Fabricating Life

"It was her 20th birthday. Xiao Mei left work early with friends, and they celebrated her birthday at KFC. 'KFC is more common today in China. But back then, we took it as a sign of affluence. Being able to afford KFC meant being able to afford the Western way of life. That was the most luxurious birthday we could imagine.' After this exotic meal, they went to a cybercafe upstairs. Xiao Mei logged onto her QQ account, and found a new subscriber named 'Li Bai.' Li Bai worked at a hardware factory in Shenzhen. He was also from the Yangchun area, from a notoriously poor place named Shiwang. The two chatted nonstop for the next six months, and by the end of those six sweet, special months, Xiao Mei realized that she was in love with Li. 'He was kind-hearted and sincere, gentle, always caring for me and my needs. It’s hard to say what’s so special about him. But he was special to me, and I decided back then that I’ll marry no one but him.'"

“I was in team 4, he was in team 1 – production teams, I mean. There’s no teams nowadays. But when I was a child, all the land was collectively owned, and everyone in a production team worked together. After we harvested the grain, every team turned over a portion to the government as grain taxes, and whatever amount of grain remained was divided up among the team members by the local cadres. Grain was in theory divided up per head, but the amounts each got were always uneven. There was never enough food for every team member, some families barely got enough to eat, and no one had much motivation to work hard – when we worked in a team and divided the team’s harvest, how hard we worked had little impact on how much we got. Later on, when the land was divided among individual households, life got a bit letter – we could at least eat our fill most of the time – but there was still no money for school or healthcare or that sort of stuff. That’s when villagers started thinking about heading to the cities to find work. In the 90s, those who left their rural hometown for work earned very little, a few hundred yuan in the 2000s, wages started getting a little better.”

"Well, for young people, it’s not just about the salary. They care about freedom—they need a job that’s fun. They don’t mind a lower salary if the work lets them enjoy life a bit. Compared to other clothing factories, the pay here is higher. But if you compare it to electronics factories, we don’t stand a chance. Electronics factories have shorter hours, plus weekends off. Here, we work long hours, with just Sundays off. You’re on from 8 AM to 8 PM, sometimes even till 11 PM. After that, it’s a quick shower, maybe scroll through your phone, and by the time you sleep, it’s past midnight. Then you’re up early again the next day—it’s like that every day. Once in a while, maybe it’s ok, but doing that everyday? It’s too much for young people. They need some downtime. If you ask them to sit there and work from 8 AM until 11 or 12 at night, they can’t take it. They just can’t sit still for that long. But if you can handle it, the pay is good – easily over 10,000 yuan a month if you’re fast."

“One year, right after the Spring Festival, my wife and I said goodbye to our parents and daughter, and we were just boarding the bus back to the city. The bus station was fairly far away from our home, and our parents and daughter walked that long distance with us. We parted when the bus came. The bus didn’t stay for long. A few minutes, maybe? But after the bus started moving again, after it’s moved over a fair distance, I think, we saw our daughter from the window, chasing after the bus and crying out with all her strength, and her grandmother chasing after her. She ran for a very long distance, very very long.” She ran for what seemed like an eternity, hoping her parents would either stay at home or take her with them to the city. Her small figure grew ever smaller in the distance, her body frail against the backdrop of the departing bus. “I turned my head away. I couldn’t bring myself to look back. The sound of my daughter’s cries were desperate. ‘Mama, Papa, Mama, Papa…’ It tore our hearts to pieces. This was the kind of pain that can only be fully understood by parents, perhaps.”

"I’ve been part of three strikes in Zhejiang around 2004 – one at Xingfu Shoe Factory, another at Rising Sun Shoe Factory, the other at Xuyang Shoe Factory. Back then at Xingfu, I was a molding technician, and we were paid by the piece. The rates were so low, we could barely make a living out of it. It started with one or two workers refusing to work, and soon everyone followed suit and walked out. Everyone just went home. After two or three days, the factory owner called us back, and they raised the rates, so we went back to work. He couldn’t find any workers to replace us! Back then, it wasn’t easy to find new people like it is now; there weren’t as many migrant workers. And even if he did find someone, the original workers knew the job, and new ones couldn’t pick it up as quickly. They wouldn’t know what they were doing, messing up the production. No deliveries, missed deadlines, more losses for the factory. Most of the strikers were skilled workers, and the owner knew it. So after a couple of days where no one was working, the boss had no choice but to pay up. Otherwise, who would do the job?"

"In 2018, the factory relocated to Huizhou, leaving Aunt Liu unemployed. She looked for job postings on every corner of the industrial park, and eventually reemployed herself at an electroplating factory, where she worked for two years until that factory also moved to Huizhou. “I was again left without a job; and it was a lot different, losing my job for a second time. I was getting older already, older than most of the factory workers for sure. It was hard for me to find work on the production line because of my age, so I had to take on various odd jobs, like cleaning. The wages were lower, but there was no other choice.”

Aunt Liu worked as a cleaner at the Liu Fu Factory in Longhua district (a factory that made phone cases) for a little over a year. “Then that factory, too, moved out of Shenzhen. But this time to Dongguan city, not Huizhou.” When the factory moved to Dongguan, she commuted there daily by factory shuttle bus to continue working as a cleaner. But after a while, the long commute became simply too much for her, and she quit. She then worked as a street cleaner in Shenzhen until September of last year. “Summer in Shenzhen lasted practically from April all the way to September – and you got temperatures of 30, even over 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). And we street cleaners had to stand on the sidewalk, under the sun without much shade, sweeping fallen leaves, fruits from green belt, and other trash from morning to evening, six days a week. All small, minor stuff, but you get fined if they find too much waste per square meter – sometimes, when they really wanted to fine me, they came right after lunch break and weighed the amount of waste left on the streets. I’d be sitting during lunch break, so newly fallen leaves were left uncleared temporarily on the street, and I got fined for that. The only time we got to sit under shade was during lunch.” The suffocating heat and intense sun were too harsh and unbearable on Aunt Liu, so she switched to cleaning for a property management company. There, she earned 2,700 yuan (~380 USD) a month, minus 40 yuan deducted for accident insurance. “The salary was too low in Shenzhen. We have a cheap life now, but we had to live even cheaper when I only made 2,700.”

​“It was a tall man dragging a woman behind him. He and the woman, his wife, stormed over and up to me without giving a single word. He yanked and ripped all the flyers, a whole stack, from my hand. A whole stack. He took a very short glance at the flyers, then he…uh…he shouted something like, ‘You’re the one who ruined my wife’s face! Do you yourself even use the cosmetics you’re selling?’ And then…and then he kept going on: ‘Look at you. Someone as short and ugly as you, standing out here and ruining the lives of others with your garbage!’ His wife, even his wife, chimed in, ‘yeah I know right – her face isn’t suited for selling makeup. It’s a waste for her, with that face of hers, to use it, let alone sell it. She probably doesn’t even bother." Sister Mann was stunned. It was the first time she had faced such aggression, and she “didn’t know how to respond. My mind was…just a white sheet of paper…entirely blank. I stuttered. I didn’t know what to say. Then staff from the supermarket heard the sound, and came and stepped in.” The supermarket staff tried to help her calm the couple down. With her help, Sister Mann stammered an apology. “After she came, I started apologizing repeatedly, again and again. I started reciting the product ingredients that I memorized and reviewed everyday after work. And I even promised to talk to the cosmetics company, to see if they can offer to test the wife’s skin reactions or allergy or some other conditions – if the company can cover the fees, basically.” The crowd dispersed, and the confrontation ended, once the couple left. “But no one, um…no one other than the supermarket staff, no one said a single word in defense of the products, let alone standing up for me. But they all knew…they all saw how unreasonable, how hurtful those two aggressors have been.” The looks people gave her as the crowd dispersed – sympathetic, disdainful, or hateful, even – all blurred together. From that day forward, Sister Mann never worked as a saleswoman again."

“Parts of the production chain that are harmful to the environment have been outsourced, you know, to small workshops or Southeast Asian suppliers. We pay these small, less heavily regulated workshops to produce the buttons and ship them to our factory; we put our labels on the buttons and sell them as our products. Our brand’s name is like a certificate. Raisin button production is an example of such.” Resin, a by-product of petroleum, causes significant environmental damage during its production, so relocating these operations was a necessary step for the factory to meet regulatory requirements. The Shenzhen government’s environmental standards have been getting stricter, requiring companies to invest more and more in wastewater treatment and emissions collection. “They told us to collect and detoxify wastewater and particulate emissions from the smokestacks. Processing wastewater is easy – wastewater flows out from particular parts of the assembly line, and you collect them in a large tank. But smokestack emissions – how do you trap all the air going out? But we’ve invested in that technology and rebuilt the smokestacks, and we meet most of the sustainability standards, with 90%, even over 90% confidence. The thing with environmental regulations is, you gotta understand, that whenever the city changes the mayor, the new leadership team would introduce their own way of doing things, their own system and goals of regulating stuff and making highlights. This one might focus on smokestack emissions. The next one might be tight on chemical pollution, so on. Weixing has been keeping pace with these regulations.”

Xiao Mei became the only one, out of her parents’ five children, who stayed in her hometown. “I was obedient, sensible, always helping at home. I was the role model for girls in my village.” Her parents hoped she would stay with them. But Xiao Mei did not obey. “I wanted to work my own job and earn my own wage in the big cities like my sister. I wanted to control my own life.” At the age of 16, defying her parents’ opposition, she left for Shenzhen to join her sister in the migrant workforce. “I knew I was going to a city called Shenzhen, where my sister was. I hope it’ll be a place where I can lead my own life.”

Xiao Mei’s sister jumped from factories to factories in the cities of Dongguan and Shenzhen, often switching jobs for as little as a 200 yuan (~28 USD) boost in monthly wage. “She was like a grasshopper, and any little increase in wages is her prey.” Xiao Mei was also a grasshopper, leaping around, chasing the elusive promise of a higher pay. She started at a garment factory in Matian district, trimming threads on finished pieces of clothing, working from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. everyday, earning 1 yuan (~0.14 USD) per piece of finished work. She was inexperienced, often finishing only 30 pieces a day. Mistakes also cost, as the employer charged a high price for each mistake found. A thread untrimmed meant a fine of 2 yuan. Three threads untrimmed on a single item cost 10. “I found myself sometimes in debt, unable to pay my employer the penalty. I worked 12 hours a day – 11 excluding lunch and dinner – and somehow I owed my employer money.”

Paying the employer’s fines was expensive, but connections with fellow workers were wealth. Xiao Mei became close to colleagues who migrated from the Yangchun area. With their help, she quickly got the hang of her job. Three months into this new urban life, she was already earning 1,500 yuan (~214 USD) per month. Working 11 hours a day, her hands were blistered, but she made thrilled hearts out of burning pain: “1500 yuan, this equaled one fourth of my parents’ yearly income. I mailed 1,000 yuan to my parents, spent 300 on gifts for my sister, and kept 200 for myself. That was the year 2000, a very special year for me.” It’s the start of a new millennium. The beginning of Xiao Mei’s new life.

“I’ll marry no one but him.” The next time Xiao Mei said these words, she said them to her parents. It was Chinese New Year, and Xiao Mei returned to her hometown during the two weeks of New Year break. Her parents opposed the marriage. “They told me that they allowed me to migrate to Shenzhen and seek a job, hoping that I’d have a better life. They told me there’s no chance they’ll agree to my marriage. No chance that they’ll allow me to marry into the remote, inaccessible, mountainous hometown of Li Bai. I questioned them: ‘aren’t we living in the mountains ourselves? If I were born in a poor village surrounded by the mountains and you treat me as a decent human being, why can’t you do the same for Li?’ But before I could finish, my father picked up a wooden broom in a corner of the room and started hitting me with it. I was pretty sure that he was merely threatening the use of force, but the pain on my back, at one point, told me that maybe it’s beyond a threat. At some point, my father got so mad that he used force on his daughter.”
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As she tried to escape the broom, her father declared sternly: “Tomorrow, we’ll meet the matchmaker. The Cheng’s in town proposed a marriage twice, and Aunt Wang from the village nearby came with a proposal too.” Xiao Mei ran into her room, locked the door, and went on a hunger strike. Her parents conceded, though only partially. They postponed matchmaking but forbade any contact between Xiao Mei and Li Bai. “They wanted to break us apart. I spent six happy months chatting with Li Bai on QQ. And then I went home and was told I can’t chat with him anymore. It was the worst New Year I’ve ever had.” Shortly after New Year’s eve, she packed her luggage and returned to the factory. Her parents tried to stop her from going back to Shenzhen. “Me being at Shenzhen meant me staying closer to Li Bai than to my parents. And they didn’t like that. But I sneaked out of my house at midnight, walked three hours to the nearest bus station, and waited another two hours for the bus to Shenzhen. Li Bai arrived at Shenzhen on the same day – we made the deal almost three weeks in advance and he kept his promise. I told him what my father told me, and we cried in each other’s arms.”

After the Jingtai Factory moved out of Shenzhen, Aunt Liu’s husband went to work at a rice noodle factory in Guizhou, following his sister there. But after a while, the hard labor took a toll on his health, and after a surgery in 2019, he returned to Shenzhen, where he became a street cleaner. He first worked for a cleaning company, sweeping the commercial streets, earning over 3,000 yuan a month if he worked overtime. He later switched to another cleaning company, where he now earns a base salary of 3,500 yuan a month, with social insurance coverage. On holidays, he receives a 200-yuan bonus per day, and during the summer, there’s a high-temperature allowance of 300 yuan spread over four to five months.
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“During Chinese New Year, they usually give us gifts like rice and cooking oil too. But last year, they didn’t. No one knows if it was the cleaning company’s decision or the government’s. Each month, all the cleaners can receive a “charity meal” (burgers, pizza, etc.) for free once, though some cleaners working for other cleaning companies get it once a week. Some say twice a week, I don’t really know. Over summer, if the streets they’re assigned to sweep and clean have businesses or homes along the sides, they can sometimes pop inside to cool off. But the roads my husband cleans don't have any of that, so he’s out in the scorching sun almost all day. The work is exhausting. He most often works two hours of overtime each day, and he’s even asked the cleaning company for more overtime hours to boost his pay sometimes. He’s also assigned to two long streets that used to be cleaned by two, but now all of that is on him; so he has double the normal amount of tasks others have. He’s reserved, silent; he didn’t really say anything about that. But I told him that he’s gotta ask – for more overtime hours or re-assignment of tasks. But the company always replies, ‘If you want to work the job, work. If not, leave. There are plenty of people waiting to take your place.’ So, he just stopped asking.”

"The type of boss determines the type of factory. Foreign-owned factories are better than joint ventures, and joint ventures are better than purely Chinese-owned ones. Foreign-owned factories are more humane, more organized – they have their rules and follow their rules, but they also follow the rules set out by China’s laws. Labor laws, for example. I worked at Zhongtai Garments, a Hong Kong-owned factory. I only look for large enterprises with hundreds of employees, preferably foreign-invested ones, to seek a job from. Chinese bosses are the worst. The smaller the company, the worse they treat you – they don't follow the rules and exploit their workers in collusion with the government. After thousands of years of Confucian indoctrination, people here are brainwashed. It’s a slave mentality. We’ve been conditioned to obey. People have become so submissive that exploitation from the top down has become a habit, normalized. We’re all slaves. The higher-ups control every aspect of our lives – our food, clothing, shelter, and even our basic freedom. If you don’t obey, they’ll cut off your water or electricity supply, and you’re left helpless. That’s the scariest part. This top-down system of oppression weighs heaviest on the people at the bottom.

Even in families, this slave mentality is the same. One generation oppresses the next. Parents raise their children by controlling them, crushing their freedom of thought, denying them the right to choose their own paths, and constantly pressuring them to study while tearing them down emotionally. Schoolwork, criticisms, they just pile everything up and throw them on their children’s shoulder to pressure them.

Even in the factories, it’s the same. They provide dorms and canteens, housing and meals, but in a way, they’re also controlling the workers’ food, shelter, and daily lives. It’s almost like a form of monopoly. But hey, at least we can still rent our own place outside, hahaha."

When she was 17, she worked as a waitress at a restaurant in Luohu district. Her main tasks were serving food and cleaning tables. “Everyday, my only thought was to work diligently and hope the boss would give me a raise. And after a year, my monthly salary went from 700 to 800 yuan. Every day, I tried my best to greet my customers warmly, and with care, like what they told you to do during the short training sessions before you start this job. Eager to do my best, I was. Then there was this one rainy day, people were constantly coming in and going out, and the first floor of the restaurant became slippery – you can see the reflection of lights on the ceiling clearly on the white ceramic tile floor, that’s how watery the floor is. I was carrying a tray of dishes, some of the dishes were quite deep and heavy, you know, those dishes used to carry soup. I slipped and spilled soup on a customer’s clothes. I didn’t know what to do but to repeat ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,’ you know, ‘I didn’t mean it, the floor is slippery, I’m really sorry,’ that sort of thing. And I was really sorry, I meant it. The customer wouldn’t forgive me. I was probably too nervous, I didn’t say the right words; the customer was unhappy. The clothes were expensive, and the restaurant owner had to pay for them. After that, he deducted a month’s salary from me. 7 hundred, 8 hundred yuan, deducted at once, gone.” After that, Sister Mann left the restaurant, hoping to find a job where she’d be paid by the day so she could at least secure her living.
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Through connections from her hometown, she landed a job at a construction site, doing menial tasks like carrying bricks, mixing cement, and cleaning up. But as an 18-year-old girl with little strength, she didn’t last long. “Just a few days after joining the construction site, I hurt my foot while carrying bricks, and accidentally hit a coworker with a brick too. The bricks were heavy. And when mixing cement, I got splattered everywhere. The cement looked fluid, but it was actually thick once you started trying to stir it. I was also the slowest at cleaning up.” Her coworkers grew impatient with her, complaining that she was more trouble than help, calling her a burden. “A nuisance, that’s the word they used. I felt humiliated. I was determined to improve, not to be looked down upon, at least. I was young back then, and it felt as if I had a fire in my gut.” Despite her injuries, she worked harder and faster, pushing through the pain. She became more efficient, but jobs on the construction site required physical strength she simply didn’t have. She still lagged behind. “Even though I improved a little, my coworkers continued to criticize me, especially the more capable female workers. The stronger and more skilled ones couldn't stand my slowness.”

Sister Mann thought she had found a safe harbor and looked forward to her new, married life. What awaited her, however, were nothing but the stormy seas. After the wedding, Li Gang had her help with running the grocery store, but the income that the store generated was meager. Sister Mann suggested Li to join her in finding work in the city, leaving the store to Li’s parents. “But his parents were in poor health, and they can’t read – illiterate. Running a store was a lot of tedious work; it wasn’t simple, you know. You need to keep track of what you ordered from wholesale, the price of each item, all that sort of stuff. His parents couldn’t manage the business on their own. So he told me, ‘you stay and manage the store, and I’ll go out, to the cities, to work.’ But we just got married. The in-law’s home still felt foreign to me. I said, I was used to working in the cities, and I didn’t want to stay. He got mad immediately. Really angry. And I ended up staying behind.”
 
A year after their marriage, they had their first child. Caring for a child, managing the store, and living with her in-laws, made a breeding ground for constant, unending, conflicts, and the strain of her distance with Li Gang was overwhelming. “I had my daughter with me, in a store, with in-laws around, living with me, and customers storming in and out. All the while my husband spent most of his time away from all this. All of this, and you feel like you can’t breathe. It felt…suffocating.” When their daughter turned one, Sister Mann proposed selling the store, leaving the child in the care of her grandparents, and moving to Shenzhen to join Li Gang in Shenzhen factories’ migrant workforce. “But he…he was so attached somehow to the store, he couldn’t bear to part with the store. But I couldn’t see how the income from the store would support our whole family, especially with a child now – a family of 5, our extended family that depends on the earnings of him and I. There was no way we could make enough money from the store, it was very clear.” After much back and forth, they agreed that Li would stay home to run the store and handle everything, while Sister Mann headed to Shenzhen to work. “And so, that’s how we spent the next two years, living mostly apart, barely ever seeing each other. I was alone in Shenzhen. I felt lonely sometimes, but it’s hard to say if I missed him.”
 
Their first child being a girl, Mann was pressured nonstop by her in-laws to have another child, to give birth to a boy. After the New Year break, she returned to the clothing factory she worked at in Shenzhen, and soon found out she was pregnant again. “I kept working. I worked until I physically could no longer handle it. After that, I took leave and went back to my in-laws’ home. Our second child was also a girl, and my in-laws, their attitudes toward me, got even worse. They don’t smile at their granddaughters, let alone me. No smile whatsoever for the babies; they were their own granddaughters.” During her postpartum recovery period, her in-laws didn’t take good care of her, leaving her with lingering, lasting health issues. “When my maternity leave ended, I couldn’t bear to leave her children. I can’t imagine what their lives would be like if I left them with their grandparents. So I messaged my boss, I quit my job at the factory because they don’t extend maternity leaves, and I stayed home to care for my daughters, until my younger one was a year and a half old.”

Q: How often do you visit your hometown?
A: It's not fixed. I don’t have a set schedule for that. My hometown is fairly close, so sometimes when I have a weekend off and really miss my kids, I’ll just go back [to Yangchun] to see them.

Q: How close is it?
A: 276 kilometers.

Q: 276 kilometers, that’s quite precise.
A: We usually drive back ourselves, so I remember the exact distance.

Q: Do you rent cars? Or do you own one?
A: Yes, we bought a used car, paid in full up front. We can’t afford paying for a new car in full, and if we deal with car finance, that’d put too much pressure on us.

Q: Right, and with two children, there are always places you need to spend money on.
A: Monthly payments from car finance, from housing finance, are heavy burdens. That’s why we built our own house on our land in the village instead of buying a home elsewhere, housing constructed by [real estate] development companies, you know.

Q: Are the children doing well in school?
A: They’re about average, not exceptionally high or low [achievers]. They get ok grades.

Q: That's still quite an accomplishment, especially considering they’re not with you here. You must be very proud of them.
A: Yes and I tell my children – my daughter, and later my son, ‘Studying is up to you, for education, they are on their own. I can’t really help you. If I can't support your studies, your education [financially], it's my problem. But if you don’t work hard, if you don’t do well, it's on you to reflect on yourself.’ That's what I tell my daughter.”
Q: When your children see you and your husband’s hard work, they will be motivated to put in the effort, to work hard themselves too.