After the Apocalypse

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “Twenty-two,” she said, adding three years to her age, still dancing and singing.

  Maybe she should have told him she was a widow? Or an orphan? But there were too many orphans and widows after so many people died in the bird flu plague. There was no margin in that. Better to be divorced. He didn’t throw any money at her, just flicked open his cellphone to check listings from the market for plague trash. This plague-trash market was so big it was easier to check online, even if you were standing right in the middle of it. She needed a new cell phone. Hers had finally fallen apart right before she headed south.

  Shenzhen people were apparently too jaded for hip-hop. She made fifty-two yuan, which would pay for one night in a bad hotel where country people washed cabbage in the communal sink.

  The market was full of secondhand stuff. When over a quarter of a billion people died in four years, there was a lot of second-hand stuff. But there was still a part of the market for new stuff and street food, and that’s where Jieling found the cell phone seller. He had a cart with stacks of flat plastic cell phone kits printed with circuits and scored. She flipped through; tiger-striped, peonies (old lady phones) metallics (old man phones), anime characters, moon phones, expensive lantern phones. “Where is your printer?” she asked.

  “At home,” he said. “I print them up at home, bring them here. No electricity here.” Up north in Baoding she’d always bought them in a store where they let you pick your pattern online and then printed them there. More to pick from.

  On the other hand, he had a whole box full of ones that hadn’t sold that he would let go for cheap. In the stack she found a purple one with kittens that wasn’t too bad. Very Japanese, which was also very fresh this year. And only one hundred yuan for phone and three hundred minutes.

  He took the flat plastic sheet from her and dropped it in a pot of boiling water big enough to make dumplings. The hinges embedded in the sheet were made of plastic with molecular memory and when they got hot, they bent, and the plastic folded into a rough cell phone shape. He fished the phone out of the water with tongs, let it sit for a moment, and then pushed all the seams together so they snapped. “Wait about an hour for it to dry before you use it,” he said and handed her the warm phone.

  “An hour,” she said. “I need it now. I need a job.”

  He shrugged. “Probably okay in half an hour,” he said.

  She bought a newspaper and scallion pancake from a street food vendor, sat on a curb, and ate while her phone dried. The paper had some job listings, but it also had a lot of listings from recruiters. ONE MONTH BONUS PAY! BEST JOBS! and NUMBER ONE JOBS! START BONUS! People scowled at her for sitting on the curb. She looked like a farmer, but what else was she supposed to do? She checked listings on her new cell phone. Online there were a lot more listings than in the paper. It was a good sign. She picked one at random and called.

  The woman at the recruiting office was a flat-faced southerner with buckteeth. Watermelon-picking teeth. But she had a manicure and a very nice red suit. The office was not so nice. It was small, and the furniture was old. Jieling was groggy from a night spent at a hotel on the edge of the city. It had been cheap but very loud.

  The woman was very sharp in the way she talked and had a strong accent that made it hard to understand her. Maybe Fujian, but Jieling wasn’t sure. The recruiter had Jieling fill out an application.

  “Why did you leave home?” the recruiter asked.

  “To get a good job,” Jieling said.

  “What about your family? Are they alive?”

  “My mother is alive. She is remarried,” Jieling said. “I wrote it down.”

  The recruiter pursed her lips. “I can get you an interview on Friday,” she said.

  “Friday!” Jieling said. It was Tuesday. She had only three hundred yuan left out of the money she had brought. “But I need a job!”

  The recruiter looked sideways at her. “You have made a big gamble to come to Shenzhen.”

  “I can go to another recruiter,” Jieling said.

  The recruiter tapped her lacquered nails. “They will tell you the same thing,” she said.

  Jieling reached down to pick up her bag.

  “Wait,” the recruiter said. “I do know of a job. But they only want girls of very good character.”

  Jieling put her bag down and looked at the floor. Her character was fine. She was not a loose girl, whatever this woman with her big front teeth thought.

  “Your Mandarin is very good. You say you graduated with high marks from high school,” the recruiter said.

  “I liked school,” Jieling said, which was only partly not true. Everybody here had terrible Mandarin. They all had thick southern accents. Lots of people spoke Cantonese in the street.

  “Okay. I will send you to ShinChi for an interview. I cannot get you an interview before tomorrow. But you come here at 8:00 a.m. and I will take you over there.”

  ShinChi. New Life. It sounded very promising. “Thank you,” Jieling said. “Thank you very much.”

  But outside in the heat, she counted her money and felt a creeping fear. She called her mother.

  Her stepfather answered, “Wei.”

  “Is Ma there?” she asked.

  “Jieling!” he said. “Where are you!”

  “I’m in Shenzhen,” she said, instantly impatient with him. “I have a job here.”

  “A job! When are you coming home?”

  He was always nice to her. He meant well. But he drove her nuts. “Let me talk to Ma,” she said.

  “She’s not here,” her stepfather said. “I have her phone at work. But she’s not home, either. She went to Beijing last weekend, and she’s shopping for fabric now.”

  Her mother had a little tailoring business. She went to Beijing every few months and looked at clothes in all the good stores. She didn’t buy in Beijing; she just remembered. Then she came home, bought fabric, and sewed copies. Jieling’s stepfather had been born in Beijing and she thought that was part of the reason her mother had married him. He was more like her mother than her father had been. There was nothing in particular wrong with him. He just set her teeth on edge.

  “I’ll call back later,” Jieling said.

  “Wait, your number is blocked,” her stepfather said. “Give me your number.”

  “I don’t even know it yet,” Jieling said and hung up.

  The New Life company was a huge, modern-looking building with a lot of windows. Inside it was full of reflective surfaces and very clean. Sounds echoed in the lobby. A man in a very smart gray suit met Jieling and the recruiter, and the recruiter’s red suit looked cheaper, her glossy fingernails too red, her buckteeth exceedingly large. The man in the smart gray suit was short and slim and very southern looking. Very city.

  Jieling took some tests on her math and her written characters and got good scores.

  To the recruiter, the human resources man said, “Thank you, we will send you your fee.” To Jieling he said, “We can start you on Monday.”

  “Monday?” Jieling said. “But I need a job now!” He looked grave. “I … I came from Baoding, in Hebei,” Jieling explained. “I’m staying in a hotel, but I don’t have much money.”

  The human resources man nodded. “We can put you up in our guesthouse,” he said. “We can deduct the money from your wages when you start. It’s very nice. It has television and air conditioning, and you can eat in the restaurant.”

  It was very nice. There were two beds. Jieling put her backpack on the one nearest the door. There was carpeting, and the windows were covered in gold drapes with a pattern of cranes flying across them. The television got stations from Hong Kong. Jieling didn’t understand the Cantonese, but there was a button on the remote for subtitles. The movies had lots of violence and more sex than mainland movies did—like the bootleg American movies for sale in the market. She wondered how much this room was. Two hundred yuan? Three hundred yuan?

  Jieling watched movies the whole first day, one right after
another.

  On Monday she began orientation. She was given two pale green uniforms, smocks and pants like medical people wore and little caps and two pairs of white shoes. In the uniform she looked a little like a model worker—which is to say that the clothes were not sexy and made her look fat. There were two other girls in their green uniforms. They all watched a DVD about the company.

  New Life did biotechnology. At other plants they made influenza vaccine (on the screen were banks and banks of chicken eggs), but at this plant they were developing breakthrough technologies in tissue culture. It showed many men in suits. Then it showed a big American store and explained how they were forging new exportation ties with the biggest American corporation for selling goods, Wal-Mart. It also showed a little bit of an American movie about Wal-Mart. Subtitles explained how Wal-Mart was working with companies around the world to improve living standards, decrease CO2 emissions, and give people low prices. The voice narrating the DVD never really explained the breakthrough technologies.

  One of the girls was from way up north; she had a strong Northern way of talking.

  “How long are you going to work here?” the northern girl asked. She looked as if she might even have some Russian in her.

  “How long?” Jieling said.

  “I’m getting married,” the northern girl confided. “As soon as I make enough money, I’m going home. If I haven’t made enough money in a year,” the northern girl explained, “I’m going home anyway.”

  Jieling hadn’t really thought she would work here long. She didn’t know exactly what she would do, but she figured that a big city like Shenzhen was a good place to find out. This girl’s plans seemed very… country. No wonder Southern Chinese thought Northerners had to wipe the pig shit off their feet before they got on the train.

  “Are you Russian?” Jieling asked.

  “No,” said the girl. “I’m Manchu.”

  “Ah,” Jieling said. Manchu like Manchurian. Ethnic Minority. Jieling had gone to school with a boy who was classified as Manchu, which meant that he was allowed to have two children when he got married. But he had looked Han Chinese like everyone else. This girl had the hook nose and the dark skin of a Manchu. Manchu used to rule China until the Communist Revolution (there was something in-between with Sun Yat-Sen, but Jieling’s history teachers had bored her to tears). Imperial and countrified.

  Then a man came in from human resources.

  “There are many kinds of stealing,” he began. “There is stealing of money or food. And there is stealing of ideas. Here at New Life, our ideas are like gold, and we guard against having them stolen. But you will learn many secrets, about what we are doing, about how we do things. This is necessary as you do your work. If you tell our secrets, that is theft. And we will find out.” He paused here and looked at them in what was clearly intended to be a very frightening way.

  Jieling looked down at the ground because it was like watching someone overact. It was embarrassing. Her new shoes were very white and clean.

  Then he outlined the prison terms for industrial espionage. Ten, twenty years in prison. “China must take its place as an innovator on the world stage and so must respect the laws of intellectual property,” he intoned. It was part of the modernization of China, where technology was a new future—Jieling put on her “I am a good girl” face. It was like politics class. Four modernizations. Six goals. Sometimes when she was a little girl, and she was riding behind her father on his bike to school, he would pass a billboard with a saying about traffic safety and begin to recite quotes from Mao. The force at the core of the revolution is the people! He would tuck his chin in when he did this and use a very serious voice, like a movie or like opera. Western experience for Chinese uses. Some of them she had learned from him. All reactionaries are paper tigers! she would chant with him, trying to make her voice deep. Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory! And then she would start giggling and he would glance over his shoulder and grin at her. He had been a Red Guard when he was young, but other than this, he never talked about it.

  After the lecture, they were taken to be paired with workers who would train them. At least she didn’t have to go with the Manchu girl, who was led off to shipping.

  She was paired with a very small girl in one of the culture rooms. “I am Baiyue,” the girl said. Baiyue was so tiny, only up to Jieling’s shoulder, that her green scrubs swamped her. She had pigtails. The room where they worked was filled with rows and rows of what looked like wide drawers. Down the center of the room was a long table with petri dishes and trays and lab equipment. Jieling didn’t know what some of it was, and that was a little nerve-wracking. All up and down the room, pairs of girls in green worked at either the drawers or the table.

  “We’re going to start cultures,” Baiyue said. “Take a tray and fill it with those.” She pointed to a stack of petri dishes. The bottom of each dish was filled with gelatin. Jieling took a tray and did what Baiyue did. Baiyue was serious but not at all sharp or superior. She explained that what they were doing was seeding the petri dishes with cells.

  “Cells?” Jieling asked.

  “Nerve cells from the electric ray. It’s a fish.”

  They took swabs, and Baiyue showed her how to put the cells on in a zigzag motion so that most of the gel was covered. They did six trays full of petri dishes. They didn’t smell fishy. Then they used pipettes to put in feeding solution. It was all pleasantly scientific without being very difficult.

  At one point everybody left for lunch, but Baiyue said they couldn’t go until they got the cultures finished or the batch would be ruined. Women shuffled by them, and Jieling’s stomach growled. But when the lab was empty, Baiyue smiled and said, “Where are you from?”

  Baiyue was from Fujian. “If you ruin a batch,” she explained, “you have to pay out of your paycheck. I’m almost out of debt, and when I get clear—”she glanced around and dropped her voice a little “—I can quit.”

  “Why are you in debt?” Jieling asked. Maybe this was harder than she thought; maybe Baiyue had screwed up in the past.

  “Everyone is in debt,” Baiyue said. “It’s just the way they run things. Let’s get the trays in the warmers.”

  The drawers along the walls opened out, and inside, the temperature was kept blood warm. They loaded the trays into the drawers, one back and one front, going down the row until they had the morning’s trays all in.

  “Okay,” Baiyue said, “that’s good. We’ll check trays this afternoon. I’ve got a set for transfer to the tissue room, but we’ll have time after we eat.”

  Jieling had never eaten in the employee cafeteria, only in the guest house restaurant, and only the first night, because it was expensive. Since then she had been living on ramen noodles, and she was starved for a good meal. She smelled garlic and pork. First thing on the food line was a pan of steamed pork buns, fluffy white. But Baiyue headed off to a place at the back where there was a huge pot of congee—rice porridge—kept hot. “It’s the cheapest thing in the cafeteria,” Baiyue explained, “and you can eat all you want.” She dished up a big bowl of it—a lot of congee for a girl her size—and added some salt vegetables and boiled peanuts. “It’s pretty good, although usually by lunch it’s been sitting a little while. It gets a little gluey.”

  Jieling hesitated. Baiyue had said she was in debt. Maybe she had to eat this stuff. But Jieling wasn’t going to have old rice porridge for lunch. “I’m going to get some rice and vegetables,” she said.

  Baiyue nodded. “Sometimes I get that. It isn’t too bad. But stay away from anything with shrimp in it. Soooo expensive.”

  Jieling got rice and vegetables and a big pork bun. There were two fish dishes and a pork dish with monkeybrain mushrooms, but she decided she could maybe have the pork for dinner. There was no cost written on anything. She gave her danwei card to the woman at the end of the line, who swiped it and handed it back.

  “How much?” Jieling asked.r />
  The woman shrugged. “It comes out of your food allowance.”

  Jieling started to argue, but across the cafeteria, Baiyue was waving her arm in the sea of green scrubs to get Jieling’s attention. Baiyue called from a table. “Jieling! Over here!

  Baiyue’s eyes got very big when Jieling sat down. “A pork bun.”

  “Are they really expensive?” Jieling asked.

  Baiyue nodded. “Like gold. And so good.”

  Jieling looked around at other tables. Other people were eating the pork and steamed buns and everything else.

  “Why are you in debt?” Jieling asked.

  Baiyue shrugged. “Everyone is in debt,” she said. “Just most people have given up. Everything costs here. Your food, your dormitory, your uniforms. They always make sure that you never earn anything.”

  “They can’t do that!” Jieling said.

  Baiyue said, “My granddad says it’s like the old days, when you weren’t allowed to quit your job. He says I should shut up and be happy. That they take good care of me. Iron rice bowl.”

  “But, but, but,” Jieling dredged the word up from some long forgotten class, “that’s feudal!”

  Baiyue nodded. “Well, that’s my granddad. He used to make my brother and me kowtow to him and my grandmother at Spring Festival.” She frowned and wrinkled her nose. Country customs. Nobody in the city made their children kowtow at New Year’s. “But you’re lucky,” Baiyue said to Jieling. “You’ll have your uniform debt and dormitory fees, but you haven’t started on food debt or anything.”

  Jieling felt sick. “I stayed in the guest house for four days,” she said. “They said they would charge it against my wages.”

  “Oh,” Baiyue covered her mouth with her hand. After a moment, she said, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.” Jieling felt more frightened by that than anything else.

  Instead of going back to the lab they went upstairs and across a connecting bridge to the dormitories. Naps? Did they get naps?

  “Do you know what room you’re in?” Baiyue asked.