City Hero, the Factory Cleaner (Part 1)

August 31st, 2024:

It was a little after 4 PM on August 31, 2024. I was waiting at the gate of Shenzhen Lihua Fashion Garment Factory for Aunt Liu, who was working overtime. At 5:10, Aunt Liu finally came out from the factory building, her face lighting up with a big, bright, radiant smile as soon as she saw me. Her energy was contagious, and I felt invigorated instantly. This was the second time I met Aunt Liu – the first had been on the afternoon of June 20, when she was sweeping the yard outside the factory cafeteria. I had walked around the yard alongside her, chatting with her while she worked, and by the time I left, we had agreed that I’d visit her again at the end of August.

I followed Aunt Liu as we walked along the street outside the factory gate, eventually arriving at the familiar cafeteria yard. I helped her stash some bundled cardboard boxes in a discreet, inconspicuous spot. She carried her bag with her personal belongings, while I held her large stainless steel thermos – everyday after work, Aunt Liu fills the thermos with hot water from the factory fountain to bring home. We got on a bus together, heading to her home. Aunt Liu’s place was about three kilometers from the factory. She usually took the bus to commute, though sometimes her husband would pick her up on his tricycle, and they’d haul back the scrap cardboard and other scrap recyclables she collected at the factory to sell.

Aunt Liu lived in a neighborhood called Dankeng Village – an urban village, or “village surrounded by cities.” Dankeng Village is a migrant workers’ enclave in Shenzhen city, and most of its residents worked various jobs at nearby factories, construction sites, restaurants, or as city cleaners. The village is packed with four- and five-story buildings, tightly packed together, jostling for space – so much so that sunlight barely reaches the ground and artificial lighting is kept on even during day time. Between the buildings, the alleyways are always dim and cramped, with crowded small stores stuffed irregularly into the first floor of each building. The buildings have no elevators, and the stairwells are narrow, steep, and dim. The stairs are so tight that if you’re not used to it, you have to step sideways on the stairs or risk slipping and falling, as half your foot would hang off the edge otherwise. Aunt Liu lives on the third floor. When she opened the door, her husband, who was in the middle of eating, immediately stood up, putting down his stainless steel bowl of cucumber and egg – his dinner – he was holding, and warmly invited me to sit on their bamboo-matted bed.

The room was just a few square meters. And most of that few square meters of space was taken up by the bed. Beside the bed, the walls and drying racks were cluttered with all sorts of clothes and random items, various odds and ends, while both makeshift tables beside the racks were stacked full and high with daily necessities, half-emptied rubbing alcohol bottles, and bags masks. Half of the masks in the bags had folds that only come from being used. The air conditioner, attached to the top right corner above the tables, looked white and clean; it was off when I went in the room. A white floor fan in the bottom left corner, dyed greasily black from use, turned slowly while whirred loudly, trying to cool the room soaked in Shenzhen’s subtropical Autumn heat. The window opened towards the wall of the neighboring building less than two meters away; this only outlet towards the outside world was small and high, covered not with glass but with metal bars that casted long strips of shadows into the dim room. Just inside the metal bars, a few pots of green plants on the windowsill brought a touch of life and vitality to the small, cramped space.

Aunt Liu was 54 years old, and her husband was four years older. They were both from Dianjiang, a rural county in Chongqing. Though they grew up in the same village, they hadn’t known each other since they lived in different parts of it. “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.”

Aunt Liu had three siblings: an older brother and two younger brothers, though one of the younger brothers had passed away from illness when he was little. “My older brother? He had been really naughty, mischievous as a kid, and there was this day, when he was playing outside along the road, he somehow lit the fuse on a detonator. He was going to throw it into a manure pit and see the explosion, like other naughty boys did at that time. But the fuse burned really, really quick, and exploded when my brother barely threw it away from his hand. His arm was burned by the explosion really badly, I remember; it was a lot of heartbreaking crying and bleeding, and parts of his skin that were not covered by red flesh and blood looked very white – lifelessly white. Surgery (skin grafts) was needed to fix his skin, but that was way too expensive, and my parents couldn’t afford it, so they had his entire arm amputated instead. He had never been truly healthy for a day after amputation, not that I remember.” Aunt Liu’s older brother passed away the second year after Aunt Liu got married. “So, now, it’s just me and my remaining younger brother left.” The reason Aunt Liu came to Shenzhen to work, instead of going to another city, was because her brother was already here.

In 2008, at the age of 38, Aunt Liu “moved to the big city to find work.” Like countless other rural-to-urban migrant workers, she “hoped she could provide a better life for her family.” At the time, her youngest son was just over a year old. “Rent, living costs, and everything else cost much more in Shenzhen, so I left my son in rural Chongqing, and came to Shenzhen by myself.” Her first job was at the Jingtai Factory in Shenzhen, where she worked in the production line, stuffing foam into car seat cushions. Her base salary was 700 yuan a month, with 3.3 yuan for each overtime hour. “If there were a lot of orders the factory needed to fill, we worked long overtime, and I could earn up to 1,200 yuan a month. But back then, the government hadn’t yet made it mandatory for factories to pay for our social security plans, so small factories like Jingtai didn’t contribute a dime to my social security.” The factory offered dormitories, with rent costing just over 100 yuan per month, and Aunt Liu lived in the dorms for the ten years she worked there.

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.” In November of last year, she quit her job as a cleaner and joined Lihua Factory.

At Lihua, her base salary is 2,360 yuan a month. Overtime on weekdays pays 13.5 yuan an hour, and on weekends, the rate’s double at 27 yuan. “I work overtime nearly every Saturday, and that brings my monthly income to over 4,000 yuan. I now earn more than what I earned back in 2008, but prices, and so the cost of living, has skyrocketed even faster. The 2,300 yuan I make now doesn’t go nearly as far as the 700 yuan did back then. I can’t buy as much with my wage now than two decades ago.”

In 2012, Aunt Liu’s mother-in-law passed away, and she returned to her hometown to take care of the household affairs. “I went back and the first thing I saw was the run-down, unpainted house my family lived in. It’s not like Shenzhen. I’ve lived in cities for too long, all this while surrounded by organized, neat buildings and new constructions. So when I saw the house we had in our hometown, I felt a pang in my heart. It was, you know, so small and so old, so different and so isolated from the outside world. At that moment, you know, I decided to bring my husband to Shenzhen. He was a quiet, reserved, and hardworking person, and I thought, he must go to Shenzhen so we can work and face the outside world together.” Fortunately, the factory she worked in was short-staffed at that time, so she left her youngest son in his grandfather’s care and brought her husband to Shenzhen – to work at the same factory, in the EV toy production line. The following year, she brought her son to Shenzhen as well, and they moved out from the factory dorms and into a rented, run-down, thatched cottage. Her son attended a private elementary school in Longhua district, where the tuition was just over 3,000 yuan (~420 USD) a year.

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.

“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.”

Now 58, Aunt Liu’s husband won’t be able to pay into his social security plan in Shenzhen municipality in two years, at which time he’ll turn 60, the legal age for required retirement. After that, he’ll have to switch to paying for it himself, and the payment will be directed back to his hometown village collective. According to China Labor Bulletin Review on China’s Social Security System, “the basic framework for China’s state pension system was set up in 1997 under the State Council Decision on the Establishment of a Unified Basic Pension System for Enterprise Workers. Both employees and employers are required to make contributions to the pension system. Workers contribute based on their individual wage, at a rate of up to eight percent, while employers contribute a percentage of the total wages paid to their workforce, initially around 20 percent. For decades in China, there was a separate pension system for civil servants and other government employees such as teachers, who did not need to pay their own pension contributions and were entitled to a generous government-subsidized pension on retirement…Workers become eligible for pension benefits when they reach the statutory retirement age, but only if they have participated in the scheme for at least 15 years…Ideally, there needs to be a single unified national pension fund. However, while some individual provinces have successfully pooled local funds, significant differences in regional development, local fund imbalances, and contribution and payment rates means that creating a national system that covers everyone, including migrant workers and the informally employed, will be extremely difficult.” This holds true for Aunt Liu’s husband.

The social security plans in Shenzhen and his hometown follow different policies, and are operated by different local governmental entities. So after he switches to a social security plan in his hometown, he needs to contribute for another 15 years to qualify for a pension. If he doesn’t, he can get a refund for the portion he personally contributed, and not the portion his employers paid for him (currently, this number is set at 318 yuan per month). “This is the best we can get. You see, they say that the boss – not us – paid for half of our pension plan, so they can’t give us back that portion. But when the boss was deciding how much wage we earn, of course he factored in what he needed to pay in our pension plan. If they weren’t required to pay into our plan, they would’ve paid us higher wages.”

Aunt Liu and her husband decided he won’t continue paying for the social security plan. For now, he can still use his health insurance to cover most of his medical bills, but this will also end when he turns 60. In China, “both workers and employers must make payments to the basic medical insurance scheme which, like the pension scheme, comprises an individual account as well as pooled funds. Workers’ contribution goes directly to their individual account, while employer contributors are included in the pooled funds. Once the worker has paid into the system for the requisite number of years, they are eligible for benefits without having to make additional contributions…The medical insurance fund pays for general outpatient expenses, treatment of serious illness and hospitalization. Different regions have different regulations on minimum and maximum payment amounts and reimbursement ratios for employee medical insurance. Workers are now able to use their individual accounts to cover medical treatment for family members. But in 2020, the per capita cumulative balance of individual accounts stood at just 2,919 yuan…Moreover, to be eligible for public insurance funds, hospital treatments must be on a pre-approved government list; treatments outside of the pre-approved list must be paid out of either the worker’s individual account or their own pocket. Coverage for outpatient treatment and medicines is even more limited. This means that people who need outpatient treatment and medicine often have to buy additional private medical insurance, pay for treatment out of their own pocket or forgo treatment altogether.” After he’s reached the retirement age, the employers of Aunt Liu’s husband won’t be required by law – and in fact, they’re prohibited by law – to pay into his medical insurance plan. So his personal medical insurance in Shenzhen municipality will expire with his legal retirement, though he’ll “probably continue to work as a ‘re-employed worker.'”

As for Aunt Liu, she has to pay out of pocket for medical expenses in Shenzhen, though she is enrolled in, and contributes to, the rural cooperative medical insurance back in her hometown. It costs her 380 yuan a year, and while it doesn’t cover minor illnesses, it does reimburse 70-80% of the costs for major medical treatments, offering at least some buffer against serious diseases.

Q: As you said, life in the countryside has been getting better and better since China’s economic reforms. Why do you still feel the need to go outside of your hometown and work in the cities

A: Well, in life, you’ve always got to look forward. People have to look forward, aim higher. You have to work hard and strive for a better life.

Q: What kind of work do you do in the factory now?

A: I’m mainly tasked with cleaning the factory buildings, the dormitories, and the cafeteria yard. Every morning, after breakfast, I pack my lunch and head out to the factory at 7 AM. The factory has two five-story buildings – one for the workshop and the other for the dormitory. I’m responsible for all the cleaning in these areas, plus the canteen yard, along with another coworker.

Q: Does the factory set specific standards for your cleaning work?

A: Yes, they do. Every day, we have to sweep the floors, stairs, and hallways in the workshop more than once. We make sure there’s no dust on the doors, windows, handrails, and walls. There should be no spider webs in the ceilings or corners, no trash or spit on the floor, so stains on the tiles or marks on the walls. The same goes for the dorms. Outside of the factory’s buildings, we also clean around the factory ground, the factory entrance, the area around the dorms, and the cafeteria yard, keeping visible garbage from these surfaces at all times. The bathrooms need to be cleaned – sweeped and washed – at least once a day. Once a week, we use disinfectant to clean the toilets and urinals, making sure there’s no buildup in the squat toilets, no dirt in the urinals, no spots or marks in the sinks, nothing on the floor, and no smell in the bathroom. So floors mopped, sinks wiped, and toilets scrubbed to ensure they’re free of odors or buildup – we do that once a week. We also empty all trash bins in the workshop and dorms every day, replace the bags, and make sure there’s no garbage inside or around the bins. Sometimes, when the boss has guests over for a meal, I also help out in the kitchen, washing and chopping vegetables, cleaning up, and keeping things tidy.

Q: That sounds like a lot of hard work – it must be quite exhausting. How do you feel about the way the factory treats its workers?

A: It’s alright, not too bad. I’ve heard this factory used to be owned by a boss from Hong Kong, but later it was taken over and run by someone from Hunan. There’s another cleaner who has been working here for 17 years. And there’s this electrician who also lives in Dankeng Village; he’s been working at the factory for over 30 years, moving along with it whenever and wherever it relocated. A lot of long-timers stay here. If the factory wasn’t good, or at least decent, it wouldn’t be able to keep all the people. They would’ve sought another job. Work is work, and as far as work goes, the more you do, the more you get paid. They pay for our social insurance plans and offer dorms for the workers. If you work overtime late enough, they get you free dinner in the cafeteria. I’m over 50 now (50 is the legal retirement age of women in China), so I can’t pay into the social insurance here in Shenzhen anymore, but if I were younger, the factory would be covering their share of the cost for my social insurance too.

Q: In terms of benefits like housing and living conditions, do you get the options from the factory as the workshop workers?

A: Pretty much the same, the treatments are very much equal. I could live in the factory dorm if I wanted to – for just 60 yuan a month. But I chose renting a place outside because the dorms don’t have private bathrooms and cooking in the dorms is inconvenient. We don’t get a housing allowance from the factory, but I do get a 100-yuan bonus for collecting trash. When we first rented in Longhua, we stayed in an old tile-roofed house because it was cheap, for around only 200 to 300 yuan a month. Then the government reclaimed the tile houses and the land they sat on, so we moved to our current rental. The rent here started at 410 a month, and over the years we lived here, that number increased from 410 to 470. With water and electricity, it comes out to over 500 yuan.

Q: What do you usually do on weekends if there’s no overtime at the factory?

A: Oh, I scroll on my phone, haha! WeChat, short videos, that sort of stuff. But to avoid staring at my phone all day, I try to find other things to do, to keep busy. Like, I grow some vegetables on the windowsill. You saw that fish mint (Houttuynia) plant at my place earlier, right? We Sichuanese (people born and raised in Sichuan province) love that stuff as a cooking ingredient, and it’s super expensive back home. I also have some pothos plants. I got that pot of pothos for free, in fact. Lihua Factory used to be much larger than it is now. Lihua Factory used to have two dorm buildings. Around the time I started working here, I heard that orders [from downstream retailers] were shrinking, the number of workers there was decreasing, and the factory owner basically told the remaining workers to move into one of the two dorm buildings, and rented the empty one to another manufacturing company. After the workers’ all moved out, I had to go clean the empty building, and there I found a few pots of green that the owner probably didn’t want anymore. So I took a pot of pothos back and placed it on my windowsill.

Most of the time, I look for side jobs, like cleaning at a tutoring center near a school. I work an hour each time for 30 yuan and do that five times a week. I also clean a dance studio three times a week, earning 35 yuan each time. So with these side gigs, I make over 1,000 yuan a month extra. If I add my factory income, altogether, if I work hard enough, I can pull in over 5,000 yuan a month given that nothing goes wrong.

Q: You’re so inspiring! You’ve really got the spirit of this city – you know what they say, Shenzhen people are always searching for new opportunities, always working hard, and always willing to fight for a better life and a brighter future.

A: Haha, well, staring at my phone hurts my eyes, and it’s such a waste of time. Might as well find something productive to do.

When I worked as a sanitation worker, I would look for extra work – side jobs – after my shifts. There was this time when I saw these volunteers, at a traffic intersection, dressed in red volunteer vests and holding small red flags, directing traffic. I went up and asked how I could apply to be a volunteer, and they told me to join a community WeChat group from the street office. There was a sign-up link where you could volunteer for two hours at a time, and they pay 15 yuan per hour. So I signed up and earned some money with that for a while. When my husband and I both worked as sanitation workers, I worked the afternoon shift while he did mornings. On days when we didn’t have overtime, I’d go to the cleaning company boss and ask him for extra work, like cleaning at the metro station. My husband and I would alternate shifts there too – I’d work for three hours, and he’d do five. Metro station cleaning on top of our main jobs as street cleaners, we each worked about 11 to 13 hours a day.

Q: You both work so hard. If more young people had your work ethic, they’d be able to achieve so much. I’ve interviewed a lot of factory employees, but it’s rare to meet someone like you. You’ve really filled your life with meaning, and I admire how you’ve made the most of it.

A: Haha… Over the years, we’ve saved a bit of money. In 2018, we bought a 120-square-meter apartment in our hometown. It has an elevator but no property rights [property ownership certificate]. It cost over 140,000 yuan, and we paid it all at once. A relative of ours bought a similar-sized apartment in the county, one that’s given an official property ownership certificate. But he bought it with a loan, and it cost over 600,000 yuan because it has official property rights.

Q: Auntie, you bought a house by working hard as a cleaner. That’s amazing!

A: Haha – I guess.

Q: Are you happy with your life, as it is now? Do you feel like society has treated you unfairly in any way?

A: I’m quite content. I don’t feel like there’s injustice, or anything’s unfair. Our parents’ generation barely had anything to eat or wear. When we were young, our family was poor, and even rice was a luxury. I remember that sometimes, all members of a household might share one or two pairs of trousers – whoever had serious things to do outdoors wore the trousers, and the rest were left with broken rag covers. You can’t even imagine that. Life is so much better now. And honestly, you can only do as much as your abilities allow; you should only aim as high as it permits, really. We don’t have much education; growing up, we didn’t have the chance to study much. So, we work within our limits and just do what we can. There are always people better off, but there are also people worse off, when you compare yourself to others. We’re better off than some, but not as well off as others. Those who have the skills can go after bigger things, but for us, it doesn’t help to think too much about it.

Q: Some workers I’ve interviewed feel quite dissatisfied with society. They think their circumstances are caused by the social system at large, and they’re not the ones responsible. They believe their hard work isn’t properly rewarded and that they deserve a better life.

A: Well, it’s up to each person to create their own life! You’ve got to create your own opportunities. Everyone wants a good life, but you have to consider your abilities and situation. You need the skills to create that kind of life. I didn’t even finish middle school, and my husband didn’t even make it through elementary school. We don’t have the skills, so we have to accept that.My two sons, they don’t listen. My oldest is already 27 and still lazy. The younger one, when he was in school, would run off with his friends for days without coming home, nearly driving me crazy! I was so mad I could’ve died. If only they had been more disciplined and obedient, and focused more on their studies, our family would be in a much better position. My eldest wanted to buy a car. He knew a second-hand car wasn’t the best option, and there’re a lot of risks of buying secondhand; it might be water-soaked before, and the engine would be half broken, for example. But he still went ahead and bought secondhand, because that’s all he could afford. No matter what you buy, you’ve got to think about your own situation, your own means. Take my brother, for example. He started working in 1997, and now he’s a chef in a restaurant in Pinghu, Longgang district, Shenzhen city, making over 10,000 yuan a month. He’s brave, willing to learn, and picked up a skill. That’s why his life is so much better than ours now.

Q: It sounds like you and your husband really support and take care of each other. You seem quite happy together.

A: Yeah, we’re okay. It’s not bad. My husband, well, he’s not much of a talker and doesn’t actively seek out opportunities, but whatever I ask him to do, he’ll do it. He’s not particularly skilled or very capable, but he treats me well and takes good care of me. During the pandemic, when I got COVID and he had to be quarantined in a hotel, I was left home alone. It was so lonely at home. It was tough; I wasn’t used to it at all.Some people might have a lot of money and success, but their marriages are a mess. They fight with their wives all the time. What’s the point of all that? So, you see, it all comes down to your situation, to what kind of life suits you. I’m short, so I married someone who matches me. As long as a family is peaceful and gets along, that’s what matters. My only regret is that my two sons aren’t ambitious and don’t push themselves. They recently started working at a sugar factory in Quanzhou, Fujian. I can’t control them anymore, but I told them, “Whatever you do, whether you’re rich or poor, never break the law.”

Q: Do you have any plans for the future?

A: We’ll just keep working here in Shenzhen. If our sons get married and have kids, and they need us to help out, we’ll go back home and take care of the grandchildren. If they don’t need us, we’ll stay in Shenzhen and keep working until we can’t anymore. Right now, we’re saving up for our future, for our retirement, and to help our kids financially. You know the couple that lives right next door to us? The old man is over 70, and he’s still collecting scraps and recyclables here in Shenzhen to make a living and save money. They work really hard, saving every bit they can.

Q: You are the unsung heroes of this city!

A: Hahaha…