Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [49]
THE LAST TIME I went to Yue Yuen was in January 2005. The factory girls wore thin cotton jackets, their shoulders hunched against the cold. Being cold appeared to be a pragmatic decision: Winter in Dongguan did not last long enough to justify spending money on a warm coat. Jia Jimei was just returning to her room when I stopped by, and she smiled when she saw me. She had dyed her hair with dark crimson streaks.
Work in the factory had slowed once Christmas passed, and now the traditional calendar took over, filling the streets with festive crowds returning home for the new year. Migrants who had just arrived in the city often wandered solitary and lost, but the ones heading home were different. They walked with purpose, in groups; they looked happy, and they knew the way. They carried cash in their pockets and shopping bags of gifts for their families—CD players, comforters, candy for the younger children. At home on the farm it was dahan, the Great Cold, the season to welcome in the new year, but by the Dongguan calendar it was time to reap the rewards of a year’s hard work. This was the only harvest that mattered now.
6 The Stele with No Name
The parents of migrants had terrible instincts. At every stage, they gave bad advice; they specialized in outdated knowledge and conservatism born out of fear. Some initially forbade their children, especially their daughters, from going out at all. But once a migrant got to the city, the parental message shifted dramatically: Send home money, the more the better. Some parents pressured their daughters to marry, though only someone from their home province—which seemed as unreasonable as telling a person living in New York to date only natives of Ohio. On the job front, their advice was invariably bad: They warned against jumping factories, which was usually the best way to get ahead.
Migrants learned quickly how to deal with their parents: They disobeyed, they fought, and they lied. They kept their distance; Chunming did not go home during her first three years in the city. The girls were matter-of-fact about such transgressions. “They don’t know how things are outside, so I do something first, and then I tell them about it,” Min said. A new life began the day they arrived in the city, and they would do what they needed to protect it. The past did not matter, and the present was everything. Family was a trap that would pull you backward if you weren’t careful.
After I moved to China, I had always resisted the pull of my own family, and perhaps some of the reasons were the same. My parents’ China was fifty years out of date; the Chinese have always respected scholars and disparaged merchants, they had taught me as a child, but the people I was meeting now contradicted all of that. I didn’t try to find relatives who were still living here. I wanted to learn about this country on my own terms. And family history seemed like a trap—a ready-made way to see China in tragic terms, a view that had little to do with how things were now.
Around the time I started meeting migrant workers in Dongguan, I began to investigate my own family history. Initially these were separate projects, a study in contrasts—there could be no common ground between the teeming chaos of the south China factories and the sober gray cities of the Northeast, with their steel mills and stone monuments aging and proud. I enjoyed the rhythms of these journeys as I shuttled south and then north, from the future to the past and back to the future again.
But the more I learned, the more I saw connections. Almost a hundred years ago, my grandfather had been a migrant too. He had left his village, changed his name, and tried to remake himself for the modern age. In his youth, China was emerging from a long, self-imposed isolation to rejoin the world—and so it is again today. My grandfather left home for good when he was sixteen years old—although he probably did not know it then, just as today’s migrants might not know it now. Chuqu,