Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  MIDDLE SCHOOL EDUCATION.

  DIGNIFIED APPEARANCE, 1.55 METERS OR TALLER.

  Jobs often listed height requirements, an obsession in Chinese society. This is especially true for women, whose career opportunities are sharply defined by looks:

  SUPERMARKET CASHIERS NEEDED.

  FEMALE, MIDDLE SCHOOL OR TRADE SCHOOL EDUCATION.

  1.58 METERS OR TALLER.

  SKIN FAIR AND CLEAR, GOOD APPEARANCE.

  Women are also paid less—a detail that was noted openly in listings, along with regional preferences:

  MALE WORKERS NEEDED FOR 35 YUAN PER DAY,

  FEMALE WORKERS NEEDED FOR 25 YUAN PER DAY.

  AVERAGE WORKERS NEEDED.

  PEOPLE FROM JIANGXI AND SICHUAN NOT WANTED.

  The listings were like telegrams—companies paid by the word, so they kept things brief. They described only the most necessary qualities, condensing human beings to whatever feature seemed most compelling to the boss. Sometimes they omitted the job description entirely, creating an odd sense of mystery. What exactly would people be doing that required only these characteristics?

  FEMALE WORKERS NEEDED.

  1.58 METERS TALL, GOOD APPEARANCE.

  600 TO 800 PER MONTH.

  WORKERS NEEDED.

  EYESIGHT MUST BE 4.2 OR BETTER.

  800 TO 1,200 PER MONTH.

  Many factories didn’t bother with the talent market. They simply posted signs on their front gates and assumed that migrants would do the legwork. During that first February in Lishui, people wandered the district in packs, and it felt like an extension of the Spring Festival holiday. Everybody was young; they wore new clothes; their voices rose in excitement as they cruised the factory strip. People from the same region tended to stick together, and often two groups met in the street to exchange information. Down the road from the bra ring factory, I joined a crowd of thirty who had gathered at the front gate of Jinchao Synthetic Leather, one of the biggest plants in the region. A factory guard checked the identification cards of potential applicants, and he turned away anybody whose ID showed a home address in Guizhou Province. Guizhou is the poorest province in China, located deep in the interior, and it’s home to many ethnic minorities.

  A group of young Guizhou people had just been rejected, and now they stood in the street, discussing where to go next. I asked one of them what Jinchao Synthetic Leather had against his home province. “They didn’t give a reason,” he said. “But lots of workers from Guizhou come to Lishui, so sometimes the factories won’t accept us.”

  It’s illegal for a Chinese company to discriminate on the basis of home province, although in practice this happens all the time. I was curious to hear Jinchao’s reasons, so I followed a line of applicants inside. They made their way to the second floor, where the deputy manager conducted interviews in his office. He didn’t hesitate when I asked about the restriction. “People from Guizhou like to fight,” he said. “They’re too much trouble in the factory. Around here a lot of the petty criminals come from Guizhou, too. So I don’t want them working in the factory.”

  I had expected him to finesse the point, or maybe refuse to answer. But he couldn’t have been more direct: he refused to hire people from Guizhou because he didn’t like them. Who needs a better reason than that? He was just as straightforward with the potential workers who crowded around his desk. When one man tried to negotiate for a higher salary by complaining about the chemicals on the pleather assembly line, the manager shot back, “If you don’t want to work with toxic fumes, maybe you should become a teacher.” Another applicant complained that the starting wages for an unskilled worker—3.8 yuan per hour, or 47 cents—were too low. The manager said, “If you were a woman, you’d make even less. Women make only 3.4. So you should be happy with 3.8.” I asked why women were paid less for the same job, which was another dumb question. “Because women aren’t as strong,” the manager said matter-of-factly. “There are some things that a man can do better, so we have to pay them more.”

  But I noticed that workers responded to this man, despite the fact that almost everything out of his mouth seemed offensive. He had an easy rapport with the returning employees, who stopped by the desk to register for the coming work year. And bolder applicants tended to be rewarded. One man wouldn’t agree to the starting wage; he had already worked a similar job at another factory, and he believed that his experience was worth a higher salary. The manager flatly refused (“Go back to your old job”), but the worker wouldn’t leave. He stood by the desk, making his case while the manager dealt with other applicants. Periodically they exchanged barbs (“I wouldn’t have come here if I’d known you weren’t fair” “Why would I care if you came here or not?”), but neither one ever showed any anger. After a full hour, the manager finally signed him up at the higher wage. That’s what it took to win his respect—patience and determination and a certain bullheadedness.

  Nobody had been doing this for long. Ten years ago, most Chinese employment was government-assigned, and in those days it was rare for a Chinese person to embark on an independent job search. Since then, people have learned quickly, but the routine is still new—the blind recruit the blind. And they have no time for the polish of the American human resources department. There are no euphemisms, no indirections; nobody talks about “becoming part of the team” or “opportunities for growth” or a desire for “highly motivated, creative individuals.” People say exactly what they think, and they make brutally sharp evaluations; they feel free to act on any whim or prejudice. Here in China, “human resources” has a more literal meaning: millions of people need to find work, and countless factories need them to work hard, and no subtleties of language can soften the hard calculus of supply and demand.

  In Lishui, the bra ring factory was one of the local companies that was hiring for the first time, and Boss Wang and Boss Gao interviewed applicants in the second-floor office. Like everything else in the factory, the office had been designed in a rush, and the furnishings felt temporary. A dirty carpet had been tossed across the cement floor, and there was a cheap couch, a low tea table, a pair of wooden desks, and two potted plants that already appeared to be dying from neglect. Brilliantly colored bra rings had been scattered atop one of the desks. They were the only spots of brightness in the room, and whenever a job applicant asked about the factory’s product, Boss Wang pushed a few rings across the desk, like a croupier in a casino. “Clothing accessories for underwear,” he would say. And often that explanation was enough, especially for female applicants, who recognized the product instantly. Only men had to be told what the rings were for.

  The factory offered a starting wage of three and a half yuan per hour, which was a little more than forty cents. In Lishui, that was the legal minimum. China doesn’t have a nationwide standard—because of wide regional disparities in wealth, each city sets its own minimum wage. In 2006, a more developed place like Guangzhou had a minimum of 4.3 yuan per hour, but that didn’t guarantee that workers earned more money. In advanced cities, low-level jobs might be harder to find, or hours might be fewer. This is a key detail for workers, who care about hours as much as they care about the starting wage. Most people want to work as much as possible—since they’re away from home, there’s no point in having free weekends or holidays. They’re pleased to hear that a factory offers overtime hours, and the perfect job is one in which an employee can expect no vacation days apart from major national holidays, such as the Spring Festival. Sometimes an assembly-line worker told me proudly that she was clocking nearly three hundred hours per month. In that situation, Lishui’s hourly minimum became a monthly wage of one hundred and twenty dollars—excellent money for an uneducated migrant.

  In truth, Boss Wang didn’t know how many hours he could offer, or even how many workers he needed, because it would all be determined by the demand for his product. But he told applicants what they wanted to hear: he assured them they’d have at least ten hours of labor every day, and no more t
han one day’s vacation every month. That was the Lishui version of a boss’s empty promise—he soothingly told applicants he’d work them to the bone, when in fact they might get stuck with only forty hours a week. The smarter applicants asked how long the company had been in the business, and many people inquired about the production process. Often a woman said, “Are there any fumes here?” In Lishui, that’s shorthand for DMF, the solvent used in pleather factories. Word had already spread about the risks, and even uneducated newcomers had a surprisingly accurate understanding. Women who hadn’t yet had children usually avoided working with pleather, because of rumors that the chemicals cause birth defects. And men only worked there if the money was good—pleather factories had to offer more than the minimum wage.

  At the bra ring factory, Boss Gao’s father helped with hiring, and he let me sit in his office while he interviewed workers. Most applicants were teenagers, and they stood with their heads down, mumbling answers. They fiddled nervously with the bra rings—everybody who entered the room invariably fixated on these colorful objects. But occasionally there was an applicant who stood out from the rest. During one interview, Mr. Gao asked a woman for her age, and she said, “Do you mean my real age, or the age that’s on my identity card?”

  “What does your identity card say?”

  “It says I’m twenty-five, but that’s not right. I had it changed when I first went out to work, because I was too young. That was many years ago. Now I’m really twenty-three.”

  Mr. Gao nodded and added her name to the list of qualified workers. It reflected how quickly time passes in a Chinese factory town: the woman had originally changed her birthdate so that she could work in her mid-teens, and now she was concerned that an advanced age of twenty-five would be held against her. After the woman left the room, I asked Mr. Gao if he worried about the kind of person who falsifies her government document. “No, that’s a good sign,” he said. “It just means she really wants to work. Somebody like that is probably going to be a good worker.”

  Initiative mattered most, regardless of how bosses imagined ideal employees. Often they made them sound like automatons—over and over, Boss Wang and others told me that they wanted applicants to be young, inexperienced, and uneducated. They didn’t want distinctive hairstyles; they didn’t want people with hobbies; they didn’t need opinions on the work floor. But the truth was that even the most pragmatic boss was susceptible to a strong personality. By the second day, the bra ring factory had already filled its potential worker list, and Mr. Gao turned people away at the door. He told one young woman that he’d add her to the backup list, but she lingered in the office.

  “Can’t you put me on the regular list?” she said.

  “I told you, it’s full. I’ll put you on the second list. If somebody decides not to work, we’ll call you.”

  She smiled sweetly and said, “Just switch my name with somebody else’s.”

  “I can’t do that. We already have enough. We have nineteen workers for that job.”

  “I’ve already worked in a factory. I’m a good worker.”

  “Where did you work?”

  “Guangdong.”

  “So young and you’re already experienced!”

  The woman’s card identified her as Tao Yuran, born in 1988. She was only seventeen, barely old enough according to Chinese law, which requires factory workers to be at least sixteen. Tao had short-cropped hair and lively eyes; unlike many job-seekers, she looked directly at the older man when she spoke. She couldn’t resist fiddling with the bra rings—nobody could—but she handled them differently from the other applicants. She picked up a few and held them tight, as if they were pieces in a game she was determined to win.

  “Just change a name,” she said. “Why does it matter?”

  “I can’t do that,” Mr. Gao said.

  “I would have come yesterday if I’d known.”

  “I’ll make sure you’re first on the second list,” he said. He scribbled her name at the top of the paper. “See, I even wrote ‘good girl’ next to your name!”

  But Tao refused to be patronized. She remained beside the desk, clutching the rings and pleading her case. After five minutes Mr. Gao stopped responding. He busied himself with paperwork, ignoring the woman, but she still kept pleading. “Just switch my name,” she said.

  Mr. Gao said nothing.

  “Can’t you just add it to the list?”

  Silence.

  “What does it matter?”

  Silence.

  “I’ll work well. I’ve already worked in Guangdong.”

  Silence.

  “None of those people will know you’ve changed it!”

  Finally, after a full ten minutes, Mr. Gao relented. He added her name, but then he looked at the list and the Wenzhou superstition came into play. “Now it’s ershi,” he said. “Twenty. That’s a bad-sounding number—too much like esi, starving to death. I’ll have to add another name after yours.”

  Tao thanked him and dropped the sweaty rings onto the desk. She was almost out the door when Mr. Gao called out a warning. “Remember, it’s the boss’s final decision,” he said. “If the boss says twenty-one is too many, then it’ll have to be nineteen.”

  The woman walked back to the desk, her jaw set. “Move my name up the list.”

  Five minutes later, after another one-sided conversation, Tao Yuran’s name was squarely in the middle of the sheet. She left triumphant; the older man looked faintly exhausted. After she was gone, he turned to me and shook his head in admiration. “That girl,” he said, “knows how to get things done.”

  In time, the bosses would learn that the young woman wasn’t at all who she claimed to be. She had no experience; she had never worked in a factory; she hadn’t been anywhere near Guangdong Province. She wasn’t seventeen and she wasn’t Tao Yuran. That was her older sister’s name: she had borrowed the ID card and bluffed about everything. The girl who got things done was barely fifteen years old.

  THE APPEARANCE OF WOMEN in this part of Lishui represented a new stage for the development zone. Every time I visited and drove through the future factory district, there was something new that caught my eye, some indication that progress had lurched another step forward. The bra ring factory was located on Suisong Road, and when I first drove there, in the summer of 2005, it was nothing but a dirt track. For some reason bus stop signs had already been planted—lonely metal markers with lists of destinations, most of which didn’t yet exist, and none of which would be served by public transport for another year. On that initial journey virtually everybody on Suisong Road was male. Most were construction workers, but there was also an early vanguard of entrepreneurs. These pioneers settled the west side of the street, facing the half-built factories, and most of their shops were made of cheap cinder blocks. They sold construction materials, and they stocked noodles, flour, vegetables, pork: simple food that catered to low-wage laborers. The only real stores—the ones with professional signs and recognizable brands—belonged to China Mobile and China Unicom. In new factory towns, cell phone shops usually appear early, because everybody is a migrant who needs to call home.

  By the time I returned in October all the bus stop markers had been stolen. Workers were laying drainage pipe beneath Suisong Road, and the western strip of shops and restaurants had grown. There was now a printing store—the first business to sell something other than food, phone cards, and construction materials. The print shop specialized in company signs and employee ID tags, and its presence was an omen that machines were about to come to life. A few factories had already posted signs in front: American Geley Professional Electrical Engineering, New Year Glass Company, Prosperous and Safe Stainless Steel Company. In January, workers finally paved Suisong Road. Dozens of men moved down the street, smoothing the surface, but they left the manholes gaping. In new factory towns, manhole covers tend to be installed late, because people steal the metal plates and sell them for scrap, like the bus stop signs.

 
In February I saw a woman drive the front left wheel of her Honda into an open manhole. The car was undamaged; men ran out from nearby shops and lifted the vehicle out of the hole. By the next month the covers had finally been installed. They weren’t metal: a Shanghai-based company called Chunyi had created a new type of lid made of composite plastic, to foil thieves. For the first time, I could drive down Suisong Road without fear of ruining a tire, and it was also on this journey that I noticed women outnumbering men. It had happened all at once: most construction crews had moved on, and now the factory bosses hired predominately girls for the assembly lines. In the evenings, after most shifts were over, workers wandered the street in packs, many of them still dressed in their uniforms. Soon the shopping options changed: two shoe stores appeared, along with a big clothes shop whose year-round sign promised “Half Price!” There was also a medical clinic and a supermarket. A half dozen beauty parlors appeared on Suisong Road, and some of them had the red-tinged lights that suggest prostitution.

  In the span of nine months the place had changed so profoundly that I could sense it with my eyes closed. At night came sounds of leisure, young people laughing and talking, and the daytime noises also took on a new character. For half a year the development zone had roared with construction: bulldozers, jackhammers, drills. This racket was fitful and erratic; a drill would whine for half a minute, and then a jackhammer would rumble, and then for a brief moment there would be silence. But the uneven syncopation ended with the factories. They had rhythm—their assembly lines hummed and sang with the regularity of a chorus. One afternoon, standing on Suisong Road, I shut my eyes and listened, picking out the song of every product. Punch-hisss, punch-hisss, punch-hisss—that was the pneumatic wheeze of the metal press that pounded out unfinished bra rings. Crussshhhh, crussshhhh, crussshhhh—the throb of a polycarbonate grinder making Jane Eyre light switches. Whir-r-r-ring, whir-r-r-ring, whir-r-r-ring—industrial spools wrapping copper wire for Geley Electrical Company. All of the machines sang together—punch-hisss, punch-hisss; crussshhhh, crussshhhh; whir-r-r-ring, whir-r-r-ring—and then I realized the other way in which these noises were different from those of construction. The factory sounds did not stop. Each was steady as a heartbeat, as reliable as breathing, and that was how the neighborhood finally came to life.