The Leavers(46)

IT STARTED AS A rumor: the city had stopped deporting rural migrants. Villagers couldn’t get permanent urban hukou, but they could buy temporary resident permits and find better jobs than fishing and farming. Two older boys on 5 Alley left for Fuzhou, the provincial capital, and came home bragging about six-story buildings and women in hot pants. Then more boys left, finding jobs in the factories there. No girls from the village had yet to go to the city, but I knew that leaving in order to make money was less suspect than leaving to become a new person. I’d never been to Fuzhou, even if it was only a few hours away, and I wasn’t sure what working in a factory would be like, only that I would make money, and I wouldn’t have to sit through silent dinners with Yi Ba, watching his mouth as it grimly worked on his food.

When I asked Haifeng if he ever wanted to move to the city, he looked confused, then alarmed. “No, I like it here.”

I told him I was thinking of going.

“To Fuzhou? Only boys can go.”

At the produce market, the parents of my former classmates talked about how their sons were sending home two hundred fifty yuan a month. One woman, whose son was still in school, said to the others, “Aren’t you worried with your sons alone in a big city? There are all sorts of girls living in the dormitories and no supervision.”

I ran home and rushed through the rest of my chores. At dinner, I announced, “I’m going to the city to work in a factory.”

“Only boys work in factories,” Yi Ba said.

“They’re hiring girls, too. At the factory where Mrs. Jia’s son works. They have separate dormitories full of girls and they make three hundred yuan a month.”

INSIDE THE FUZHOU GARMENT Export Corporation, the rooms hummed with the motors of hundreds of sewing machines and the windows steamed with the blistering heat of flatbed irons. I was a snipper. On the south side of the fourth floor, I sat at a long table and snipped threads all day from piles of blue jeans. My hands cramped, but I worked hard, even if it was so hot I felt like vegetables frying in a pan. Sweat dripped into the fabric, no time to wipe it off. I couldn’t put my scissors down for a second, to notice the way the sun streamed in through the windows, or marvel at how there were so many different shades of blue in a single square of denim. Those jeans kept on coming and if I was a second late, the girls down the line would curse at me and Foreman Tung would dock my pay.

The city was filled with girls like me, girls who swore we’d never go home again. I wanted to work my way up to a better factory, a bigger dormitory, and eventually, my own apartment, like my friend Qing’s cousin.

Fuzhou didn’t look like the pictures of Beijing in Liling’s old book. The alleys split into streets clouded by moped exhaust, the highways were punctured with sinkholes, and the air was all chainsaws and hammering. We slept sixteen to a room, two rows of eight bunks each, decorating the walls with pictures ripped from magazines, actors and singers and landscapes of mountains and lakes. Stuffed animals dangled from the bed poles, teddy bears in shades of greens and pinks. On line for the bathroom at five thirty in the morning, we complained about our thirteen-hour shifts as if we were much older women, discussing aching shoulders and imitating Foreman Tung. I did good imitations. I would lean into the bunks and yell, “Go, slowpokes, go, you turtles!” and emit a low snort my bunkmates agreed was exactly like his. “Not fast enough! You missed a thread!” The other girls would double over with laughter.

I sent home two hundred seventy yuan one month, two hundred forty the next. “You only made this much?” Yi Ba said on the phone. I said I’d try to send more, though the money I wired was twice what Yi Ba made on the boat. When I called to tell him that I’d made two hundred yuan in three weeks, he said, “Guess I taught you well.” Later, the neighbors would tell me he bragged about me, said I was more hard working than any boy. When they found out how much I was earning, they no longer said it was improper for girls to be living alone in the city. They let their own daughters go; they made their daughters go.

Soon Yi Ba had a television, the biggest one on 3 Alley, and when he came home from another crap day at the sea there would be four or five children lying gape-mouthed in front of the screen, drooling at a fuzzy historical drama, and by nightfall this crowd would swell to nine or ten or eleven or fourteen children, splitting peanuts between their teeth and tossing the shells across the room. When Yi Ba walked to the outhouse the shells would crunch and poke at his feet. “Go home,” I pictured him saying, but not really meaning it, and he would be sad when other parents purchased televisions with money their older kids sent from the city and his nights were quiet again.

Two months after I left Minjiang, Haifeng’s parents sent him to the city. As I snipped threads, he fit plastic spools into cassette tapes at an electronics factory on the other side of the highway, and we seldom had the same days off. When he first arrived he called the communal phone in my dormitory every week, though he rarely got through to me. I didn’t think of him often, only missed him during the few times I was by myself, when I’d worry I wasn’t doing enough for Yi Ba.

Mostly, I spent my free time with Xuan and Qing. The three of us had matching jeans, tight blue with a silver star on each butt cheek, and on afternoons off we paraded down the street arm in arm, moving in sync like the world existed only to watch us. We danced to cassette tapes Qing played on her Walkman, pop songs about true love and heartbreak. I memorized the words to the songs; I wrote them down in a hot pink notebook. There was a store that blared music from big speakers, with racks of colorful cassettes. My favorite songs were about girls who’d been treated badly by boys but were now happy on their own.