City Hero, the Factory Cleaner (Part 2)

August 31st, 2024:

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.