预计阅读本页时间:-
15 Perfect Health
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
Sometimes Chunming spoke English in her dreams. She would find herself in a place with foreigners, like the Dongguan library, and she would address them in English and they would respond.
I asked Chunming how it felt to dream in a language you couldn’t speak.
“I can’t describe it,” she said. “All I know is that in the dream I am speaking English.”
In the few lessons she had taken at Assembly-Line English, Chunming hadn’t yet mastered the alphabet. For pronunciation, she relied on the International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of notation commonly used to learn a foreign language. The queer-looking symbols became her key to English, a row of locked gates behind which language waited to be released like a flood. “I think the secret to learning English is the phonetic symbols,” Chunming told me. So many people talked about studying English, but no one I had met invested it with more meaning than Chunming.
If I learn English, I can see more of the world. I can enjoy life more. I want to find new kinds of happiness. If I don’t learn English, I will always feel the limits of my life.
In September 2005, nine months after she had gone to the Dongguan Science Museum, Chunming paid another visit to Mr. Wu. A dozen young women were enrolled at the school, which was still being run out of his apartment. They studied and boarded free of charge and took turns cooking meals; in exchange, they compiled the curriculum for Mr. Wu’s textbook project. The students lived in cramped bedrooms behind the classroom. Each room had four bunk beds, with laundry draped over the bed frames and buckets of water on the floor. The rooms felt like workers’ dorms inside a factory.
Mr. Wu wasn’t there when we arrived; his former student, the English teacher Liu Yixia, showed us around. The power had been cut for the day, and Chunming walked through the sweltering rooms with her lips pursed in judgment.
“We stay here most of the time,” said a student named Xiao Yongli. “Teacher Wu doesn’t let us go out.”
“He doesn’t let you go out?” Chunming looked worried.
“He doesn’t think it’s good for study.”
“Once you go outside, you’ll begin to have doubts,” explained Liu Yixia. “That’s why the girls all cut their hair so short.”
“Everyone has to cut their hair?”
“Yes, so they won’t be distracted by worrying about being pretty.”
I chatted with Xiao Yongli in English; she spoke quickly and with confidence. She was twenty years old, from Sichuan Province. She had worked in a Samsung factory and come to Assembly-Line English a year ago. Now she studied ten hours a day.
“Do you study on weekends too?” I asked.
Xiao Yongli had to ask me in Chinese what “weekend” meant. Yes, she said, she studied then too.
I asked her why she had come to Dongguan, and she was silent for some moments. Switching to Chinese, I asked if she understood.
“It’s a long story,” she said earnestly. “I’m trying to figure out how to say it.”
Finally, in English: “I came to Dongguan to work.”
She wanted to be a simultaneous interpreter, an odd career choice for Dongguan, where United Nations–caliber translators were not exactly in high demand. “Our teacher says that’s the highest level of learning the language,” she said. “I want to reach the highest level.” Clearly Xiao Yongli hadn’t thought much about what she would do with English; that would come later. Right now she was pure determination.
WE MET MR. WU LATER at a coffee shop near his apartment. I half listened as he spoke to Chunming about the cerebrum, the right hand, the left hand, the eyeballs. I noticed that after every sentence he smiled automatically—maybe he had read in a book that this would make people like him more.
“Our students can do six hundred sentences an hour.” Smile.
“Six hundred sentences . . .”
“Not all of them, only the best ones,” Mr. Wu corrected himself quickly.
“You mean, they can read six hundred sentences an hour?” Chunming asked.
“Read? No! They can read one hundred and eight sentences a minute! I’m talking about writing.”
Chunming turned to me. “Can you write six hundred sentences an hour?”
“I’m sure she cannot,” Mr. Wu said smugly. Smile.
I considered pointing out that this might not be the skill that mattered most, but I decided against it. My cerebrum was starting to hurt.
“So what you’re saying is that most people’s potential is not being developed,” Chunming said. “I agree with that.” She seemed taken by Mr. Wu’s sales pitch, and then she asked about his best pupil. “What about Liu Yixia? Do you think she’s done well?”
“She’s okay,” Mr. Wu said. “After all, she studied at my school for a year. But in terms of writing sentences, she cannot compete with my students. That Xiao Yongli can write six hundred sentences an hour.”
Chunming asked about the school rules. Mr. Wu locked his students in at night and woke them at six every morning for calisthenics. They were allowed out once a week, on Sunday evenings, to buy personal necessities; each girl could make one phone call home a month. Visitors were forbidden. Of course, Mr. Wu said, an older student like Chunming could rent an apartment nearby and just take lessons during the day. But without absolute devotion, he was skeptical of her chances. “Learning is painstaking work,” he said severely, and that time he forgot to smile.
CHUNMING LIKED THE IDEA of dedication and transformation, but she was put off by the school’s living conditions and the remoteness of the neighborhood. Meanwhile, she had just invested in a new company. To quit and study English instead—a venture whose payoff was at least a year away—would shock all her friends. On the bus ride home, she mulled it over. “When my friends hear I’ve started a company and immediately left to study English, they’ll think I’m very odd.”
“But I bet they’ll feel envious,” I said, thinking of all the times strangers had gushed over my English.
“I don’t know,” Chunming said. “But after I learn English and get a new job, that’s when they’ll see what my achievement is.” Outside the bus window, the lights in the factories were coming on. “I could cut off contact with all my friends for two years,” Chunming said, “and when I finished I could see them again.” She was preparing, perhaps, to renounce the world. But she was outside again, and that was always where the doubts begin.
* * *
Two months passed before I saw Chunming again. She went home to see her family. (“Home is always the same. It’s even poorer than before.”) She had two teeth pulled in preparation for getting braces, which she had finally chosen over porcelain fakes. One night back in Dongguan, she was riding in a friend’s car when a Toyota sped toward the intersection where they were stopped, smashed their car on the left side, and roared away. The man in the passenger’s seat was hospitalized with stitches to his head. Chunming, who had been sitting in back near where the car hit, twisted her shoulder.
I saw her two days after the accident. She was still in pain and couldn’t lift her arm. “When I think about it, I feel really scared,” she said. “You must really cherish what you have.” We were sitting on the couch in the room above the machine-parts store. “I’ve encountered a new opportunity,” Chunming said. “Whenever I think about it, I feel like my dream has returned to me.”
I waited.
In a low voice, she said two words: “Direct sales.”
Wanmei, the company she had worked for in 1996, had not died after the government’s ban on chuanxiao, network sales. It had retooled its business and expanded into a wide range of health products: high-fiber meal, amino acid tablets, pollen supplements. The company was thriving; all three of its Malaysian-Chinese founders drove Mercedes-Benzes. Chunming started eating Wanmei nutritional powder mixed with water every day for breakfast and selling the products to her friends.
Overnight she had become an authority on health. Only 5 percent of the population was healthy and 70 percent “subhealthy,” she informed me; the symptoms of subhealth, according to one of her new health books, were easily tired, has many dreams, excitable, catches colds, lacks concentration. Much of her conversation revolved around bodily functions, with anecdotes involving personal acquaintances and historical figures such as the wife of Chiang Kai-shek. I have a friend who did not empty her bowels for four days. Soong Mayling would often wash clean her intestines to remove poisons.
Chunming had started attending motivational lectures for Wanmei salespeople. She grabbed my pen and wrote:
To read 10,000 books is not as good as to walk 10,000 miles.
To walk 10,000 miles is not as good as to meet 10,000 people.
To meet 10,000 people is not as good as to have a successful person show you the way.
To have a successful person show you the way is not as good as walking with that person toward success together.
She put the pen down. “That’s what the lectures are about.”
I asked Chunming how she had re-entered the field. A few months earlier, an old friend from chuanxiao days had contacted her. He had rejoined Wanmei and wanted her in his network; salespeople earned a commission on the sales of all their recruits, and he remembered Chunming’s talent for selling. He told her that the direct-sales industry was legal now and gave her a Wanmei promotional DVD. She was focused on her new company and told him she wasn’t interested.
One day, Chunming heard on the news that the government had passed a law legalizing direct sales; her friend, it turned out, had been telling the truth. She found the DVD he had given her and watched it. “In the 1980s, the people who manufactured tape recorders made a lot of money,” the narrator of the video said. “In the 1990s, the Internet made millionaires. The twenty-first century is the era of high growth for direct sales. If you rule out direct sales, you rule out the opportunity for success.” The video did not deny that people were suspicious of the industry—in fact, such doubts were central to its arguments. The more people refused Wanmei, the greater the opportunity for those who embraced it first. This was an evangelical appeal, with one difference: If you came late in life to Jesus, you could still be saved. But if you delayed joining direct sales, you would lose out financially to everyone who built their networks before you.
“Today you know about this opportunity in your heart,” the man in the video said. “You can no longer pretend that you don’t know.”
CHUNMING SOLD HER SHARE in the mold-parts company to Fu Gui, her business partner. She moved out of the store and rented a spacious apartment in downtown Dongguan. In the entry, she hung a floor-to-ceiling poster that showed the Wanmei factory complex beneath the slogan “Perfect Cause, Perfect Life.” She bought a set of tall glass cabinets and stocked them with shower gel and nutritional meal and powdered drink mix. Posters throughout the apartment advertised aloe vera, bee pollen, royal jelly, health tea, seabuckthorn, and “garlic soft capsule”—“that one is good for overweight people and also fights cancer,” Chunming told me. From a machine-parts mall, she had moved to live inside what looked like a product showroom.
She was now taking four of the company’s products a day: a high-fiber meal to clean the digestive tract; a health tea; a powder of aloe, minerals, and pollen that was good for the skin; and a nutritional powder for breakfast. She didn’t look any more or less healthy than before, but she had finally gotten braces, and permed her hair and dyed it orange, the color of pumpkin pie. Her new bible was Direct-Sell Your Way to Wealth: Major Arguments, and she memorized the food combinations that could hurt nutritional absorption. Under no circumstances, she warned me, should I eat dog meat with garlic. I must never drink sorghum liquor and coffee at the same time. A list of “One Hundred Health Warnings” contained enough symptoms to drive anyone to hypochondria: skin dry or oily—“See, I think you have this,” Chunming said—bad breath, bad temper, poor sleep, difficulty concentrating, eyes tear easily.
After I had endured two sessions of Chunming’s proselytizing, I decided that Wanmei’s founders—Mercedes-driving Malaysians, or whoever they might be—must be geniuses. Health was a national obsession in China. Most people did not have medical insurance and lived in fear of being bankrupted by illness. And the Chinese loved to discuss ailments and folk cures; questions about fertility or the state of one’s bowels were considered perfectly normal, even among people who had just met. A thousand-year-old heritage of traditional medicine was based on adjusting the balance between various foods and herbs, and everyone considered himself an expert. Yet overnight the Chinese had moved into an unfamiliar world of abundance, where junk food was like a virus against which they had not yet developed immunity. Anyone could see what would help them—quit smoking, exercise, eat less fat—but Wanmei’s prescription was more appealing, a miracle cure in scientific packaging. And it could make you rich.
“In three years, I’ll achieve my goal of financial independence and freedom,” Chunming said. “By 2008, at the minimum, I’ll have an income of one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand yuan a month. By then I’ll have my own car, and freedom in how I spend my time. I’ll be able to go wherever I want, whenever I want.”
Finally I ventured to ask her: “Why did you choose direct sales instead of English?”
She nodded. This was a new habit: Whenever I asked a question she would nod, because now she had all the answers. “If you don’t do this today, you can’t do it tomorrow,” she said. “If I join today, I get my friends to be in my network. If I wait until tomorrow, I’ll be part of their network instead. In one or two years after I make money, won’t I learn English even better?” A new idea had entered her world and she reordered her life around it. English lessons, or seabuckthorn and garlic soft capsule—each was just a way to become someone else. And now she had, with seemingly no memory of what had come before.
* * *
Soon after joining Wanmei, Chunming attended a company sales convention. Buses from around the country converged on Zhongshan, an hour’s drive south of Dongguan, where the company had its headquarters, including a production plant and its own five-star hotel. Only the biggest earners were invited—emphasis on hierarchy was one of the company’s organizing principles—but many managers had chartered buses to bring their recruits anyway, so they could “experience Wanmei in person.” There are still millions of Chinese who see an overnight bus trip to a factory as a vacation.
None went away unimpressed: Only a highly successful health-products company would have its own luxury hotel. “This is where all the managers stay when they come for training,” Chunming said. “Soon I will be a junior manager.” She was wearing a stylish twill blazer with her hair in tight pigtails, Pippi Longstocking–style; her eyes were wide with excitement like a girl on the first day of the county fair. The parking lot of the Golden Diamond Hotel swarmed with people: old men with rheumy eyes, migrants in baggy suits, housewives, peasant women with sloping shoulders and leathery skin from long hours in the fields. They were among society’s least privileged members, brought together by their devotion to Wanmei. The gathering, it occurred to me, was a kind of anti–talent market.
Chunming walked through the crowd pointing out celebrities. “Oh! I’ve only seen that woman in photographs! She makes”—a quick calculation—“five hundred thousand yuan a month.” She went up to another middle-aged woman. “I heard your talk, ‘The Products Changed My Life,’ ” Chunming said. “I was very moved.”
The woman smiled modestly.
Chunming turned to me. “This woman used to be a dishwasher.”
We went into the hotel to admire its marble lobby. The wait for the ladies’ room was long, and Chunming took the opportunity to meet people—to duanlian, or train herself. “Where are you from?” she asked a woman in a pink suit with a flared ruffle at the hips.
“Hunan,” the woman answered.
“Where in Hunan?”
“Changsha.”
“I’ve heard that business in Changsha has really taken off!” Chunming said. “And your skin is so good!” The woman went into a stall, and Chunming turned immediately to the woman behind her. “Where are you from?”
By mid-morning, the energy level at Wanmei headquarters was at its peak. Cheering groups posed for photos before the building entrance; crowds flooded the lobby where Wanmei commercials played continuously on TV screens. At 10:30 the top-earning managers walked down a red carpet that had been laid in the middle of the parking lot. It was lined on both sides with recruits, many carrying banners with the names of top salespeople. A great roar went up as the managers marched into the building to begin three days of training on how to sell even more Wanmei products.
I walked into a store and said to the boss, “I’m from Wanmei.”
He said, “Out.”
I repeated my words.
He said, “Fuck.”
(Laughter.)
I walked out. I thought, the next person will not be so low-class. So I went into the next store, and I talked to the boss. He became a customer, and he has bought sixty thousand yuan of products from me.
(Applause.)
Later that day, Chunming attended a “sharing” session for Wanmei salespeople. More than a hundred people had gathered to hear inspirational speeches in a drafty auditorium whose stage was hung with leftover new year decorations. A woman in a cream-colored pantsuit took the stage. She had joined Wanmei in 1996, quit after the government ban, and returned, just like Chunming.
I want to ask the women in the audience: Are you satisfied with the way your life is now? Do you want to change your life?
Yes!
Are you satisfied just to marry a good husband?
No!
I don’t believe you. I know some women in the audience think it’s enough to marry a good husband. But if you don’t have knowledge and cultivation, can you hold on to your husband?
No!
That’s right. We live in a very pragmatic society.
The speakers all spoke without notes. They used hand gestures and made eye contact and smiled. They knew how to repeat sentence patterns, to establish a rhythm, and to excite a crowd. Their hands didn’t tremble. A retired music teacher went up and disappeared behind the lectern but for a cloud of permed gray hair. She was sixty years old and she spoke in a gentle, even teacher’s voice.
In the past I looked much older than I was. I caught a lot of colds. I was always tired. From head to foot, I had many health problems: congestion, intestinal problems, lung problems, skin conditions, sleeplessness, heart disease, tired eyes. I couldn’t walk half an hour without getting tired.
In November 2003, a colleague introduced me to Wanmei. My first week taking Wanmei, one side of my nose cleared. The second week, the other side cleared.
(Applause.)
In two weeks, Wanmei got rid of all my colds. After a few months, I could walk for a whole day.
(Applause.)
I could sleep through the night.
(Applause.)
I am grateful to Manager Chen. My medical problems are very serious. He taught me how to use the various products and in what amounts.
In China, people from such humble backgrounds rarely spoke in public. But here they were, each person unapologetic and full of faith that her personal story was interesting. They were better speakers than most Chinese professors and officials I had seen—better, by far, than their country’s top leaders, who appeared once a year for a live press conference looking like wax figures wheeled in from a museum.
A woman wearing a down jacket with the ruddy skin of a farmer took the stage. She spoke in a raspy voice, with such a thick Cantonese accent that she was almost impossible to understand.
In the past, my health was very bad. I went to the hospital every week with colds, dizziness, headaches. A friend introduced me to Wanmei, and I started to go to lectures. Through Wanmei’s training, I have changed myself.
In the past, I couldn’t speak Mandarin. I would never dare to stand up here and share my experience. I felt too inferior. We are all ordinary people. But through Wanmei, we have become healthy, we have done training, we have made friends. These are things that money can’t buy.
* * *
In the months after the sales convention, Chunming waited for the government to issue Wanmei’s business license; without it, she couldn’t recruit the network of salespeople who would help her earn a lot of money. But she started to hear troubling rumors: Wanmei’s top managers earned money not by selling products, but by charging exorbitant fees for training sessions. It looked like Wanmei—“Perfect Cause, Perfect Life”—might not be much better than a pyramid scheme.
Once again, direct sales had trapped Chunming. She had borrowed money from friends to rent and furnish her downtown apartment, so she took a job as a salesperson at a family-owned factory that made glue used in shoes and handbags. She moved into a single room in a tile building next door to the glue factory. With this latest life change came yet another hairstyle: Chunming grew out her perm and had her hair cut in a sharp asymmetrical line in back.
But she had no time to be disappointed. A new man entered her life, an American in his mid-fifties named Ha-wei Dai-meng-de.
YOU ARE ABOUT TO COME face-to-face with what you have been looking for all these long years.
Harvey Diamond was an American health guru who believed that most drugs were toxic and that the human body had the ability to heal itself. He advocated regular “monodieting”—eating only fruits, vegetables, juices, or raw foods for a number of days—and cutting back on animal products, as a way to cleanse the body and combat disease. His Fit for Life series of books, according to promotional materials, had sold more than twelve million copies and had been translated into thirty-three languages.
In the summer of 2006, Chunming came across his ideas in a Dongguan bookstore. She was immediately entranced by the story of Ha-wei Dai-meng-de, who had been plagued by ill health until he discovered the medical precepts that changed his life. Chunming read Ha-wei’s latest book straight through twice. She began consuming fruits or fruit-and-vegetable juices every day for breakfast; for lunch and dinner, she ate only vegetables and rice. She drank three quarts of water a day and carried a water bottle everywhere she went, in accordance with Ha-wei’s prescriptions. His underlying philosophy appealed to her. Take charge of your health, he wrote. Remake your life. Your actions carry consequences. These were the tenets of the American self-help movement, which reflected a fervent belief in second chances; they were well suited to young migrants from the countryside who were just getting their first chance. Aside from the fruit-and-vegetable fasts, much of what Ha-wei had to say was standard knowledge for any American schoolchild: Eat fruits and vegetables, cut back on meat, exercise. But for Chunming, basic nutrition was a revelation around which she could shape her whole life, just as Ha-wei had done.
CHUNMING’S NEW LIVING QUARTERS were humble. A bed draped in mosquito netting took up most of the room, with a desk and a bookcase squeezed to one side. The apartment had a small bathroom but no kitchen; a low table by the door was stacked with celery, carrots, oranges, apples, and tomatoes. When I visited her now, the first thing Chunming did was grab a handful of fruit and cut it up in the bathroom sink for me. Suddenly a fruit-and-vegetable diet was the natural order of the universe, and she had become an expert in evolutionary biology.
Sharp teeth are intended to eat meat, but we have only two sharp teeth. That means that we’re supposed to eat mostly vegetables and very little meat.
Anyone I meet, I tell them, “Drink more water.” Now I can look at someone and just from the quality of their skin I can tell if they have health problems.
Chinese people are overly addicted to medicines. When a child has a fever, they give it a shot. But the fever is the body’s way of fighting illness. Fever is good for a person.
I found myself agreeing with a lot of what she said. Chinese people did rely too much on medicine, and they had a morbid fear of drinking water. The whole country seemed to me permanently dehydrated. It was common to be told that a woman shouldn’t drink cold water because it would damage her womb, while drinking water at night caused stomach trouble. But as usual Chunming had gone to extremes. “After I read that book, I didn’t eat rice for one week,” she told me. “I just ground up fruits and vegetables into juice and drank them.” On that particular day, she had consumed two glasses of tomato juice and an apple.
Ha-wei counseled his readers to build up gradually to raw-food diets. Your effort to improve your health and prevent becoming sick needn’t be a stress-filled journey. It can be a joyous one. This is not a race! Maybe he had not met anyone like Chunming. She was already seeing the benefits: Her nose wasn’t oily anymore; she no longer suffered from constipation and eyelash loss. Her moles were getting smaller, a scar on her leg was fading, and her teeth were getting whiter. She had stopped using toothpaste.
Chunming’s quest for perfect health proved to be a boon in her new job. At the end of the workday, she would stand outside the gate of a shoe or handbag factory and ask the workers the last name of their factory’s boss and the head of the production department. Then she called up those executives and pretended to have done business with them or to have a friend in common. In the disorganization of the Dongguan workplace, no one questioned her and almost everyone agreed to a meeting. After she made her sales visit, Chunming would send a letter of thanks along with a few health books as a gift. In the letter, she wrote:
I know you are very busy. I recommend this set of health books to you and hope you can look them over in your spare time. I think you will benefit a great deal from them. I recommend these books from the bottom of my heart. I believe these are the best books I have ever read about health.
Whether we do business or not doesn’t matter. We can be friends just the same. Every company must make its own choice. Of course, if you wish to give me an opportunity, I will value it and do my best to provide your company with the most satisfactory service.
She had met close to a hundred potential clients this way and had already landed four regular ones.
I tried to picture Ha-wei’s typical American reader. Perhaps it was an overweight man fed up with years of yo-yo dieting, or a middle-aged woman who worried about the breast cancer that ran in her family, or a retiree who woke up every morning to a cocktail of medications. All of these people, you could say, were victims of modern living, of technology and medical advances and processed food. They longed for a way of life that was healthy and simple and pure. Chunming had grown up in a rural village, where people ate vegetables and rice and almost no one went to the hospital or ate food that had been bought in a store. And now she wanted the same things the Americans wanted. For better or worse, that was one measure of how far she had traveled.
* * *
Almost everyone I knew in Dongguan was a striver. To some extent, this was self-selecting: A person with ambition was more likely to be open to new things, and that included talking to me. I can’t say that Min and Chunming were typical of China’s vast population of migrant workers. They were only the young women I ended up writing and caring about, the ones I came to know best. But their lives and struggles were emblematic of their country today—and of the China of my family, too, who strived to make up for everything they had lost or left behind. In the end, across time and class, this is the story of China: leaving home, enduring hardship, and making a new life. They did so against daunting odds, but perhaps these challenges were no more intimidating than those that faced newcomers to America a century ago.
Successful or not, migration changes fates. Studies of recent migrants suggest that most of them are not destined to return to the farm. The ones who do well will likely buy apartments and settle in their adopted cities; the others may eventually move to towns and cities near their home villages and set up stores, restaurants, and small businesses like hairdressing salons or tailoring shops. Such enterprises, in turn, tend to employ returned migrants, who are seen as more capable than those who have never gone out.
As I got to know the factory girls, I couldn’t help worrying about them. They took such risks, and they were surrounded by corrupt or dishonest people. They contained tragic flaws: The same fearlessness that had helped them rise in the world could be their downfall. Min made major life decisions with a snap of her fingers; Chunming embraced every fad that passed her way. Liu Yixia moved too fast to improve her English the way she wanted. In some ways, I probably knew them better than their own friends did. Being an outsider helped—I was so removed from their universe that they felt comfortable confiding in me. They were hungry to know about my world too, asking me how Americans ate, and dated, and married, and made money, and raised children. Perhaps my presence was encouraging to them, a promise that someone knew and cared what they were going through. But in all the time I knew them, the migrant girls never asked me for help, and rarely even for advice. Life was something they faced alone, as they had been telling me from the first day we met. I can only rely on myself.
The first time I met Wu Chunming, she was working for a foreign company, making a thousand dollars a month, and living in a three-bedroom apartment in downtown Dongguan. The last time I saw her, two and a half years later, she was working for a Chinese company, making $150 a month, and living in a single room in a part of the city known for small shoe factories with poor working conditions. By every calculus that mattered, she had fallen a long way. But she was more serene than I had ever seen her. In a city where a Mercedes was the measure of all things, Chunming had somehow broken free and developed her own personal morality.
“Before I was always hungry,” she told me. “If I saw a sweater I liked, I would have to get it immediately. Now if I don’t eat the best things or buy the nicest things, it doesn’t matter so much. If I see a friend or a family member happy, then that is meaningful.” She was no longer panicked about being single at the age of thirty-two, and she had stopped having affairs with men she met online. “I believe I’ll become more and more beautiful, and more and more healthy, and my economic circumstances will get better and better,” she said.
Chunming hoped to have children someday, and she often asked me about American attitudes toward child-raising. “I would like a child to grow up to have a happy life and make a contribution to society,” she said.
“A contribution to society?” I asked her, startled. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t mean to be a big scientist or something like that,” Chunming said. “How many people can do that? I think if you live a happy life and are a good person, that is a contribution to society.”
* * *
The last time I went to Dongguan was in February 2007. The air tasted smoky and cold, and the streets were full of workers heading home to the village to celebrate another new year. A driver in Chunming’s factory was going to deliver a hongbao—a red envelope containing eight hundred yuan—to a client and attend their new year’s banquet. He convinced Chunming to go with him because she knew how to talk, and she invited me. The dinner would probably be in a fancy restaurant, she said, which was how most factories did things nowadays.
When we arrived at the Wonder Fashion Leather factory, she was disappointed. The workers were already eating in the factory cafeteria at large round tables under fluorescent lights. This was where they ate all their meals, although on this day there was a whole fish at each table. The dishes were greasy; Chunming picked at the vegetables, which were also coated with oil. At the front of the room, the factory boss led workers through games of musical chairs and telephone. He knew his employees by name and teased the ones who had boyfriends and girlfriends already. “I can see this boss is a good person,” Chunming said.
After dinner came the lucky draw. The workers left their free food and beer and moved forward as one, like a battalion given the signal to advance. There were more than a hundred of them, mostly teenagers wearing short-sleeve factory shirts. Some of the boys were so young they looked like girls. In every factory, the lucky draw was the highlight of the new year’s banquet. To me, it was a game of terrible odds; to the workers, it was the amazing possibility that for once in this world, you might get something for nothing. The top prize tonight was wool blankets, and then comforters, hair dryers, and thermoses. There were also cash awards of fifty, one hundred, and two hundred yuan. Those who didn’t win anything could claim a consolation prize, a face towel and a scoop of clothing detergent out of a giant bag. When the workers heard that, they cheered just as loudly as for any of the other prizes.
As one of the factory’s suppliers, Chunming was invited to draw the winning tickets for the one-hundred-yuan prize. She walked to the front of the room, grabbed the microphone, and effortlessly took over the proceedings.
Do you all hope that the factory does well in 2007?
Yes!
Do you all hope that the boss makes a lot of money, so you can have higher salaries and more prizes?
Yes!
Do you all pledge to work very hard this year to make those wishes come true?
Yes!
In her factory days, Chunming told me, it was rare to meet anyone from the outside world. When you did, it felt fresh and new, and you tried to learn everything you could. Now she spoke to these young people as if she had known them all her life; her voice rang out through the hall. I am the same as you. The workers pressed forward, cheering their visitor and dragging out their applause, as if they too did not want this night to end.