chudaoxianren

Only then did I learn that Liu Yuan was also a high-school graduate. The difference was that her family lived in the county town. She could have repeated her final year of high school and tried again for university, but she had never liked studying. So her family paid to send her to a computer-training center in the county town. After completing the course, she came to Dongguan. Although she had no experience as an office clerk, her high-school diploma was enough to get her into a factory as a clerk without much trouble. Later, dissatisfied with that factory, she changed jobs and came to Liangguang. As I listened to her, a tiny ray of hope flickered inside me. When Lijuan and I had been looking for work, I had seen computer-training centers too. If I could make some money, couldn't I go learn computers as well and become an office clerk like Liu Yuan? I was just about to ask Liu Yuan about computer training when several of the girls finished their tests. She had to stop talking to ...

I quickly went with her to a small breakfast stall nearby and bought her a one-yuan serving of stir-fried rice noodles. Watching Lijuan wolf down her food, I felt like crying myself. The moment she heard that our factory usually worked overtime only until ten at night, she was filled with envy. I, on the other hand, envied her. She might be exhausted, but at least the pay was better. “Our department is just the production floor,” Lijuan explained. “The monthly wage is only three or four hundred yuan. But if you can get into the injection-molding section or the painting section, the pay is better. The smell in those two departments is awful, but they give you an extra health allowance. And if you work in injection molding, there’s also a night-shift allowance. Altogether, you can make five or six hundred yuan a month.” Five or six hundred yuan a month? I immediately became interested. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but if I lived frugally, I could send five hundred yuan home ever...

 After she said that, I was mortified. I had always considered myself at least somewhat educated, yet here I was, unable to understand something that even A-Xiang, who hadn't finished elementary school, understood perfectly. After dinner, we chatted for a while longer. Then the work bell rang. We were working overtime that night. Under normal circumstances, the factory worked until ten. Days without overtime were rare, and whenever there was a rush order, we sometimes worked through the entire night. I had hoped to see Lijuan that evening, but it looked like that would be impossible. Back when I was in school, I often stayed up until ten as well. But those late nights had been for studying—for my future. What about now? What was I staying up late for now, working myself to exhaustion for the sake of one or two hundred yuan a month? That wasn't why I had come to Dongguan. After a full day of manual work, my arms were sore and aching, and my fingers were almost numb. Sometimes I ...

Time passed painfully slowly. And because we had to keep our heads bent over our work all the time, by the end of the morning my back and waist were aching badly. Fortunately, we were allowed to talk while we worked. We just had to keep our voices low whenever Miss Zhao was around. If we got too loud, she would immediately shout at us. But whenever she went out, we could talk loudly—even sing. A-Xiang told me that during overtime at night, we could sing as loudly as we wanted even when Miss Zhao was there. As she said this, a look of satisfaction flickered across her big eyes. At long last, noon arrived. When the lunch bell finally rang, we rushed out of the workshop like caged animals suddenly set free. Because my foot hurt, I fell behind. As I watched the others hurry ahead, I noticed that several of them, like me, had difficulty walking. The bowls and chopsticks I used for meals were the ones I had brought from home, so I didn't need to buy new ones. The older workers also kept ...

Thinking about how shabby and run-down the factory I had ended up in was, I felt a dull ache in my heart. I could only console myself with the old saying that gold would shine wherever it was. As for what kind of light it would give off, or how exactly it was supposed to shine, I had absolutely no idea. There was something else, too. I had to find that damned Qi Huaiyi. I had to find him. But in the vastness of Dongguan, the Pearl River Delta, and Guangdong as a whole, trying to find one particular person was like searching for a needle in the ocean. Yet when all my hopes, dreams, and plans for the future had turned to ashes, what else could I possibly ask for? Chen Gang had finished a rush order some time ago and had now been given a few days off. But he couldn't go home. He had to remain available in case the factory suddenly needed workers to rush another order. As he had told us before, when he wasn't working, he received only ten yuan a day for living expenses. So he was r...

We were about to ask a few more questions about the factory when a clerk from the personnel department came to the security office to interview the applicants. I had heard Chen Gang say that many personnel departments secretly charged workers a fee to get into the factory, so I had imagined the people in those departments as stern, intimidating figures. But now I saw that this was not necessarily the case. The personnel clerk was a young woman, only a few years older than me. She was slightly plump, with a round face and a pair of narrow, squinting eyes. Put her in a crowd, and she was so ordinary that no one would have been able to pick her out. She chatted and laughed with the security guards, looking almost kind and pleasant. But the moment she started dealing with us, her attitude changed completely. Sitting inside the security office, she examined our ID cards and diplomas one by one through the window. She repeatedly compared the photographs on our documents with our faces. Only ...

I nodded repeatedly and let out a long sigh of relief. Taking back my ID card, I hurried out of the factory as though I had just been granted a pardon. I wanted to shout at the top of my lungs: "I've got a job! I finally have a job, too!" It wasn't until I walked out of the gate that I noticed the factory's name: Yongxin Handicrafts Factory. I returned to the entrance of Brightlight and waited for a long time before Lijuan finally came out with the other girls. When I told her how simple my interview had been, she could hardly believe it. Their recruitment process had been extremely complicated. First, they had to take a written test. One person who couldn't write had even been turned away. After that, a security guard had put them through some basic drills, including marching in place, turning left, and turning right. Brightlight also required a deposit of one hundred yuan. Fortunately, Chen Gang had given Lijuan one hundred yuan the night before, so she was ...

The Taiwanese-owned factory was called Brightlight Plastics and Electronics. The buildings were relatively new, though they had clearly been in use for some time, and the factory occupied a fairly large area. The security office beside the entrance looked rather dim and gloomy. Like many factories, it had an electric gate, with the security office on the left. Outside the window facing the main road, more than a dozen young women were already waiting in line for job interviews. Most of them looked just as timid and awkward as we did. They were shy, reserved, and dressed in clothes that looked rather old-fashioned. One girl standing ahead of us particularly caught my attention. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, with her long, beautiful hair hanging loose over her shoulders. A thin layer of makeup covered her face, and she was exceptionally pretty. At a glance, I could tell she had already spent some time working away from home. Sure enough, while we waited for the interviews to begin, she c...

I Am a Flower Adrift in the Wind: The Survival Story of a Migrant Girl in Dongguan If every boy who leaves his homeland is a blade of grass without roots, then every girl who finds herself far from home is a flower adrift in the wind. For all kinds of reasons, people have long held prejudices against migrant workers, especially young women who leave their villages to work elsewhere. They look at our lives with curiosity, suspicion, or outright contempt, imagining all sorts of stories about us. What I am writing here is my own account—the most complete and honest portrait I can offer of the lives of migrant workers. —Author’s Note I often came across newspaper and television reports about the lives of migrant workers, and for reasons I never quite understood, the media seemed particularly interested in migrant women. According to many of these reports, a migrant girl was either vain and eager for money, eventually becoming a prostitute or a mistress, or else she was trapped in condition...

Several others were taken away at the same time. Some did not have temporary-residence permits, while even more were caught without health certificates. There were also unmarried couples who were living together without marriage certificates. Around here, it was perfectly normal for two people who had decided to be together to live under the same roof. But without a marriage certificate, it was considered illegal cohabitation. Once the matter was treated as a legal violation, the fines were no longer just a hundred or two hundred yuan. A whole chain of consequences could follow. If they failed to show up for work that day, they could be treated as absent without leave and fined by the factory. In more serious cases, they could even be accused of prostitution and risk being fired. Lijuan and I both drew a sharp breath when we heard this. When Chen Gang came back after work, Lijuan was no longer in the mood to be nice to him. “When are we actually going to be able to get into your factor...