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4 The Talent Market
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In the evenings after Min got off her shift, I would take the bus to meet her at the front gate of her factory. Dongguan came to life after the sun went down; as the day’s wearying heat evaporated, the darkening streets would be flooded with young people getting off work—changelings, turning before my eyes from dutiful workers back into eager teenagers again. Min and I would walk the few blocks around her factory and choose a cheap restaurant for dinner. She always ordered a meat dish, stir-fried greens, a whole fish for the two of us that invariably turned out to be mostly bone; if we met up around payday, she would insist on treating me. Min ate like someone starved for good food. Long after I had finished, she would continue picking at the dishes, extracting flavor from the tiniest morsels like a discerning gourmet.
Once when her cousin was in town, he took us to McDonald’s. Min took a long look at her Big Mac, lowered her face down to the table until it was eye-level with the sandwich, and ate through it layer by layer—bun, tomato, lettuce, beef. She had never been to McDonald’s before. When I gave her two small picture frames one birthday, I had to show her how to open the back to slip a photograph inside. Once she asked me what a stock was. She was completely uninterested in the affairs of the nation. During a meal with two older coworkers from her factory one afternoon, the conversation turned to growing up in the 1970s under Mao Zedong. “We were always hungry,” one of the men recalled. “It wasn’t until the 1980s that we stopped being hungry.”
“Who is Chairman Mao now?” Min asked suddenly. “I don’t even know.”
“Hu Jintao,” one of the men said.
A hint of recognition. “Then it isn’t Jiang Zemin anymore?” she said.
I said no, that Jiang Zemin had retired and Hu Jintao had taken his place.
“Oh. I thought Jiang Zemin was dead.” Then she said, “These people seem very far away from me.”
The details of her own life crowded out everything else; almost every time I saw Min, she had something new to tell me. It sometimes felt as if the laws of the physical world did not apply to her, that she had only to think of something—a job switch, a breakup—to make it so. If I didn’t see her for a while, she might forget to tell me that she had quit a factory or gotten a raise, because in her mind she had already moved on. She rarely stopped to take stock of everything she had done since coming out from home, a common trait in Dongguan. Maybe people worried that they would lose momentum if they stopped moving long enough to look backward.
When my first article about Min was published in the Wall Street Journal, I brought her a translated copy when we met up one night in a pastry shop near her factory. Her pound cake and iced mungbean shake sat untouched while she read. On page three, she giggled—“You remember it in great detail,” she said—and again on page four. She read the story through to the end and flipped the last page over, looking for more. “That’s it?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“It leaves you wanting more,” she said.
“There will be more.”
“Really?” she said. “Are you writing it now?”
“You’re living it,” I said. “It’s happening now.” Min gave me an odd look, as if she weren’t sure whether I was joking with her.
She read the article several more times, and afterward she sent me an e-mail. Seeing the self I used to be, she wrote, I realize that I have really changed.
One thing Min never forgot was how hard her year on the assembly line had been. In the factory world, it was common to hear people speak almost nostalgically about their days on the assembly line, a time of few worries and responsibilities. Min did not do that. “Nothing is as hard as being an ordinary worker,” I often heard her say. She never forgot where she had come from. That was one of the things I liked most about her.
* * *
In April 2004, Min got her first two weeks’ pay at her new job, but she did not send the money home. Instead, she went to the mall and she bought a fitted black shirt and white capri pants. She was keeping a promise to visit old friends, and to visit old friends required new clothes. The next morning at eight o’clock, Min and I boarded the bus for a remote district of Dongguan, where she had worked her first year out from home. The bus was packed with migrants on their weekend outings. Young women sat in pairs wearing their Sunday best—white shirts, clean jeans, sleek ponytails—and the overflow passengers in the aisle snaked merrily, like a conga line, with every lurch of the bus. A few carsick young women clutched the railings, their heads bowed and their eyes squeezed tightly, as if to shut out the suffering.
Min talked the entire two-hour ride. She was hoping to convince her friends to jump factories, as she had done. She kept up a running commentary on the places we passed.
Zhangmutou: “They call this Little Hong Kong. It is very luxurious here. I came here many times looking for jobs but couldn’t find one.”
Qingxi: “There are a lot of computer factories here, but you need more skills to get in.”
Fenggang: “This isn’t as developed as the place I am now, right?”
To me, every town looked the same. Construction sites and cheap restaurants. Factories, factories, factories, the metal lattices of their gates drawn shut like nets. Min saw the city through different eyes: Every town was the possibility of a more desirable job than the one she had. Her mental map of Dongguan traced all the bus journeys she had made in search of a better life.
MIN’S FRIENDS WAITED for us at the bottom of a highway overpass, looking anxiously in the wrong direction. Liang Rong was tall with a pretty face; Huang Jiao’e was short and plump, with bright eyes and cheeks still soft with baby fat. Both were a year older than Min. The three girls held hands and squealed and jumped up and down, like game-show contestants who had just won a big prize.
“Wow! You lost weight!”
“You’ve grown taller!”
“You cut your hair!”
“I just bought these clothes,” Min said urgently. “Are they pretty?” Her friends agreed that they were.
Next to the highway was a small park with a concrete plaza. Its stone benches had baked white in the sun, like ancient tombs; they were shaded by a few skinny saplings that looked like they were drawing their final breaths. The girls found a vacant bench and sat down and played with one another’s hair. They admired Min’s new clothes and she told them what each item cost.
“So, have I changed?” Min demanded. She had been gone exactly two months.
“Yes, you’ve changed,” Huang Jiao’e said.
“How have I changed?”
“You look more mature.”
Liang Rong and Huang Jiao’e shared the news from the factory: who had found a new job, who had cut her hair. This was their first day off in a month, because the factory’s power had been cut. The pay was still the same and often late, depending on the boss’s mood.
Min couldn’t help boasting a little about the place where she worked now. “The people in this factory are really low-quality,” she said. “My factory now is much better. The boss has a lot of money.
“Come on over to where I am,” Min said suddenly. “I’ll invite you out to dinner. When will you come?”
“But if we come,” said Liang Rong, “you might not have a day off.”
“You come visit me and I’ll introduce boyfriends to you,” Min said boldly. “There are many boys in my factory.”
The two girls’ eyes opened wide. They said “Ooh!” at the same time, and then all three of them laughed.
A beggar with a cane walked up, and the girls stopped talking. Liang Rong hesitated and then gently placed an apple in the old man’s bowl, like a scene out of a fairy tale. Dongguan was a hard place to live in, and maybe because of that people could be surprisingly kind to one another. I saw more charity toward beggars in Dongguan than I ever saw in another Chinese city. The factory workers had compassion for the elderly or anyone with a physical handicap, but toward people their own age they showed no pity. If you were young and healthy, there was no excuse for not working.
MIN’S OLD FACTORY was a half hour’s walk from town, where industrial China broadened into open farmland. A stream flowed sluggish and shiny black, like a river of gasoline. The road turned from pavement to packed dirt, a dusty strip lined with noodle stalls and pool tables set out in the open air. Knots of young men in factory shirts and slippers shot pool. Min walked along with a friend on either side, her head held high like a centurion returning from battle. Teenage boys and girls called out to her: “When did you get back?” “Where are you now?” They were impressed that she was working in downtown Dongguan.
“Have I changed?” Min asked of everyone who came up to her.
“You’re thinner and darker,” one young woman said.
Min was disappointed. “I want you to say I’m more mature than I used to be.”
Liang Rong and Huang Jiao’e went into the factory to pick up their wages; apparently the boss was in such a good mood that he had consented to pay his workers that day. Min waited outside the gate, peering in at the tile buildings and a mountain of dirt in the middle of the yard. The factory was expanding.
“How do you think it looks?” Min asked me.
“It looks okay,” I said.
“It looks all right from the outside,” she said, “but you never see the inside until you’ve agreed to work there. And then you have nowhere else to go.”
______
IN THE AFTERNOON, the girls met up with two other friends from the factory and went to a nearby park. Part of being a migrant worker was having no idea how to spend leisure time. At Tangxia Park, they watched a girl of about six aiming pebbles at the head of a turtle squatting in a shallow pool. But most entertainments at the park cost money. Visitors could use air rifles to shoot fish in a pond; Min looked at the few skinny fish awaiting execution and said solemnly, “This is what happens when you don’t have freedom.” A cable car brought passengers to a nearby hilltop, but that cost fifteen yuan. The girls sat at a picnic spot far below and watched the cars pass overhead.
Huang Jiao’e had enrolled in a computer class. She wanted to leave the factory, go to the talent market, and find a better job, as Min had done. “I have already made plans,” she said shyly.
“Do you know how to go online yet?” Min asked.
“I haven’t been online yet.”
“I’ll teach you.” Min looked at her watch; it was four o’clock. “Maybe not today, though—next time.
“Just try to learn what you can,” Min advised. “If you learn something, you can always take it with you to your next job. At least that has been my experience,” she concluded modestly. Somewhere during the course of the day, she had realized she could do little to help her friends. Finding the courage to leave a factory was something a person had to do alone. It was as the migrants always said: You can only rely on yourself.
At five o’clock, the girls parted with the most casual of goodbyes. “I’m not tired yet,” Min said as we found seats on the bus. “I’ll be tired later. Right now I’m too excited.” But as the bus passed through the towns of her job searches, now falling into evening, Min’s mood darkened. She had visited her old life and knew it was past. Yet her new life, too, was somehow wanting. On the street outside, the lights in the factories started to come on, and shadows moved soundlessly against the windows; even on Sunday night, people were going to work. “If I only go to school, come out and do migrant work for a few years, then go home, marry and have children,” Min said, “I might as well not have lived this whole life.”
IN THE BLUE LIGHT OF EVENING, Min and I stood outside the gate of her factory. An electrician friend of hers was joining us for dinner, and we waited while he changed his clothes. A good-looking security guard in camouflage pants—1.7 METERS OR ABOVE, CAN PLAY BASKETBALL A PLUS—passed by with the flash of a smile and tossed Min a bunch of keys; she had given them to him for safekeeping. People trickled back to the factory from their Sunday outings. Min called out to a young woman, who peered into the shadows and barked roughly, “I’m starving to death!” She went into the factory without coming by to say hello.
Min seemed taken aback by her rudeness. The woman had recently tried to abort a pregnancy using herbal medicine, Min told me, but it didn’t work. Min had gone with her to the hospital for surgery. “She’s one of the people I pretend to have good relations with, but really we are not friends,” she said.
An older man with glasses and a potbelly walked past us into the factory. “Was it you who left the office door open?” he asked.
“I’ve been out all day,” Min shot back.
That was Min’s boss; she hated him. “He is very proud,” she said. “Not a single person in the factory likes him.” Her boss passed by again a few minutes later, going out, and glared at her. Min stood her ground and glared back. Neither of them said anything.
“Tomorrow he’ll ask me who you are,” Min said. “I know he will. I’ll tell him you’re a friend, that’s all.” Privately she called him Liu Laotou, “Old Fogey Liu.”
In ten minutes by the factory gate, I felt as if I had seen Min’s world: the easy friendship with the guard, the young woman’s coldness and her botched abortion, the gratuitous cruelty of bosses. The fact that she stood her ground.
MIN’S ELECTRICIAN FRIEND APPEARED—he had muscular arms, an open face, and a shy smile—and we went to a street-side restaurant for grilled beef, braised fish, and beer. At the end of a long day, Min’s discontent poured out all at once. “In my old factory, I cried once for half an hour and my friends tried to console me but couldn’t,” she said. “Since I’ve been at this factory I’ve cried twice, but no one even knew.”
The electrician looked into his bowl of rice and didn’t say anything.
Min’s fury turned to the two friends who had gone to the park with us that afternoon. “We’re not close. We just pretend to be friends,” she said. “The fatter one? All she cares about is trying to find a boyfriend. When she gets paid, she doesn’t send any money home. She’ll just pay her boyfriend’s mobile-phone bill or invite boys out to dinner. And she isn’t even good-looking! The other one had a boyfriend but she broke up with him when she found out he was cheating on her. He gave her a watch and she still wears it.
“Do you see how they are all unhappy when they get their month’s pay? They are all thinking: I work so hard and this is all I get? To work every day in the factory is so hard.”
And then she turned on me. “You can’t know what it feels like,” she said. “Only someone who has experienced it knows.”
* * *
Min tired of things she had so recently wanted. The thrill of joining an office gave way quickly to the realization that she was the lowest person in it. Everybody dumped work on their newest and youngest colleague, and Min’s only workplace ally had disappeared: Two weeks after she arrived, the kindly man who had hired her decamped to a better job in Beijing. Left on her own, Min learned about the complicated politics of the white-collar world. Her new boss, the man with the potbelly, had been fired from the factory the previous year for keeping a mistress—because no one respected him, it made things harder for Min. Her coworkers appeared eager to see her fail: When she entered a room, conversations stopped, and no one helped her in her new job. She discovered that a person could say one thing and mean another, and that she must learn this skill too. “In the office, they may be very friendly to you, but they say things behind your back,” Min told me. “You can’t have a single friend in that factory.”
Crossing the class divide added to her loneliness. The workers on the assembly line were closest to her in age and background, but she was no longer of that world. Her office colleagues were older, many of them married, and they had nothing in common with her. The dorm room emptied out on weekends when the others visited their boyfriends or husbands. Min pretended not to care, and she never let anyone see her cry.
In April, her former boss called from Beijing to offer her a job. He was assembling computer parts to sell in the provinces, and he needed someone to mind the store. He was in his thirties, had attended elite Tsinghua University, and was the only adult in Dongguan who had shown her any kindness: That was all she knew. She decided to go.
She phoned her older sister in Shenzhen.
“What will you do there?” her sister asked.
“Mind the store,” Min said.
“How much is the salary?”
“I don’t know. But it must be better than here.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Yes.”
“Be careful.”
Min sent me a letter about her plans:
I have decided to go to Beijing after all, to give myself an opportunity. I will handle these feelings between “Big Brother”and “Little Sister” well. But having gotten used to this work here at last, I am really loath to leave . . .
A person cannot grow up through happiness. Happiness makes a person shallow. It is only through suffering that we grow up, transform, and come to a better understanding of life!
But in a place with no moorings, Min was prone to wild changes in mood. She decided it wouldn’t be proper to join her boss in Beijing. He was a man, he was not family, and she didn’t trust him after all. She would stay where she was.
Production in the factory was picking up; her dorm room now housed nine people, up from six. With so many people working different shifts, it was hard to sleep at night, and Min thought again about leaving. Next door to her office was the human resources department, where Min sometimes saw people lined up for job interviews. Ten people were interviewed for every one hired, and many of them had college diplomas. Min felt lucky then to have the job she did.
The assembly-line workers in Min’s factory made 320 yuan a month. That was low for Dongguan, and it bothered Min. She always said hello to the workers but she never got to know them better. “Some of the people in the office won’t even speak to the workers, because they look down on them,” Min said. “But I used to be a worker too.”
* * *
In late May, Min sent me a message from her mobile phone. I have a pleasant surprise for you. I won’t tell you now. Ha ha.
I was on my way to see her, and I raced through the possibilities in my mind. She had quit her job. She had found a boyfriend. She was going to Beijing after all.
I answered her: I’m very curious.
Maybe you’ll think it’s not good, she wrote back. Ha ha. I hope you won’t be disappointed.
She was waiting for me at the factory gate, and I saw that she had straightened her hair. It was sleekly cut in an asymmetrical line; her girlish long curls were gone. The chemical treatment had taken three hours and cost one hundred yuan at a salon, Min told me. She had just gotten her first full month’s pay.
She shared the gossip from work. Her immediate superior, who was a few years older than Min, had fought with his girlfriend. She was smart and made twice as much money as he did, a fact that everyone in the office knew and relished. She had saved eighty thousand yuan; everyone knew that too. If they were going to split up, the girlfriend demanded ten thousand yuan in compensation for the seven years she had spent with him. That was a breakup, Dongguan style: Emotional hurt gave way to financial calculation, and everyone in the factory knew every last detail. Now her young boss was quitting the factory, Min said, and several others with him. There was no reason to stay, so she had resigned yesterday.
“You’ve decided to leave?” I asked. The swiftness of her decisions took my breath away.
“I handed in my resignation letter yesterday,” Min said.
Her boss, the one she disliked, had asked why she wanted to leave.
“I want to go home,” Min had lied.
“Have you found another job?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I just have things to take care of at home.” Another lie.
“You’re doing well here,” her boss said. “Why do you want to leave?” For once he was not rude to her. But he didn’t approve her departure either; he told her he would decide within a month.
This was Min’s surprise: She had straightened her hair. She had also made a move to quit her job and jump back into the unknown, but apparently she did not consider that news.
THAT AFTERNOON, we went to a small park near Min’s factory. It was ringed by apartment buildings, with a pond of greenish yellow water the color of Mountain Dew. Children waded up to their knees, filling shallow pans and glass jars. “At home the ponds where we go swimming are deep and the water is clear,” Min said.
“In the summers when I was a child,” she continued dreamily, “we would plant watermelons. About ten minutes’ walk from home, the adults would build a shed with tree trunks for posts and put a plank of wood with grass on top. We would sit under it all day guarding the watermelons and my father would sleep there at night.
“My older sister, my cousin, my two younger sisters, and I would go there during the day. We’d play cards, fish, and swim. We had schoolwork during the summer and our mother would tell us to do it but we wouldn’t.
“We would put a few watermelons in the fast-rushing river. We’d tie them to the bank with a rope so they wouldn’t float away. When we ate the watermelon, it was really cold.”
I had never heard a migrant speak of the countryside as Min did.
“If I were you, if I had your qualifications and your money,” she said then, “I would work very hard while I was young. But when I was older I would go to the countryside and find someone to marry and live in a small house there. You could live in a hut and raise a few chickens.” She was silent for a while, spinning out in her mind a fantasy that we both knew would never come true.
* * *
In early June, a newly hired worker in Min’s factory lost four fingers of his left hand on the single-punch machine. A week later, the same machine ate the tips of three fingers of another recent hire. Neither employee had been properly trained. On the city’s factory floors, injuries hewed closely to the demands of production. During the slow winter months, factories could afford to train new workers; when orders picked up in the spring, such training was often cut short even as inexperienced people flooded in. Because the assembly line paid by the piece, working faster during busy times meant a bigger paycheck—spending time training others brought nothing. That was the zero-sum logic of the Dongguan factory, where helping someone else meant hurting yourself.
Later that month, Min was unexpectedly promoted to her factory’s human resources department. Her job was to stand on the sidewalk under a scorching sun and convince people who passed by to join her factory; she signed up ten workers her first day. She also ran orientation sessions for the new workers, most of whom were older than she was. Min had no weekends now, so we met one Friday night in late June when her overtime shift ended at nine, at a fruit-drinks shop outside the factory gate. Her friend from the old factory, Huang Jiao’e, arrived just after I did with a small suitcase. She had come to work on the assembly line.
Min told us about her new job. “I stand by the side of the road and convince people to come work at our factory.”
“What do you say to them?” I asked.
“I tell them, ‘You may think that other factories look better. But every factory has its own difficulties that you may not be able to see. Isn’t it better to stay here and be more stable? Save some money, get some experience, and then decide what you want to do.’ ” The words were familiar; this was what her parents always told her.
“But that’s the opposite of what you have done,” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded and smiled. “It goes against what I believe in.”
“I’ve never heard you speak in such an exaggerated way!” Huang Jiao’e said.
“This is my responsibility,” Min said defensively. “You would do the same if you were in my place.” Though the conversation was teasing, there was an edge to it. The two girls had been friends and equals, but now Min worked in the office, far above assembly-line workers like Huang Jiao’e.
Min went to the stall next door to buy me some noodles for dinner. “If it weren’t for Min, I wouldn’t have come here,” Huang Jiao’e confided after she had gone. Two days earlier, she had visited the factory but had not liked the conditions. Originally she was to move over yesterday, but she hesitated; finally today she had left her factory without asking anyone or getting her two months’ back pay. There were many ways to quit a factory. A worker might resign with her boss’s permission and receive all of her back pay. She could take a temporary leave that guaranteed a position upon her return. Some departing workers negotiated with their employers for a portion of the money they were owed. But nothing was worse than kuangli—literally, “crazy leaving”—which was what Huang Jiao’e had done.
I asked her how long she planned to stay.
“We’ll see,” she said. “I am testing them, and they are testing me.”
Min returned to the table. “If you do well, you will move up.” She added, still defensively, “Our salary is not high either: eight hundred yuan. If you have overtime, you may get more than me.”
“But I would be tired to death!” Huang Jiao’e said.
“There are different ways of being tired,” Min said. “In my job now, my body is tired and my heart is tired.” She was moving up in the world. Her new responsibilities included pouring tea for visiting clients, and she had enrolled in a weekly English class for the factory’s managers. “Do you know what ‘pardon’ means?” Min asked Huang Jiao’e, saying the single word in English. She looked disappointed when her friend said yes.
MIN’S OTHER NEWS did not emerge until after repeated prodding from Huang Jiao’e. A boy from home had come out to Dongguan and found a job as an assembly-line worker. He and Min had dated briefly in middle school, but she had not seen him in three years. The previous week, he had come to visit.
“There is still feeling between us,” she announced. Then, immediately—“But he is very short: only 1.65 meters.” She reported the details: “He smokes, he drinks, and he gets into fights. His family situation is not good. He has a stepmother.”
“What does his family do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to know. In the end we must rely on ourselves.”
The two of them had spent the day together. At lunch, Min poured tea for her former boyfriend while he stared at the television set mounted somewhere above Min’s head. In cheap Chinese restaurants, there is always a television playing at top volume, and the eyes of the patrons and wait staff are usually glued to it.
“Why don’t we talk?” Min prodded him. “Why do you keep looking at the television?”
After he left, Min sent him a message on his mobile phone. How did you feel about our day together?
I feel a lot of pressure, he wrote back. My feelings are very complicated.
They had talked on the phone the night before. Min got right to the point. “Do you think we have a future together?”
He told her he needed three days to think about it.
“So I will have my answer in two days,” she said. “Whatever he answers is fine with me.” But she was already spinning her dreams around the boy, who had some training as a cook. “We could go home and start a small restaurant,” she said. “There is no future in this migrant work.”
“Do you want to get married?” I asked her. The entire conversation astonished me.
“That’s not what this is about,” she said impatiently. “I’m eighteen years old now. I don’t want to waste my time. If he’s not serious about me, I want him to tell me now.”
IN THE END, everything was decided for Min. Three days after the conversation with her former boyfriend, she got a message on her mobile phone at seven in the morning: I’m here at the factory gate. She didn’t believe it and ran downstairs to see. He had gotten off the night shift and taken the bus straight to her factory. Min had to work, so the boy waited outside from eight o’clock until noon. The two of them ate lunch together, then he left and Min returned to work.
“Did he say you have a future?” I asked.
“No,” said Min. “But because he came, I knew.”
She had recently taken the bus—a two-hour ride—to spend an afternoon with him. “He is not tall, he is not handsome, he has no money, his job is not good,” Min said.
I waited for something to follow this declaration of shortcomings.
“But you like him,” I said at last.
Min didn’t say anything, but she smiled.
Now the boy was leaving Dongguan because his father wanted him to work closer to home. No sooner had Min found a stable prospect than he was disappearing too, but she was unfazed. “We will keep in touch by mobile phone,” she said. She was not staying put either. Later that month, her boss approved her departure and returned her two months’ back pay. Min went to the talent market again. She had worked in her factory’s human resources department for exactly twenty-four days, and on that she could build a new career.
* * *
In an unforgiving city, the Dongguan talent market was the toughest place of all. For ten yuan, about $1.25, anyone could enter and interview for the hundreds of jobs on offer at the company booths inside. But going in required courage—to talk to strangers, to sell yourself, to face rejection while everyone within earshot listened. Min hated the talent market because it made her feel “replaceable.” The job listings reduced human beings to the only characteristics that mattered, and rarely did these essentials require more than twenty words:
RECEPTIONIST. SWEET VOICE. GOOD APPEARANCE AND DISPOSITION. KNOWS OFFICE SOFTWARE AND CANTONESE.
LATHE WORKER. 18- TO 22-YEAR-OLD MALE, EXPERIENCE AT A FOREIGN FACTORY. NOT NEARSIGHTED. NO SKIN SENSITIVITY.
SALES SPECIALIST. CAN EAT BITTERNESS AND ENDURE HARDSHIP. OPEN TO MEN AND WOMEN WITH RURAL RESIDENCY. NO ONLY CHILDREN.
On a busy Saturday, Dongguan’s biggest job fair might draw seven thousand visitors. By midmorning, all these people would have congealed into a single bloated mass, making individual movement all but impossible; occasionally, a group would break off and swamp a certain booth, though it was unclear what suddenly made one job more desirable than all the others. The most popular booths featured airbrushed posters, usually of long, windowless buildings set in concrete landscapes; a simple booth consisted of a man or a woman with a clipboard. The talent market stretched a full city block and filled a four-story building that had once housed a karaoke lounge and a bowling alley. Trading in the futures of people, it turned out, was a more lucrative business than entertainment.
SECRETARIES. 18 TO 25, 155 CENTIMETERS OR TALLER, REGULAR FEATURES.
SECURITY GUARDS. 20 TO 26, 172 CENTIMETERS OR TALLER.
Discrimination was the operative rule. Bosses liked their clerks female, pretty, and single, and they would only consider men for certain technical jobs. One factory might impose a blanket ban on people from Henan Province; another could refuse to hire anyone from Anhui. Sometimes an applicant’s entire family would come under scrutiny, because people who had siblings were deemed more likely than only children to chiku nailao, eat bitterness and endure hardship. Being less than 160 centimeters tall, or about five feet three inches, guaranteed a frustrating day at the talent market.
Height was a universal Chinese obsession. In a country that had experienced malnutrition and even famine in living memory, height signaled fortune, and it functioned as a proxy for class: On any construction site, the armies of peasant workers were a head shorter than the city people whose homes they were building. Manual laborers in the West might be larger than their white-collar counterparts, but in China the opposite held true—the educated could literally look down on the lower classes. For women, height requirements were attached to the more glamorous trades. “If I were only ten centimeters taller,” a young woman who worked in a hair salon told me once, “I could sell cars.”
Age was another liability—in the talent market, that meant anyone over thirty-five, which was the upper age limit for many positions. “People over thirty-five are inferior in their thinking and drive,” explained a factory manager in a promotional newspaper put out by the company that operated the market. The paper’s advice to this demographic: “Don’t always talk about your past experience. You must have a mentality of starting from zero.” In a perverse way, age limits were evidence of upward mobility. At the booth of a company that made headboards for beds, the list of jobs and target ages seemed to be a timetable for career advancement:
COST ACCOUNTANT: 25
MARKETING DEPARTMENT MANAGER: 30
PRODUCTION DEPUTY MANAGER: 35
The most common openings were for clerks, receptionists, salespeople, security guards, and cooks, with mold design and machine repair also in high demand. One company was looking for people “skilled in operating Mitsubishi and Fujitsu machinery.” Job titles were specific and sometimes bewildering: PATTERN GROUPERS. APPLIQUE WORKERS. PRESSURE VESSEL WELDERS. Here the industrial might of modern China was broken down into pieces, and the pieces were people.
Interviews at the talent market were brief and brutally honest. Recruiters did not pretend that jobs were anything to write home about; candidates freely admitted their ignorance. It was the rare interview that lasted more than five minutes. Hiring was usually done on the spot, and no one checked references.
At the booth of the Hengfeng Molds factory, a young woman sat down.
“Our pay is not high,” the recruiter said immediately. Then: “Have you worked with computers?”
“Yes, I learned computers in school.”
“Well, our pay is only six hundred.”
Another booth, another woman: “What can you do?”
“I keep in touch with customers, mostly through e-mail, and if they come to the office, I can receive them. If the job is more technical, I don’t know anything about that.”
What can you do? In most Chinese cities, where finding a job required a college diploma, money, and connections, that was a rare question. At the Dongguan talent market, you never heard: Where did you go to school? Whom do you know? Or least of all, Are you from around here? It was always: What can you do? Do you know computers? Do you know English? Job listings, which were usually written out by hand on preprinted cards, mocked the standard categories that were provided. In the space for residency, an employer usually specified the sex of the person sought: instead of profession, a company might list height requirements instead.
Not everyone who came to the talent market dared to go inside. Throngs gathered on the sidewalk before a giant electronic job board, like people fated only to look upon a promised land they would never enter. The listings moved upward in a continuous crawl, like stock prices, and the crowd stared, mesmerized.
* * *
Her second time at the market, Min knew exactly what to do. She aimed high, approaching only those companies with jobs in the human resources department. “Clerk is a very low position, so I didn’t look for that.” In her interviews, she asked about employee turnover and company size; she was looking for a smaller factory with fewer superiors to please. She sidestepped questions about why she had left her old job. That was a personal matter, Min said, that she would rather not discuss.
And this time she was not more honest than the others. At the booth of the Shenxing Rubber Products Company, she told the recruiter that she had worked in human resources for a year. “If you say less,” she explained to me afterward, “they think it’s not enough experience.” She was hired with a six-dollar-per-month raise above the salary of the person she was replacing.
Min started work two days later in the human resources department of the company, which made rubber components for mobile phones and computer keyboards. Her workday lasted eight hours, with every Sunday off. Workers at her level slept four to a room, and her room had its own bathroom and phone. She made eight hundred yuan a month, including room and board—the same as her last job, with a chance of a raise if she did well.
In her new job, Min kept track of the employment records, performance, demerits, and salaries of the factory’s four hundred workers. Where she had once looked after machines, now she was in charge of people, and it seemed a better fit. When workers came to the factory gate, she screened them for hiring. Do you have an ID? How long do you plan to stay?
Thank you, she told those who did not answer to her liking. We don’t have jobs right now.
On the tenth of every month, the Taiwanese wife of the factory owner came to pay the workers and seek the Buddha’s blessing. Min would follow the boss’s wife around the factory—to the canteen, the front gate, and each of the dangerous machines—and the two of them would ask the Buddha to protect the workers and let business prosper. Min would silently seek blessings for her family and friends and for her grandparents in the next world, but she didn’t tell the boss’s wife that.
She was getting better at office politics. Not long after she arrived, the top boss called Min into his office. The previous person in Min’s position, he told her, had been talkative and made mistakes. “You don’t like to talk much,” he observed.
“No,” she agreed.
The boss smiled. “When you have to speak,” he said, “you should speak. If you don’t have to speak, don’t speak.” That was the secret rule of Chinese workplace survival, but no one had ever shared it with Min.
This time she handled her parents more adeptly. She didn’t tell them she was quitting her job. Instead she found a new one, wired home $120, then called her parents with her news; the cash transfer was a preemptive strike that stunned them into silence. “They don’t know how things are outside,” Min told me. “So I do something first, and then I tell them about it.”
Everyone she knew was in flux, and many were on their way up too. Her sister in Shenzhen had been promoted to executive secretary; her cousin was now a manager in Guangzhou. Her two friends from the old factory had scattered. Liang Rong had gone home to marry someone of her parents’ choosing. Huang Jiao’e, who had moved over to Min’s factory, quit the same day Min did and landed a job as a production clerk elsewhere in the city. And Min’s old boss was back in Dongguan. He had returned from Beijing to work in a Taiwanese socket factory, but Min refused to see him. Workers in her old factory said he was romantically interested in her. She went through his old phone messages to her—Your big brother misses you—and decided it was true. The only adult who had been kind to her was not to be trusted, after all.
Small factories had their own problems, and Min soon discovered what they were. The workplace was disorganized, and her own responsibilities were never made clear; she scrambled to keep up with all the tasks thrown her way. Her new boss, like her old one, was insecure and status-conscious. Min was learning that many Chinese men had this flaw. He didn’t like it that Min did not get his approval for everything she did. He didn’t like it that she was friendly with the security guards. His response was to begin interviewing candidates for her position—a colleague, rival, or replacement for Min—without telling her. She heard about it from the office receptionist.
In August 2004, two months after she arrived, Min collected her pay and left without telling anyone. A former colleague had joined a factory in Shenzhen and invited her to go work for him, and she decided to go. She spent the night in a hotel near her factory; while she slept, someone broke the lock on her door. The thief took nine hundred yuan and Min’s mobile phone, the only place where she had stored the numbers of everyone she knew in the city: the excolleague who was her only link to her new job, the friends she had made since going out, and the boyfriend who had gone home.
* * *
The mobile phone was the first big purchase of most migrants. Without a phone, it was virtually impossible to keep up with friends or find a new job. Letters between factories often went missing, and calling up a worker in her dorm, where a hundred people might share a single hallway phone, was difficult. Office phones inside factories were often programmed not to allow outside calls or to cut off automatically after several minutes. Anyway, people jumped jobs so often that dorm and office numbers quickly went out of date. In a universe of perpetual motion, the mobile phone was magnetic north, the thing that fixed a person in place.
I learned all of this painfully. In my early days in Dongguan, I befriended many new arrivals who did not have mobile phones yet, and I lost track of them, one by one. When I met Min, I decided to buy her a pager, but that industry had collapsed so suddenly and completely in the past few years that salesmen in electronics stores just laughed at me when I said I wanted one. I gave Min a mobile phone so I would not lose her too.
In the migrant world, the mobile phone was a metaphor for the relentless pace of city life. An executive at a shoe factory summed up the disjunctions of migration this way: “At home they have no phones, then suddenly they are here and it is Nokia 6850.” A young woman who sold insurance said to me, “At home they hand down a mobile phone from one person to another” to describe rural life. People referred to themselves in the terminology of mobile phones: I need to recharge. I am upgrading myself. The parents of migrant girls instinctively distrusted the phones, and some forbade their daughters from buying one. The mobile phone, which allowed and even encouraged private contact with strangers, was everything that communal village life was not.
A girl might signal her interest in a young man by offering to pay his mobile-phone bill. Couples announced their allegiance with a shared phone, though relationships sometimes broke up when one person secretly read text messages intended for another. The migrants I knew spent a great deal of time managing their phones—changing numbers constantly to take advantage of cheaper calling plans, and switching phone cards when crossing to another city to save on roaming fees. That was the short-term mentality of Dongguan: Save a few pennies, even if it meant losing touch with some people for good.
Migrant workers are a major reason the Chinese mobile-phone market is the world’s largest, yet the industry has mixed feelings about them. Migrants were behind the market’s poor economics, one friend in the telecommunications industry told me; they supposedly drove down prices because they were willing to pay for only the cheapest services. Popular culture also felt their negative impact: The quality of Chinese pop music had deteriorated in recent years, I was also told, because migrants chose the least sophisticated songs for the ring tones of their phones.
Hundreds of Dongguan factories made parts for mobile phones, and every third retailer in the city seemed to be a mobile-phone store. The city also did a thriving trade in stolen phones. Certain districts were known for a high incidence of phone theft; one tactic was to speed down a sidewalk on a motorcycle and rip a phone from a pedestrian’s ear, mid-sentence. The stolen phones might be fitted with new covers and then sold as new. Manufactured, sold, stolen, repackaged, and resold, the mobile phone was like an endlessly renewable resource at the heart of the Dongguan economy.
It was also Min’s link to the city. With the theft of her phone, the friendships of a year and a half vanished as if they had never been. She was alone again.
