预计阅读本页时间：-
5 Factory Girls
广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元
It takes two hundred pairs of hands to make a running shoe. Everything begins with a person called a cutter, who stamps a sheet of mesh fabric into curvy irregular pieces, like a child’s picture puzzle. Stitchers are next. They sew the pieces together into the shoe upper, attaching other things—a plastic logo, shoelace eyelets—as they go. After that, sole-workers use infrared ovens to heat pieces of the sole and glue them together. Assemblers—typically men, as the work requires greater strength—stretch the upper over a plastic mold, or last, shaped like a human foot. They lace the upper tightly, brush glue on the sole, and press the upper and the sole together. A machine applies ninety pounds of pressure to each shoe. Finishers remove the lasts, check each shoe for flaws, and place matched pairs in cardboard boxes. The boxes are put in crates, ten boxes to a crate, and shipped to the world within three days. Every shoe has a label on its tongue: MADE IN CHINA.
If you wear athletic shoes, chances are you have worn a pair that was made at the Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan. The Taiwanese-owned factory is the biggest manufacturer for Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, along with smaller brands like Puma and Asics, all of whom stopped making shoes years ago and farmed out production to factories that could do it more cheaply. Yue Yuen’s secret is vertical integration: It controls every step of the manufacturing process—from initial design to making glues, soles, molds, and lasts to cutting, stitching, and assembling the finished products. One-third of the world’s shoes are made in Guangdong Province, and the Yue Yuen plant is the biggest of them all.
Seventy thousand people work at its Dongguan factory. Imagine the entire population of Santa Fe, New Mexico, under the age of thirty and engaged in making athletic shoes. Inside the compound’s brick walls, workers sleep in factory dorms and eat in factory cafeterias and shop at factory commissaries. Yue Yuen runs a kindergarten for employees’ children and a hospital with a 150-member staff; it has a movie theater and a performance troupe, volunteer activities and English classes. It operates its own power plant and fire department, and sometimes the city of Dongguan borrows Yue Yuen’s firetruck ladder, the tallest one around, to put out fires. Yue Yuen bottles its own water. Locals will tell you that it grows its own food, which is not true, although the company at one point contracted with farmers in the area to guarantee its food sources. Nothing short of apocalypse could cut off the world’s supply of what the industry calls “branded athletic footwear.”
For young migrants, Yue Yuen offers stability. An assembly-line job brings only an average salary—about seventy-two dollars a month in take-home pay, in line with the city’s minimum wage—but it is paid every month, on time. Work is capped at eleven hours a day and sixty hours a week with Sundays off, rare for an industry in which laboring through the night is not unheard of. Yue Yuen workers sleep ten to a room in metal bunks, and this too is better than average. Young women typically pay middlemen one hundred yuan to procure a job here; men pay several times that. Eighty percent of the workers at Yue Yuen are women, most between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.
A migrant who lands a job at Yue Yuen may never work anywhere else. Over the years, she may quit and go home—to see a sick relative or settle a marriage engagement, to have a rest or a child—and then return to Yue Yuen. A worker may introduce a sibling or a cousin or a fellow villager into the factory, and the company encourages this; in one instance, ten members of an extended family all worked inside the factory. Employee turnover is high—5 percent a month, meaning that more than half the workforce changes in a year—but that does not take into account the many workers who quit only to return again. Zhou Yinfang joined Yue Yuen in 1991, when she was seventeen. She met her husband in the factory, took time off to have two children, talked her way into a promotion, and now manages 1,500 workers as a factory chief. “I would like to work here until I retire,” she told me; she was thirty years old, but her voice was already the harsh whisper of an old woman. All of the Yue Yuen bosses, the workers say, have raspy voices from years of shouting orders over the din of the machines.
Upward mobility is possible; the demands of production are so intense that Yue Yuen must promote from within. Almost all of the company’s managers, from supervisors of single lines to the heads of whole factories, are rural migrants who started out on the assembly line. An intricate hierarchy orders this world. Managers are divided into thirteen grades, from trainee to managing director; they typically address each other by title and not by name. One cafeteria is reserved exclusively for production line leaders, while another caters to supervisors, the next step up from them. A child is a status symbol: Only line leaders and above are allowed to live inside the factory as a married couple with a child. Ordinary workers usually leave their children at home in the village, to be minded by grandparents.
Factory society divides along provincial lines. Workers from the same province stick together, speaking dialects that outsiders cannot understand. Those from provinces with large migrant populations further segregate based on which county they come from. Natives of the adjoining provinces of Anhui, Henan, Shaanxi, and Shandong can speak to one another in their own dialects; they call one another “half-fellow provincials,” which brings a sense of closeness. The company doesn’t fight these regional prejudices: Its cafeterias offer workers a choice of Hunan, Sichuan, or Cantonese dishes. Provincial stereotypes color hiring, and a boss can ban an entire province if he believes that a hundred million people from one place can share a personality trait. Henan people get into fights. People from Anhui are hardworking but untrustworthy.
Workers can spend their days without venturing beyond Yue Yuen’s guarded gates, and many of them do, saying the world outside is luan—chaotic, dangerous. Yet life inside Yue Yuen’s walls can be turbulent too. Petty theft is rampant; workers are banned from dorms during work hours in an effort to reduce such crimes. Factory-floor quarrels carry over into the dorms, where workers on the same production line are required to room together for the sake of efficiency. Gangs thrive inside Yue Yuen. Some rob workers of their wages on payday; others focus on stealing shoe parts. The gangs practice a vertical integration of their own. One group may spirit shoelaces out of the factory, while another smuggles out soles. The parts are assembled into shoes and distributed in other parts of the city. In the universe of Chinese counterfeiting, theirs is a distinctive sub-specialty—the illicit assembly of authentic parts. The gangs are organized along provincial lines, and the ones from Hunan are most feared.
Love triangles and extramarital affairs are common, as are out-of-wedlock pregnancies and abortions. A few years ago, a young woman committed suicide over a failed love affair; another gave birth in her dorm bathroom and threw the baby into the toilet. The baby died, and the young woman was sent home. “We have seventy thousand people. It is a city,” says Luke Lee, a Yue Yuen executive who oversees worker health and safety. “Whatever problems a city has, we have in the factory.”
* * *
On weekends when the production lines shut down, the mood inside the Yue Yuen compound changes. Girls who walked with purpose and poker faces during the week turn slow and languorous. They stroll hand in hand with girlfriends, their factory IDs on straps around their necks or on chains linked to their belts, like American school janitors. They talk loudly in their native dialects; they show skin. They wear tank tops and jeans, or black party dresses with high heels; sometimes several friends step out in identical outfits, announcing their shared loyalties to the world. They eat ice-cream cones and sit barefoot on patches of grass in twos and threes, reading magazines or sharing confidences. Sometimes one girl sits alone staring dreamily at nothing.
The dorms offer no privacy. Girls stand in doorways combing their shampooed hair in hand mirrors; girls in shorts and flip-flops lug buckets of water to mop the dormitory floors. Residents of the upper floors lean on bare arms over balcony railings, checking out the goings-on at ground level and calling out to friends many stories below. A pop ballad blasts from a tape deck into the muggy morning. I love you, loving you, as a mouse loves rice. The air smells of laundry hanging out to dry; bleach, detergent, and damp are the perpetual scents of the Yue Yuen factory.
On a Sunday morning in June 2004, several young women lay chatting in their bunks in Building J, Room 805. The room had the disheveled feel of the last stage of a slumber party, and the girls lounged in their pajamas although it was already eleven o’clock.
“When you meet a man outside the village,” one girl said, “you don’t know his real character and you don’t know about his family.”
“If you get a boyfriend while you are outside, your parents will have no face at home.”
“You may make friends with someone, then you go home and lose touch.”
“When you go home, you find out people know all sorts of things about you.”
Ten girls lived together in J805, an eighth-floor room measuring two hundred square feet with two rows of metal bunk beds. The room smelled, like everywhere else at Yue Yuen, of wet laundry. Each girl was assigned a wall cabinet that held clothes, snacks, makeup, and jewelry; they decorated the insides with magazine pictures of movie stars, like the lockers of American high school girls. The spaces under the bunks were a graveyard for shoes: high heels, sneakers, Hello Kitty flip-flops. Room J805 was on a long hallway of identical rooms, with toilets and showers at each end. The building housed two thousand workers.
Back home on the farm it was the busiest season of the year, the time for the summer harvest and the summer planting. But the global cycle of shoe manufacturing was slowing down. The girls in J805 worked in the Yue Yuen Number 8 factory, which made shoes for Adidas and Salomon. Now they were working only ten and a half hours a day plus half or full days on Saturdays; in the world of Dongguan manufacturing, that was considered the slow season. Some of the girls were planning to go home on leave, but their paths diverged depending on which part of the shoe they made. The ones who worked on shoe soles could leave. Cutters and stitchers had to stay on.
Jia Jimei, a twenty-one-year-old Henan native who worked in the sole department, rushed into the room from a shopping trip and showed off her purchases: snacks for the train ride and a cassette player for her family. She had just been granted a one-month home leave. “I haven’t been able to sleep these past two nights,” she said. “Once you know you’re going home, you can’t think about anything else.” She had a snub nose and wide-set eyes in a round face that turned softer when she smiled. She sat down on her lower bunk, clutching a stuffed panda bear to her chest.
Zhang Qianqian, a young woman from Anhui Province who was visiting from down the hall, watched the going-home preparations. She was solidly built, with broad shoulders and a hard unsmiling face; she wore jeans and a black sports watch that made her look tough. She was a cutter, so she was staying. “When I go home, I’m bored to death,” Qianqian said. “There’s no TV and no cassette player. And almost everyone from home has gone out, so I’m all by myself all day.
“My grandmother gets up at dawn to make breakfast,” she continued, “and calls me to come eat, and sometimes I’m still sleeping. Then my father says, ‘You’re lying in bed and won’t even come to eat breakfast your grandmother has made for you.’ At home they are always criticizing you.”
“When you go home, you can’t stay,” agreed Li Xiaoyan, a roommate from Hunan who was also a cutter. The girls had a complicated relationship with home. Out in the city, they were tired and lonely and talked constantly of going home; once home, they quickly grew bored and longed to go out again. If a girl decided to leave the factory, it sent ripples of shock and uncertainty through everyone around her. To be a migrant was to be constantly abandoned by the people closest to you.
Qianqian was a veteran of departures and returns. She had come out from home three years before, worked at Yue Yuen for a year and a half, quit because of conflicts with her boss, and gone home for a while. Back in Dongguan, she joined a small electronics factory where conditions were much worse than at Yue Yuen. She quit and went home again, this time for her grandmother’s eightieth birthday. Four months ago, she had rejoined Yue Yuen. “I’ve moved here and there, and I always seem to end up in this factory,” she said.
Jia Jimei was less certain. “I may return to Yue Yuen but I’m not sure yet,” she said. She left for home a week later without telling her roommates if she was coming back.
* * *
China is a quarter century into the largest migration in human history, and the profiles of the people on the move are changing. Those who came out from their rural villages in the 1980s and early 1990s were heading into the unknown, often driven by a family’s need for cash and the desire to build a house back home. It was considered risky, even shameful, for a single woman to go out on her own. These early migrants often found seasonal work, and the seasons were those of the farm. They returned home to help out during the sowing season and again at harvest time. When they had made enough money, they returned to the village for good.
The new generation came of age when migration was already an accepted path to a better life. Younger and better-educated than their predecessors, they are driven out less by the poverty of the countryside than by the opportunity of the city. There is no longer any shame attached to migration. The shame now lies in staying home.
Newer migrants have looser ties to their villages. Their trips home are no longer dictated by the farming calendar or even by the timing of traditional holidays like the lunar new year. Instead, younger migrants come and go according to their personal schedules of switching jobs or obtaining leaves, and these are often tied to the demands of the production cycle. It is the seasons of the factory, rather than the fields, that define migrant life now.
Migrants increasingly look and act like city people. Migrant magazines launched in the 1990s have folded or are struggling to find readers now. Songs about the migrant experience are no longer heard in the factory cities of the south; the workers on the assembly line now listen to the same pop tunes as urban teenagers. Today’s migrants spend money freely on themselves—on clothes, hairstyles, and mobile phones—and may send home cash only in instances of need. The newer migrants are more ambitious and less content than their elders were. One survey found that 12 percent of migrants who had left home in the 1990s were satisfied with their situations in life, compared with 27 percent of the generation that had come out a decade earlier. That does not necessarily mean that the newer migrants want to return to the village. But it suggests that their basis of comparison is already the city, and perhaps these greater expectations promise a greater chance of success. Or it may mean that this new generation is only bound to be disappointed.
GETTING TO KNOW the factory girls of Yue Yuen was not easy. Girls would make dates to meet me and not show up; if I found them later, they gave no explanation or apology. No one was willing to accept the mobile phone I offered so we could stay in touch, perhaps not wanting the responsibility. They might be friendly to me one day and cold the next, and if I struck up a conversation with one girl in a dorm, the others in the room would shun me. One girl instructed her roommates to lie and tell me she had left the factory, because her friends had told her I was not to be trusted. The company granted me free access to its dormitories, but winning the trust of those who lived there was the hard part. In the shadow of the giant shoe factory they flitted, insubstantial as moths, and more elusive than anyone I met in the city.
The girls were equally wary with one another and often spoke roughly among themselves. They frequently knew nothing about the people with whom they lived and worked; as I got to know them better, they often asked me for news of one another. Most girls seemed to have one or two true friends who lived far away, perhaps in another factory, preferring to confide in them rather than in the many close by. Maybe this was their defense against living in a colony of strangers: They took it for granted that someone who slept in an adjoining bunk one night would disappear the next.
It took willpower for any migrant worker to change her situation. But inside a factory as large as Yue Yuen, the pressure to conform felt especially intense. The girls all claimed in front of one another that they didn’t approve of finding a boyfriend in the city, although many of them already had one; they disparaged further education as useless even as some quietly took classes in an effort to improve themselves. Yue Yuen was a good place to work—everyone who worked there said that. But if you wanted something different, it took all your strength to break free.
* * *
In July, the hottest season of the year in the farmer’s calendar, work at Yue Yuen slowed to a crawl. Dorm rooms gaped empty as more workers went home on leave. Those who stayed behind were working only eight hours a day, five days a week. The normal work schedule of the Western white-collar world was paradise here.
Qianqian woke up past ten o’clock one Sunday just as I arrived to see her. She yawned, stretched, and slowly swung herself out of her top bunk. She pulled on a green tank top, jeans with floral embroidery stitched down one leg, and scuffed high heels with pointy toes. “In the whole year, only these few months are a bit more fun,” she said. Two bunks over, a roommate sat in bed practicing English phrases under her breath. She took a weekly class run by the factory. The sentences in her well-thumbed book were strange.
THIS IS LOO. HE’S FROM PERU.
One made sense:
DON’T LOSE THE OPPORTUNITY.
Qianqian walked downstairs, past the other dormitory buildings, and through the factory gate. Out on the sidewalk, the sun’s glare was so strong that the street appeared blinding white, like an overexposed photograph. Qianqian entered a department store and gravitated toward the racks of sequined high-heeled shoes. She fingered a yellow platform shoe whose strap had three glittery pink hearts, like Valentine’s Day candy. “This is very fashionable this year,” she said. In the gifts section, she pointed out a picture frame with fake roses embedded inside; she had given one to a friend for her birthday.
Back on the near-deserted street, she shouted at a girl walking past. “Qu Jimei! Where have you been?”
A girl with dyed red streaks in her hair stopped walking. She was carrying a nylon Nike backpack. “I’m going home,” she said.
“You’re going home? Now?”
“Now.”
Qianqian held the girl’s hand for a moment. “Well, goodbye then,” she said. She watched the girl walk away. “You meet so many friends in the factory like this, and then they go home.”
“Do you keep in touch?” I asked her.
“It’s hard. Sometimes we exchange addresses.” Her closest friend in the city was someone she had met during her first stint at Yue Yuen. They had quit the factory at the same time, gone home to their respective villages, and arranged to come out again together. Qianqian frequently visited the friend on her days off. The effort required to keep in touch explained why the factory girls had so few true friends. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.
We sat down in a sunbaked plaza outside a department store and ate ice-cream cones. A girl in a blue-and-white striped factory shirt who appeared to know Qianqian sat down with us. She idly fanned herself with a postcard she was on her way to mail. “I have left the factory,” she announced. It was so hot that no one responded. The two girls sat in silence and watched me writing in my notebook.
“Do you read English?” Qianqian asked the girl.
She laughed harshly. “I didn’t even finish elementary school!”
After the girl left, Qianqian explained that they had worked together at a small factory nearby. “Yue Yuen is better,” she said. “The welfare benefits are better. There is a library and an activities center. You can play chess or join the Hula-Hoop club.” I asked her if she took part in any of those activities, and she said no.
She walked down the street, encountering other friends who were going home, saying hello and goodbye to people who in all likelihood she would never see again. From afar, Qianqian’s parents were pressuring her to go home too, and yet they wanted her to send more money. She had given them almost five thousand yuan in her first two years out but nothing since. In her village, parents traditionally built a house for a grown son to live in after his marriage; Qianqian’s younger brother was only fourteen, but her parents were already worrying about the expense.
“All the other people in the village have built their houses,” her father had said to her. “How come mine hasn’t been built yet?”
“I was going to ask you the same question,” Qianqian retorted.
From their homes in the village, families tried to influence their daughters. Send money home. Don’t get a boyfriend outside. Get married sooner. Come back. For the most part the girls did as they pleased. Qianqian’s parents didn’t even know her phone number inside the factory—when she wanted to talk, she would call them. They were always home.
* * *
The streets around the Yue Yuen factory teemed with opportunities for spending or self-improvement. On weekend afternoons, the Hopeful Computer Training Center was crowded with workers sitting at computers learning Word and Excel. (A sign outside advertised, in English, MICROSOFT WORB.) A shop sold men’s white dress shirts for twenty yuan, and a photo studio offered a choice of aspirational backdrops: Pastoral Landscape, Corinthian Columns, Suburban Villa. Retailers catered to the homesick with geographically specific offerings. HENAN ZHOUKOU SESAME CAKES. WUHAN BARBER. One store consisted of a row of plastic phone booths crammed along the wall, an enterprise that existed only in migrant towns. Pasted to the opposite wall was a train schedule to cities all over China: twenty-five hours to Ningbo, forty to Chengdu. The Shangjiang City Health Station advertised one-minute pregnancy tests, venereal disease cures, and abortions. The hospital inside Yue Yuen also performed abortions, but almost no one went there. The sidewalk clinics offered the same procedures and no one had to know.
Outside the gates of Yue Yuen, I once saw a man speaking rapidly, like an old-time carnival barker, into a microphone headset. “If you have stomachache, if you have backache, if you have rheumatism, this is for you.” The air reeked sourly of alcohol, and a blanket spread out on the sidewalk displayed preserved snakes, a starfish, and bottles of brownish liquid the color of strong iced tea. Several snakes, apparently dead, were entwined in a plastic bucket; the man stirred them with a stick, like a stew. He was a chain-smoker with a hacking cough, and he did not look in the least qualified to be giving out medical opinions. Yet a crowd of young men and women clamored for the flyers he was handing out.
SNAKE WINE TO NOURISH KIDNEYS
Prescription: This product’s main components are king cobra, krait, silver-ringed snake, and so on, in all seven types of poisonous snakes and many kinds of herbal medicines. Usage: Mornings and evenings take half or one liang.
Another day on the same stretch of sidewalk, a man lay on his stomach with his crippled legs curled under him, writing on the pavement with a stub of chalk. A crowd of young migrants gathered to read his story: His wife had died, his son was sick, and he had traveled far from home to beg for money. The man had some bills in his cup already, and two more people gave money as I watched.
From the main street in front of the Yue Yuen factory, alleys ran straight back at intervals between the stores. These passages were strewn with garbage and the walls of the buildings were plastered with ads for gonorrhea and syphilis clinics; in China these flyers broke out like rashes wherever prostitution thrived. Down one of these alleys, I once looked through the window of a single-story building. Young women were sitting in the shadows with their heads bent over, sewing. That was a factory too, the worst kind.
The girls who worked at Yue Yuen seldom ventured down this way. The alleys did not open onto more streets of computer schools and hair salons: They ended in farmland. Just beyond the border of the factory world, men and women past middle age worked in fields of leafy green vegetables, under a cloudy sky that did not protect them from the glare of the sun.
THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE calendar divides the year into twenty-four segments and gives farming instructions for every two-week interval. The year begins with lichun, the start of spring on February 4 or 5 and the time for spring sowing. The calendar dictates when to plant melons, beans, coarse cereals, beets, and grapes and when to harvest rice, wheat, apples, potatoes, radishes, and cabbage. It predicts heat and heavy rains. It sets the proper time to protect crops from the wind, to kill pests and collect manure, to weed and to irrigate, to fix fences for livestock and to welcome in the new year. The calendar was standardized during the Former Han Dynasty—with regional variations, it has governed the rhythms of life on the farm for two thousand years.
The girls at Yue Yuen know nothing of the farming cycle. When they go home, their parents don’t usually want them to work; if they help out in the fields, they suffer sunburns and blisters from the unfamiliar labor. One migrant worker described to me a typical day at home: She kept farmers’ hours with the rest of the family but spent most of her day watching television.
I get up at 6:30. I watch TV—News Focus, then the serials. I watch TV until one or two in the afternoon. I take a nap and walk around a bit. I eat dinner and go to bed at ten.
The global calendar of shoe manufacturing also picks up in the spring. The machines gear up in March and quicken in April, May, and June, turning out footwear ahead of the summer shopping season in the United States and Europe. In July—when the farmer’s calendar urges moving fast to bring in the summer harvest before the rains come—the shoe industry falls into a lull. Orders drop to their lowest in August, with production lines sometimes running at only 20 percent of capacity. In September and October, business picks up and the machines run full-time in anticipation of the production crunch to come. November and early December are the go-for-broke periods, with everyone clocking lots of overtime to meet the Christmas rush. After the holidays, the cycle slows until spring comes again.
The girls know the seasons of the shoe intimately, and also its daily rhythms. On the cavernous factory floors of Yue Yuen, making sneakers is a science measured with stopwatches. A plastic sign in front of every station on the assembly line displays how many seconds a worker needs to complete a given task. It takes a Yue Yuen assembly line ten hours to make a shoe, down from twenty-five days four years ago, and the number of shoes produced per worker has gone up 10 percent.
The factory floor has its own hierarchy. The best jobs are in the development department, where workers produce small quantities of shoes for samples and don’t have much production pressure. Cutters and sole-workers are next: As the first people on the assembly line, they set the pace and enjoy more freedom. The highest-stress jobs are in stitching and assembly, where workers are locked into the middle of the production chain. Pressure bears down on them from both ends—people up the line push work on them, while those farther down implore them to move faster. There is little room for error here: Quality inspectors and customers alike zero in on these lower sections of the assembly line, because it is easier to spot flaws in a finished shoe. The workers have a saying:
Those in stitching are scolded to death,
Those in shoe assembly are worked to death,
Those in cutting play to death.
When Yue Yuen set up its first factory in China in 1989, South Korea dominated the global sneaker market. In its first decade here, Yue Yuen often worked employees through midnight and gave them a single day off each month. “As long as you gave the brands the goods at a certain price, they didn’t care how you ran your factories,” says Allen Lee, the head of Yue Yuen’s manufacturing operation for Adidas in Dongguan. “We didn’t talk about whether to pay overtime, or whether to put toilet paper in the bathrooms, or whether workers should wash their hands, or how many slept in each dorm. We used repressive management methods: This is your task and if you have to stay up three days and nights, you do it.”
China’s cheap, motivated workforce was suited to the labor-intensive business of sewing shoes, and in the 1990s China became the global leader. After the big American brands came under attack from unions and workers’ rights groups for harsh conditions in their factories, Nike and Adidas began pushing their suppliers to improve the working environment. Yue Yuen changed to an eleven-hour workday and gave employees every Sunday off; many workers quit, complaining that the overtime pay was no longer enough. The company set up a business unit to oversee working conditions and a counseling center where workers could seek help and file complaints. It improved safety measures, banned hazardous chemicals, and abolished military-style calisthenics. Yet even as the brands have pushed factories to treat workers better, they are also pressuring them to cut costs. At times these goals work at cross-purposes. The Yue Yuen plant for Adidas used to issue workers’ uniforms free of charge. Because of cost-cutting pressure from Adidas, Yue Yuen started charging workers for uniforms, but Adidas objected to this practice too. Yue Yuen abolished uniforms altogether, and workers now wear their own clothes on the job.
In 2001, Adidas initiated a program called Lean Manufacturing to increase efficiency and reduce waste at Yue Yuen. Workers say that while they work shorter hours now, the time on the line is more stressful; tasks are parceled out precisely and there is almost no downtime. Assembly lines have been restructured into small teams so workers can switch tasks every few days, whereas before they might have done the same thing for a month at a time. This makes production more flexible, but it is exhausting for the workers. Also in the name of efficiency, living arrangements have been reshuffled so workers live with their assembly-line colleagues rather than with their friends.
The accelerating pace of the global fashion cycle increases the pressure. A decade ago, the big athletic-shoe brands gave factories ninety days from receiving an order to delivering a product; several years ago it was sixty days, and now it is thirty days. Orders are getting smaller, to allow for a rapid response when fashions change, and workers live inside this unpredictable cycle. Only on Thursday does their boss tell them if they must work overtime on Saturday. During busy times, the sole department runs double shifts; employees take turns working the day shift one month and the night shift the next, their internal clocks scrambled and their bodies struggling to catch up.
Executives say that the demands of the market have only made Yue Yuen better. “If we didn’t have pressure, we wouldn’t improve,” says Allen Lee. “As Darwin said, only the strongest survive.” An Adidas study found that workers initially felt stress from the Lean Manufacturing program, but over time, the study said, they got used to it.
* * *
August is the time to irrigate corn and prepare to plant the winter wheat. Inside the Yue Yuen factory, a new season was starting earlier than expected: the long approach to Christmas. After the easy pace of summer, the girls were working overtime every weekday and all day Saturday. On the assembly line, they worked faster and talked less. But their bodies rebelled.
“I have the worst headache,” complained Qianqian one morning in early August. “This is supposed to be the low season, but we have so many orders.” The day before, she had turned twenty-two; she had planned to visit her best friend to celebrate but spent her birthday working overtime instead.
Down the hall in Room J805, Jia Jimei had returned to the factory from her visit home. She sat on her lower bunk, listless and unsmiling.
“How was home?” I asked her.
She smiled briefly. “It was good.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I thought about not returning,” she said slowly, as if she were just waking from a dream. “But there is nothing to do at home. If there were something to do near home, it would be better to be close to home. But there isn’t. I feel very uncomfortable being back here. I don’t really want to go back to work again.”
In the bunk above, Wu Yongli was more cheerful. She was nineteen years old, with pretty features in a slender face, and on this summer morning she wore an elegant black dress with spaghetti straps and a choker with a heart-shaped locket. “Don’t mind her,” Wu Yongli said. “She hasn’t adjusted to being back yet.” More jarring change was on the horizon: Once a year, the factory reassigned workers to new dorms. The purpose was to take into account people who had left or arrived during the year and to ensure that production teams were living together, but it turned everyone’s lives upside down. “We already have friends here,” said Jia Jimei. “Now there is a chance we will all be scattered again.”
LATER THAT MONTH, the workers were transferred to new dorms. In a factory the size of Yue Yuen, girls who had seen one another every day suddenly did not know how to find their friends again. Many lost touch for good.
After the move, Qianqian disappeared, and I searched for her through September. I visited her new dorm many times—it was four floors down from her old one—but her roommates did not know where she had gone. They asked me for news of other workers they had lost touch with as well. I called Qianqian’s family in a farming village in Anhui; her father told me she was still working at Yue Yuen. According to the factory, Zhang Qianqian, employee 28103, Number 8 Factory, Building B, Second Cutting Group, was still registered as an employee. On paper she was living in the dorm, working on the assembly line, cutting materials for the uppers of Adidas shoes. But in person she had vanished, a disappearance that mocked the rule of schedules and stopwatches that had seemed to order factory life so well.
* * *
From the gate of the Yue Yuen factory, down the main street, and through a maze of dirt roads lined with restaurant stalls and shops, there is a neighborhood of low red-tiled apartment buildings. The doors to the apartments are pieces of sheet metal. The area is pockmarked with vacant lots and half-finished buildings, and it feels at once overcrowded and abandoned. In the relentless delta summer, neighbors sat outside in their undershirts or pajamas playing mahjong, as chickens pecked in the dirt underfoot.
On a Sunday afternoon in mid-October, I was brought here by a young woman I had met in Qianqian’s old dorm. She led me through the alleys, into a red-tiled building, up a flight of stairs, and through a sheet-metal door. We entered a one-room apartment with a double bed, and a poster hanging on the wall above it.
SUCCESS
Success feels very, very far from you, while failure in contrast seems to always follow you. You must bravely vanquish one failure after another, and then success will walk toward you.
Next to this poster was a picture ripped from a calendar of a topless woman holding a Grecian urn. Sitting on the bed, in a T-shirt, cutoff shorts, and bare feet, was Qianqian. When she saw me, she gave me a smile that was fleeting but also reluctant, as if she were not entirely happy at being found.
After payday in August, she had quit the Yue Yuen factory, walking off the line without permission and without the back pay that the company owed her. Since then she had stayed with various friends, including a young woman named Ge Li who shared this apartment with her boyfriend. She was thinking of going home or joining another factory.
“Why did you leave Yue Yuen?” I asked Qianqian.
“It isn’t fun anymore,” she said. And though I asked her several different ways, she would not say anything more.
IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, production pressure in the factory continued to build as Christmas approached. In the countryside it was lidong, the beginning of winter, the time to fix fences for livestock. On a Sunday afternoon in November, I went by the red-tiled apartment building with the sheet-metal doors and asked Ge Li if she had news of Qianqian.
She hadn’t seen her friend in a while. “She’s still trying to decide between going home and rejoining the factory,” Ge Li said.
“What exactly is she trying to decide?” I asked.
Ge Li shook her head. “I don’t know what she’s thinking in her heart. We haven’t spoken about it.” Ge Li had recently quit Yue Yuen and was planning to go home soon to introduce her new boyfriend to her parents. Once she left, there would be no way for me to find Qianqian anymore. Maybe this was what failure in the migrant world meant—not any incident or tragedy you could name, just a gradual drifting away, until a person was lost from view.
THE LAST TIME I went to Yue Yuen was in January 2005. The factory girls wore thin cotton jackets, their shoulders hunched against the cold. Being cold appeared to be a pragmatic decision: Winter in Dongguan did not last long enough to justify spending money on a warm coat. Jia Jimei was just returning to her room when I stopped by, and she smiled when she saw me. She had dyed her hair with dark crimson streaks.
Work in the factory had slowed once Christmas passed, and now the traditional calendar took over, filling the streets with festive crowds returning home for the new year. Migrants who had just arrived in the city often wandered solitary and lost, but the ones heading home were different. They walked with purpose, in groups; they looked happy, and they knew the way. They carried cash in their pockets and shopping bags of gifts for their families—CD players, comforters, candy for the younger children. At home on the farm it was dahan, the Great Cold, the season to welcome in the new year, but by the Dongguan calendar it was time to reap the rewards of a year’s hard work. This was the only harvest that mattered now.
