by Karoline Kan
That same summer, Chunting finished her first three years of vocational school and was excited to prepare for another two years of college at a campus in the Tianjin city center.
But Uncle Lishui had changed his mind.
If Chunting quit now, she could immediately get a graduation certificate and the school would find her a job, as promised in the pamphlet. Uncle Lishui calculated that if his daughter continued for two more years, he would have to spend another 20,000 yuan to cover tuition and living expenses, yet it wouldn’t guarantee a white-collar job. Especially when it had become difficult for graduates of four-year universities to find decent work. He advised Chunting to take a factory job that her school offered and look for a good husband.
Chunting did as she was told. She packed her bags, stood at the school gate for one last photo with her roommates, and then walked to the bus station. On the bus, she messaged her first boyfriend, Jiaming, asking what decision he had made for the next year. He said he was going to Tianjin for college. She wanted to text him: Do we still have a chance? but replaced it with a smiley face. She knew they didn’t.
The school assigned Chunting an internship in a local factory producing pumping units used for drilling oil. Fifty people, from the age of eighteen to twenty-four—half of them from the vocational high school—stood in three lines at the factory entrance, ready for their six-month apprenticeship. Chunting and two other girls were picked to be a team. Their shifu, or supervisor, Chen, was a man in his early thirties whose face was covered with stubble.
Each shifu led his new apprentices to a room in a small building separated from the main workshop. A woman whose hair wasn’t covered with a blue cap like the others gave them their uniforms: a loose blue cotton jacket and trousers, and a blue cap.
Chen sat down, lit a cigarette, and chatted with the women. Chunting noticed that black machine oil covered both of his hands, and that his fingers were hard and knobby, with skin far too worn and torn for a man his age. Through the room’s small windows, she saw gray smoke belching so heavily from a chimney that it blurred the trees. This was not what she had imagined her job would look like, especially not when compared to the pages of a fashion magazine.
Chunting showed me photos she had taken of the place, using a new cell phone her father had given to her as a graduation gift. The factory compound was made up of a row of red-brick buildings, many stories high. Inside, vast machines used for different processes arranged for melting steel, pouring it into molds, polishing the finished product, and measuring their weight and size. Fifty or sixty people worked on each floor. Orders from domestic and international companies were heaped haphazardly in her manager’s in-tray. Demand had increased in recent years and the factory now had three thousand workers.
Chunting worked from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., with an hour’s break for lunch. There were no weekends off. When there were too many orders, they had to work night shifts to make sure the machines ran twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
As an entry-level employee, Chunting was given the easiest job: in quality control. Chen shifu taught her how to measure the components, which had to be accurate down to the nearest 0.01 centimeter. She had to use her fingers to touch the surface of the products to feel for any damage or holes. The loud, growling machines, along with often-tight deadlines, made it impossible to ask questions. Chen shifu would shout into Chunting’s ears whenever he needed to explain something.
The experienced workers earned 2,000 to 3,000 yuan per month at a time when the rent for a two-bedroom apartment in town cost around 800 yuan per month. As an apprentice, Chunting earned a monthly wage of only 500 yuan minus the lunch served at the canteen, which cost three yuan per day and which was deducted before they received their paychecks. The factory also offered health insurance and the opportunity to join a pension, which many workers declined because it would mean another 150 yuan deduction each month. Still, accidents happened, like when a woman’s hair got caught in the machine, and she almost had her head taken off.
Chunting had never worked so hard. When she had lived with her parents, they looked after her, especially her mother, who did all the cooking and cleaning, including washing Chunting’s clothes, even her underwear!
Within a few weeks, before receiving her first paycheck, Chunting decided to quit.
A friend had told her about a job at a wholesale shopping market. She needed to be there only to check the goods loaded in the van against the customers’ orders, log items and their amount in a notebook, and operate the cash register. The salary was more than she was earning at the factory, and the work easier.
But when Chunting started the new job, she found it wasn’t so easy. There were more than twenty kinds of soft drinks and two hundred types of snacks in the food section. In the daily necessities section, shampoos, soaps, and detergents of different brands sat haphazardly on the shelves without the prices being listed. Chunting had to memorize the price for each item and the discounts, which varied. Her boss handed Chunting a price list on her first day, but the drivers rushed her through it. “Quick, quick,” they would say, and she spent the whole day flustered. If she counted the money or calculated the discounts incorrectly, her manager would deduct the missing sum from her already humble paycheck. If Chunting accidentally charged more, he never said a word.
Chunting’s life had become a grind. The weekends I visited, she was so exhausted she only briefly said hello to us before going to her bedroom to sleep. If I asked about her job, the only thing she would say was: “It’s boring.”
It wasn’t until she received her first paycheck that the light returned to Chunting’s eyes. I was there when she finished work that evening. She took a shower, tied her fluffy hair into a ponytail, and put on rosy red lipstick.
“Let’s go eat out,” she said, nearly pulling me out the door. “I’ll treat you!”
I was still on my summer break before the first semester of college. After the gaokao and my acceptance to a university, a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. For the first time in my life, I no longer needed to worry about anything related to school. I spent my days reading, watching movies, learning watercolor painting and guitar, all the useless things that students were discouraged to do before the gaokao.
Chunting and I went to KFC.
“I’m older than you, Miss Chunting, but you are the one making money first,” I teased, sipping my Coke. “I’m so happy for you.”
She smiled. “This is nothing. I only got 1,000 yuan this month. My boss is so stingy. She earns thousands every month, and treats us like her slaves,” she said, grimacing. “Well, let’s stop talking about that female píxiū. I have more exciting news.”
I laughed. A píxiū was a creature in ancient Chinese legends who ate but never excreted.
“What?” I asked.
“I might be seeing someone…” Chunting blinked her big eyes.
“I knew it! You always hide in your room with your phone! I knew it!” I giggled.
Chunting’s new boyfriend, Ling, was a driver in the market where she worked. He was three years older than us and had been chasing her.
“Maybe I won’t date him,” she said. “He’s so tan, and I like guys with fair skin. His eyebrows are so thick that they almost connect.”
We laughed.
“He’s not as good-looking as I would want my boyfriend to be.”
She looked like the little girl who used to lie in bed with me, talking about being an actress.
“More importantly,” she continued, “I know my parents won’t like it. His dad’s not well.”
“Ah,” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He has lung cancer.” Chunting sighed, looked away, and took a long sip of her Coke.
Since Chunting was no longer a student, there was no need to hide her relationships anymore. We had relatives in Ling’s home village, Houmi, which was only a twenty-minute drive away. Everyone there knew his family had spent a lot of money trying to he
al his father’s cancer and that they were in debt. Ling’s mother had taken over the farming. Ling was hardworking, but what future would a driver from a low-income family have? In those days, almost all girls asked their fiancé’s family to buy an apartment in town after marriage, but Ling’s parents couldn’t afford it.
Three years earlier, Ling’s parents had renovated their house in preparation for Ling’s future bride, but no girl would agree to a second date when they learned there was no possibility of an apartment in town. Chunting was right. Once her parents heard of it, they and everyone else in our family would say she shouldn’t see him.
I was unsure about what to think.
Chunting knew we all wanted what was best for her, but she found it difficult to stop hanging out with Ling, partly because they worked together. She made up her mind to break up with him, but within a week she missed him too much.
Gradually, her job became easier, and she was happy to see Ling every day. Before he drove back to the market to reload his van, he would send a message to Chunting so that she could prepare the order. When he arrived, the two would chat and enjoyed each other’s company, mainly laughing about the crazy customers. After work, he would drive her to KFC or the new shopping center, New Century Capital. Chunting loved their dates to Uegashima Coffee, the first coffee shop in town. It sounded Japanese but was Chinese-owned. Neither Chunting nor Ling liked coffee, but there were other drinks on the menu. And the shop seemed so modern, with leather sofas, orange-tinted soft lighting, and the feeling of newness. Altogether it added a special atmosphere to their dates.
Beijing was hosting the summer Olympic Games that year. For months, the city had been in a frenzy of activity in preparation, with many ultra-modern new buildings constructed to complement the new stadiums and show off the new, emerging China to the rest of the world. I was glued to the TV, cheering for our athletes, but Chunting was not interested at all. Her whole focus was on love. She seemed to check her phone every minute, smiling while reading the messages from Ling, and seemed far away during our conversations. After dinner, she would immediately lock herself in the room we shared while I’d sit chatting with our parents. I envied her. It looked nice to be in love. She was glowing and it made me daydream about what sort of boyfriend I’d like to have. Would I like a man like Ling? Probably not. I imagined my boyfriend to be a writer, a musician, or a professor, someone who would love the poems I’d write him. And he’d be someone who lived in the urban, sophisticated atmosphere of the city. Those were my fantasies.
Chunting was only nineteen years old and just having fun, but their families, especially Ling’s, didn’t think so. Ling was twenty-two, still very young, but in the village, competition to find a wife was fierce. The gender ratio for the marriageable population in China is strikingly imbalanced as a consequence of the One-Child Policy and the preference for boys. A poor villager’s chance of finding a wife was slim. The unfortunate single men—villagers or not—were called guānggùn, or “bachelors,” like a tree branch that bore no leaves or fruit.
China had never in its history had such a big guānggùn population.
During the thirty-year One-Child Policy, families had thrown many girls away, drowning, smothering, or aborting them. Scholars believe that 30 to 60 million girls “disappeared” due to the One-Child Policy.
The tables had turned and, given that women could now be selective (despite playing hard to get), they tended to marry men with better economic backgrounds. Village girls tended to marry town boys, and town girls to marry city boys, leaving the rural boys wanting.
Some families used marriage agents or matchmakers to introduce girls from the poorest areas like Inner Mongolia to the rural men in our village. Some families were so desperate they paid agents to find girls from neighboring countries like Vietnam or North Korea, especially defectors. Many such brides entered China without any legal paperwork, and it was common to hear about such “mail-order brides”—many of them trafficked and there against their own free will—who would run away shortly after marriage.
In Ling’s village, with a population of 1,500, there were more than twenty guānggùn. Some of them in their thirties. So with Chunting on the scene, Ling’s parents didn’t want to lose their chance. They sent a matchmaker to Uncle Lishui’s door to propose marriage. Although it had by then become common for young people to marry for love, to show their respect, the man’s family still asked for help from a matchmaker to negotiate the marriage details with the woman’s family.
Matchmakers are usually married women who know both families. It’s not a full-time job, but, in Chinese culture, if you have successfully matched a couple, it is believed you will be blessed with good karma. To show their gratitude, the man’s family gives gifts to matchmakers too. When my parents married in the 1980s, the gift was twenty chicken eggs and a bag of rice. Today, the gift is always a lucky red envelope filled with crisp new yuans, from a few hundred to a few thousand.
“Ling’s parents really like Chunting, and as you can see, the two children are a well-suited match,” said the matchmaker, a fortysomething woman married to a Caiyuan villager.
Uncle Lishui smiled and offered her a plate of fruit. Even when you refuse a marriage proposal, it is important to save “face”—that is, maintain a semblance of your own and, sometimes more importantly, the other person’s self-respect.
“I understand how decent Ling’s parents are, and how hardworking he is, but Chunting is still young; we don’t want to be rushed.”
In fact, many marriage proposals were waiting for Chunting. After a girl left school, all eyes were fixed on her. Suddenly she was a hot commodity. Among Chunting’s suitors, most were from Lutai, and a few from Tianjin. But Chunting turned them all down, saying she couldn’t meet them while she was in a relationship with Ling. My family thought she was crazy. Chunting still had a few years to decide, but needed to be more practical. After twenty-five, her “season” would be over.
“I understand, but here’s my concern,” said the matchmaker. “She’ll be the one to lose out if she keeps hanging around with Ling. A man doesn’t worry about rumors; a good man can wait a long time, and still many women will want to marry him. Girls cannot afford such luxury.”
She played her cards nicely, and exchanged a few cordial rounds back and forth with Uncle Lishui. A good matchmaker, she said many nice things about Ling and his family, including the fact that Ling’s father was on a diet of “special ingredients” prescribed by an experienced and highly respected traditional-medicine doctor whose fees were less than those charged by a doctor practicing Western-style medicine. In short, this meant his illness wouldn’t cost the family as much as had been feared or rumored.
I encouraged Chunting to stick with Ling if she loved him. She should be the one who had the final say, not their parents. She had a whole life in front of her. She was not her parents’ puppy or possession. Uncle Lishui said I read too many romantic books, and this was real life; money and a family’s background mattered.
I again thought about the difficulties my parents had gone through in moving from the village to Lutai. If my mom had married somebody from Lutai with an urban hukou and a lot of money, her life would have been much more comfortable. Though I felt I’d have to marry for love—or else I wouldn’t be able to live with myself—maybe our parents were right. Chunting faced a big dilemma.
She decided to quit her job, this time to lessen her contact with Ling. To further break up the young couple, our family started to arrange blind dates with “suitable” candidates; that is, only when both sides were clear on basic information about each other were they allowed to meet. The information included their age, height, and education, as well as their parents’ ages, and whether they had siblings who still needed support.
It was still tough, because all the suitors’ information would be glorified by the matchmakers—a plain-faced man was described as “very handsome,” his parents always “good tempered” and “good at sav
ing money.” The language of the matchmakers was carefully coded.
In the first meeting, the parents would take their children to the matchmaker’s house, leaving the two young people alone to chat, the parents and matchmaker talking in another room.
Chunting had a few blind dates, none of them successful. The guys were either too shy or too chatty. Another young man was all right, but his parents were not satisfied with Chunting’s height. He was only five-feet-five, and his parents wanted their son to marry a girl taller to “improve their genes.” Chunting was only four-feet-nine.
All were involved in each step of the process. A blind date was the first step to marriage between adults, not a game between children.
* * *
A few weeks after the matchmaker visited in the early autumn, Chunting caught a cold that lasted an entire month. Her face was pale and she threw up every morning. She also put on weight. One morning after breakfast, Chunting rushed to the yard and vomited. My mom and the other women in the house exchanged looks.
That afternoon, Mom asked Chunting if everything was okay. Chunting said she thought so, but wasn’t sure. She hadn’t had a period for two months.
She was given a pregnancy test.
I heard the news from Chunting herself, who spoke to me in her small room, her eyes swollen with tears. “They never taught me anything, and now they blame me for making mistakes,” Chunting said. The ceiling fan helped circulate a little cool breeze from two windows, but I felt sluggish in the muggy air and with such a depressing situation. I suggested that she have an abortion, telling her she could go to a small clinic instead of a hospital to avoid being seen by people she knew.
Abortion advertisements were everywhere, on electricity poles, coffee-shop bathrooms, in the fish market. They promised a “painless, three-minute” surgery, no ID required. So even minors could do it without their parents’ permission. At nineteen years old, I didn’t realize what irresponsible advice I was giving her: Women died at these clinics, which were often unlicensed, or suffered from debilitating pain or fertility loss. All I knew was that Chunting was too young, and unmarried, and that I didn’t want to lose my best friend. I was desperate to set my cousin free from the swamp she was sinking into.