No Way Out (Chapter 4)

July 6th, 2024:

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.”

So 18 months after she started her maternity leave, Sister Mann returned to Shenzhen and found work at another garment factory. “I spent the entire rest of the year in Shenzhen alone, and the next time I went back to my hometown, it was the next New Year’s holiday. So I went on the bus, went back to my hometown as usual. That’s when I realized something very bad…heartbreaking: my family, including my two daughters, treated her like a stranger. My daughters didn’t even care to go and wait for me at the bus station – only my husband went to meet me. But he did not go for me. The first question he asked? He asked how much salary the factory paid me! Literally, at the end of a whole year, his only concern was how much money I had brought back; there was no – he showed no – care or concern for my well-being or whatsoever. And then there were my in-laws, on the other hand, who kept asking when they would get a grandson from me to carry on the family line. But I’ve already given birth to two children at that time. But that was half expected. They’ve been like this, and I had only a dim hope on the bus that they would change – entirely unrealistic hope. At least I got to see my daughters and spend some time – a week or so – with them, I thought. But even my daughters, I found out that all they had been told was that their mother only cared about money, that their mother loved money more than them. They called me by my name; they never called me ‘mom.’ They asked me why I preferred working far away from home, rather than staying home with them.”

That entire New Year’s holiday was spent in constant arguments. By the end, Sister Mann’s heart had turned cold. She boarded the bus back to Shenzhen before the holiday ended, her mind filled with the determination to earn more money to provide for her daughters’ living expenses, education, and their future. The communication between her and Li Gang became more and more sparse, “dwindling to almost nothing – to the point where we didn’t even feel like talking anymore. I didn’t want to speak to him because when I did, it always ended in bitter arguments and more conflicts.” Their marriage was, in essence, nothing but an empty shell. “It feels over. Already.”

At least the grueling work at Lihua’s factory allowed Sister Mann to momentarily forget the misery of her marriage.