by Karoline Kan
* * *
On a weekend when I visited Chunting, I spent half a day at another factory where she had been moved to. It was smaller, and felt more like a workshop, with only about twenty sewing machines and thirty workers. It was operating illegally, having been closed down for using coal-fired stoves in the winter to stay warm. When the local environmental protection bureau came for a surprise inspection, they discovered the stove and its chimney. They ordered that it be destroyed immediately and the factory shuttered. The owners paid the police tens of thousands of yuan to avoid jail time.
Though the government sealed the front door with a notice, “Failed the environmental protection test,” the factory kept going—it was an open secret. Workers just entered through a side door.
Beijing’s notorious air pollution was partly due to the country’s industrial development and the factories set up in towns and villages surrounding the city, as well as sand storms that blew in regularly. To clean the air, the city government ordered almost every one of those factories closed, which would have meant a debilitating loss of jobs.
In reality, the local officials put on a show: Manufacturing contributed to economic growth. So, sometimes they destroyed stoves, and often they turned a blind eye to illegal operations.
Local officials decided to re-inspect the factory where Chunting was now working, but her boss had been forewarned. When the inspectors were due to arrive, she and the other thirty workers ran out to the cornfield to hide, locking the factory door behind them. The next week, as subterfuge, they worked from 5 to 11 p.m.
The factory smelled overwhelmingly of glue. Nobody wore a mask. Chunting was going to wear one, but feared it would make her look weak.
“Don’t worry,” she said to me. “After ten minutes you won’t smell anything.”
It was true. But my head began to ache, whether from the smell or from the noise of the sewing machines, I could not be sure. The machines were so loud that workers only spoke when they needed something, and when they did, they had to shout. I sat down quietly beside Chunting.
She worked seated upon a small, four-legged plastic stool, almost child-size, her face inches from the machine.
“You have to get your fingers close. I’ve been pricked by the needle twice this year,” Chunting said, showing me her left index finger. “A needle broke the other day and flew off, hitting me in the face, but thankfully it hit my glasses.” I noticed she was the only one in the workshop who was nearsighted. The glasses made her look more like a schoolteacher than a factory worker. “Being hit by a needle is nothing compared to being cut by a knife when you’re cutting leather. One of those almost sliced straight through my finger.”
I found it odd that she recounted these accidents in the same tone she used to count vegetables, and told her so. “Please,” I added, “stay away from needles and knives.” And with that, we looked at each other and cracked up.
That month they were making waterproof Wolverine shoes. A quick search on my phone revealed that the brand could sell one pair for 1,500 yuan, then worth about twenty days of Chunting’s salary. This unnamed factory would produce the uppers of about three hundred pairs of shoes per day. After that they would be transported to another factory where the soles were added, then shipped to Europe and the US.
By 2010, China had replaced Japan as the world’s second-largest economy, a development fueled by tens of millions of anonymous workers like Chunting, the underpaid and overworked shadows behind clattering machines. In that factory, I suddenly began to understand why my cousin cared so much about money. Who was I to judge her values from my air-conditioned office in the capital, with my lunch breaks and paid holidays?
After a while, I had to get some fresh air. The blue sky was scattered with clouds. Such beautiful days used to be rare during winter in northern China, so maybe the government’s work was paying off, I thought. Yellow reeds swayed gently in the breeze, and a flock of sparrows had alighted on dry silver flowers.
After work, as Chunting and I walked home, her boss zoomed by in a BMW.
“Look at that,” she said, “I work so hard, but I will never have that. It’s not fair.”
* * *
“I have something to tell you, Chaoqun,” Chunting said as we walked along the dirt road. “I had an abortion.”
“Really” was all I could say, my heart beating fast as I took in what she said.
She had become pregnant accidentally, and after the procedure had taken twenty days off to recover. “Little Song exhausts me. And do you know how expensive it is to raise a kid? I really can’t understand why our parents cried over having a second child.”
After Reform and Opening Up, Chinese people, especially my generation, were growing more open-minded. To my married friends, the need to carry on the family line was no longer their main concern. What mattered most was the financial burden of raising children. For years, China’s fertility rate had been below replacement level. Experts were now saying that China faced a demographic crisis. In October 2015, the government encouraged all Chinese families to have a second child and demographers soon began discussing whether China should end birth limits entirely.
I found it ironic that so many babies had been killed during the One-Child Policy, and now those of us lucky enough to have survived, like me and Chunting, were being called on to produce more babies in the name of saving our country from a crisis. I could never forget the fact that I was not a “legal” baby and the sacrifices my parents had made to bring me into the world.
That evening, Chunting, Ling, and I had dinner together. Like other newly built homes in the village, the outer walls had been finished with trendy white tiles. As soon as one family in the village had done this, the rest quickly followed, some of them fearing the neighbors would think they could not afford renovations. Not to be outdone, Chunting and Ling had also installed new windows and doors. The floors were cool marble, and huge wedding photos took pride of place in the front rooms. Chunting never used her own kitchen so that it wouldn’t get ruined, and would instead use her mother-in-law’s.
Chunting said that almost all of the young people had moved to Lutai to live in apartments. The number of school-age children in the village had dwindled to the point that the local school was shut down, with Song sent to another village school, five miles away.
Much had changed, yet so much had also remained the same.
Chapter Sixteen
Forever Red
Uncle Lishui became an internet user at the age of seventy. Chunting bought him a smartphone, which changed his life. Initially, he had laughed and said he was too old to learn how to use it. But within a month, he had mastered it, and was sharing whatever he found interesting to our family chat group.
He had three favorite topics: reminiscing about the Mao era, North Korea, and current affairs. He didn’t realize—at least initially—that so much of what was posted on the internet was total nonsense or nothing more than made-up rumors. His online friends were people who had similar interests, so social media kept him stuck in a time warp.
I changed jobs after three years at That’s Beijing to work as a producer at Radio France International’s Beijing Bureau; then, in the summer of 2016, I joined the New York Times’s Beijing bureau as a “researcher.” Chinese law does not allow its citizens to be “journalists” employed by foreign-owned media; instead these writers are known officially as either “news assistant” or “researcher.”
Still, I was excited about the job. I had been reading the Times ever since I was a university student—sometimes old copies in the library but more often their website with the help of a VPN. My teacher Helen had told me it's probably the most renowned paper in the world. The interview period lasted three months, and when I got the offer, I was traveling in Tibet with friends. We celebrated by drinking local bottles of beer—it was a dream coming true.
I was working on a piece about the Cultural Revolution, and thought Uncle Lishui would be the perfect person
to interview. He had been a Red Guard. During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, he had been offered two chances to work in the city, but he rejected them. He thought it was his duty to construct China’s countryside, as Chairman Mao encouraged his youthful army to do. Uncle Lishui firmly believed that “in socialist China, there are no different classes.” But after Reform and Opening Up, people chased after money and Mao’s way went quickly out of date, with farmers like Uncle Lishui again looked down upon. Nobody really cared about making sacrifices for the country, and people laughed at Uncle Lishui’s choice while he was young.
No matter how fiercely we argued about whether the Red Guards had damaged or tried to save the country, Uncle Lishui was forgiving. He loved me unconditionally, even if I disagreed with him. These days he was so proud of me that he bragged about me to his friends.
One autumn weekend, I visited Uncle Lishui just before the local elections.
Village committee members and village leaders began to be elected directly from 1998 onward, and are the only regularly held direct elections in China. These are attractive positions to hold; the officials not only manage the village’s money but also have a chance to work with those in higher-level government. The village election is as close to democracy as Chinese people get, yet the system is riddled by bribery and cheating.
Each village committee has a chief, a party secretary, an accountant, and a person like Sister Lin in charge of work related to women. The village cadres manage collective enterprises, including land, building and repairing roads, maintaining public security, and administering family-planning issues. For a long time, that was all I knew about the village election apart from the fact that the previous village chief was a gangster. He’d wielded a knife and threatened to kill an entire family over a land dispute. Nobody dared to upset him in the election. The current chief, Lianrun, was not a gangster, but was just as greedy. When he learned that the central government was about to fund the restoration of riverbanks, he sectioned off a portion of the land by the river’s edge and hastily built a shoddy six-room house. It was not for him to live in permanently. He knew that part of the budget had been reserved to compensate villagers whose homes would have to be demolished as part of the project. He received 100,000 yuan.
Lianrun announced that he was eager to run a second time. For the first time since he had been elected three years before, people could find him in his office, the potholes were fixed, and he let his office be used for public events. He knocked on doors and gave each family red envelopes with money, and treated dozens of influential men in the village to a dinner at the fanciest restaurant in town.
Unsurprisingly, Lianrun was reelected.
“See, that’s elections!” Uncle Lishui said to me. “He breaks promises and then he promises again. They’re all corrupt. I don’t see the difference between one wolf and another.”
“It’s not the fault of the election,” I said. “It’s the fault of certain people running.”
Uncle Lishui believed that instead of elections China should have a leader as capable and strong-minded as Chairman Mao and that the central government should send somebody competent and with high moral standards to work as village officials. When Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016, Uncle Lishui sent me an article that explained why Trump’s winning set an example for China and the world that democracy was wrong. “Read this article. Are you still a fan of so-called American democracy? A businessman who is rude and arrogant is their president. Even I, a farmer, know he’s nothing but a joke!”
* * *
In the autumn of 2017, China held the Nineteenth National Congress of the Communist Party. To mark the opening, the central government sent an environmental inspection team to our hometown and gave us a phone number so that we could report any violations of the environmental protection rules. Uncle Lishui, who wanted to report on the garbage heaped near his house, dared not dial the number. Besides, everybody knew the biggest offender was the paper factory five miles away, which spilled its wastewater underground. The factory never got into trouble during environmental inspections.
Uncle Lishui called and asked if I could help him report the garbage. I encouraged him to make the call himself. “But,” he said, “what if they tell the village officials that it was me?” My experiences were so unlike his. I never hesitated to say bad things. I angrily and openly criticized. I told him that his generation had been brainwashed into following suit and that nothing would happen to him.
I immediately regretted how cruel I sounded. Who was I to tell my uncle what he should and shouldn’t believe in? He was an old man and had never been as privileged as I was lucky enough to be. My generation had abandoned him. He had made a way for us, but we criticized him and everything his generation had built.
So I dialed the number. After a dozen times with no answer, finally a stern-sounding woman said she would hand the information over to her boss. Nobody ever showed up.
Chapter Seventeen
A People Without Roots
I had lost my hometown the moment I hopped on the bus and headed to university, and with each visit back, I struggled more than the previous time. I found it hard not to judge or look down on people. I wanted to stop them from being uncivilized—spitting, speaking loudly on the bus, and smoking indoors. I had lived in Beijing and thought I was somehow better. I had lost some ability to understand the local dialect I’d been speaking since childhood. I couldn’t decipher their gestures, facial expressions, and subtle tones. Somewhere along the way, we had become different. They could also tell I was no longer the same. The restaurant owners would ask me what I was doing in their small place. The taxi drivers always charged me more money.
The only link between my hometown and me became the weekly phone call to my parents and my irregular weekend visits.
Almost as soon as I arrived, I couldn’t wait to leave. I felt guilty, and promised to visit longer the next time, but always shortened my trip.
My childhood friends were all married. They’d half joke, “Bring your boyfriend next time or never show up again, Chaoqun.” I felt ashamed but held my head high as they talked again about the same childhood memories, while I had been away experiencing new things. They seemed happy, working as policemen, low-level government clerks, or teachers, and posted photos of their children on social media, made the same jokes our parents did about their controlling husbands or wives.
I grew more at odds with my family—beyond bickering with Chunting about feminism. I couldn’t help but want to change them. My mom thought the washing machine wasted too much water, so when she used it, she saved the water to rinse a basin or clean the toilet.
“It’s getting smelly,” I shouted one day, pouring the water into the sewer without her approval.
“It does not stink!” she demanded, racing over to grab the basin. “I prefer to wash my clothes by hand. All these new inventions are a waste of money.”
“It’s for your convenience, Mom.” I kept pouring the water out.
“Wasting water is wasting money!”
“How much money would you save by re-using this water?”
“A few yuan today and a few yuan tomorrow make a lot. How do you think your father and I managed to send you and your brother to school? By always giving you whatever you wanted?”
They thought Yunxiang had changed too. A few years before, Yunxiang had married a woman from Lanzhou, a city in the northwest. Now they lived in Beijing and had a son. Yunxiang visited home even less than I did, partly because his city wife thought Lutai was a backwater. My mom went to Beijing a few times when my nephew was younger and needed somebody to look after him. But most of the time, it was Yunxiang’s mother-in-law who helped. My mom didn’t like Beijing, and felt conflicted.
Yunxiang bickered with my parents about similar things, too, those that seemed so country to us now. Our relatives in other villages always invited us to weddings, funerals, or their babies’ one-month-old celebrations, but othe
rwise never. At those events, my parents were expected to give money or gifts. Needless to say, my parents always attended and even tried to take both Yunxiang and me along, arguing that it was the only opportunity we had to maintain relationships with our family. Yunxiang said there was no point in keeping up such relationships when he lived in Beijing and barely had enough time to be with the four of us.
“We can cut them off; what’s the point of it?” he said one day when Baba insisted we go to the funeral of our grandfather’s cousin.
“Does this mean you won’t bring your son to my tomb when I die?” Baba asked in frustration. “No matter how far away you two go, your roots are still in the village!”
Yunxiang and I didn’t reply. My parents couldn’t even remember these people’s names, so why did they feel obligated to pay their portion of a few hundred yuan at these ceremonies? Chinese people have many distant cousins and are expected to send money on such occasions. It had become a burden for us. My parents complained that we were unrealistic.
“They would talk badly about us if we didn’t go and give money,” said my father.
“Why do we have to live up to their expectations?” I countered.
“This is Lutai, not Beijing, remember that. What people say is all we have. You won’t use your new city ways to embarrass our family,” Mom scolded.
In Beijing, I was nostalgic about my hometown, which looked beautiful from afar. But though I felt I no longer belonged there, I knew I didn’t belong to Beijing either.
Where do I belong? I’d wonder.