“She always wants pizza, spaghetti, burgers – the expensive Western stuff. Kids, you know. Somehow they’re drawn to it by an invisible force. You just can’t understand – what’s there in them that makes them so alluring, when the cheapest among them is too expensive for us? It’s not much meat, not much seafood; if it were any of that I could understand, though we still couldn’t afford it. But you know, we still give her a treat now and then. She’s lovely.”

“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?"

 “We still have a little pickled radish at the bottom of the plastic bottle. Buns dipped in that leftover oil and brine will do for dinner tonight. And there’s still that jar of preserved tofu. The one that’s been in the fridge for a year, or maybe two. You can eat the steamed buns with that.”

​“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.”