Factory Girls_ From Village to City in a Changing China - Chang, Leslie T_ [8]
On weekends, teenagers take over Dongguan, giving its parks and squares the feel of an open-air high school. Girls roam in cliques, wearing frilly tops and tight jeans, with their arms around one anothers’ shoulders. Boys travel in smaller packs, the sleeves of their factory shirts rolled up under their armpits. Couples parade apart, the girls proud in ownership, the boys slouchy and nonchalant. On Monday mornings, the parks and the squares of Dongguan are eerily empty. The long avenues of factories show only blank faces to the world, the packs of girls and boys swallowed up inside. Industry does not require movement and activity, but their opposite—street after street, there is only silence.
At night, the factories lining the highways are lit. Look closely and you can sometimes see shadows moving against a window, erratic as fireflies—as long as there is light, people are still working. Each strip of blue-lighted windows against the dark signals a single factory; one strip is set apart from the next, like stately ocean liners on the sea. From a distance, they are beautiful.
* * *
The girls were twenty days out from home, so new to the city they didn’t know who owned the factory where they worked. They carried nothing with them: no drinks, no plastic bags of fruit or snacks. They just sat, under the blazing sun, in the public square of a district of Dongguan known for its small shoe factories.
Their names were Tian Yongxia and Zhang Dali. They were sixteen years old and this was their first time away from home. They had left their farming village in Henan Province on the ninth day of the lunar new year, which was regarded as an auspicious moment to depart. A girl from their village worked in a factory here for eight hundred yuan a month, and they wanted that too. They each paid four hundred yuan, about fifty dollars, to a husband and wife who promised them factory jobs and brought them out on a three-day bus journey. But when they got to the city there were no jobs, and the couple disappeared.
The girls spent four nights in the bus station and finally got in touch with someone from home, who found them work in an electronics factory for three hundred yuan a month. It was a poor salary, but they were in no position to negotiate. “By that time I wanted to join a factory just so I could get a good night’s sleep,” said Yongxia, who had a broad face and small eyes and smiled a lot. She did most of the talking. Dali was slimmer and prettier, with delicate features and uneven teeth.
The girls quickly learned the hierarchy of factory life, and that they were at the bottom. Workers who had joined the previous year looked down on newcomers and did not talk to them. Theirs was a smaller subsidiary factory, which paid less, but to work at a company’s main facility you needed skills and a proper identity card; both girls had joined the factory with borrowed IDs because they had not applied for their own cards yet. The assembly line ran eight hours a day with weekends off, and that was bad too, because overtime would have meant more money. Shoe factories paid more, but they were known to work extremely long days, and the girls constantly debated whether the extra money would be worth the exhaustion. Soon after Yongxia and Dali arrived in the factory, they started talking about how to leave.
Before they went out from home, the two girls had made a pact: If