I asked her quietly, “Um… he’s not going to spend the night here, is he?”
Luo Xiaohua gave me a suggestive smile. “He’s already here. What do you think? Of course he’s staying the night. Besides, whenever he’s on the day shift, he spends the night here.”
Whenever?
The thought of having a man and a woman sleeping in the bunk below me whenever I was on the day shift made me miserable.
“Aren’t male workers forbidden from entering the women’s dormitory? It says so in the factory rules.”
Luo Xiaohua gave me a cold look.
“Rules are dead. People are alive. Besides, she’s not the only one in this dorm who brings a male worker in for the night.”
At that, I remembered that Luo Xiaohua was married too. Her husband worked at the factory as a cleaner. I immediately fell silent.
That night, lying in bed, I could not stop thinking about the young couple below me. The whole situation was unbearably awkward.
I tried not to turn over. Whenever I moved, the bed below moved with me. The bed was poorly made and squeaked and groaned at the slightest motion.
I lay there in discomfort, not knowing when I finally drifted off to sleep.
In my dream, I was lying on a boat. It rocked gently back and forth, surrounded on every side by an endless sea.
I woke in terror. When I realized I was lying in my bed rather than on a boat, I finally relaxed.
But strangely enough, my bed was rocking just like a boat, accompanied by the same creaking and groaning sounds. Every now and then, I could hear the faint breathing of a man and a woman.
Suddenly, I understood what was happening in the bunk below me.
I was mortified.
But the two people below seemed completely unaffected by my embarrassment. The bed continued to rock at a steady rhythm.
I stared wide-eyed into the darkness and covered my ears, wishing I could somehow make the whole world stop.
It was useless.
Just when I thought the night would never end, the bed suddenly began shaking more violently, as if a storm had arrived. Then came the man’s heavy breathing and the woman’s muffled moans.
Finally, everything became quiet again.
The next morning, the pair of men’s leather shoes was gone.
Wu Shaofen’s face was flushed with happiness. She cheerfully handed each woman in the dorm a small apple.
I received one too, but I had no appetite for it. I had barely slept all night and was exhausted.
At lunch the next day, Lijuan noticed how listless I looked and asked what was wrong.
I told her what had happened during the night.
She cursed angrily. “Why does every dormitory have people like that? Ours does too. Remember Sister Guo? Her husband works at another factory, and he sneaks in to spend the night almost every week.”
I asked in confusion, “Why don’t they just rent a place? I really don’t understand them.”
“Because renting costs money,” Lijuan said. “They’re trying to save.”
I sighed.
“So, when you get right down to it, everything comes back to money.”
“Exactly. Anyway, we’re going to spend New Year’s at Chen Gang’s factory, so let them do whatever they want.”
She paused, then added, “I became a regular employee last week. From now on, I can get a thirty-yuan perfect-attendance bonus every month. I can also resign whenever I want.”
I asked her, “When you became a regular employee, did you sign a labor contract? Did they arrange workers’ compensation insurance or pensions?”
Lijuan cut me off.
“You’re even more naïve than I am! Some of the veteran workers in our workshop have been here for eight or nine years, and they’ve never even seen what workers’ compensation insurance or a pension looks like.”
She continued, “There are more than a thousand workers in the factory, but only about two hundred have ever signed labor contracts. And those two hundred contracts are just there to satisfy inspections from above. Other than signing their names once a year, most of them don’t even know what the contracts actually say.”
“That’s illegal,” I said angrily.
Lijuan gave a helpless shrug.
“When I first arrived, I thought so too. But after hearing the old workers talk about it, I just became numb. Be grateful for what you have. Wasn’t your previous factory the same?”
I felt even more frustrated.
“Then what’s the difference between being a regular employee and not being one?”
“There is still a difference,” Lijuan said with a bitter smile. “Once you become a regular employee, the factory arranges your temporary-residence permit. It costs five yuan a month, sixty yuan a year, and they deduct the whole sixty from your first month’s wages.”
I cried out, “But it’s almost November! If they issue the permit now, I can only use it for two months. They still deduct the full sixty yuan?”
“Of course.”
I was speechless.
Perhaps, like Lijuan, I had simply become numb.
Just as Lijuan had said, Wu Shaofen was far from the only person in our dormitory who brought a male worker in to spend the night.
Of the twelve women in our room, eight were either married or had boyfriends. Three or four of them regularly brought their husbands or boyfriends in to spend the night.
Luo Xiaohua was one of them.
Strangely enough, I suddenly went from hating the night shift to actually liking it.
At least when I worked nights, I did not have to lie in bed while it rocked back and forth. I did not have to listen to all that creaking and groaning.
And when two or more men happened to spend the night in the dormitory at the same time, waking up in the middle of the night could be quite a spectacle.
This awkward situation was not finally resolved until the middle of December.
Someone must have reported it anonymously. One night, the security department suddenly conducted a surprise inspection of the women’s dormitories.
They caught nearly twenty men spending the night inside.
Five of them were from other factories. Their wives were immediately fired.
The other fifteen men were publicly reprimanded throughout the factory. Both the men and women involved were required to write self-criticisms, which were posted on the factory notice board. Both sides were also fined half a month’s wages.
Fortunately, we happened to be on the night shift during the inspection, so Wu Shaofen and the others escaped.
After that, however, they never dared bring male workers into the dormitory again.
Not long afterward, Wu Shaofen and Lu Meng rented a small place outside the factory together with two other couples. They agreed that each couple could spend one week a month there.
At last, our dormitory became peaceful again.
Before long, through a stroke of luck, my life as a pi gong worker also came to an end.
I had originally thought the injection-molding department had only thirty-eight machines.
That was not quite accurate.
There was a small room tucked away in one corner of the department, and inside it were another eight injection-molding machines.
Liangguang Factory mainly manufactured plastic products. It was a processing factory operating under the “three forms of processing and compensation trade” system, producing mainly cameras and toys.
Because these products were mostly low- to mid-range, the lenses did not require particularly high precision.
Those eight machines in the small room were used specifically to produce lenses.
The pi gong workers on those eight machines rotated with the workers operating the thirty-eight machines in the main workshop.
Around the end of December, Wu Shaofen and I were transferred to the small room.
There was only one window, and the air conditioner ran constantly.
Even so, the room was unbearably stuffy.
Worse, because there was almost no ventilation, the smell of plastic was incredibly strong. The first time I went inside, I could hardly breathe.
Since we were producing lenses, however, the environmental requirements were stricter. Before entering, we had to change into special slippers and put on white gloves.
For several days, the eight machines continuously produced a new type of lens. Wu Shaofen and I were assigned to work as the pi gong operators for these machines.
The petite Section Chief Ma frequently came in and out with her clerk, Xiang Li.
Xiang Li was a young woman from Jiangxi. She wore glasses. She was not particularly pretty, but she had a very good figure.
After a few days, she became familiar with us, and we began chatting from time to time.
Xiang Li was twenty-two that year. She had graduated from a teachers’ college and come straight to Dongguan after graduation.
I had assumed her salary must be quite high.
To my surprise, she earned only six hundred yuan a month.
I was astonished.
It turned out that because she had no work experience, she had been hired as a reserve cadre—essentially a management trainee.
More than twenty other people had been hired at the same time. They were assigned to different departments for on-the-job training.
Xiang Li considered herself lucky because she had been assigned to clerical work. Several of the college graduates who had arrived with her had been sent straight to the production line to assemble cameras.
She was deeply uncertain about her future.
The boss who had recruited them had promised that those who performed well would eventually receive higher wages.
Their group had already been at the factory for more than six months. Some had become key employees in their departments, while others were still working themselves to the bone on the production line.
When Xiang Li talked about it, her expression was full of discouragement.
Yet strangely, I saw hope in that discouragement.
In that respect, Liangguang Factory was actually quite good.
Unlike government offices and enterprises back in the inland provinces, where a person’s future was often determined solely by educational credentials, Liangguang seemed to give ordinary workers a chance to prove themselves.
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