by Spencer Wise
* * *
The deep, rich smell of shit and cow skin, mixed with notes of mango from the trees planted along the sidewalk wafted through the open window of the van as we turned off Qifeng Gongye into the factory. Dad asked if it was just him or did everything in China smell either like shit or flowers. I told him it was because he only goes to the shoe factory and the overspritzed hotel. If he went someplace else he might enjoy a third smell.
“Where else would I go?” he said.
Even though we were only an hour from Guangzhou, no taxi driver had ever heard of these roads. On Google Maps we were a blank gray stretch intersected by a few highways. You had to be led here.
A Chinese worker in loose trousers and white shirt pulled a metal rickshaw full of yellow-and-blue lasts, the plastic models shaped like a foot around which you build a shoe. My skin bumped when I saw them stacked all around the factory, in rusty drums or giant baskets, hundreds of lasts of mismatched colors and sizes, like feet without shoes or shoes without feet, a weird double nothingness. Today though I took an odd sort of pleasure in imagining them bringing to life my own designs, assuming I didn’t fuck things up at the presentation with Abelson’s later.
Tiger Step factory was just five cement buildings clad with shiny peach-and-white tiles stained from acid rain, leather dust and the blue clay blown over from the brick factory next door. I could smell the factory, that sickly sweet adhesive cement glue burning my nostrils. The administrative building sat right across from the dormitories, adjacent to the two production plants.
I got out of the van and scanned the bank of steel sash windows, hoping to see Ivy in the sample room, not wanting to see her hands at work, just her face in profile, but the disc of sun glinted off the windows, and even when shielding my eyes I could make out only the silhouettes of workers’ heads. Maybe she was in her dormitory, tired from visiting her grandmother over the holiday. It was still early.
I turned around to her dorm. Up on a fourth-floor balcony a young woman was snipping a spring onion from a flowerpot with a pair of scissors. The moment she felt my eyes on her, she lowered her head, without finishing, and disappeared. Only I still saw her eyes behind a beaded curtain waiting for me to leave. Another woman I’d never know, and I wondered what had been moving through her as she trimmed the green stalks. I often wondered that, riding the subway alone into Guangzhou as I was squished right up against a woman in a silk chemise with a tortoise shell hairclip at her temple, who turned and looked at me with all the enthusiasm of a pallbearer, that dour inert glare as she brushed right past me at her stop, her body sliding over mine, knowing with each passing moment that it was my last chance to speak to her, knowing better still that I’d sound like an idiot if I tried.
Dad shoved my messenger bag into my chest. “Come on,” he said. “I’m schvitzing.” It was eighty-five degrees but inside the plant it was probably ninety-five under the heat setter boxes. I heard the hiss of hydraulic machines, the musky and wonderful smell of treated leather. Right outside our office, the same state employees were digging up the street—sparks flew as their mattocks glanced off limestone rocks, five feet down in the ground. They were fixing nothing. Nothing was broken. A year in China and I understood the importance of imaginary jobs, they were practically indispensable, but there was a third man in the crew who didn’t even pretend to dig. He sat on a stool outside the trench staring as I passed, his eyes bloodshot, muzzle like an angry electric socket, and I was relieved to get inside the vestibule where I quickly called the elevator.
“The smoke tickles my throat,” Dad said. In the corner stood a small shrine with the enameled figurine of Guan Gong, the God of Business, with bamboo shoots and burning sticks of sandalwood. “You think Yong minds if I—” Dad licked his finger and reached to pinch the red ember right as the bell chimed and I yanked him inside the elevator.
On the way up I could tell the incense had set off some obsessive part of his brain because for five flights he was just listing foods that bothered his throat and mouth. Potato chips, toasted bread, frisée. As soon as the doors opened I almost jogged to my office and set my bag down on my desk. I wasn’t in there long before there was a knock on my door, and Hongjin, a tall, scrawny Chinese man attempting to grow a goatee, came into the room. Hongjin was thirty-one years old and our account manager for Abelson’s, the Midwestern department store we’d worked with for the past five years.
He knuckled his black frame glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. “Is it true Fedor has made a partner out of you?”
“Yes. Partners.”
At twenty-seven, Hongjin had a heart attack from overworking at the Bureau of Municipal Economy. He’d been doing sixteen-or seventeen-hour days and right as he was thinking about cutting back, his heart just gave out. When Hongjin interviewed for the job here at Tiger Step, Dad asked to see the scars on his chest, not because Dad didn’t believe him, but because he had almost a holy reverence for scars. Dad kept saying, “Poor thing,” as he traced with his forefinger the crooked scar tissue on Hongjin’s chest, not actually touching him but just a few inches away. Dad hired him on the spot. The thing that really got to him was that Hongjin never told his parents about his heart attack. He said he didn’t want to worry them. Dad talked about that for days.
“Congratulations.” Hongjin came over and hugged me, and I could smell the smoke on his clothes. He chain-smoked Yangcheng cigarettes, Kings unfiltered, except he was respectful enough not to do it in front of my father, saying it was bad for Dad’s allergies, but I knew it was because Dad gave him a second chance and he almost touched his scar.
Hongjin was examining the blue last on the folding table.
The presentation was only a few hours away and I realized I had this idea in the back of my head.
“Hongjin, why do we use Die Jo as a foot model?”
“She’s not a football,” he said over his shoulder.
“Foot model.”
“Oh,” he said, turning around. “Sorry. To be the foot model, you have to be most beautiful girl in the factory.”
“She’s almost sixty years old.”
“She speaks a little English, and she’s a size six. They call her Butterfly Queen.”
“That doesn’t make her one,” I said, and I realized that I was pushing him only to justify in my own mind a decision I’d already made.
“Can you get her for me, please?”
* * *
Ten minutes later Hongjin brought Die Jo into the office. She had a short bob haircut, heavy crow’s-feet, and she wore a black dress like she was in mourning. It was quiet now, just the gurgling of the air conditioner. “Welcome,” I said, and already my throat felt dry.
“Thank you, Mr. Cohen, dollface,” she said, and her face changed, now she was looking at me with great pity and tenderness, as a mother would. “Do you like China? Wouldn’t you rather be back at the Tropicana dancing Charleston with a swell dame?”
I smiled politely. She talked in a language learned from her father’s contraband noir and detective films; it was all the English she knew. The buyers loved it when she said, “Sure, pal, I’d buy these heels, I’m no dumb Dora.” Some customers thought we taught her this language as some kind of sales shtick. I could see she was frustrated. No choice but to get to the point. I told her I had to relocate her.
“Who’s the new gal?” she said.
“Let’s not worry about that. The point is we need to relocate you.”
In desperation she turned and spoke to Hongjin in Cantonese. His eyes were wide and serious. She nodded. For what felt like a long time he spoke and I didn’t know what was happening, other than the fact he wasn’t supposed to say anything at all. When he was done, she sat taller, almost like she was straining to reach something high with her chin. “Baloney!” she said, a bird’s wing of red lipstick trembling across her lips. “You’ve seen my gams. It’s what I was bui
lt for. I’m a star. Who’s better?”
She stood slowly. She wouldn’t look at me. “You ain’t so tough,” she said, barely audible.
I looked to Hongjin. “What the fuck did you tell her?”
Hongjin told me about her hukou, her household registration pass. She held a village pass so if we fired her, she had to go back. I’d never heard anything about it before, my face prickled with embarrassment, and I suddenly felt like a fraud. How had I never heard of this? Flashing across the front of my brain was that Dad knew all about the hukou system and never spoke a word of it to me.
“I didn’t say anything about firing,” I said.
“You said relocate.”
Die Jo was walking in slow motion toward the door.
I called her back to the chair. “You aren’t fired, okay. Nobody has to go anywhere. Let’s make this work. Is there anything else you can do here? Can you work the line maybe, stitch, pattern in the sample room?”
A little color came back into her cheeks. “I play poker. I’m a big cheese. A four-flusher like Black Cocoa in Honolulu.”
“I have no idea what she’s saying,” I told Hongjin, “but good enough.” I invented a position for Die Jo: Chairwoman of the Workers’ Recreation Poker Committee. That sounded sufficiently bureaucratic. Hongjin asked if I could do that and I told him I didn’t see why not. Who was stopping me? Die Jo smiled, came over to the other side of the table and bowed very formally. I bowed back and Hongjin escorted the Butterfly Queen out of my office. I waited until I couldn’t hear their footsteps to go find Ivy.
* * *
I headed down the back stairwell where no one would see me. It wouldn’t have looked good if Dad or Yong or Shen or any of the managers saw me bring Ivy, a stitcher, up the front stairs. I paused right before the green steel door, because I could hear the girls’ voices on the other side. The door’s metal arm was cool in the heat of the building. I knew what would happen when I opened the door, all the sounds would stop, the women would look down as though they worked twelve-hour days without uttering a word. Badly, I wanted them to look at me, and then, in the exact opposite way, I wished they’d forget about me and act the way Ivy said they did when I wasn’t around, talking and laughing and fighting, making fun of me and Dad. But there was no place I could stand without them seeing me. Not over by the hand-lasters with their metal beaked claws, or the women burnishing leather on a horsehair wheel, or the ones hunched over open ceramic bowls of latex cement, their noses constantly running as they glued suede kiltie tassels to a pair of oxfords—so many operations to make a pair of fucking shoes, hundreds of steps, and I couldn’t find a place to stand and watch and listen without ruining everything.
When I pushed open the door, a cold hopeless silence fell over the room. Dad always mistook this for a sign of respect. Ivy was at a rectangular wood table with five other girls, tracing a design pattern on a full grain hide with a silver pen. The whole trick of making a shoe is turning a two-dimensional object into a three-dimensional object. How to take something flat, a drawing, an animal hide, and give it body, shape, form; breathe some life into it like a golem. I called to Ivy. She came over, everyone watching without watching, and we walked out of the sample room in silence save for the squeak of sewing machine pedals, the slug of the needle and the clack of the bobbin.
* * *
Up in my office, I asked Ivy to have a seat. She was wearing dark blue jeans and a white T-shirt. We had never been in my office together before and though we flirted there was nothing beyond that. Not even a discussion of beyond.
“How’s it going down there?” I asked from my chair behind my desk. Her eyes went to the curtains I’d closed so that no one from the plant could see us. I winced a little in shame.
“Going as you expect,” she said, looking at her fingernails. “We’re making your shoes.”
“Right.” She seemed much darker here, unreadable, and I pulled my chair out from behind my desk and sat closer to her.
“Ivy, I’ve let Die Jo go as our foot model and—”
“I know,” she interrupted. “I saw Die Jo in the sample room crying.”
“We need a younger girl.”
“There’s millions of them in China.”
My problem with women was always thinking that I was as clever as they were. Earlier on, I had somehow got it stuck in my head that seduction was like sales, if you said enough of the right things, you closed the deal. That the world went to the best liars. Even now, when I wanted to be honest with Ivy, I heard myself lying. It was not that I needed younger. It was her.
“I want you to be the new girl. You’re perfect for this.”
She laughed, but at least the darkness lifted from her face. “I suspect this is what you want. The girls are talking. Your father made you a partner? I thought you did not know if you wanted this business.”
“Well, I lost that fight.”
“We all lost, this is why we are here. Let me ask something. Why are you messing around with me?” She gave me a sly smile. “I’m just a factory girl.”
That didn’t sit with me. The way she spoke English so well. Her smarts. None of it ever added up. Most of the girls in the factory hadn’t gotten out of grade school.
“Are you really?” I asked.
“I have a history with shoes,” she said, crossing her legs. “Before the revolution, my grandfather worked for the Foot Emancipation Society. He went town to town educating women about liberating their feet.”
She hadn’t answered my question, but now wasn’t the time to push. “See?” I said. “It’s fate that we’re together.” Right when I said that I felt a heat on my ears and face, reddening for having suggested something between us. Something more. I’ve never had sense enough to keep my mouth shut.
“How do you know I am the right size?”
“I saw your flip-flop on your grandmother’s boat. Size six.”
“Is that sweet or weird?”
“Both? Look, Ivy, you’re born for this.” That was the wrong thing to say.
“For foot modeling? Sort of the way you are born for this factory.”
“Should I have turned it down?” I asked.
“I bet you thought about it. I don’t blame you. You don’t see other options yet. Well, look, I am sure you can capitalize on my feet. Put them to good use.”
“We can spend more time together.”
“Oh,” she said, smiling. “Is that what I want? I love when men tell me what to want. How else can I know?”
“Come on. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“There is an old tradition. When born, the mother puts a jug of wine under your bed. Supposed to save this for marriage day. But me and my girlfriend drank it one time, maybe we were thirteen, and got drunk. I wanted the jug gone. It was under my head my whole life. Very bad taste. Bad vinegar. We go see fortune-teller, old lady no one seeks anymore, but she reads the coins, Book of Changes—says in big voice that I am born to raise geese, chicken, in a field. We laugh at her. Rude girls. But she was so wrong. So maybe you take birth too serious?”
I started fiddling with the measuring tape on my desk. A pang in my stomach, that twisted ache when you want someone very badly. I couldn’t think of an answer. I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like a chance to say something honest but I heard myself slide right into business mode.
“This brings a bump in your pay.”
“This is your answer?” she said. “After what I tell you? You are ridiculous. What are you so scared of?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Who said anything about scared? It’s what’s best for the company.”
There was a loud banging on the wall behind me and I heard Dad’s voice on the other side of the wall. “Young man. Young man, a glass of water. Drying up over here. So parched!”
Ivy gave a little bit of a smirk, one side of her l
ip curled. “You better hurry.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “He’s not dying.”
“Dying!” Dad yelled.
I turned to the wall as if I was going to be able to see through it and glare him silent, but when I turned back, Ivy was already slipping out the door. “Hurry with water, young man,” she said.
“Will you do it?”
“Oh,” she said, with a knowing smile. “Yes. I do it. Whatever is best for the company.”
Then her face vanished behind the door and the dark diagonal slice of the hallway was gone.
* * *
After lunch at the canteen, I was wearing my suit and sitting in the wood-paneled conference room with Dad, Hongjin, Yong and the two women from Abelson’s, Marie and Esme from Chicago. There was no telling how Dad would react when he saw Ivy walk in. He hated change that he didn’t initiate. His ethos of total control and supervision matched China’s rather nicely. Growing up he refused to squirt WD-40 on the door hinges; the unique door squeaks told him who moved where. A terrifying omnipotence like a ghost following you through the house.
A soft knock at the door and Ivy walked in wearing a floral dress that tied at the waist and fell softly on her body and flared just above her knee. Dad’s mouth fell open, Yong’s as well, not because it wasn’t Die Jo, but because she looked beautiful. She didn’t look like a stitcher at the factory, not a typical inland girl who left her village. She looked modern, like she was born in Guangzhou and had always belonged there. Yong whispered something to my dad and I saw them both shrug. I’d assumed correctly that they wouldn’t jeopardize the presentation by making a scene. Dad didn’t shout, Where’s the normal girl, ignoramus! He said, “Hello, Ivy,” barely opening his mouth.
“Mr. Cohen,” she said, bowing her head ever so slightly before taking a seat with us around the oval table. On the table, I’d arranged the collection from heels to flats, and I found myself unconsciously knocking each shoe against the table as I gave a brief overview of the line to the ladies, just like Dad did, using each shoe almost as a gavel to emphasize the point.