A-Ling’s husband, who had been silent until then, shot her a glance.
“Crappy eggs? He’s the shift leader. Dinner comes with one meat dish, two vegetable dishes, and two eggs. One of those eggs must have been something he asked someone else for. That means he and that person could only eat the two vegetable dishes. You’ve got to know when you’re already getting enough. Don’t be ungrateful.”
Lijuan fell silent. She was no longer angry, but she still looked unconvinced.
Whether we liked it or not, the fact remained that we were now sharing a room with two other men and a woman.
A-Ling explained that this was how people kept rent down. One bunk cost only 80 yuan a month. With two bunks, that meant 160 yuan a month just for her.
I could hardly believe it.
This tiny room was low-ceilinged and damp, barely larger than the kitchen in our house, yet the four bunks cost 320 yuan a month.
It was daylight robbery.
If we could rent out our house at that kind of price, we could make a fortune every month just from rent.
Then why had my father gone down into a coal mine?
And if he had never gone into that mine, would he still be alive?
The thought darkened my heart.
But this was no time to grieve.
I had no idea what kind of life was about to begin for us in this completely unfamiliar place, but everything already felt strange. And when A-Ling took us to the place where we were supposed to bathe, Lijuan and I were completely stunned.
The place was called a chongliang fang—a shower room. A-Ling explained that people in Guangdong didn’t say they were going to xizao, “take a bath.” They said they were going to chongliang, literally “wash off the heat.”
We found the expression strange, but we understood the rule of living in a new place: when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
The so-called shower room was nothing more than a few narrow, flimsy wooden boards thrown together in the middle of the courtyard. It was perhaps five or six square meters. Above it, someone had haphazardly laid a piece of corrugated roofing that looked like asbestos sheeting. It covered only half the roof.
Through a gap barely wider than a palm, we caught sight of a bronze-colored body.
Then came the loud shhhhhh of running water.
Someone was showering.
I glanced at the doors surrounding the courtyard and quickly pulled Lijuan back into the room.
“How are we supposed to wash ourselves?” Lijuan asked anxiously. “You can see people in there!”
“What can we do?” A-Ling said helplessly. “Girls usually wait until it gets dark. Then people outside can’t see much.”
We had been sitting on the train for three days and two nights. We desperately wanted a shower and a change of clothes.
Now it seemed we would have to wait.
We took out the dry food we had brought from home, only to discover that the heat had already turned everything moldy.
With no other choice, we followed A-Ling’s directions. Lijuan and I held hands and cautiously made our way toward the nearby market.
Back home, once night fell, hardly anyone was out on the streets.
Here, it was exactly the opposite.
There seemed to be even more people outside at night than we had seen during the day. People moved everywhere in twos and threes, most of them young women.
The girls we saw at night looked completely different from the factory workers we had seen during the day. They wore pretty little tops and skirts. Some carried ice cream, others held skewers of grilled food. They chatted and laughed as they walked, looking as though they were having the time of their lives.
Lijuan and I turned this way and that as soon as we left the compound. Before long, we were lost.
We didn’t know where the market was.
We didn’t even know how to find our way back to where we were staying.
In the end, we asked a girl passing by. She happened to be heading to the market too, so we followed behind her.
She was pretty and friendly.
Looking at her, then at the clothes Lijuan and I were wearing—the kind of styles people had worn back in the 1970s and ’80s—we wished the ground would open up and swallow us.
Fortunately, we reached the market soon.
The girl nodded to us and ran toward a place where loud dance music was blasting. A crowd had already gathered there.
Lijuan and I stood awkwardly at the edge of the market, caught between excitement and fear.
The market was enormous.
There were people everywhere.
All kinds of goods were on display, dazzling and abundant. Compared with the farmers’ market back home—no, compared even with the shops in our county town—it seemed to have everything.
Along the roadside were countless food stalls.
Almost immediately, we spotted piles of stir-fried rice noodles and flat rice noodles, each dish decorated with bright green vegetables.
A handwritten sign in front of every stall said:
One yuan a serving.
Dozens of young men and women were eating them.
My mouth watered.
Lijuan and I timidly approached one of the stalls and ordered one serving of fried rice noodles and one serving of stir-fried flat rice noodles.
The owner was friendly. Bare-chested, he stood over the wok, tossing the noodles again and again as sweat poured down his body.
Every so often, he wiped his face with his hand.
Judging by the way he did it, I guessed most of the sweat ended up flying straight into the noodles he was cooking.
But by then, I didn’t care.
My stomach was growling with hunger.
The smell of the noodles kept teasing my nose, and at that moment, that one-yuan plate of fried noodles seemed like the finest food in the world.
Before long, the noodles were ready.
The cheap foam containers they came in gave off a strange smell, as did the disposable chopsticks, but we were too hungry to care.
We wolfed them down.
I was so hungry that it felt as if there were a tiny hand inside my stomach grabbing each mouthful the moment it reached my lips.
But once the noodles were in my mouth, something felt wrong.
They were hard, as if they might not have been fully cooked.
Worst of all, after I swallowed them, there was hardly any taste of noodles left in my mouth.
Instead, all I could taste was the chemical stink of the cheap foam container and disposable chopsticks.
After finishing her portion, Lijuan muttered softly,
“Why does it taste so strange?”
I looked around.
Everyone else seemed to be eating happily.
Had their taste buds simply gone numb?
I handed the stall owner two yuan.
His hands were slick with sweat, and there was a patch of black grease on one of them. He took my money and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he reached into another pocket for my change.
Just then, another customer came over and ordered fried noodles.
The owner immediately poured oil into the wok.
Then, with the very same hand that had just taken my money, he grabbed a handful of rice noodles and tossed them into the pan.
I couldn’t bear to watch anymore.
I was afraid that if I kept looking, I would throw up everything I had just eaten.
I grabbed Lijuan and hurried away.
Across the street were rows of clothing stalls, filled with pretty little outfits.
Lijuan and I could only stand there and stare.
“When do you think we’ll be able to wear clothes that pretty?” she asked enviously.
I sighed.
“Forget the clothes. We need to buy a bucket. We still have to wash ourselves and our clothes later.”
Lijuan deliberately opened her mouth wide and drew out the word in a mocking tone:
“Chong—liang. Guangdong people are so strange. How can taking a bath be called ‘washing off the heat’? Do they mean that instead of washing with a bucket, they just pour the water over themselves from head to toe?”
We imagined what these people must look like taking their “showers” and burst out laughing.
Suddenly, Lijuan grabbed my arm.
“Look over there! What are they doing?”
I followed her finger.
Several small vendors selling fruit and cheap household goods along the roadside were suddenly looking terrified. Some shouted in panic:
“The security team is coming!”
They hurriedly gathered up their goods and scattered in every direction.
Those who were fast disappeared almost instantly.
But many others weren’t quick enough.
A dozen men in camouflage uniforms jumped out of a vehicle and caught them.
Only later did I learn that these men were members of the local public-security patrol teams.
In Dongguan, the security patrolmen all wore camouflage uniforms. They rode confiscated motorcycles, radios crackling and shrieking from their shoulders, and carried batons or iron rods as they patrolled the streets and neighborhoods around the rental compounds, day and night.
Officially, they were there to maintain public order.
In practice, one of their main jobs was to round up people without temporary-residence permits.
The security patrols had become one of Dongguan’s most distinctive sights.
If this had happened before, I would have assumed that camouflage uniforms belonged to soldiers and that anyone wearing one must be a good person.
But that morning, we had been cheated by men wearing the very same kind of uniforms on the bus.
Now, for reasons I couldn’t quite explain, the sight of camouflage made me afraid.
I quickly pulled Lijuan into a shop behind us.
The dozen or so patrolmen had already caught seven or eight vendors.
First, they ordered the vendors to gather up the goods in front of them and throw everything into the vehicle the patrolmen had brought.
Then they shouted at them to climb aboard.
One of the vendors was an old man selling pears.
He looked to be in his sixties. His back was bent, and he walked with a slight limp. He moved a little too slowly.
One of the patrolmen shoved him to the ground.
Then he snatched away the old man’s weighing scale, smashed the pears one by one against the pavement, and stamped on the baskets until they broke apart.
Tears streamed down the old man’s face.
Kneeling on the ground, he let out a cry of despair:
“You bandits! You’re nothing but a bunch of bandits!”
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