12 The South China Mall

 

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Chunming’s map of Dongguan traced the different people she had been. Over thirteen years, she had lived in seven of its towns and switched residences, by her rough count, seventeen times. In remote Qingxi she rose from factory clerk to department head and got a five-hundred-yuan raise. In Zhongshan she joined the frenzy of direct sales. In Guangzhou she was a reporter with a talent for extortion. In the city’s downtown she moved in with her boyfriend and started a company with him—a Dongguan double jackpot—but the venture fell apart, the relationship ended, and she was forced to start again.

Since the late 1990s, she had sold building materials. She spent much of her working day on construction sites and inside industrial shopping malls that traded in paint, pipes, grout, and glue. It was a man’s world and she liked that fine; she enjoyed being outdoors and not stuck in an office. Construction seemed to me like the most earthbound of industries, but for Chunming it meant freedom.

Some places she had lived in more than once, but only the latest incarnation stayed in her memory, the way a computer document overwrites older versions of itself. One spring night, she and I took a motorcycle taxi through a district called Humen. We passed a luxury hotel that had eight hundred rooms. From its rooftop, beams of red, blue, and green light swept the sky in wide searching arcs. “I saw this hotel going up,” Chunming said. “I sold the water pipes that are in it now.” That had been seven years before, when she first entered the building-materials business. Humen was also where she had wandered homeless after fleeing the hair salon. And it was where she had worked when she first came out from her village.

After Chunming had lived in Dongguan a few years, she thought of the city as home. Her past was inscribed in its buildings, in the pipes that delivered water to one of the city’s grandest hotels; her personal history was written in plaster and steel and stone.

*   *   *

 

One afternoon I went with Chunming to an outlying district near the bus station. On a vast construction site, the largest mall in the world was being built. “Only the world’s five hundred biggest brands will be here,” Chunming told me, “like KFC and McDonald’s.” But the South China Mall was already causing her headaches. A contractor complained that her company’s paint was showing cracks, and he wanted the job redone. Until then, he was withholding 140,000 yuan in payment, or more than $17,000.

Shopping malls—known in Chinese as mo, as in modeng, modern—were new to the Chinese retail scene. Developers aspired to their Western glamour and cachet, but beyond that they were pretty much at sea; they had no idea how the retail industry functioned in a mall. When it came to planning, the important thing was to make them as big as possible. The South China Mo would cover seven million square feet, with a 1.3-mile artificial river equipped with gondolas. A brochure referred to the mo as a “Dynamic Entertainment Theme Park” and made special mention of a roller coaster, an IMAX theater with a screen as large as a basketball court, and something called a Teletubbies Edutainment Centre.

Chunming and I waited for the contractor to arrive. Many of the mo’s buildings were already up, their facades in clashing architectural styles. There were cupolas, towers, columns; one building was decorated in an apparent Christian motif of crosses. A row of billboards advertising the mo lined the sidewalk with one English word per sign, like a word puzzle with no solution.

 

SPIRIT
STINK
ILLUSIVE
NATURE
SPORT FUL
POPPLE
GLORIOUS

 

“Are you sure they won’t mind my being here?” I asked Chunming.

“Don’t you worry about that,” she said loudly. “These people are very low-quality.”

Just at that moment, as if on cue, a skinny young guy rode up on a mountain bike and skidded to a stop, splashing our shoes with dirt.

“Are you Mr. Mu?” Chunming said, only a little discomfited.

“Yes. I’m the project manager.”

“Then who is Mr. Wang? The one who walks a little, you know?” she said delicately.

“He’s the chairman.”

“Ah, the chairman. And is Mr. Huang the managing director?”

“There is no Mr. Huang. It’s just Mr. Wang.”

A representative of Chunming’s company arrived and took us on a tour. The construction site was a lake of mud, its largest puddles crossed by wooden planks. One building exterior after another showed wide cracks, some extending the length of the facade. But Chunming’s colleague blamed the quality of the construction. The surfaces painted in a rival company’s product, he said, also had to be redone.

Chunming nodded. “They are just trying to avoid having to pay,” she concluded quickly.

Her colleague led us to the corner of a building. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to a sizable crack at the base. Chunming knelt and poked at the corner with her fingers. A fist-size chunk of the world’s biggest mo came off in her hand.

She suspected corruption. Raw-material costs were going up, and many construction companies were cutting corners and defaulting on their debts. In a commercial world that rewarded risk-taking, everyone was overstretched. We circled the complex again. Chunming looked up at a metal tower reaching into the sky; one day soon, an amusement park ride would plunge passengers down its two-hundred-foot length. “I hope the construction of that is better quality,” she said. The contractor reappeared on his bike. “I think the problem is with the construction of the building, not the paint,” Chunming told him. She glibly repeated something her colleague had said about steel mesh and reinforced concrete and air bubbles.

The contractor could not hide his frustration. Opening day of the mo’s first phase, he said, was two weeks away. That seemed extremely unlikely given the current state of the mo but perfectly possible considering how things worked around here. “I don’t care if it’s the factory’s problem or whose problem,” he said. “If we don’t finish, we don’t get paid. And we’re talking about several million, not several thousand.”

At an impasse, they dialed different executives on their mobile phones. Chunming’s voice was the loudest. “I have already talked to the cripple!” she shouted at one point. All three of them were young and spoke Mandarin with heavy rural accents; probably none of them had had a day’s instruction in business, building, or contracting in their lives. Chunming turned to the contractor and said calmly, “I believe it’s not a problem with paint. But if you want to contest it, I will send our technical people by.” In the end her company agreed to do some repairs, the contractor paid up what it owed, and the mo opened two weeks later, right on schedule.

 

 

I STOPPED BY THE SOUTH CHINA MO one weekend afternoon two years later. McDonald’s and Pizza Hut were doing brisk business, but the rest of the place was dead. There were only a few stores, which were either deserted or closed. Most of the spaces were empty shells, with glass doors chained shut and walls of bare plaster, as if construction were still under way. Two open areas on the main floor were filled with inflatable bouncy castles; parents paid a few yuan to let their kids jump up and down inside. That looked like an innovation of sorts—the least productive use of indoor mo space in the entire retail industry.

The South China Mo felt to me like another Dongguan history museum. Putting up a building was easy; the hard part was figuring out what went inside. In the end, paint turned out to be the least of the mo’s problems, and in the afternoon sunshine the building exteriors looked bright and brand-new. There was more than one way for a mo to fail.

*   *   *

 

Corruption seeped through Dongguan life. The motorcyclists who offered rides to pedestrians wore vests that said VOLUNTEER SECURITY OFFICER; this blatantly dishonest job title was used to skirt a law banning for-profit operations involving motorcycles. A regulation limited government banquets to “four dishes, one soup,” but officials countered by ordering rare seafood entrees costing thousands of yuan. Driver’s licenses were another racket: Aspiring drivers had to take fifty hours of classes at government-affiliated schools, but on test day they still had to bribe their examiners. “In each car there are four people taking the test,” a factory executive explained to me, “and if one person doesn’t give money, all four may fail.”

It was far easier to buy a fake license, as Chunming had done years ago. She had taken a few lessons since—“I know how to drive forward”—and she figured that one day she would learn the rest of what she needed to know. “Driving is not hard,” she informed me. “The key is not to get angry at other people.”

Kickbacks were universal in her industry. In order to make a sale, she usually had to pay 10 percent under the table to the buyer; that meant the person buying a product often earned more on the deal than the factory selling it. Some potential clients asked Chunming straight out: How much will you give me? Others were more discreet. But you could see from their apartments and nice cars, she said, that everyone took kickbacks. Corruption was embedded in the language. The word for “commissions,” yongjin, meant a legitimate percentage earned by a seller, but it also referred to illegal kickbacks to a buyer. As far as the language was concerned, you couldn’t distinguish between legal and illegal transactions, even if you wanted. At the lunar new year, clients were given hongbao—red envelopes of cash—and lavish boxes of tea, liquor, and cigarettes, which were called li, presents. I never heard the Chinese word for “bribe” used by anyone.

“It’s very black,” Chunming said. “But even if you don’t do it yourself, you won’t change anything.” She had her own personal code: She refused to sell any substandard product that might harm someone. If she was on the buy side of a deal, she said, “I wouldn’t ask for it, but if someone gave me a kickback I wouldn’t refuse.”

One afternoon, she mentioned that her older brother had moved to Shenzhen. “What does he do there?” I asked.

“His work is not very proper,” she said. “He works with other people . . .” She hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Basically what he does is illegal.” Her brother resold secondhand mobile phones. Often the phones had been stolen, with their keypad covers replaced to make them look new. Chunming didn’t blame her brother; she told me he had tried to do business at home but couldn’t make a living there.

“Is Dongguan more corrupt than your hometown?” I asked.

Chunming shook her head. “It’s about the same. It’s just that there are more opportunities here.”

Another day she told me a friend’s brother had scored well on the city’s civil service exam. I asked her what kind of person aspired to be an official. “The big bosses need the help of officials with the right connections,” she explained. “And the officials work together with the companies. It’s a form of cooperation. So deciding to be a government official is just another way to go into business.” She didn’t mention job security, or prestige, or the desire to serve one’s country: Being an official was just an alternate route to the market economy. It was the best explanation I ever heard of why anyone in China entered government service.

*   *   *

 

Chunming’s boss parked his forest-green Toyota SUV and walked over to where she and I were waiting. He was in his forties, with a bland square face and glasses, a generic-looking businessman wearing a tan shirt with a gray suit. He said hello to Chunming and ignored me.

“Chairman Chen, this is my friend,” Chunming prompted. Chairman Chen’s head swiveled fifteen degrees until I entered his field of vision. He smiled and shook my hand, as if I had just become visible that instant. They had come to Shenzhen to negotiate contracts with sales agents. The first stop was a storefront office where they sat and waited amid buckets labeled TILE GROUT and WATERPROOFING SLURRY. And waited. It was ten in the morning, and Boss Xie was already running late.

These were some of the rules of doing business in China: Never plan ahead. Never turn off your mobile phone. Never be on time.

Chunming passed the time gathering intelligence from a young woman who worked in the office. “I just saw that big order of Davco go out as we were coming in,” she said, naming a rival brand.

“Yes.”

“Where is it going? To the construction site?”

“Yes.” The young woman named a project.

“It sells pretty well now, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve just arrived, right?” Chunming asked.

“Last month.”

Chairman Chen lowered the newspaper he was reading. “How are sales this month?”

“Quite good,” the young woman answered.

“But if you’ve only been here a month,” he said, “how do you know if sales are ‘quite good’ or not?” The young woman blushed and didn’t say anything.

Chairman Chen asked Chunming whether she had found a site for a new Dongguan store yet. She described a few possible locations while he continued reading his paper, occasionally flinging questions out of the side of his mouth without looking in her direction. While she was still talking, he took out his mobile phone and started dialing. That let her know their conversation was over.

______

 

BOSS XIE ARRIVED AN HOUR LATE, wearing a brown jacket from one suit and black pants from another, and bragging that a client owed him nine hundred thousand yuan. He told Chunming and Chairman Chen that he wanted to pull out of the retail side of the business. Chunming said that first he must hand over a full list of clients. In response, Boss Xie started taking potshots at the products made by Chunming’s company. Grabbing a chunk of tile, he scratched a gash across its surface with a small rock. “See? The quality is not good.” The performance looked rehearsed; the tile was already riddled with old scratches.

Chunming rushed to the tile’s defense. “That’s just a sample.”

“That’s an actual tile.”

Chairman Chen sat back in his chair, ostentatiously smoking Marlboros without offering them to anyone. When he did speak, it was often to undercut something Chunming had said.

“We will draw up a contract . . .”

“The contract is not important. Most important is that we compile the client list.”

I imagined what Chunming would say if she had been fixed up with Chairman Chen on a blind date.

He didn’t make eye contact the whole time he spoke to me!

He wore a tan shirt with a gray suit!

He is so low-class!

But he was the boss, so she kept quiet.

 

 

LATER IN THE DAY, Chunming and her boss visited another sales agent. They had arranged to meet Boss Luo at his store inside a mall selling construction materials, but they had trouble finding him. They were looking in paint stores, but it turned out that his shop sold water faucets and door handles. That was another rule of business: Diversify like crazy.

Chunming announced that they were willing to award him the exclusive right to their Shenzhen retail business. Boss Luo was interested.

“Are all your sales entered into a computer?” Chunming asked.

“No,” Boss Luo said. “Our salespeople are in the marketplace. Once they go down there, they know right away what’s going on.”

“Not necessarily,” Chunming said. “If you have the precise numbers, you know exactly how your sales are doing.”

Boss Luo didn’t say anything. Don’t leave a paper trail.

Chairman Chen spoke up. “How about getting rid of these water faucets?” he asked. “They present the wrong image.”

“I can’t do that,” Boss Luo said, looking pained. “The faucets are a big part of our revenue.”

Chunming asked Boss Luo about his sales targets, but again her boss cut her off. “You can figure that out later.” Chairman Chen seemed to exhibit many of the traits of unqualified leaders. But when I read the Square and Round book, I found that its rules for success described his behavior exactly.

 

When you are sitting face-to-face, whoever shifts his line of vision first gains the initiative.

 

To maintain a halo around your head and increase your importance, you must appear as little as possible. Let a competent subordinate appear in your place. Only when everything has been resolved do you appear at the end to make a final decision.

 

The day ended at yet another construction site, where Chunming met up with two colleagues. More troubleshooting: A client complained that their company’s base-coat product—which was spread on a building surface before applying paint—was too powdery. More waiting: The man in charge of the project was in a meeting. Someday, Chunming had told me, a forest of luxury apartments would rise on this spot. As the late-afternoon sun stretched their shadows across the lot, she and her coworkers spoke of the rural villages they had come from. It was a country remembered but now gone forever, like childhood.

At home there was a graveyard right behind my house. I’m not afraid of people who have been dead a long time. But the ones who have just been put into the ground . . .

In my village, there is also a graveyard behind my house. I have seen with my own eyes that blue fire that jumps from one grave to another. They say those are the souls of people.

How often do you go home?

I haven’t been home in eight years.

The foreman arrived at last. Everyone gathered around a section of wall that had been painted with the base product. It felt smooth and dry, just as it should. Chunming took charge. “Sometimes there may be slight differences from one batch to the next. That may account for slight differences in quality.”

“If there are quality problems, it is very important to me,” said the foreman, not ready to be appeased.

“And if there are quality problems, it is even more important to us,” Chunming said soothingly. “You are very important to us.”

“But the date on the bag said it was all produced the same day. How can there be differences in quality?”

Lai Gong, Chunming’s colleague from the technical department, explained that a factory produced many batches in one day.

“Your workers must make sure to apply it properly,” Chunming said. “You can’t wait too long between applying the base and the paint, because the base will get too dry. Right now in Shenzhen it is very dry. Even people feel it.” Humanizing the paint surface: brilliant.

The foreman started on a round of elaborate apologies. That was the usual sign that a Chinese business meeting was coming to an end. “My greatest regrets that you had to come all this way!”

“Not at all,” Chunming said. “If there are any more problems, just call Lai Gong directly. Lai Gong, give him your card”—the young man fumbled in his computer bag—“and he will help you.” Chunming and I walked out to the highway to catch a taxi and meet a friend of hers for dinner. The two young men, who might have been hoping for an invitation, walked down the road in the other direction, looking disappointed and hungry.

 

 

CHUNMING AND I SHARED A TAXI back to Dongguan that night. “Sometimes I feel like I need to recharge, like I don’t have enough energy,” she said. “I lack so many things. I don’t know English, I don’t know computers. When I joined this company, I told my boss I’d learn English in two years. Now I’ve been here almost three and I still don’t know it.” She was thinking of returning to the Assembly-Line English school, where she had taken a few lessons and dropped out. She was also thinking of leaving her paint company.

“What would you do?” I asked.

“My friends, the ones who are all bosses of their own trading companies, are trying to talk me into starting my own company. They make twenty or thirty thousand yuan a month. But if I did that, my life would be just about making money. I want to keep raising the quality of my life. I want to find new kinds of happiness.”

It seemed that everything in Dongguan could be reduced to numbers: sales, kickbacks, language ability. The height of a potential boyfriend. You started with numbers—What year are you? How much a month? How much for overtime?—and then other numbers charted your progress: salary, the square-footage of an apartment, the price of a new car. But Chunming was looking for something that couldn’t be measured. As we sped along the dark highway, the factories of Chang’an zipped past on both sides. “If the lights are still on, it means people are working overtime,” Chunming said. “So many people work for years inside the same factory.” It was eleven o’clock, but many of the factories were still lit, each one casting a cold blue glow into the night like a dying star.

*   *   *

 

Two crucial things happened soon after that. Chunming’s boss cut her sales commissions without explanation, and a good friend named Liu Huachun bought a Buick. She was twenty-six years old. “She used to be a clerk in a shoe factory,” Chunming told me. “Then she started her own factory with investment from her brother, learned everything from start to finish, and within one year she is able to buy a car.”

These events spurred Chunming to action. In the spring of 2005, she set up a business with a friend to buy and sell mold parts—the innards of the plastic-injection molding machines that made everything from water pistols to coat hangers. They invested one hundred thousand yuan, about $12,500, in savings and loans from friends. Her new business partner had worked for six months in the finance department of a hardware factory. Chunming’s only contact with molds had been on the assembly line a decade before, when she had made plastic toy cars and trains, but she wasn’t in the least perturbed. “Doing anything is about knowing how to behave as a person,” she told me. “If you can behave well, you will do well.”

She didn’t tell her boss she was leaving; in fact, she didn’t leave. Since she rarely went to the office anyway, Chairman Chen had no way of knowing one of his star salespeople had gone off and started her own company while on his payroll. She continued to keep up with clients and to draw her monthly pay. It was classic Chinese behavior on all sides: He didn’t tell her why he cut her commissions. She didn’t tell him that she had quit his company.

She also started seeing a dentist. Her two front teeth stuck out slightly and she was considering “teeth beautification,” which entailed having the offending teeth pulled and replaced by porcelain fakes. After that you couldn’t bite into anything hard, like meat on the bone. Chunming was also considering braces, but that took at least a year—beautification was instant. A friend of a friend had undergone the procedure. “It changed the way she looks,” Chunming reported, “and completely transformed her life.” The next time I went to Dongguan, Chunming filled me in on all these developments, but she mentioned the teeth first. The molds were a career change, the teeth a cosmetic one, but to Chunming they were part of the same project. She was becoming someone else, again.

 

 

THE NEW BUSINESS BEGAN with deception: The partners printed up name cards in Chinese and English that said DONGGUAN YUXING HARDWARE & MOLD PARTS CORPORATION. There was no such entity; at this point, all that existed was a store. “ ‘Corporation’ makes us sound bigger,” Chunming explained.

She and her business partner, Fu Gui, were on their way to Shenzhen. It was the first day of the Sixth China International Machinery & Molds Industry Exhibition. In the taxi, Chunming continued to field calls from her old job. “If it says putty additive on the label, it means you can use it,” she shouted into her mobile phone. “I can show you a price list, but you can’t share it with anyone.” In between, she called her brother to share bad news from home. “Uncle has stomach cancer,” she said in a quieter voice. “We have to send money home right away.” The fair was being held at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center. The center was still under construction and not formally open yet, but its vast floor swirled with crowds. Chunming and Fu Gui joined the mob, like minnows sucked into the mighty current.

“Some of these machines can cost one million!” Chunming said, her eyes big with excitement. She walked up to one that was spitting out plastic coat hangers. “Oh! We used to have these when I worked in the factory.” A man proudly handed her a sea-green hanger that was still hot, like a fresh bagel. Chunming and Fu Gui wandered the exhibit booths, handing out cards and picking up product catalogs. Their aim was to meet parts manufacturers or their chief distributors, who bought straight from the factory and offered the lowest price. Everyone claimed to be a chief distributor, but when they quoted a price, you knew they were lying.

“What do you do?” a man at a booth asked Chunming. She mentioned a type of saw blade, hesitated, then said, “We do a lot of things. Look at my card.” Occasionally she bargained. “How much?” picking up a drill bit and weighing it in her hand, as if she were buying onions at the market. Then: “So much? When we come, you must give us a better price.”

The molds fair was bewildering to me. One booth might display something that resembled an oversize gold battery; another offered a metal cylinder lined with holes, like an old-fashioned hair curler. I saw tangles of brightly colored plastic spirals that looked like Tinkertoy creations. The advertisements around the exhibits didn’t help much. Billboards featured metal parts against a backdrop of blue sky or city skyline, or sometimes a bunch of gears grouped in a circle, as if in orbit. Some of the signs were in English, but this was a language almost entirely of nouns rammed forcibly together, like a Mack Truck pileup. TRACTION DRIVE SPEED ACCELERATOR. TURRET PUNCH PRESS. There were ELECTRICAL DISCHARGE MACHINES and CENTERLESS GRINDING and ALLOY QUENCHING FURNACES.

The industry was populated by meaty-looking men who resembled bodyguards, though occasionally a woman from a factory’s marketing department had been pressed into service. The hottest booth on the floor belonged to Eva Precision Industrial Moldings. Three young women in tight-fitting shirts handed out flyers while a video featuring gear parts and a disco soundtrack played on a screen behind them.

By midmorning, Chunming and Fu Gui were weighed down with shopping bags full of catalogs, like harried Christmas shoppers. They stowed their loot and continued on their rounds. At noon, Chunming called a friend who also wanted to start a molds business and had asked Chunming to join her. The friend had not even left home yet. That was how Chunming knew that in allying with Fu Gui, she had picked the right business partner.

 

 

THEIR NEW STORE was in the Changrong International Machinery and Hardware Center, a mall of machine-parts stores near the Bubugao electronics factory. It was situated in the middle of a long row of stores exactly like it. The downstairs had a meeting area and shelves lined with product samples, while the second floor would be their living quarters; on the floor was a single mattress where Fu Gui slept. Over the next month, Chunming moved in. She and Fu Gui repainted the walls a clean white and stocked the small kitchen with Chunming’s pots and dishes and her rice cooker. They moved her double bed upstairs and fashioned a cozy sitting room with shelves, a television, and a sofa. “If the place I live isn’t clean and comfortable, I can’t work,” Chunming said. But however you dressed it up, she was now living in a machine-parts mall. If there was more to life than making money, you couldn’t see it from here.

*   *   *

 

Chunming had one complaint about her new living arrangement—“I can’t bring home lovers anymore”—but her dating didn’t seem to suffer any. She spent a day at a beach resort with a man who worked in finance; in the course of telling me this story, the man’s marital status changed from “he has been married” to “he is married.” She met a good-looking guy in a restaurant and started a relationship even though he had a girlfriend. She cut it off when he started renovating his apartment, a signal to Chunming that he was probably getting married soon. She had a fling with someone she met online.

“He’s a surgeon,” she told me. “He’s very fat, but he has a good heart. He must be married.”

“He must be married?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He won’t tell me.”

“Did you ask him?”

She had. “You’re married, right?” she asked.

“If you think I’m married,” he responded, “then I’m married.”

Married men who pretended not to be were the number-one dating hazard of Dongguan. Fu Gui, Chunming’s business partner, had been involved with one such man; Liu Huachun, the friend who had recently bought the Buick, had been tricked twice. In a place where people lied reflexively for work, deception naturally seeped into personal relationships. Lying was often the pragmatic choice because it got you what you wanted. Eventually your lies might catch up with you, but few people thought that far ahead.

Chunming had her own rules for such affairs. No one should get hurt, and neither side should make demands. “Of course, I’d like to find the right person and get married,” she told me. “But since I haven’t, it’s fine to be with someone you don’t love. You can still enjoy your time together. You can still rest your head on his shoulder when you’re tired and feel a sense of security.”

I once asked Chunming if she had ever met a man older than she who wasn’t married. The minute I asked I thought it was a dumb question—of course she had—until she answered.

“Very, very few,” she said. She thought for a while. “My old boss.” Then she made a face. “The ones who aren’t married are all no good.” Of course, that didn’t mean the married ones were any good, either.

 

 

WHILE LIVING IN THE MACHINE-PARTS MALL, Chunming and Fu Gui devised a way to trap men. They posted the personal details of an imaginary twenty-four-year-old woman on a local Web site, next to a picture of a beautiful woman they had downloaded from the Internet. “She’s 1.65 meters tall, she speaks English and French, she works in international trade, and she likes jazz,” Chunming told me. She paused. “I don’t even know what jazz is.” The men fell over themselves to chat with her. Chunming knew many of them, and one was an occasional lover who told her he never met women online. She cut off relations with him after catching him in the act of flirting with the imaginary jazz fan. The city planner she had been involved with—He is very ugly—also came calling. But Chunming had turned against him; she found out that he had bragged about sleeping with her to other people. “We get men to come talk to us and then we attack them,” Chunming explained. “But they’re very thick-skinned, because they still hope they have a chance with you.”

She showed me a recent exchange between the virtual woman and the city planner.

I think you are probably like a pig, she wrote. A fat pig.

Actually, I am more like a mouse.

A mouse? Isn’t that even more disgusting?

She called him fat pig a few more times, while he tried gamely to keep the conversation going. Then I watched as Chunming logged on as two people at once, as herself and as the young woman. The young woman was immediately bombarded with messages.

Are you Hunanese?

What are you doing?

In your picture, you look even younger than twenty-four!

Chunming ignored them. As herself, she was chatting with a possible date, though he was on the far border of possible: forty-two years old, divorced, with a young son.

Are you off tomorrow?

Yes, are you? Can we meet?

I’m going to see friends tomorrow.

How about dinner the following night?

She agreed. If we meet and have no feeling, she wrote, then let’s not eat together.

Chunming took other precautions. She never gave a strange man her mobile-phone number, so he couldn’t track her down if things went badly. She didn’t even tell him her name, making up one—Ling—instead. After Chunming had explained these rules and detailed her plans, she said, “Now I want to meet a man who has never been online.”

“Who has never been online?” Fu Gui said.

“Ever since the Internet,” Chunming lamented, “relations between people have become false.”

“Ever since mobile phones, relations between people have become false,” Fu Gui said. “You can always lie and say you’re somewhere you’re not.”

 

 

THE NEXT TIME I SAW CHUNMING, I asked her how the date with the forty-two-year-old man went.

She wrinkled up her face. “Not good.”

“What was wrong with him?”

She pointed to the top of her head. “On the top of his head he had a spot . . .”

“What? A bald spot?”

“A spot where the hair was very thin,” she said. “I don’t like those men who have very little hair. You couldn’t see that at all in the picture he sent me.” The man also had a seventeen-year-old daughter whom he had not mentioned in their online chats. A bald spot and a grown daughter—both were deal-killers for Chunming. You had to wonder about a man who thought he could hide either of those for very long.

*   *   *

 

Not surprisingly, Chunming’s relations with her boss continued to deteriorate after she stopped doing any work for his paint company. In April 2005—around the time she moved into the machine-parts mall—Chairman Chen cut her salary by five hundred yuan and banned her from signing up new clients in Shenzhen. In May she was formally fired. In June she learned the company would not be paying her commissions she had earned earlier that year. Together with severance pay, the company owed her eleven thousand yuan, more than $1,300. Chunming tried to get in touch with Chairman Chen, but his management strategy in this particular case was not to answer his phone. To maintain a halo around your head and increase your importance, you must appear as little as possible. Over lunch with me and a friend, she mulled her options. “Now I just have to see how much money he gives me,” she said. “If it’s not enough, I’ll sue him.”

“A lawsuit is too much trouble,” Chunming’s friend said. “There are other ways to get your money.” He had a thin face, with the skin stretched tight over the cheekbones and hair so short it gave him a permanently startled expression. He worked in shipping.

“What other ways?” I asked.

He said a cousin of his had been owed money by a client. “One day I was in the parking lot of the client’s company. I saw a Benz parked there. ‘Is that the company president’s car?’ I asked people. It was.” Chunming’s friend did a little more research and phoned up the company president. “I told him his home address. I told him the ages of his children. The company paid up ninety percent of the money they owed right away.”

A few weeks later, Chunming decided to file a legal complaint with the labor bureau in Guangzhou, the provincial capital. “A complaint like this has a big impact inside a company,” she told me. “Once the labor bureau starts investigating, all the employees will start thinking, ‘What about the money the company owes me?’ The company will have to treat them better.” She was excited, and so was I. So much of life was unfair; Chunming knew that as well as anyone. Yet she believed her individual suffering mattered, and she was willing to go to court to seek justice. It was the last thing I would have expected.

 

 

THE FOLLOWING MONDAY MORNING, we took the bus to Guangzhou. Chunming was dressed, stylishly as always, in a slim black sweater, khaki pants, and high heels. We traveled by subway to the provincial labor bureau and were immediately bounced to the district labor bureau.

The office had a long low counter, with chairs for visitors on one side and a civil servant sitting opposite each chair. The arrangement was supposed to make government more accessible, but there was never one supplicant per official; instead, at least half a dozen people huddled around each chair, maneuvering for an opening. While waiting, they listened in on other cases and periodically offered comments. A middle-aged man was sitting in the chair when we arrived, explaining at great length how his boss had disappeared without paying him. Chunming pushed to the front and crouched low beside him, like a ball boy at a tennis tournament tensed to spring. When the man paused for breath, she bounced up. “Excuse me, I just have a quick question.”

The official looked through her documents: her employment contract, letter of dismissal, a copy of her company’s registration certificate. The papers showed why it would be almost impossible for ordinary workers to file a complaint. They rarely signed work contracts and they did not have access to a company’s registration documents, as Chunming did because her clients sometimes wished to see them. The official told her she must get a copy of the license for the company’s branch in Guangzhou.

But by now it was almost noon, and government offices across the city were shutting down. In a world where almost everyone worked nonstop, Chinese officials enjoyed two-hour breaks for lunch and a long nap. When Chunming stopped by one office to ask a quick question, the guard at the gate looked offended. “They are still sleeping.”

______

 

OVER SOUP AND RICE at a self-serve lunchroom, Chunming revealed her Plan B. She opened her business-card case and plucked out a card. GORAN WIDSTROM, GROUP CHAIRMAN. This was the head of her former employer’s parent company, which was based in Sweden. He had visited the Dongguan office several years ago and im-pressed Chunming as a kind person.

“Chairman Chen doesn’t know I have the business card of Wei-si-te-ling,” she said, using the transliteration of the Swedish name.

She caressed the edge of the card with her fingers. Once Wei-si-te-ling knew what was going on, he would help her get her money back. Chunming asked me if I could call him. I looked at my watch. The Swedes were still sleeping, like the Chinese officials. We lingered and drank several glasses of strong tea.

“Sometimes I wonder what I’m working so hard for,” Chunming said. “I read in a book that success is saying the things you want to say and doing the things you want to do. I don’t feel like that now.”

“What would you like to do?” I asked.

“I’d like to study. I would really like to learn English.” Her eyes filled suddenly with tears. She pressed a tissue into them, hard.

As usual, I hadn’t seen it coming. “You’ve already done so much,” I said. “Just read your diaries and you can see how far you’ve come.”

“Don’t mind me,” she said. “I cry very easily. People think I’m strange.” She dabbed at her eyes one last time, smiled at me, and stood up to do battle with the bureaucracy.

 

 

CHUNMING VISITED three commerce bureaus that afternoon in search of her former employer’s branch-office license. The city commerce bureau pushed her to the province, the province to the district. No two officials said the same thing. Finally a woman at the district commerce bureau said she could print up the license for sixty yuan. Once money entered the conversation, there was hope. It was already 4:10 when Chunming, license in hand, ran into the city labor bureau to file her complaint, past the sign that said PLEASE DO NOT MAKE NOISE, SMOKE, OR SPIT. But she was in the wrong place, again. The district, not the city, handled branch offices of foreign enterprises, an official told her. He gave her a brochure explaining this.

Just before five, Chunming returned to the district labor bureau—her third visit of the day. And for the third time, the same official behind the same low counter denied her. “You must go to the city labor bureau. They handle foreign enterprises.”

“They don’t handle the branch offices of foreign enterprises,” Chunming countered, slapping the brochure down on the table. He picked it up; written documents always impressed people in China. The official read the brochure and then put it down. Slowly it was dawning on him that he might actually have to do some work today. He pointed her to the end of the counter to get an arbitration form.

As Chunming filled out the form, she realized that arbitration might be more complicated than she expected. She would have to meet with her old boss to negotiate a settlement, which was the last thing she wanted. She would need to return to Guangzhou for the negotiation and to pay a fee whether or not she got any money. But there was no time to think any of it through, because she was scrambling to fill out the forms, which ran four pages and had to be filled out in duplicate. The government employees were leaving for the day, the women zipping their purses shut with finality.

“Wait, I’m going to file this today,” Chunming called out.

The last woman left in the office stood up and shut off her computer. “It’s 5:28. Are you going to finish in the next two minutes?” she said caustically.

“Can’t you please be more helpful?” I asked. “We came all the way from Dongguan this morning.”

“I live far away too,” the woman said.

Finally Chunming gave up; she would have to come back another day. “They have absolutely no sense of responsibility in their work,” she said to me as the metal gate of the labor bureau clanged shut behind us.

 

OUT ON THE SIDEWALK, Chunming began to have doubts. Arbitration was so complicated. A legal complaint might bring trouble to Wei-si-te-ling; foreign investors in China were always vulnerable. She had more faith in personal intervention, even from a person living seven time zones away whom she barely knew. “Once I get him on the phone, I’m sure he’ll remember me,” Chunming said. “And then we can talk about it.”

I told her that most likely a secretary would answer the phone. Wei-si-te-ling was probably very busy, I said, and she shouldn’t get her hopes up.

“When I met him in China, he didn’t behave like a person who was important and busy. I felt like he was someone who really understands how to live.” She had such faith in herself and her own importance. When she finally got through to Wei-si-te-ling, the global chairman of a Swedish paint company, she was certain the two of them would talk as friends, as equals. But of course it was exactly the kind of blind confidence that had brought Chunming to where she was today.

I dialed the number on the card. It was an answering service, in a secretary’s voice, just as I had expected. I said what Chunming had told me to say.

 

I am calling on behalf of Ms. Wu in the Dongguan sales department. She met you at a group meeting in Dongguan at the end of 2003. She has left the company but has always admired you very much.
Now she has been fired for no reason, and the company has not paid the commissions owed her. She wants to file for labor arbitration, but she doesn’t know how it will affect you and your company. She is wondering if you can help her.

 

Wei-si-te-ling never called.

Chunming never returned to Guangzhou to file her arbitration claim. Her former boss offered to pay part of the money he owed, which was enough for her. Too many things in her life were changing. She decided to quit the molds company; she would hand over her stake to Fu Gui, who would pay back her investment at a later date. The company had two regular clients and was already breaking even. “We haven’t made big money yet,” Chunming said. “But even if I make a lot of money, it won’t satisfy me. Just to make money is not enough meaning in life.”

She planned to go home for the mid-autumn festival, the lunar calendar holiday that celebrated the summer harvest. After so many years in the city, Chunming still marked time by the traditional holidays, seeing them as natural breaks between the phases of her life. When she returned to Dongguan, she would spend two years studying English. She had made up her mind, she told me. “I want to learn English so I can live a happier life.”