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.”