge Li had recently quit Yue Yuen and was planning to go home soon to introduce her new boyfriend to her parents. Once she left, there would be no way for me to find Qianqian anymore. Maybe this was what failure in the migrant world meant—not any incident or tragedy you