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3 To Die Poor Is a Sin
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May 25, 1994
After I was fired from the Yongtong factory, fortunately my wages were fully paid. I had more than one hundred yuan on me and I was not frightened at all. Still I was a little worried, since after all I did not even have an identity card. But with no way out I could only take an ID card that said I was born in 1969 and try my luck. Who knew my luck would be pretty good? I made my way into this factory’s plastic molds department.
Since I have come to Guangdong, I have jumped factories four or five times, and each factory was better than the last. More important was that at each instance, I relied on myself. I never begged for help from anyone. Although I have a few good friends, not one helped me at the time when I most needed it.
I remember when I fled back from Shenzhen. At that time, I truly had nothing to my name. Other than my own self, I had nothing else. I wandered outside for a month, completely penniless, once even going hungry for two days, and no one knew . . . Although older cousin and his wife were in Longyan, I did not want to go find them, because they could not really help me. I often wanted to rely on others, but they cannot be relied on. You can only rely on yourself.
Yes, I can only rely on myself.
The first time Wu Chunming went out she did not tell her parents. It was the summer of 1992 and to migrate was something bold and dangerous. In her village in Hunan Province, it was said that girls who went to the city would be tricked into brothels and never heard from again.
Chunming was seventeen years old that summer. She had finished middle school and was peddling fruits and vegetables in a city near home; she migrated with a cousin who was still in school. The two girls borrowed money for train tickets to Dongguan and found jobs in a factory that made paint for toys. The smell of the chemicals gave them headaches, and they returned home after two months as broke as before. Chunming went out again the following spring. Her parents objected, and argued, and cried. But when she decided to leave anyway, with a few friends from nearby villages, her mother borrowed money for her train fare.
Guangdong in 1993 was even more chaotic than it is today. Migrants from the countryside flooded the streets looking for work, sleeping in bus stations and under bridges. The only way to find a job was to knock on factory doors, and Chunming and her friends were turned away from many doors before they were hired at the Guotong toy factory. Ordinary workers there made one hundred yuan a month, or about twelve dollars; to stave off hunger, they bought giant bags of instant noodles and added salt and boiling water. “We thought if we ever made two hundred yuan a month,” Chunming said later, “we would be perfectly happy.”
After four months, Chunming jumped to another factory, but left soon after a fellow worker said her cousin knew of better jobs in Shenzhen. Chunming and a few friends traveled there, spent the night under a highway overpass, and met the girl’s cousin the next morning. He brought them to a hair salon and took them upstairs, where a heavily made-up young woman sat on a massage bed waiting for customers. Chunming was terrified at the sight. “I was raised very traditionally,” she said. “I thought everyone in that place was bad and wanted me to be a prostitute. I thought that once I went in there, I would turn bad too.”
The girls were told that they should stay and take showers in a communal stall, but Chunming refused. She walked back down the stairs, looked out the front door, and ran, abandoning her friends and the suitcase that contained her money, a government-issued identity card, and a photograph of her mother. Footsteps came up behind her. She turned in to one alley and then another, and the footsteps stopped. Chunming ran into a yard and found a deserted chicken coop in back. She climbed into the coop and hid there, all day and all night. The next morning, her arms laced with mosquito bites, Chunming went into the street and knelt on the sidewalk to beg for money, but no one gave her anything. A passerby brought her to the police station; without the name or address of the hair salon, the police couldn’t help her either. They gave her twenty yuan for bus fare back to her factory.
The bus driver dropped her off only partway back to Dongguan. Chunming started to walk, and a man on the street followed her. She spotted a young woman in a factory uniform and asked if she could sneak into her factory for the night. The young woman borrowed a worker’s ID card and brought Chunming in, where she hid that night in a shower stall. In the morning, Chunming stole clean pants and a T-shirt that were hanging out to dry in the bathroom and climbed the factory gate to get out. By then she had not eaten in two days. A bus driver bought her a piece a bread and gave her a lift back to Dongguan, where her cousin and his wife worked.
Chunming did not tell them what had happened to her. Instead she wandered the streets. She befriended a cook on a construction site who let her eat with the other workers, and at night she sneaked into friends’ factory dorms to sleep. Without an ID card, she could not get a new job. After a month of wandering, Chunming saw an ad for assembly-line jobs at the Yinhui toy factory. She found an ID card that someone had lost or left behind and used it to get hired. Officially she was Tang Congyun, born in 1969. That made her five years older than she really was, but no one looked closely at such things.
Chunming worked at the Yinhui factory for a year, mixing vats of plastic that was poured into molds to make toy cars, planes, and trains. She was bold and she liked to talk, and she made friends easily. Her new friends called her Tang Congyun. She had become, quite literally, someone else.
For years after she left the factory, she received letters addressed to Tang Congyun. Chunming never found out who she was.
I HAD KNOWN CHUNMING for two years before she told me this story. It was a Sunday afternoon at the end of 2006, and she was sitting in a Dongguan juice bar after a day of shopping for birthday presents. “I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me then,” she said, sipping her mixed-fruit juice. “When I tell this story it’s like it happened yesterday.”
“Did you ever find out what happened to the friends you left behind in the hair salon?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know if it was a truly bad place or just a place where you could work as a massage girl if you wanted. But it was frightening that they would not let us leave.”
Chunming’s best friend had been among the ones she left behind. They had met in the city on the assembly line, so Chunming didn’t know the name of her friend’s village or how to find her again. Years later, Chunming met a girl who had known the friend; she said the friend had gone home and had later come out to Dongguan again. Chunming had to conclude from that brief account that her friend had turned out fine. But there was no way of knowing for sure; perhaps she had been tricked into a brothel and was never heard from again, just as the people in the village had said. Chunming’s good friend was lost to her, like so many people she had met along the way. A year in Dongguan is a long time, and Chunming had lived in the city for thirteen years.
* * *
May 24, 1994
We start work at seven in the morning and get off work at nine at night. Afterward we shower and wash our clothes. At around ten, those with money go out for midnight snacks and those without money go to sleep. We sleep until 6:30 in the morning. No one wants to get out of bed, but we must work at seven. Twenty minutes to go: Crawl out of bed, rub your swollen eyes, wash your face, and brush your teeth. Ten minutes to go: Those who want breakfast use these ten minutes to eat breakfast, but I have seen many people not eat. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t want to eat, or to save money, or to stay thin . . .
I certainly would not ignore my health for the sake of thinness or saving money. After all, what is the point of doing migrant work? Can it be that it is just to earn this bit of money?!
Soon after she came to the city, Chunming began to keep a diary. In notebooks with pastel-pink covers she described life in the factory, the tyranny of the timekeepers, and the rare moments of leisure that were given over to gossip, snacks, and crushes on boys. You must record every day the things you have seen, heard, felt, and thought, she wrote. In this way, you can not only raise your writing standards but also see the traces of your own growing up. In these same pages, she plotted her escape from this world through a relentless program of self-improvement: reading novels, practicing her handwriting, and learning to speak—both to erase her Hunan accent and to master Cantonese, the language of the factory bosses. Her greatest fear was of getting stuck where she was. Time was Chunming’s enemy, reminding her that another day had passed and she had not yet achieved her goals. But time was also her friend, because she was still young.
The diary entries were often undated and out of order. Chunming wrote quickly, describing her days, drafting letters to her parents, copying inspirational slogans and song lyrics, and goading herself to work harder. Sometimes her sentences marched in diagonal formation across two pages, growing until each character was an inch high. Inside her head she was shouting.
I HAVE NO TIME TO BE UNHAPPY BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY THINGS I WANT TO DO.
“TIME IS LIFE”
WE CAN BE ORDINARY BUT WE MUST NOT BE VULGAR.—WU CHUNMING
RIGHT NOW I HAVE NOTHING. MY ONLY CAPITAL IS THAT I AM STILL YOUNG.
It is almost one o’clock! I cannot bear to put down this issue of Migrant Worker but I must work at seven tonight again. I might as well go to sleep.
Ai! I truly hate that there is too little time. Every day I work for twelve hours; in the remaining twelve hours I must eat, shower, wash my clothes, and sleep. How much time is there left to read? Working on the night shift, time is even more fragmented: After I get off work and eat, I must wait an hour to shower. I sleep in the afternoon until six and then must get up. Dinner is another hour wasted . . . I read at night until midnight; that leaves not even six hours for sleep. There is one hour left for other things.
I HAVE BEEN DEFEATED, DEFEATED
CAN IT REALLY BE THAT ON THIS ROAD OF LIFE I AM DESTINED TO BE DEFEATED?
I DON’T BELIEVE IT
I ABSOLUTELY DON’T BELIEVE IT
Wu Chunming, you cannot go on living every day like this! Think about it: You have already been at this factory an entire half year, but what have you really gained? You know that to do migrant work in the plastic molds department for your whole life does not have any prospects, so you want to job-hop and find a satisfactory job. First you must learn to speak Cantonese. Why are you so useless? Are you truly so stupid?
Why can’t you learn the things other people learn?
You are also a person, Wu Chunming. Can it be that you are a useless thing?
You have already had more than two months but made no progress in Cantonese. Do you remember your goal when you entered this factory was to learn Cantonese? If you cannot learn Cantonese in this year, then you are a dumb pig, a dumb ox, and you need not do migrant work in Guangdong anymore. With this two or three hundred yuan a month, you would be better off at home.
March 23
Ai, there are really too many things I want to do, and too little time. Some people say they are annoyed to death, hai! Other people are annoyed, but I have no time to be annoyed.
One, I must exercise my body. To be fat is not acceptable.
Two, I must read a lot and practice my writing, so that I can live happily and richly.
Three, I must learn to speak Cantonese. This must not be hurried but slowly learned.
As for sleep time, six hours at most is enough.
March 29
We were paid today. I got 365 yuan. After repaying a fifty-yuan debt, I still have three hundred yuan. I want to buy a watch, clothes, and personal items. How will I have any left over? . . . Summer is here and I don’t have any clothes . . . and I must buy a watch. Without a watch, I cannot make better use of my time.
As for sending money home, that is even less possible. Next month after we are paid, I will register at the Shorthand Secretarial Correspondence University. I must get a college diploma. I certainly did not come to Guangdong just to earn this two or three hundred yuan a month . . . This is merely a temporary stopping place. This is definitely not the place I will stay forever.
No one will understand me, and I don’t need others to understand me.
I can only walk my own road and let other people talk!
May 22
A lot of people say I have changed. I don’t know if I have changed or not . . . I am much more silent now and I don’t love to laugh the way I used to. Sometimes when I laugh it is forced. Sometimes I feel I have become numb. “Numb.” Numb. No! No! But I really don’t know what word I should use to describe the me that I am now.
Anyway, I am so tired, so tired.
Really, really, I feel so tired.
My body and my spirit feel so tired.
Too tired, too tired.
I don’t want to live this way anymore.
I don’t want to live this way anymore.
Never to live that way anymore.
How should I live?
* * *
Even as Chunming plotted her rise in the factory world, in her letters home she struggled to be a good traditional daughter.
Mother, I have knit you a sweater . . . If I weren’t knitting a sweater, I could have used this day to read so many books. But Mother, sometimes I think: I would rather be Mother’s obedient daughter, a filial daughter, and even throw away those books I want so much to read.
Mother, I have knit my love for you into this sweater . . . Mother, remember when I was still at home, you always said other people’s daughters knew how to knit sweaters but that I lacked perseverance. But today, do you see that your daughter also knows how to knit? Remember, your daughter will never be dumber than other people!
The expectations of family weighed on her. Young women from the countryside felt particular pressure from home. If they didn’t progress quickly, their parents would urge them to return home to marry.
I finally got a letter from home . . . Other than Father, who else can write me a letter? Mother did not include even a single line to tell me that she misses me . . . In the last letter, she added on a line telling me not to find a boyfriend outside. Although it was only one line, it made me happy, as if Mother were at my side teaching me.
How badly I want to pour out to my mother all the words in my heart, but I cannot. Mother! My mother, why are you an illiterate? It’s all right that you are an illiterate. Why can you not even write a letter? It’s all right that you cannot write a letter. It would be fine if you could write a few words. Even if you made up a few words to say what you wanted to tell me, I would understand your true thoughts.
Mother, I know you have many things to say to me, only that Father did not write them . . .
Father and Mother, it looks like we cannot communicate between us. You will never know and never understand what is really in your daughter’s heart. Maybe you think that I have already found my ideal factory, with three hundred yuan a month. Maybe you think that I will never again jump factories. Maybe your wish is that I never jump factories again, that I work at this factory for two years and then come home to get married, to have a family like all the girls in the countryside. But I am not thinking any of these things . . .
I want to carve out a world for myself in Guangdong . . . My plan is:
1. To study at correspondence university
2. To learn to speak Cantonese
3. With nothing to my name and without any accomplishment, to absolutely not marry
During her first three years in the city, Chunming did not return home once. She told friends that the factory break was too short, but in her diary she wrote: Who knows why I am not going home for the new year? The main reason: I really do not want to waste time. Because I must study! She also rejected her mother’s advice and wrote love letters to a good-looking young man who worked on the factory floor. Young men in the workplace were a rarity, and the better-looking ones were spoiled by the attentions of multiple girls. This one was not interested in Chunming, and he passed her letters around for others to read.
After six months on the assembly line, Chunming learned that her factory was hiring internally for clerks, and she wrote a letter to the head of her department expressing interest. The boss had heard of her boy-chasing reputation and ordered her transferred to another department. But his order was somehow misstated, and Chunming reported to work as a clerk. She performed well and the boss changed his mind about her. The new job paid three hundred yuan a month—triple what Chunming had made a year before.
THE STORIES OF MIGRANT WOMEN shared certain features. The arrival in the city was blurry and confused and often involved being tricked in some way. Young women often said they had gone out alone, though in fact they usually traveled with others; they just felt alone. They quickly forgot the names of factories, but certain dates were branded in their minds, like the day they left home or quit a bad factory forever. What a factory actually made was never important; what mattered was the hardship or opportunity that came with working there. The turning point in a migrant’s fortunes always came when she challenged her boss. At the moment she risked everything, she emerged from the crowd and forced the world to see her as an individual.
It was easy to lose yourself in the factory, where there were hundreds of girls with identical backgrounds: born in the village, badly educated, and poor. You had to believe that you mattered even though you were one among millions.
April 1, 1994
Yes, I am a person so ordinary that I cannot be more ordinary, so plain I cannot be plainer, a girl like all the other girls. I like to eat snacks, I like to have fun, and I like to look pretty.
Don’t imagine that I can be superhuman.
You are just a most ordinary, most plain girl, attracted to anything that is pretty or tasty or fun.
So from being ordinary and plain I will make my start.
* * *
Inside a Dongguan factory, the sexes were sharply divided. Women worked as clerks and in human resources and sales, and they held most of the jobs on the assembly line; the bosses felt that young women were more diligent and easier to manage. Men monopolized technical jobs like mold design and machine repair. They generally held the top positions in the factory but also the dead-end occupations at the bottom: security guards, cooks, and drivers. Outside the factory, women were waitresses, nannies, hairdressers, and prostitutes. Men worked on construction sites.
This gender segregation was reflected in help-wanted ads:
GAOBU HANDBAG FACTORY SEEKS TO EMPLOY
SALESPERSON: FEMALE ONLY, GRADE FOUR ENGLISH RECEPTIONIST: FEMALE ONLY, CAN SPEAK
CANTONESE
SECURITY GUARDS: MALE, UNDER 30, 1.7 METERS
OR ABOVE, EX-MILITARY, KNOWS
FIREFIGHTING, CAN PLAY BASKETBALL A PLUS
The divide implied certain things. Young women enjoyed a more fluid job situation; they could join a factory assembly line and move up to be clerks or salespeople. Young men had a harder time entering a factory, and once in they were often stuck. Women, in the factory or out, came into contact with a wider range of people and quickly adopted the clothes, hairstyles, and accents of the city; men tended to stay locked in their outsider worlds. Women integrated more easily into urban life, and they had more incentive to stay.
Women make up more than one-third of China’s migrants. They tend to be younger than their male counterparts and more likely to be single; they travel farther from home and they stay out longer. They are more motivated to improve themselves and more likely to value migration for its life-changing possibilities. In one survey, men cited higher income as the chief purpose of leaving home, while women aspired to “more experience in life.” Unlike men, women had no home to go back to. According to Chinese tradition, a son was expected to return to his parents’ house with his wife after he married; a son would forever have a home in the village where he was born. Daughters, once grown, would never return home to live—until they married, they didn’t belong anywhere.
To some extent, this deep-rooted sexism worked in women’s favor. Many rural parents wanted a grown son to stay close to home, perhaps delivering goods or selling vegetables in the towns near the village. Young men with such uninspiring prospects might simply hun—drift—doing odd jobs, smoking and drinking and gambling away their meager earnings. Young women—less treasured, less coddled—could go far from home and make their own plans. Precisely because they mattered less, they were freer to do what they wanted.
But it was a precarious advantage. If migration liberated young women from the village, it also dropped them in a no-man’s-land. Most girls in the countryside were married by their early twenties, and a migrant woman who postponed marriage risked closing off that possibility for good. The gender imbalance in Dongguan, where 70 percent of the workforce was said to be female, worked against finding a high-quality mate. And social mobility complicated the search for a husband. Women who had moved up from the assembly line disdained the men back in the village, but city men looked down on them in turn. Migrants called this gaobucheng, dibujiu—unfit for a higher position but unwilling to take a lower one.
The migrant women I knew never complained about the unfairness of being a woman. Parents might favor sons over daughters, bosses prefer pretty secretaries, and job ads discriminate openly, but they took all of these injustices in stride—over three years in Dongguan, I never heard a single person express anything like a feminist sentiment. Perhaps they took for granted that life was hard for everyone. The divide between countryside and city was the only one that mattered: Once you crossed that line, you could change your fate.
* * *
Moving up came easily to Chunming. In 1995, she jumped to a factory in a remote part of Dongguan that made water pistols and BB guns. She finally learned to speak Cantonese. Within a year, her monthly salary increased from three hundred yuan to six hundred and fifty, then eight hundred, then one thousand yuan. She discovered that the department heads above her made more money though she did the same work. If you don’t increase my salary to 1,500 yuan a month, she wrote her boss, I refuse to do this anymore. She got what she wanted; no one in the factory had ever received a five-hundred-yuan raise before. But the promotion did not satisfy Chunming. It cast her into a new world where there was so much to learn.
Her dealings with other people immediately became more complicated. In the village, relations between people were determined by kinship ties and shared histories. In school and on the assembly line, everyone was in the same lowly position. But once a person started to rise in the factory world, the balance of power shifted, and that could be unsettling. A friend could turn into a boss; a young woman might be promoted ahead of her boyfriend.
March 26, 1996
My promotion this time has let me see the hundred varieties of human experience. Some people cheer me, some envy me, some congratulate me, some wish me luck, some are jealous of me, and some cannot accept it . . .
As to those who envy me . . . I will only treat them as an obstacle on the road to progress, kicking them aside and walking on. In the future there will be even more to envy!
Making a good impression on strangers became important. Chunming studied the higher-ups in her factory, as intent as a biologist with her specimens. She observed that when the head of the human resources department gave a speech, he was so nervous that his hands trembled. Around the new year holiday, a manager on the factory floor ignored her until she boldly wished him a happy new year; he responded warmly and gave her ten yuan in a red envelope, a traditional gift. From this incident, I understand: Some people who have always seemed unapproachable may not really be so. You just need to make yourself a little more approachable.
Her plan to remold herself kicked into high gear. In her diary, Chunming no longer recorded the details of her days but copied the rules for becoming someone else, a task for which she read widely if not always coherently.
Self-confidence, dignity, and elegance are the image that professional women should have.
Benjamin Franklin’s Thirteen Rules of Morality
1. Moderation: Do not eat to saturation or drink to excess.
2. Silence: Do not engage in unimportant talk.
3. Order: Place things in fixed positions and do tasks at fixed times.
4. Decisiveness: Decide what you want to accomplish, be unyielding.
5. Thrift: Do not waste money. Spend money on things that benefit yourself and others . . .
Receiving Criticism
1. When other people criticize you, you must be calm and dispassionate and show that you are listening attentively.
2. Look at the person who is speaking to you.
3. Do not criticize someone who has just criticized you.
4. Do not be dejected.
5. Do not make jokes . . .
The ideals in Chunming’s diary bore an inverse relationship to the world she lived in. One of her lists, entitled “The Fifteen Traits of Unqualified Leaders,” could easily have been called “How to Be a Dongguan Boss,” including trait three:
Busies himself over small things and participates in everything.
and trait fifteen:
When the group is given bonuses or awards, he appears first on the name list; among the executive members, he sits in the front row.
She enrolled in a correspondence course to learn secretarial skills, but gave up because the textbook looked too complicated. An effort to learn public relations also foundered.
How do you plan to learn public relations studies?
Answer: To learn public relations properly, you must first learn how to behave as a person.
At one point, Chunming decided to learn English on her own. She made a list of vocabulary words—
ABLE
ABILITY
ADD
AGO
ALWAYS
AGREE
AUGUST
BABY
BLACK
BREATH
—but gave up before she got to C.
So many things would have to be learned, and the rules for getting ahead bled together in her diary. Sixty percent of people do not have a goal. For a look of “Gorgeous Radiance,” blend black, gray, golden yellow, sapphire blue, and bright red eye shadow. 
Can be drycleaned; “A” means any detergent can be used. The exchange of greetings is the catalyst and lubricant of conversation. When you drink soup, don’t let the soup spoon rattle against the plate. People who don’t read books will find their speech dull and their appearance repulsive.
* * *
With their mothers far away, migrant workers looked elsewhere for advice. Magazines for migrant readers appeared in the mid-1990s, particularly in the factory cities of southern China. They were published on cheap newsprint and sold for about four yuan, or fifty cents, an issue. The magazines investigated migrant work conditions and gave advice on legal questions, job-hunting, and relationships. In first-person stories that traced the lives of individual migrants, life followed one of two trajectories: A young woman went to the city, endured hardship, and triumphed, usually by starting her own business and buying an apartment. Or a young woman went to the city and was brought low, typically by a man who turned out to be lazy, faithless, or married with a child. These could have been the heroines of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, for upon such narratives was built the modern Western tradition of the novel. But in the pages of the migrant magazines, the moral was always the same: You can only rely on yourself.
Every success story ended with a personal triumph that could be tallied on an accountant’s ledger: the monthly turnover of a business, the square-footage of an apartment. In “Ambition Made Me Who I Am,” a teenage nanny taught herself to read and write and put herself and her brother through college by selling Popsicles, delivering goods, cutting hair, and peddling insurance. At the story’s end, she headed an insurance company’s sales department and owned a 1,300-square-foot apartment. In “Be Your Own Master,” a young woman worked as a hairdresser for two years without pay in order to learn the trade and set up her own shop. Turnover is more than three thousand yuan a month, six hundred yuan for rent, and one hundred yuan for taxes, and the rest is all hers. In “The Girl Who Wanted to Make Television Dramas,” a young woman worked diligently at a menial office job—she often typed for ten hours without interruption—and rose to be vice-president of an entertainment company with an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment.
The path to success was long and hard, and many strayed from it. A young woman might dream of finding a man who would love and support her. But this was always the wrong way.
When I got home, I burst into loud sobbing, not daring to believe that my own true love was a fraud.
What he saw in me was how easy it would be to deceive me.
If I leave him the way I am now, who will still want me?
Articles described the indignities of daily life as a migrant. A young woman sneaked into the bathroom at McDonald’s because her own building’s facilities were so poor: The environment inside a McDonald’s bathroom is so good. It is not only very clean, but there is toilet paper and there are hand dryers. A migrant worker was ashamed to tell his boss that he couldn’t afford a mobile phone. Those lucky enough to land office jobs found an environment as ruthless as anything described by Darwin:
Because some of my clients are behind in their payments, the company says I am responsible for collecting these debts and will withhold 30 percent of my salary every month until all the money is paid. Is this reasonable?
Our company rule is that every month the person with the worst sales record is fired. Is this legal?
Sometimes the message of self-reliance went too far. An article about a physically abused maid did not address the vulnerabilities of domestic workers but celebrated her daring escape from her employer’s apartment. The only person who could rescue Wang Li was Wang Li herself. An account of a deadly department store fire skirted the bigger issues—poor construction and prevention measures—to focus on fire survival tips: When the fire burns your body, take off your clothes or roll around on the floor to extinguish the flames.
Against the staid and preachy Chinese media, the migrant magazines broke new ground. They did not insist on upbeat endings; many of the stories ended in anguish or confusion. They described a world in which people cheated one another and did nothing to aid the lonely and the lost. They did not preach about laws that must be amended or behaviors that must be improved, and they never mentioned the Communist Party. They wrote about how to live in the world just as it was.
* * *
In the summer of 1996, Chunming wrote in her diary:
Friends, we were born into the world poor through no fault of our own. But to die poor is a sin.
In the course of life, have we not worked hard and persisted in the struggle? To be a success in network sales, we must honestly achieve these four points:
1. Have determination.
2. Have a clear goal.
3. Deeply study and thoroughly understand the company’s products and plans.
4. Study the techniques of network selling.
That summer, a friend from the factory took Chunming to a lecture that changed her life. The speaker worked for a company called Wanmei Daily Use Products. Wanmei, which means “perfect,” sold health supplements, but what it really offered was a dream of wealth and personal fulfillment encapsulated in the magical word chuanxiao. The Chinese phrase, which translates as “network sales,” does not distinguish between legitimate direct sales and fraudulent pyramid schemes. Corruption, which sometimes seemed to be in the air people breathed, had also seeped into the language they used.
Chunming started selling Wanmei health products to supplement her income, mostly to fellow factory workers. She bought Wanmei tapes and attended Wanmei lectures, and her diary turned into a Wanmei sales manual mixed with some bizarre health claims.
THE SUCCESS OF A SALE LIES IN THE FIRST THREE
SECONDS OF MEETING.
WHEN YOU SPEAK, LOOK INTO THE OTHER PERSON’S EYES.
GET TO KNOW THREE PEOPLE A DAY.
THE ALOE MINERAL CRYSTAL CAN REGULATE THE HUMAN
BODY’S FIVE SYSTEMS.
A PERSON LOSES HIS HAIR BECAUSE HE LACKS COPPER.
By the end of 1996, Chunming had an influential job in the factory as head of its general affairs department, but she quit to sell Wanmei products full-time. She spent ten thousand yuan in savings to rent out meeting rooms and equipment for training sessions. She recruited former colleagues from the factory to join her network, with the promise that they would all get rich together. In the back pages of her diary, Chunming listed the salespeople she had recruited. Many of them were still in their teens; the oldest person in her network was twenty-five years old.
Why have we come together today? Simply to let everyone discuss the topic: “How should a person live one’s entire life?”
Think about it: Why are we still so ordinary? Why are so many people who have worked hard their entire lives still not living the lives they imagined? We all had dreams once. We all once struggled and worked hard. But why is there such an imbalance between what we spent and what we have gained? How many regrets have been played out upon us!
We have gradually understood one truth: A person who wants to develop must grasp opportunity. Merely to have a dream and determination is not enough . . . If the choice of vehicle is not good, you will be bustling about your whole life. Just as our mothers and fathers chose farming: They have been busy their whole lives, but when the hair on their heads is white, they must still scrape together money for oil and salt.
My friends, do we want to follow the road of our mothers and fathers?
No!
Give yourselves a round of applause!
Direct-sales companies had taken off in the United States during the economic boom that followed the Second World War. Unlike traditional retailers, companies like the Amway Corporation and Avon Products sold their goods through independent distributors rather than stores. These distributors made money in two ways: through selling goods themselves and through recruiting a network of salespeople and receiving bonuses based on their sales.
In the mid-1990s, a craze for network sales swept China, with some of the chuanxiao companies copying the American sales model. Others simply charged new recruits a hefty fee to join, with the promise of riches when they recruited additional members. These were pyramid schemes: Their money came not from selling actual products but only from the high entry fees they charged. The schemes made money for the earliest entrants but collapsed when they ran out of new members, defrauding many people out of their savings.
The network-sales model was ideally suited to a Chinese society in which traditional morality had broken down and only the harshest rules—trust no one, make money fast—still applied. The companies relied on traditional networks of extended family and friends; the first thing a chuanxiao salesman usually did was to browbeat every friend and relative into buying something. They promised wealth and fulfillment. And they offered a clear road map to success: Get to know three people a day. The industry flourished in the small towns and migrant communities of the Pearl River Delta. Here where rural and urban worlds met, people envied the success of others and were hungry to have it themselves. If someone they knew promised instant wealth and a miracle cure, they were easily swayed.
The rise of chuanxiao companies worried the central government. Some of the companies traded in fake, smuggled, or shoddy goods; their training meetings, where charismatic leaders drove members into an evangelical selling frenzy, came to look disturbingly similar to cults. The more extravagant operations even threatened the social order; in 1994, the police were called out to disperse hundreds of angry distributors after the collapse of a Taiwanese diamond-selling scheme. Beijing passed many regulations to bring the network-sales industry under control, but local governments rarely enforced its orders. This was partly because the companies brought welcome tax revenue and employment to local areas, and partly because moonlighting as a chuanxiao distributor was a popular sideline for government officials.
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For Chunming, the sales meetings were a training ground for learning how to speak. In traditional China, the art of oratory was not an important skill—to write an elegant essay in beautiful calligraphy was what mattered—and speeches in China have always been dismal affairs. Speakers often read directly from a script, and the script is usually tedious. A person like Chunming—young, rural, and female—would have many reasons to stay silent in the presence of her betters. But in a modern China driven by commerce and competition, knowing how to speak had become a necessary skill.
The network-sales companies imported the ethos of America direct to the Chinese lower classes. Their style of speaking combined the call-and-response of old-time preachers with the tireless haranguing of motivational speakers. They spread the news that the individual was important and that everyone was a winner. And they brought with them the very American faith that wealth and virtue could go hand in hand.
In her diary, Chunming collected drafts of her speeches:
My name is Wu Chunming, a very plain and ordinary name. But I believe that someday in the future I will make my name no longer ordinary . . .
Friends, what kind of person do you want to become in the future? This is a question worth thinking about. What kind of person are we today: Is that important?
Not important!
What’s important is: What kind of person do you want to become in the future? For what purpose have we traveled thousands of miles and left our homes behind to come out to work?
To earn money!Correct, to earn money. But until today, have we earned the money we wanted?
No!
Is the life we live today the one we want to live or the one we can live?
Correct, the one we can live . . .
Friends, what kind of person do you want to become? That is all up to you. If you never dare to want to succeed, then you will never succeed . . . What is important is that you must dare to think, dare to want . . .
Really, each of us is unique in the world. When we are born, we are not doomed to failure. Because we are all born winners.
Friends, please believe me! But more important, believe in yourself! Because you can!
At Wanmei, Chunming rose quickly from trainee to manager. In 1997, she quit to join a Taiwanese company called Tangjing Soul Pagoda Garden Development Company. Its business was constructing high-rise buildings to store the ashes of the dead. The buildings were known as “soul pagodas,” and the company’s sales pitch married the spiritual, the practical, and the Chinese passion for real estate. For the dead, the Tangjing Soul Pagoda Garden promised an eternal resting place with excellent feng shui. For the living, the pitch focused on the garden’s prime location, its limited number of spaces, and the burgeoning population of the Pearl River Delta. An investor could purchase an entire soul pagoda and then flip individual spaces to buyers at a profit.
Chunming’s job was to run training sessions for the company’s salespeople. She had learned to talk, and now she taught others how to do it—as with the factories, what was actually being sold was the least important facet of the enterprise. Chunming’s pitch blended Buddhism, the environmental benefits of cremation, and the near-certainty that a soul pagoda would appreciate 300 percent. Death, in other words, was the best long-term investment there was.
Let our ancestors take life’s last journey in the most civilized, dignified, and stately way.
Guangdong alone has more than one million dead each year.
For our company’s regular pagoda spots, the July 1995 price of 3,500 yuan has grown to 5,600 yuan today.
We offer a full line of services (from cremation to entering the pagoda, including the expiation of sins of the dead and so on).
Our operating time is from July 11, 1994, to July 10, 2044.
Chunming was on a more abbreviated schedule. In late 1997 she jumped again, to a chuanxiao company that charged new members one thousand yuan for a box of traditional Tibetan medicine. It was a pyramid scheme, pure and simple, and Chunming got in early enough to make some real money. She recruited a dozen people, all proven earners, and within a few months she headed a network of ten thousand people. By then Chunming was making forty thousand yuan a month—about five thousand dollars, an astronomical sum in the Pearl River Delta in 1998. The company began laminating her weekly pay slips in sheets of clear plastic so she could show them to recruits as a motivational tool. On a visit home, Chunming gave her parents thirty thousand yuan to renovate the family house, install tile floors, and buy new appliances and a twenty-nine-inch television set. Her success in the city had made her famous beyond her village. “Everyone living in our area had heard about me,” she said.
But the industry was getting out of control. In a town called Danshui, about forty miles from Dongguan, a Taiwanese scheme to sell foot vibrators had become all the rage. To join the enterprise, a participant had to buy a foot vibrator for 3,900 yuan, or almost five hundred dollars—about eight times the market price. Participants were told they would receive 40 percent of the admission fees of anyone they recruited. Migrants flocked to Danshui; some sold their houses, furniture, and oxen to pay the admission fee. But it turned out that selling 3,900-yuan foot vibrators in a poor town was not easy, especially when thousands of other people were doing the same thing.
When the scheme collapsed, some defrauded members assaulted the people who had recruited them, while others demonstrated in front of government offices to get their money back. Police were called in to quell the crowds, restore order, and send migrants home. By then, the organizers had moved inland to a town in Hunan Province, where they set up the same operation and recruited about thirty thousand participants before that scheme, too, fell apart.
In April 1998, the cabinet of Premier Zhu Rongji ordered all chuanxiao companies to cease operations. More than two thousand companies shut down, and an industry that had resisted government regulation for years collapsed in an instant. Chunming found herself out of a job; her life as a wealthy person had lasted exactly two months. She took the blow hard, and she knew who was to blame. “After Zhu Rongji came on,” she said, “he wouldn’t allow network sales anymore, so I stopped.” In the freewheeling Pearl River Delta, where Chunming had learned to talk, where commerce was king and everyone was a winner and to die poor was a sin, the long arm of the government had touched her life, astonishingly, for the first time.
