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13 Love and Money
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Nothing about Min’s life satisfied her after she returned from her visit home for the new year. She wasn’t learning anything new in her job, and her salary was low. She could see how badly she stacked up: Because she worked in the human resources department, she knew how much everyone else in the factory made. And she was unhappy with her boyfriend. As an assistant on the factory floor, Ah Jie made three hundred yuan more a month than Min, but his was a dead-end job. He was only a middle school graduate, a fact that Min had never mentioned before. At one point he suggested she follow him to Beijing, where he could get a job as a security guard. She turned him down. “Everyone looks down on security guards,” she told me. “It’s even lower than being an ordinary worker.”
Ah Jie’s shyness, a common enough country trait, became a liability. At a dinner with Min’s friend from a former factory, Lin Jia, and her two sisters, Ah Jie didn’t say a word the entire meal. Afterward Lin Jia sent an assessment to Min on her mobile phone: I’ve discussed it with my sisters and we all think he is too soft. He is not worthy of you. From Changsha, where she had found work doing sales for a bank, Min’s older sister Guimin weighed in: In this society, a person who is too well behaved cannot survive.
Min worried that Ah Jie’s lack of ambition was rubbing off on her. “Since I’ve been dating him, I haven’t studied at all,” she complained. “I can’t go on having fun like this. If I do this for another year or two, that will be my whole life.” Ah Jie had reason to be comfortable where he was. Two-thirds of the workers and all the top bosses in the factory were from Henan, his native province. He had many friends at work, while Min was more alone than ever now that her older sister was gone. She had no friends inside the factory, a deliberate choice. “If you get close to someone,” she said, “it’s easier for them to betray you.”
FOR A LONG TIME, I didn’t know much about Min’s factory. It was Hong Kong–owned, it made handbags—that was all she had said. On the train ride home to her village, she surprised me with a new year’s present: a Coach change purse, with the company’s signature logo of capital C’s, its edges lined in brown suede. I assumed it was fake, like so many things in Dongguan. Only by chance did I learn that Min’s factory manufactured for some of the biggest brands in the business: Coach, LeSportsac, Dooney & Bourke, Lacoste. So the purse she had given me was authentic—it probably cost fifty dollars in America.
One night after Min had returned to Dongguan, I asked her and Ah Jie how they got the bags. “If you’re friends with the security guards, you can take the handbags out of the factory,” Ah Jie said.
“You mean you just steal them?” I asked.
“We work on the factory floor,” Ah Jie said, in a matter-of-fact way. “If the production line has filled an order, we can have them make a few extra bags. Then if you’re friends with the guards, you can take them out.”
“Doesn’t the factory care?” I asked.
He shrugged. “As long as we fill the order, they don’t care.
“I just took a handbag out of the factory today,” Ah Jie continued. “It sells for two hundred U.S. dollars. Do you want it? Why don’t you come look at it?”
I said hastily that I didn’t need a handbag. “You should give it to your mother as a present,” I said.
“His mother lives on a farm,” Min said. “What’s she going to do with a handbag?”
Min’s and Ah Jie’s dorm rooms were awash in Coach bags: a purse with the capital-C motif, a black leather billfold with contrast stitching, a dainty wristlet in burgundy suede—“That’s for holding makeup,” Min ventured. In one of the bags I found a printed card, in English, in an inside pocket:
AN AMERICAN CLASSIC
In 1941 the burnished patina of an all-American baseball glove inspired the founder of Coach to create a new collection of handbags, from the same luxuriously soft, glove-tanned leather. After refining this leather, six skilled leatherworkers crafted twelve signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair. They were fresh, functional, and women everywhere adored them. A new American classic was born.
In Min’s universe, the Coach bags fluctuated widely in value. She gave the purse with the C-motif to her friend Lin Jia, who had lent her a place to stay while she was job-hunting. When Lin Jia’s older sister held her wedding in one of the city’s grandest hotels, Min brought a luxury handbag as a present. But on most days these purses that sold for hundreds of dollars in America were worthless, because almost no one in Min’s circle had any use for them or knew what they were worth. Min stored her keys and ID card in her favorite one—a Lacoste hobo bag in sage-green suede—but it never left the room. Something that nice, she figured, would get stolen in no time at all.
MIN DECIDED to stay put. Summer had come to the Pearl River Delta, with temperatures in the nineties every day. At night the dorms were stifling; on the factory floor, the chemical smell was so strong that periodically a young woman would pass out on the assembly line and have to be carried out. During the summer, personal ambition often lay dormant, like an animal in hibernation.
But there was more to Min’s decision than the weather. Over dinner one night in June 2005, she told me she had given notice to her boss, but withdrew it after Ah Jie begged her to stay. “So I’ve told Ah Jie I’ll stay here this year,” Min said. “For the new year, I’ll go home with him to his family. After the new year, I’ll quit and look for a new job. And next new year, he’ll come home with me to my house.”
As we continued talking, what she had just said slowly sank in: She had mapped out the next two years, and the rest of her life. At the age of nineteen, she had agreed to marry Ah Jie.
“When will you get married?” I asked.
“Probably three years from now.”
“Have you told your parents?”
“No. I don’t need to tell them until I bring Ah Jie home for the new year, two years from now.”
“What about when you don’t go home next year?”
“I can just tell my parents our factory is not giving us vacation.”
“You mean, lie?”
“Yes.” Concealing things from her parents was now second nature to her. Her older sister was living in Changsha with her boyfriend, but when she phoned home she pretended she was still in Dongguan, and she made Min cover for her. Next to that, Min’s evasions didn’t seem so bad.
* * *
Not everyone took Min’s engagement seriously. Her friend Lin Jia and her two older sisters continued to bad-mouth Ah Jie. People from Henan are too poor! He doesn’t have any real skills. Find someone else. One weekend in July, Lin Jia decided to introduce Min to a classmate from home; he worked in the remote district of Qingxi but was in town for the day. “I already have a boyfriend,” Min objected. But she was curious enough that she didn’t say no.
The night before, she came over to my apartment for a sleepover. Min got off the bus carrying nothing at all, the way country people showed up empty-handed on someone’s doorstep. I found a T-shirt and shorts for her to sleep in and took her out to buy a toothbrush. Her phone rang around ten, while we were watching TV, and she answered without a greeting and chatted for a while. “We’ll go see Lin Jia tomorrow,” she said.
The phone rang again. I had assumed it was Ah Jie both times, but it was actually the potential boyfriend. He hadn’t even met Min, and he was already calling her nonstop. “Lin Jia has told him how pretty and smart I am, so he really wants to meet me,” Min said. All evening long, Min’s phone trilled from the boy’s messages to her. Around 11:30, the phone rang as we were getting ready for bed. “We’re going to sleep now,” Min said. “If you don’t stop calling me, I’m going to have to turn off my phone.”
———
THE DATE TOOK PLACE in a deafeningly loud dim sum restaurant. Lin Jia was already there with her oldest sister, Lin Xue; Lin Xue’s husband and four-year-old daughter; her second sister; the girls’ elderly father; and a cousin recently arrived from the countryside. The boy, Zhang Bin, had a narrow face, round dark eyes, and pale cheeks that were flushed with nervousness. He wore a white dress shirt and blue pinstripe suit pants. He had brought a friend from his factory. This was a blind date with eleven people in attendance.
As soon as Min and I sat down, Lin Xue leaned over toward us. “He’s a college graduate and a line leader in a factory,” she whispered. “He is very diligent.”
Lin Xue’s husband was sandwiched awkwardly between Min and the boy; the two of them did not say a word to each other the entire meal. From far across the table, Lin Jia giggled and dropped hints. Why are you so quiet today? What are your plans for later? Halfway through lunch, the boy left the table and stood by the restaurant window alone, gazing out. He looked like the romantic hero of a Chinese television soap opera, ready to reveal dramatic intimacies. In the soap opera, Min would have gone and stood beside him. Instead she turned to me and said in a low voice, “I don’t usually like boys who look like that.”
After the meal, Lin Xue’s husband spotted someone from work and went over to say hello. The boy gathered up his courage and turned toward us. “I’m happy to meet you and your friend,” he said to Min. We lifted our teacups and drank. Min didn’t say a word.
SHE CALLED ME AT ELEVEN that night. “We just got back,” she said, sounding out of breath. After lunch, she and Lin Jia had gone to the park with the boy and his friend. They climbed the hill to the television tower and then walked around the city.
“How was the boy?” I asked.
“Good. What do you think of him?”
“I don’t know him,” I hedged. “He seems like a good person.”
“Better than Ah Jie?” she pressed.
“What do you think?”
“Good,” she said. “He knows how to behave.”
Also that night, the boy called her. For the first time, Min told him that she had a boyfriend. “Just give me an opportunity,” the boy said.
* * *
Things started to move quickly after that. Min bought a new phone card. Since dating Ah Jie, she had shared his mobile phone; getting her own number was a declaration of independence.
Lin Xue was in my neighborhood a few days later, and we met up for lunch. “Min is taken with that boy!” she reported as soon as she saw me. “Now she wants to quit the factory to escape Ah Jie.” Lin Xue was triumphant but a little alarmed at her matchmaking success. “I told her not to be so hasty. Is she sure about this?”
Min called me the next day. She had urgent news, but it wasn’t what I expected. “I’ve just spoken with my parents,” she said.
“How are they?” I asked.
“I’m going home. I want to get my diploma.”
The diploma was a long-standing point of conflict with her parents. Because Min had left school a semester early, she hadn’t picked up her diploma before going out. Employers usually wanted to see one, and though Min had talked her way into the jobs she wanted, it was getting harder to explain why she was two years out of school and still had no diploma. She had asked her father to go to her school and get it, but he resisted: He hoped to prevent her from switching jobs again. To her parents, it was enough that Min was employed—they didn’t understand that some jobs were better than others. Min tried to explain. “In this job I have no prospects,” she said in a phone call home.
“You haven’t even gone to college,” her mother said. “How can you talk about prospects?” Min was so upset she hung up on her.
Over dinner a couple of nights later, Min told me the boy was twenty-four years old and a chief supervisor in a digital-camera factory. “He’s very good,” she said. “He has quality and cultivation. He knows the correct way to behave. He takes care of people. In all these ways, he is better than Ah Jie.” Min said she would go home later this month after she got paid, pick up her diploma, then return and find a new job near the boy’s factory.
I asked why she had to leave her factory right away.
“I don’t dare break up with Ah Jie,” she said. “I don’t know how he would react.”
“What do you mean?”
A few days earlier, Lin Jia had gotten a phone call from someone she didn’t know. “Don’t interfere with what doesn’t concern you,” a male voice warned her. “Don’t tell Min that Ah Jie is not worthy of her.” Thuggish threats in the service of relationship maintenance: I hadn’t imagined Ah Jie was so enterprising.
“So you don’t plan to tell Ah Jie anything?” I asked.
“I’ll call him after I leave the factory,” she said. “I’ll tell him that I’m leaving and he shouldn’t try to find out where I am.”
“Will he accept that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. But he won’t know how to find me.” She planned to leave the factory without taking anything so no one would suspect she was quitting for good. “I’ll take a change of clothes and the experience I’ve gained this year,” Min said solemnly. “The other things I can buy again.”
———
THINGS DIDN’T WORK OUT that way. In early August, I got an e-mail from Min. She was still at the same factory. My new friend is fine, she wrote, but the situation between us is not very good. Maybe he and I are more suited to be friends. Her younger sister Sar had graduated from vocational high school and wanted to work in Dongguan. Min found someone in her factory’s shipping department who was from the town near her village; he could get Sar a job as a shipping clerk. There was one problem: Sar was only seventeen, which meant she was too young to be hired. Min paid thirty yuan to a person whose specialty was changing the birth dates on government-issued identity cards. Sar’s newly doctored ID said she had been born in June 1986, while Min was born in February of that year. If anyone looked closely at the sisters’ ID cards, they might wonder. But no one ever did.
Now I feel much less pressure than I did before, truly, Min wrote to me.
It was late September 2005, and the cooler weather was her signal. A month after Sar arrived, Min jumped again. She found a job as an assistant in the purchasing department of a hardware factory; it was a two-hour bus trip from where her younger sister was working. Min left without settling things with Ah Jie. She was no longer in touch with the other boy. Her solution to these entanglements was the only tactic she knew: Keep moving.
This time her job hunting was easier because she finally had her diploma. Her father had gotten it from her school but refused to mail it to her; he was still trying to keep her from changing jobs. Min lied and told him her factory had a new rule—anyone without a diploma would be fired. When her father heard this, he panicked and paid extra to send the diploma by express mail. Min laughed when she told me this story.
* * *
Min’s new factory made metal parts for power supplies, computer monitors, and DVD players. Her workday stretched eleven hours, with every other Sunday off. She made one thousand yuan a month; if she did well, she would be promoted to purchasing supplies on her own. She started reading a book whose title was Production Planning and Materials Purchasing.
In the past year, she had sent home five thousand yuan—more than six hundred dollars—but her parents thought that was too little. “Other people’s children have much less education,” her father said. “How come they send home more money than you?”
“Other people’s fathers make enough money so their children don’t have to go out to work,” Min countered.
Nowadays she saw her parents in a more critical light. When Min’s father had worked briefly in the Wenzhou shoe factory in the late 1990s, he had fallen sick and returned home. Her mother had gone out for a year without saving any money either. They had failed where Min was succeeding, and for the first time she recognized this. “They have tasted migrant life. They should know how hard it is,” Min told me. “And yet they think that for us to work outside and make money is so easy.”
Five months after she was hired, Min was promoted to a job purchasing mold parts for her factory. It was her big break: The young woman who had previously held the job had gone home for a visit and her parents found out she had a boyfriend in the city. “They’re holding her at home and not letting her come out again,” Min said, “so I have an opportunity.” In her new job, she made 1,200 yuan a month in salary and between six thousand and ten thousand yuan a month in kickbacks. In her first six months, she saved thirty thousand yuan—close to four thousand dollars—and sent home about $1,300. For the first time, she opened a bank account in the city, against the wishes of her parents. They wanted her to send all her money home.
“If the company knew I was taking kickbacks, they would fire me right away,” Min told me.
“But everyone is doing it, right?” I asked her.
“Yes. But it’s something we never talk about.”
We were sitting in a McDonald’s at a shopping mall near her factory. Min had ordered an iced coffee and fries; she ate out a lot now. I remembered the first time she ever went to McDonald’s, two years before, when she brought her face down close to her Big Mac and ate her way through the sandwich one layer at a time. In a low voice, looking around to make sure no colleague was in sight, she told me about her job. Suppliers typically paid 10 percent of a purchase in kickbacks; Min met them away from the factory to collect their payments, in cash. The bank where she opened her account was far from the factory, so she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew when making a deposit. People in purchasing were often resented inside a factory because their jobs were so lucrative. When Min ran into her colleagues outside, she would say hello and pick up their restaurant tabs to stay on their good side.
Success brought more pressure. “In the past if I didn’t like my work, I would just leave,” she said. “Now I worry what happens if the company doesn’t want me anymore.”
AS SOON AS MIN STARTED making more money, her relationship with her parents changed. They stopped complaining about how little she sent home and started dreaming up ways to spend her savings. They wanted to buy a villa in the nearby city of Wuxue, which would cost 120,000 yuan, about fifteen thousand dollars. Her father hatched a scheme to raise crayfish, which required somewhere between thirty thousand and fifty thousand yuan. He had lost money on last year’s cotton crop and had no capital of his own. Min shot down both plans. “You can’t make money in one instant,” she lectured her father. “You must proceed step-by-step.”
It was amazing to me how quickly Min overturned the power structure within her family. When my grandfather returned home to his village after seven years in America, he had been beaten by his father for changing his course of study without permission. The man had become a modern, foreign-educated person, but he had not gained the slightest status in his father’s eyes. In contrast, Min was able to dictate family affairs from afar. She monitored her father’s purchases and rejected his business plans, and the fact that she had sent home $1,300 gave her such authority.
There was also a difference in class, which in China is largely correlated to a person’s level of education. My grandfather’s father had been an educated man, which gave him stature even though he had never gone far from home. Migrant workers like Min came from the lowest rung of society—if they enjoyed success in the city, they immediately rose above all the other members of their family. Soon Min was actively directing the lives of her siblings. She promised her little brother a summer in Dongguan taking English lessons if he did well in school. Her improving finances changed the fate of her youngest sister, Xiu, who had failed the exam to get into high school. When the three older sisters had failed, each had enrolled in vocational school and then gone out to work. But now Min could afford to pay an extra fee that permitted Xiu to enroll in high school—in three years, she would take the college entrance exam.
“How are your grades?” Min asked her sister when she called home.
“I don’t know,” said Xiu, who was very shy.
“Do you know I’m out here working so you can stay in school?” Min asked. “You better get good grades and not let me down.”
“I know,” her sister replied. “I will.”
Min weighed in on her older sister’s situation too. Guimin’s job and relationship had fallen apart, and she had returned to Dongguan to work in a hammer factory. Min thought her sister was too old to be switching jobs so often. “You need to stay in one place and develop yourself,” Min told her.
In the summer of 2006, Min paid a visit home. She gave her family a Changhong-brand television set, a DVD player, and five thousand yuan. For her father, she bought a shirt that cost eighty yuan. It was the nicest shirt he had ever owned, and he wore it the whole time Min was home. Min’s father had recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday and had gone to see the fortune-teller. After he turned fifty, he was told, his luck would improve. Thanks to his second daughter, this fortune was coming true.
* * *
For the 2007 lunar new year, I returned to Min’s village. She had gotten two weeks’ leave from work because there was to be a wedding at home. Min’s cousin and next-door neighbor was marrying a young woman who lived several villages away. During the year, he worked on a construction crew in faraway Ürümqi—forty-four hours by train—and she sewed clothes in a factory in Wuhan, three hours by bus. They had been introduced by a matchmaker the previous year and had gotten engaged right away. In the year that followed, they had tan lianai—“spoken of love,” or courted—by phone. The process seemed backward to me—first you got engaged, then you started dating—but even so, it was a concession to modern ways because it allowed a couple to get to know each other before marrying.
The night I arrived, Min took me next door to see the cousin. Two years before, the main bedroom of his family’s house had been an empty shell with a bare cement floor. Now the room was laid with tile and crowded with furniture: a wardrobe, a couch, a coffee table. A double bed with a pink mattress had the word Happiness in English written across it in fancy script. Above the bed was a studio photo of the cousin in an ivory three-piece tuxedo and his bride-to-be in a low-cut ball gown.
“She is so pretty!” Min exclaimed.
“She won’t be pretty tomorrow,” joked her cousin.
“What are you saying!” Min said. “A bride on her wedding day is at her prettiest.”
Though a son traditionally lived in his parents’ house with his wife after his marriage, Min’s cousin and his new wife would spend only a few days at home before going back out to work. Across the Chinese countryside were countless rooms like these, furnished and decorated at considerable expense, and destined to stand empty almost all the days of the year.
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, the young men of the village set out for the bride’s house, carrying traditional rattan baskets on shoulder poles to bring back the wedding dowry. Peasants had carried loads on their shoulders in this way for centuries, but these young men had spent their working lives as urban migrants, mostly in factories. Only one older man looked comfortable balancing the bamboo pole across his shoulders. The groom, wearing a blue pinstripe suit and patent-leather shoes, was still denigrating his fiancée’s looks at every opportunity. “When you see her today,” he told me, “you’ll be frightened.” Min and her older sister were to accompany the bride back to her new village. They had never taken part in a country wedding before.
At the bride’s house, neighbors crowded the muddy yard to watch the proceedings. The main room overflowed with her dowry, looking like a clearance sale at a home appliance store: a refrigerator, an air conditioner, a hot-water dispenser, a washing machine, a high-definition color television, a stereo, and a karaoke machine. In the adjoining room, the bride sat on the bed with her head bowed while her mother, her grandmother, and her aunts wailed and cried—a traditional ritual to mourn a daughter’s departure.
The young men took turns running into the house to “steal” the dowry while the bride’s family and friends tried to fight them off. It took more than an hour to carry everything into the yard, where it was put into baskets or lashed tightly to bamboo poles. The groom was forced to wear a paper dunce cap, with a mustache and eyeglasses painted on his face and a chamber pot hung around his neck. He marched at the head of the procession out of the village. This was how victims of the Cultural Revolution had been paraded through the streets, except that he was smiling.
THE WEDDING LUNCH at the bride’s home followed set rules. There were twelve dishes, and firecrackers were set off between many of the courses. The banquet included a whole fish for each table, a chicken surrounded by a dozen hard-boiled eggs, and sweet glutinous rice balls—their roundness symbolized perfect happiness. The dishes were brought one at a time and cleared before they were finished, to ensure there would always be abundance in this marriage.
In the afternoon, the bride set out for the groom’s village. Min and her sister served as her escorts, but many of the wedding guests came along to prevent the bride from being taken away. The group would walk only a few steps before it halted in the road and forced Min and Guimin to sing a song. The procession then inched forward, stopped, and demanded more penalties. Most of the village had come out to join the fun of ganging up on Min and Guimin.
Sing more loudly!
One song is not enough!
It was all playacting, yet it felt serious. Two burly men and several middle-aged women led the attacks. Min and Guimin became flustered; they sang in quavering children’s voices, staring at the ground. Suddenly I felt like an outsider—alone, watching from a distance the familiar sight of Chinese people trapped in their groups. Even something as innocent as a communal blind date seemed to point to a flaw in the national character, an inability to break free and take individual action. And now I sensed that the Cultural Revolution was rooted in the dynamics of the Chinese village, with its rituals that enforced the safety of the group. It was dangerous to be alone; in a crowd, you gained confidence and power. When the villagers yelled at Min and Guimin to sing more loudly, or cursed their performances, the most extreme voice always carried the day. The two young women stood at the center of the crowd with their heads bowed, waiting for it to be over.
At last we saw the groom’s party on the path ahead. Young men came forward one after another to negotiate the bride’s release, offering cigarettes or impromptu performances while the villagers continued their bullying and insults. Finally the groom charged into the crowd, picked up his bride, and carried her off into a waiting black sedan that had been rented for the occasion.
At the groom’s house, everyone sat down for another feast even though they were still full from the last one. I kept waiting for some sort of ceremony or declaration to formalize the marriage, but none ever came. In these rituals, marriage had been portrayed with different meanings: an exchange of property between families, a confrontation of rival villages. But none of the traditions featured an agreement between the bride and the groom; the fact that this was a union of two individuals seemed almost incidental. When the liquor was poured, Guimin turned to her cousin and his new wife with a traditional toast: “Give birth soon to a treasured son.”
THE REST OF MY STAY passed quickly. Min’s family walked up the mountain to kowtow at the graves of their ancestors. She went to admire a three-story tile house that an uncle had built with his earnings as a migrant bricklayer; the house would stand vacant until he returned the next year with money to furnish it. On another day, she visited an aunt who sold clothing in the city to discuss the possibility of investing in a shop together. One evening, another uncle brought home a possible boyfriend for Min’s older sister. Guimin did not say a word to him all evening, but after he had gone to bed she pronounced his death sentence: “The wheels of his brain just don’t turn fast enough.” The boy was gone before breakfast.
On my last morning, Min accompanied me to the bus station—she would not return to Dongguan for another week. She was wearing a belted jacket in watermelon pink, cropped black jeans, and high-heeled boots. Hu Tao, the old boyfriend she had taken out to the city two years before, had gotten back in touch. He wanted to get back together, and he was introducing Min to his mother later that day.
“If I don’t find anyone else, I can always marry him in a few years,” Min said. Another young man from home who had opened a store in town was also hoping to meet up. Min did not seem too worried about her marriage prospects. The four sisters in the family were expected to marry in order, as in a Jane Austen novel. As long as Guimin stayed single, no one was pressuring Min.
At the station, I bought my ticket and boarded the bus for Wuhan. From my window seat I waved; Min smiled and waved back. It was beginning to rain, so she dashed over to a nearby store for cover. As my bus pulled away, I saw Min intently typing a message into her mobile phone. She was figuring out where she was going next, and as usual she had a plan.
