Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [5]
At the booth of a company called Yidong Electronic, a recruiter asked for Min’s résumé. She had not thought to prepare one. The woman told her to write her job history on an application form. Min did not even have a pen, so the woman lent her one. And the woman smiled at Min. “I don’t know. She smiled at me. Maybe that was it.” Thus Min would return over and over to this day, trying to unravel the mystery of the moment when her luck changed.
The woman told Min to go to the factory for a follow-up interview, but Min didn’t go. The place was too far away. But at the headquarters of Yidong Electronic, a manager named Li Pengjie was looking over applications, and he stopped at Min’s. He noticed that she had good handwriting.
In traditional China, calligraphy was the mark of an educated person. Good calligraphy showed refinement and literary accomplishment; calligraphy could also reveal the subtle weaknesses in a person’s character. Li Pengjie had something more mundane in mind: He needed a clerk to keep files on the factory’s machines, and the files were written out by hand. In a factory that made connectors and backlights for mobile phones, it was this antique skill that mattered most.
Li Pengjie called Min’s cousin on his mobile phone—she did not have one of her own—and asked Min to come in for an interview that would last three hours.
First she flunked the computer test. “The other girls all know computers better than you,” Li Pengjie told her.
Next he asked about her work experience.
“I haven’t done this work,” she said. “I don’t have any experience.”
Then he gave her a writing test, and she wrote well. Li Pengjie told Min that she was hired, and that he would be her new boss. He told her to go get her things so she could move into the factory that day.
The offer was so unexpected that Min did not know what to say. But as she got up to leave his office, the words suddenly came. “So many people wanted this job,” she said to her new boss. “Why did you choose me? I don’t know anything.”
“You are very straightforward,” he said. “And you are more honest than the others.”
Min started work the next day as a clerk in the equipment division. Her department tracked the punches and grinders and roll-plating lines that made the pieces of a mobile phone. A bound book recorded the condition and history of every machine, like the medical file of a giant mute patient. Min’s job was to keep these files in order. Workers slept eight to a room; a meal was rice, three meat or vegetable dishes, and soup. A day in the office stretched ten hours, with sometimes a Saturday or Sunday off. Min would make eight hundred yuan a month—one hundred dollars, double the base pay at her old factory.
I MET MIN for the first time three weeks later. She was short and sturdily built, with curly hair and keen dark eyes that didn’t miss a thing. Like many young people from the Chinese countryside, she looked even younger than she was. She could have been fifteen, or fourteen, or even twelve—a tomboy in cargo pants and running shoes, waiting impatiently to grow up. She had a child’s face. It was round and open to the world, with the look of patient expectation that children’s faces sometimes wear.
We met at the apartment of a woman named Lin Xue, who wrote articles for a local magazine that targeted migrant readers. I had told Lin Xue I wanted to write about young migrant women for the Wall Street Journal; her younger sister worked in a factory and invited Min, one of her coworkers, to come. I was meeting many migrants then, and Min’s story was already familiar to me.
“I’m from a farming village