Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [6]
“I went out with my older sister, who went to work in Shenzhen. We wanted to work in the same place, but we can’t work in the same place.”
She paused dramatically.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because we always fight.” And then she laughed.
Min was willing to talk about anything; unlike most of the Chinese people I knew, she clearly enjoyed telling her own story. And she was as curious about me as I was about her: She had come to Lin Xue’s apartment that day because “I wanted to see what an American looked like,” she told me later. My only worry was that she might be too settled—with a stable office job in hand, perhaps the great dramas of her life were already past. But I needn’t have worried about that.
On the day we met, Min told me her life plan. She would work in the city for seven years, sending money home all the while to repay her mother and father for raising her to adulthood; that reflected the traditional Chinese view that children should be grateful to their parents for the gift of their existence. When she turned twenty-three, the debt repaid, Min would return home and find someone to marry.
She was in a good mood that day. She had “walked out of the factory,” as the migrants say, crossing the class divide between those who work with their hands and those who work with their heads. “God is still fair,” she said. “He let me be so tired for a year, but now he lets me have a new beginning.” She had just turned eighteen and she was already an expert in new beginnings.
2 The City
Long journeys end at the Guangzhou railway station, where the passengers pour off the trains after rides that have lasted twenty or thirty or fifty hours. They are mostly young and they arrive alone, dragging a suitcase or a backpack or a coarse burlap sack that once held rice. The vast plaza in front of the station seethes with travelers, and the first thing you hear is the jangle of announcements for people who, newly arrived, are already lost. Someone from Henan, your brother is looking for you. Older brother’s wife, come to the exit area. WELCOME TO THE BEAUTIFUL FLOWER CITY: A bus company is offering tours. But the city does not look beautiful and there are no flowers here.
Up a steep ramp and across an overpass is the long-distance bus station, where the express to Dongguan, thirty miles away, leaves every ten minutes. The bus is packed, and it smells of sweat and of clothing that is worn every day and slept in at night—the smell of migrants. The bus races down the elevated highway and the factories emerge below: printing factories, paint and plastic factories, mobile-phone and screw and sofa factories. The buildings, faced in white tile, resemble giant public bathrooms; worker dormitories rise beside them, their balconies blooming with laundry. Chinese factories are named for their auspicious associations, and the journey to Dongguan is a high-speed tour of virtue and fortune: HIGH REFINEMENT AIR-CONDITIONING. ETERNAL SINCERITY GARMENTS. NEW ERA ZIPPER COMPANY.
Two decades after the first factories were built, development still feels new. The innards of a mountain spill out, red-earthed and raw, where its face was blasted away; exit ramps off the highway disappear in fields of marshy weeds. A brand-new corporate headquarters looks out on rice paddies, fishponds, and duck farms; miraculously, people are still farming here. In the seventeenth century, settlers turned the floodplains of the Pearl River Delta into one of China’s most fertile regions, supplying fish, vegetables, and rice to the country and exporting silk to Europe. Today in the land of full-throttle industry, it is these glimpses of nature that are unsettling. The farmers are mostly migrants, the lowest of the low, for they have traveled a thousand miles from home but have still not left the farm behind.
The bus slows for the Dongguan exit, and now the factories appear up close. Red banners stretch across the fronts of buildings in sagging smiles