Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (53 page)

They had purchased bottles of Double Deer beer for the men. The older Ren sister’s boyfriend was there—he had just finished a twelve-
hour shift at a pleather plant—and Old Tian came from the factory. Old Tian was the foreman on the underwire assembly line, where he monitored Tao Yufeng, the fifteen-year-old who had lied about her age during the factory’s first hiring. Tonight the girl targeted Old Tian as soon as the beer was uncapped.

“Old Tian, drink a glass,” she said. She topped off the man’s shot glass with beer and filled her own cup with Sprite. They both drank, and Yufeng immediately followed with a refill.

“Drink again,” she said sternly.

“Wait a minute,” Old Tian said. “I need to rest.”

“Drink it!”

“Wait.”

“Now! Drink it now!”

The moment the glass was empty she poured another.

“Now it’s your turn,” she said, pointing to Ren’s boyfriend. “Make him drink. I want him drunk so he can’t boss me around at work tomorrow morning.”

“I won’t boss you around!”

“Make him drink!”

After the boyfriend obliged, she turned to me. “You go next,” she instructed. “Make Old Tian drink.” I didn’t hesitate—I knew better than to get in the way of Yufeng. From the moment she lied her way into the job, Yufeng had established herself as a force of nature in the factory. She had a young, boyish face, with chubby cheeks and short-cropped hair, but she had more attitude than all of the adult workers combined. Nobody else was nearly as fast with underwire, and she refused to be intimidated by the bosses. Once, when Boss Wang told Yufeng there wouldn’t be any work for a few days, she cursed him and stormed out of the factory. “That g-g-girl has a temper,” he said mildly, after she was gone. Like the other men at the plant, he seemed more bemused than anything: nobody knew how to handle a woman so young and yet so sharp.

In particular, OldTian was no match for the girl. He barely weighed one hundred pounds, with a gentle, elflike face, and he lived according to a two-sentence motto: “Pass Every Day Happily! A New Day Begins
from Right Now!” This had been his catchphrase ever since he first set out from rural Sichuan in the mid–1980s. Back then, he earned a good living as a wristwatch repairman, setting up stands on the streets of development zones. Soon, however, he found himself overtaken by the pace of progress. In the early 2000s, cell phones suddenly became cheap enough for even low-income consumers, who also used the devices to tell time; Old Tian’s trade in wristwatches became obsolete. Like so many people in China, he learned that it was impossible to be complacent with new knowledge; he had already shifted from farming to watches, but now it was time to learn something else. He took it all in stride, the eternal optimist:
A New Day Begins from Right Now!
In the Wenzhou region he found jobs as a factory technician, eventually specializing in the production of underwire.

He earned a good wage, roughly a third of which was spent on lottery tickets. In China, the state-run Welfare Lottery funds social programs, and Old Tian contributed more than his share. The man was obsessed—he kept track of winning numbers, writing them across the walls of his dormitory room. He slept in a windowless chamber on the first floor, where the bare plaster walls had been covered with his motto about passing days happily, along with dozens of mysterious lottery calculations:

Every worker in the plant nursed some secret dream for the future. Yufeng told me that eventually she wanted to start a shoe factory, and Little Long talked about raising rabbits or doing wholesale trade. Master Luo had a business idea that involved drying lotus root and selling it shrink-wrapped in northern China, where it doesn’t grow naturally. Once, when Old Tian was fiddling with the factory’s machinery, I asked him what he would do if he got lucky and won the lottery. He smiled
and pointed at the underwire. “I’d make this,” he said. “I’d start my own business making it.” He was the only person in the factory who aspired to do exactly what he already did. In China, that’s a pipe dream, as unlikely as winning the lottery: to live in complete confidence that your trade will never become obsolete.

At the birthday party Old Tian’s face quickly turned red from the beer. Yufeng bullied him into a few final shots before relenting, and he sank onto the bunk bed in the corner of the room. The girls started talking about factory jobs. They mentioned the rumors that working with
pige
, or pleather, causes birth defects, and Yufeng said shoe plants are better.

“They have toxic fumes, too,” Ren Jing said. “It’s the same problem.”

“The fumes aren’t the same,” Yuran, the older sister, corrected her. “The problem with shoes is that they use a type of glue that’s bad for you. But it’s not as bad as the
pige
fumes.”

Yuran was only seventeen, but she was worldly when it came to factories; this was her third assembly-line job. Previously she had made shoes and dress shirts. Ren Jing, the birthday girl, had technically come of legal working age only today, but she was already onto her second job. At the age of fourteen she had started as a seamstress in a low-end garment factory. “They paid by the piece,” she told me. “This job is better, because I get paid by the hour. It’s more relaxed.”

“I liked the clothes factory where I used to work,” Yuran said. “The boss was really nice. One night we had to work late, because of an order, and he came and brought drinks for all of us. Nobody asked him to do that.”

“Boss Gao wouldn’t do that.”

“Boss Gao is too cheap.”

“The boss at the clothes factory cared about the workers.”

“Boss Wang is nice. He’s just too worried all the time.”

“Look at Old Tian!”

The girls laughed—the tipsy foreman had fallen asleep on the bunk bed. The cake had all been eaten, and a small pile of gifts sat on the table: a toy pig, a little cow, a floppy cloth dog. Ren Jing loved stuffed animals, and like all the girls she sometimes seemed younger than her years. They
never mentioned boys, at least not in mixed company, and they obeyed their parents with a readiness that would have been unimaginable to an American teenager. But in other ways they were remarkably mature. In the United States, few girls could prepare a seven-course banquet for a sweet sixteen birthday party, and almost certainly such an event would not feature a fifteen-year-old bullying her assembly-line foreman into drinking too much. But some teenager qualities are the same everywhere, and once the Anhui girls started talking, their faces lit up and they couldn’t have been happier. For an hour Ren Jing sat with her friends, chatting about old jobs and new bosses and which factories are the best.

ONE EVENING THAT FALL,
while driving from Wenzhou to Lishui on the new expressway, Boss Gao lost control of his car. It was pitch-black and raining hard; he was going faster than eighty miles per hour. On a curve, he hit a patch of water and locked the brakes, and then he hydroplaned. He was driving his aptly named Buick Sail. The car spun a full three-sixty, skidded across the highway, and slammed into a guardrail. Many sections of the Jinliwen Expressway are elevated, and often the road is bordered by cliffs, but Boss Gao was fortunate in the location of his accident—the guardrail held. It was nearly midnight and the road was empty. Afterward, when the car came to a stop on the shoulder, Boss Gao smoked a State Express 555 until his nerves calmed. But the damage to the car was relatively minor, and he was able to continue driving to Lishui.

Both bosses still had homes near Wenzhou, and they made the round-trip journey two or three times a week. To some degree it was an issue of machine quality: in the factory, something always seemed to be breaking down, forcing them to return to Wenzhou to get the right part or repair. In the past, neither boss had driven much and the open road unsettled them. It was expensive, too—each round trip cost roughly twenty-five dollars in highway tolls. And that autumn, almost immediately after the factory became profitable, the bosses began to talk about moving the whole operation closer to their hometowns.

Some of it was simply the eternal restlessness of the development zone. People in such places become accustomed to moving and adjusting; their instinct is always to tinker. And often a little success proves to be more unsettling than satisfying. After the bosses began to earn money, they became obsessed with cutting costs. Their staff of twenty employees was overstretched, and often the crew worked late into the evening, but the bosses refused to hire new people. They complained about rent, because their factory space was so big. Their initial plans for the business had been overly ambitious; they had hoped to make a major expansion within six months. But after a year the growth had proven to be smaller than expected, and much of the empty space on the top floors was wasted.

Whenever the bosses discussed important business between themselves, they spoke in their local dialect, so the workers wouldn’t understand. And they rarely gave anybody a sense of their plans. But during the fall they asked Master Luo how much time he would need, in the event of a factory transfer, to disassemble the Machine and put it back together again. He told them it would take ten days total. After that, they didn’t ask him any more questions, and he couldn’t tell whether they were serious about the possibility of moving. He believed they wouldn’t try something like that before the end of the year, because business was just starting to boom and a transfer involved risks. But Master Luo admitted that after all the years he’d spent in Chinese factory towns, he still couldn’t predict the snap decisions of a boss. People rarely planned carefully, especially in a place like Zhejiang. From Master Luo’s perspective, the region was even more chaotic than Guangdong, where he spent so many years. “They build things differently there,” he told me. “It’s more logical. In Guangdong the first thing they do is build the road, and then they build the factories. But here it’s the opposite. They build factories first and then they worry about finishing the roads and everything else.”

At the end of autumn, Master Luo decided that it was best for his wife and baby to return to her hometown in Guizhou Province. He wasn’t sure if the factory was going to move, and the bosses were still withholding part of his salary; there was a chance he’d make a job search
after the Spring Festival holiday. In either case, mobility would be crucial, and such things are harder with a small child. Like so many migrant families, they decided to live apart until Master Luo’s job situation was more stable.

Cheng Youqin packed up as much as she could carry, and she took their new Canon digital camera. This was the family’s most valuable possession—after the baby’s birth, they spent one hundred and fifty dollars on the camera. With all of her bags and the baby, Cheng left from the Lishui bus station, eventually transferring to a train to Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province. It was an overnight journey and they arrived before five in the morning. At the Guiyang train station, a friendly young woman approached Cheng and asked where she was going. The friendly woman said she knew somebody with a van that was also headed in that direction, and she offered a good price, so Cheng accepted. Her hometown was in the countryside outside of Guiyang, more than an hour away, and usually she had to connect with a couple of public buses in order to get there.

She followed the young woman outside the train station, but once she saw the vehicle she became nervous. It was dingy and cramped, the kind of minivan known as a “breadbox.” Three people waited inside, and two of them were heavyset men who smoked cigarettes and didn’t say much when Cheng approached. She thought about turning around and waiting for a public bus, but it was so early and the long journey from Lishui had left her tired. Her son still slept peacefully in her arms. At last she decided to enter the breadbox van and hope for the best.

They drove through Guiyang and into the countryside. The other four people all knew each other, but they didn’t say much, and the farther they went, the more this silence unnerved Cheng. Guizhou is a poor, remote province, with stunningly rugged scenery, and soon they had left the last settlements of the Guiyang suburbs. Along an empty stretch of road Cheng noticed a strong chemical smell; suddenly she felt dizzy. The breadbox van pulled over to the side of the road. After that, events occurred as if through a haze: the men demanded her money, valuables, and cell phone; they threatened to kill her and the baby if she didn’t cooperate. Cheng had the equivalent of one hundred and twenty
dollars in cash, which she handed over, along with her cell phone. They asked for her earrings and she took them off. But she didn’t tell them about the digital camera, which she had hidden at the bottom of a bag of baby supplies. Even when the men asked again about valuables, threatening to kill them both if she lied, she denied there was anything else.

The thieves left Cheng and her baby by the side of the road. It was early morning, and the air was wet and cold; Cheng still felt disoriented. She believed she had been drugged—recently there had been reports of thieves using chemicals to knock out victims. Fortunately, a farmhouse stood not far from the road, and Cheng stumbled there with the baby in her arms. The elderly couple who answered the door took Cheng in, gave her something to eat, and let her use their phone. The first thing she did was try to call every friend and relative whose number had been programmed onto her cell phone. After stealing a phone, Chinese thieves sometimes go through the memory bank, calling numbers with a story about a terrible accident. They claim the phone’s owner is so badly injured that she can’t speak, and she needs a medical procedure immediately; doctors won’t treat if they’re not paid in advance. If relatives fall for the story, the thieves convince them to wire money immediately.

Cheng had heard about such scams, so she tried to remember every number possible, and she called Master Luo to ask for any others. For half an hour she telephoned relatives and friends, explaining what had happened and warning them about the scam. Then she noticed that the baby was still asleep. Usually he woke up by this time in the morning, but today he seemed groggy, and Cheng called Master Luo again in a panic. He told her to bathe the baby immediately, scrubbing hard in case he had been contaminated with some drug.