After the Apocalypse

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  Jieling didn’t. Baiyue took her to ask the floor auntie, who looked up Jieling’s name and gave her a key and some sheets and a blanket. Back down the hall and around the corner. The room was spare but really nice. Two bunk beds and two chests of drawers, a concrete floor. It had a window. All of the beds were taken except one of the top ones. By the window under the desk were three black boxes hooked to the wall. They were a little bigger than a shoebox. Baiyue flipped open the front of each one. They had names written on them. “Here’s a space where we can put your battery.” She pointed to an electrical extension.

  “What are they?” Jieling said.

  “They’re the battery boxes. It’s what we make. I’ll get you one that failed inspection. A lot of them work fine,” Baiyue said. “Inside there are electric ray cells to make electricity, and symbiotic bacteria. The bacteria breaks down garbage to feed the ray cells. Garbage turned into electricity. Anti–global warming. No greenhouse gas. You have to feed it scraps from the cafeteria a couple of times a week or it will die, but it does best if you feed it a little bit every day.”

  “It’s alive?!” Jieling said.

  Baiyue shrugged. “Yeah. Sort of. Supposedly if it does really well, you get credits for the electricity it generates. They charge us for our electricity use, so this helps hold down debt.”

  The three boxes just sat there looking less alive than a boom box.

  “Can you see the cells?” Jieling asked.

  Baiyue shook her head. “No, the feed mechanism doesn’t let you. They’re just like the ones we grow, though, only they’ve been worked on in the tissue room. They added bacteria.”

  “Can it make you sick?”

  “No, the bacteria can’t live in people.” Baiyue said. “Can’t live anywhere except in the box.”

  “And it makes electricity.”

  Baiyue nodded.

  “And people can buy it?”

  She nodded again. “We’ve just started selling them. They say they’re going to sell them in China, but really, they’re too expensive. Americans like them, you know, because of the no-global-warming. Of course, Americans buy anything.”

  The boxes were on the wall between the beds, under the window, pretty near where the pillows were on the bottom bunks. She hadn’t minded the cells in the lab, but this whole thing was too creepy.

  Jieling’s first paycheck was startling. She owed 1,974 R.M.B. Almost four month’s salary if she never ate or bought anything and if she didn’t have a dorm room. She went back to her room and climbed into her bunk and looked at the figures. Money deducted for uniforms and shoes, food, her time in the guesthouse.

  Her roommates came chattering in a group. Jieling’s roommates all worked in packaging. They were nice enough, but they had been friends before Jieling moved in.

  “Hey,” called Taohua. Then, seeing what Jieling had. “Oh, first paycheck.”

  Jieling nodded. It was like getting a jail sentence.

  “Let’s see. Oh, not so bad. I owe three times that,” Taohua said. She passed the statement on to the other girls. All the girls owed huge amounts. More than a year.

  “Don’t you care?” Jieling said.

  “You mean like little Miss Lei Feng?” Taohua asked. Everyone laughed and Jieling laughed, too, although her face heated up. Miss Lei Feng was what they called Baiyue. Little Miss Goody-goody. Lei Feng, the famous do-gooder soldier who darned his friend’s socks on the Long March. He was nobody when he was alive, but when he died, his diary listed all the anonymous good deeds he had done, and then he became a Hero. Lei Feng posters hung in elementary schools. He wanted to be “a revolutionary screw that never rusts.” It was the kind of thing everybody’s grandparents had believed in.

  “Does Baiyue have a boyfriend?” Taohua asked, suddenly serious.

  “No, no!” Jieling said. It was against the rules to have a boyfriend, and Baiyue was always getting in trouble for breaking rules. Things like not having her trays stacked by 5:00 p.m., although nobody else got in trouble for that.

  “If she had a boyfriend,” Taohua said, “I could see why she would want to quit. You can’t get married if you’re in debt. It would be too hard.”

  “Aren’t you worried about your debt?” Jieling asked.

  Taohua laughed. “I don’t have a boyfriend. And besides, I just got a promotion, so soon I’ll pay off my debt.”

  “You’ll have to stop buying clothes,” one of the other girls said. The company store did have a nice catalog you could order clothes from, but they were expensive. There was debt limit, based on your salary. If you were promoted, your debt limit would go up.

  “Or I’ll go to special projects,” Taohua said. Everyone knew what special projects was, even though it was supposed to be a big company secret. They were computers made of bacteria. They looked a lot like the boxes in the dormitory rooms. “I’ve been studying computers,” Taohua explained. “Bacterial computers are special. They do many things. They can detect chemicals. They are massively parallel.”

  “What does that mean?” Jieling asked.

  “It is hard to explain,” Taohua said evasively.

  Taohua opened her battery and poured in scraps. It was interesting that Taohua claimed not to care about her debt but kept feeding her battery. Jieling had a battery now, too. It was a reject—the back had broken so that the metal things that sent the electricity back out were exposed, and if you touched it wrong, it could give you a shock. No problem, since Jieling had plugged it into the wall and didn’t plan to touch it again.

  “Besides,” Taohua said, “I like it here a lot better than at home.”

  Better than home. In some ways, yes, in some ways, no. What would it be like to just give up and belong to the company? Nice things, nice food. Never rich. But never poor, either. Medical care. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing. Maybe Baiyue was a little … obsessive.

  “I don’t care about my debt,” Taohua said serenely. “With one more promotion, I’ll move to cadres housing.”

  Jieling reported the conversation to Baiyue. They were getting incubated cells ready to move to the tissue room. In the tissue room they’d be transferred to the protein and collagen grid that would guide their growth—line up the cells to approximate an electricity-generating system. The tissue room had a weird, yeasty smell.

  “She’s fooling herself,” Baiyue said. “Line girls never get to be cadres. She might get onto special projects, but that’s even worse than regular line work, because you’re never allowed to leave the compound.” Baiyue picked up a dish, stuck a little volt reader into the gel, and rapped the dish smartly against the lab table.

  The needle on the volt gauge swung to indicate the cells had discharged electricity. That was the way they tested to see if the cells were generating electricity. A shock made them discharge, and the easiest way was to knock them against the table.

  Baiyue could sound very bitter about New Life. Jieling didn’t like the debt; it scared her a little. But, really, Baiyue saw only one side of everything. “I thought you got a pay raise to go to special projects,” Jieling said.

  Baiyue rolled her eyes. “And more reasons to go in debt, I’ll bet.”

  “How much is your debt?” Jieling asked.

  “Still seven hundred,” Baiyue said. “Because they told me I had to have new uniforms.” She sighed.

  “I am so sick of congee,” Jieling said. “They’re never going to let us get out of debt.”

  Baiyue’s way was doomed. She was trying to play by the company’s rules and still win. That wasn’t Jieling’s way. “We have to make money somewhere else,” Jieling said.

  “Right,” Baiyue said. “We work six days a week.” And Baiyue often stayed after shift to try to make sure she didn’t lose wages on failed cultures. “Out of spec,” she’d say and put it aside. She had taught Jieling to keep the out-of-specs for a day. Sometimes they improved and could be shipped on. It wasn’t the way the supervisor, Ms. Wang, explained the job to Jieling, but it cut
down on the number of rejects, and that, in turn, cut down on paycheck deductions.

  “That leaves us Sundays,” Jieling said.

  “I can’t leave compound this Sunday.”

  “And if you do, what are they going to do, fire you?” Jieling said.

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to earn money outside the compound,” Baiyue said.

  “You are too much of a good girl,” Jieling said. “Remember, it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

  “Is that Mao?” Baiyue asked, frowning.

  “No,” Jieling said, “Deng Xiaoping, the one after Mao.”

  “Well, he’s dead, too,” Baiyue said. She rapped a dish against the counter, and the needle on the volt meter jumped.

  Jieling had been working just over four weeks when they were all called to the cafeteria for a meeting. Mr. Cao from human resources was there. He was wearing a dark suit and standing at the white screen. Other cadres sat in chairs along the back of the stage, looking very stern.

  “We are here to discuss a very serious matter,” he said. “Many of you know this girl.”

  There was a laptop hooked up and a very nervous-looking boy running it. Jieling looked carefully at the laptop, but it didn’t appear to be a special projects computer. In fact, it was made in Korea. He did something, and an ID picture of a girl flashed on the screen.

  Jieling didn’t know her. But around her she heard noises of shock, someone sucking air through their teeth. Someone else breathed softly, ‘Ai-yah.’

  “This girl ran away, leaving her debt with New Life. She ate our food, wore our clothes, slept in our beds. And then, like a thief, she ran away.” The Human Resources man nodded his head. The boy at the computer changed the image on the big projector screen.

  Now it was a picture of the same girl with her head bowed and two policemen holding her arms.

  “She was picked up in Guangdong,” the human resources man said. She is in jail there.”

  The cafeteria was very quiet.

  The human resources man said, “Her life is ruined, which is what should happen to all thieves.”

  Then he dismissed them. That afternoon, the picture of the girl with the two policemen appeared on the bulletin boards of every floor of the dormitory.

  On Sunday, Baiyue announced, “I’m not going.”

  She was not supposed to leave the compound, but one of her roommates had female problems—bad cramps—and planned to spend the day in bed drinking tea and reading magazines. Baiyue was going to use her ID to leave.

  “You have to,” Jieling said. “You want to grow old here? Die a serf to New Life?”

  “It’s crazy. We can’t make money dancing in the plague-trash market.”

  “I’ve done it before,” Jieling said. “You’re scared.”

  “It’s just not a good idea,” Baiyue said.

  “Because of the girl they caught in Guangdong. We’re not skipping out on our debt. We’re paying it off.”

  “We’re not supposed to work for someone else when we work here,” Baiyue said.

  “Oh, come on,” Jieling said. “You are always making things sound worse than they are. I think you like staying here being little Miss Lei Feng.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Baiyue snapped.

  “Well, don’t act like it. New Life is not being fair. We don’t have to be fair. What are they going to do to you if they catch you?”

  “Fine me,” Baiyue said. “Add to my debt!”

  “So what? They’re going to find a way to add to your debt no matter what. You are a serf. They are the landlord.”

  “But if—“

  “No but if.” Jieling said. “You like being a martyr. I don’t.”

  “What do you care,” Baiyue said. “You like it here. If you stay you can eat pork buns every night.”

  “And you can eat congee for the rest of your life. I’m going to try to do something.” Jieling slammed out of the dorm room. She had never said harsh things to Baiyue before. Yes, she had thought about staying here. But was that so bad? Better than being like Baiyue, who would stay here and have a miserable life. Jieling was not going to have a miserable life, no matter where she stayed or what she did. That was why she had come to Shenzhen in the first place.

  She heard the door open behind her, and Baiyue ran down the hall. “Okay,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll try it. Just this once.”

  The streets of Shanghai were incredibly loud after weeks in the compound. In a shop window, she and Baiyue stopped and watched a news segment on how the fashion in Shanghai was for sarongs. Jieling would have to tell her mother. Of course, her mother had a TV and probably already knew. Jieling thought about calling, but not now. Not now. She didn’t want to explain about New Life. The next news segment was about the success of the People’s Army in Tajikistan. Jieling pulled Baiyue to come on.

  They took one bus and then had to transfer. On Sundays, unless you were lucky, it took forever to transfer because fewer buses ran. They waited almost an hour for the second bus. That bus was almost empty when they got on. They sat down a few seats back from the driver. Baiyue rolled her eyes. “Did you see the guy in the back?” she asked. “Party functionary.”

  Jieling glanced over her shoulder and saw him. She couldn’t miss him, in his careful polo shirt. He had that stiff party-member look.

  Baiyue sighed. “My uncle is just like that. So boring.”

  Jieling thought that, to be honest, Baiyue would have made a good revolutionary, back in the day. Baiyue liked that kind of revolutionary purity. But she nodded.

  The plague-trash market was full on a Sunday. There was a toy seller making tiny little clay figures on sticks. He waved a stick at the girls as they passed. “Cute things!” he called. “I’ll make whatever you want!” The stick had a little Donald Duck on it.

  “I can’t do this,” Baiyue said. “There’s too many people.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Jieling said. She found a place for the boom box. Jieling had brought them to where all the food vendors were. “Stay here and watch this,” she said. She hunted through the food stalls and bought a bottle of local beer, counting out from the little horde of money she had left from when she had come. She took the beer back to Baiyue. “Drink this,” she said. “It will help you be brave.”

  “I hate beer,” Baiyue said.

  “Beer or debt,” Jieling said.

  While Baiyue drank the beer, Jieling started the boom box and did her routine. People smiled at her, but no one put any money in her cash box. Shenzhen people were so cheap. Baiyue sat on the curb, nursing her beer, not looking at Jieling or at anyone until finally Jieling couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “C’mon meimei,” she said.

  Baiyue seemed a bit surprised to be called little sister, but she put the beer down and got up. They had practiced a routine to an M.I.A. song, singing and dancing. It would be a hit, Jieling was sure.

  “I can’t,” Baiyue whispered.

  “Yes you can,” Jieling said. “You do good.”

  A couple of people stopped to watch them arguing, so Jieling started the music.

  “I feel sick,” Baiyue whimpered.

  But the beat started, and there was nothing to do but dance and sing. Baiyue was so nervous, she forgot at first, but then she got the hang of it. She kept her head down, and her face was bright red.

  Jieling started making up a rap. She’d never done it before, and she hadn’t gotten very far before she was laughing and then Baiyue was laughing, too.

  Wode meimei hen haixiude

  Mei ta shi xuli

  tai hen xiuqi—

  My little sister is so shy

  But she’s pretty

  Far too delicate—

  They almost stopped because they were giggling, but they kept dancing, and Jieling went back to the lyrics from the song they had practiced.

  When they had finished, people clapped, and they’d made thirty-two yuan.


  They didn’t make as much for any single song after that, but in a few hours they had collected 187 yuan. It was early evening, and night entertainers were showing up—a couple of people who sang opera, acrobats, and a clown with a wig of hair so red it looked on fire, stepping stork-legged on stilts waving a rubber Kalashnikov in his hand. He was all dressed in white. Uncle Death, from cartoons during the plague. Some of the day vendors had shut down, and new people were showing up who put out a board and some chairs and served sorghum liquor; clear, white, and 150 proof. The crowd was starting to change, too. It was rowdier. Packs of young men dressed in weird combinations of clothes from plague markets—vintage Mao suit jackets and suit pants and peasant shoes. And others, veterans from the Tajikistan conflict, one with an empty trouser leg.

  Jieling picked up the boom box, and Baiyue took the cash box. Outside of the market, it wasn’t yet dark.

  “You are amazing,” Baiyue kept saying. “You are such a special girl!”

  “You did great,” Jieling said. “When I was by myself, I didn’t make anything! Everyone likes you because you are little and cute!”

  “Look at this! I’ll be out of debt before autumn!”

  Maybe it was just the feeling that she was responsible for Baiyue, but Jieling said, “You keep it all.”

  “I can’t! I can’t! We split it!” Baiyue said.

  “Sure,” Jieling said. “Then after you get away, you can help me. Just think, if we do this for three more Sundays, you’ll pay off your debt.”

  “Oh, Jieling,” Baiyue said. “You really are like my big sister!”

  Jieling was sorry she had ever called Baiyue “little sister.” It was such a country thing to do. She had always suspected that Baiyue wasn’t a city girl. Jieling hated the countryside. Grain spread to dry in the road and mother’s-elder-sister and father’s-younger-brother bringing all the cousins over on the day off. Jieling didn’t even know all those country ways to say aunt and uncle. It wasn’t Baiyue’s fault. And Baiyue had been good to her. She was rotten to be thinking this way.

  “Excuse me,” said a man. He wasn’t like the packs of young men with their long hair and plague clothes. Jieling couldn’t place him, but he seemed familiar. “I saw you in the market. You were very fun. Very lively.”