CONTENTS

COVER PAGE

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

MAP

PART ONE The City

1  Going Out

2  The City

3  To Die Poor Is a Sin

4  The Talent Market

5  Factory Girls

6  The Stele with No Name

7  Square and Round

8  Eight-Minute Date

9  Assembly-Line English

PART TWO  The Village

10  The Village

11  The Historian in My Family

12  The South China Mall

13  Love and Money

14  The Tomb of the Emperor

15  Perfect Health

SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

COPYRIGHT

For my parents

PART ONE The City

1 Going Out

When you met a girl from another factory, you quickly took her measure. What year are you? you asked each other, as if speaking not of human beings but of the makes of cars. How much a month? Including room and board? How much for overtime? Then you might ask what province she was from. You never asked her name.

To have a true friend inside the factory was not easy. Girls slept twelve to a room, and in the tight confines of the dorm it was better to keep your secrets. Some girls joined the factory with borrowed ID cards and never told anyone their real names. Some spoke only to those from their home provinces, but that had risks: Gossip traveled quickly from factory to village, and when you went home every auntie and granny would know how much you made and how much you saved and whether you went out with boys.

When you did make a friend, you did everything for her. If a friend quit her job and had nowhere to stay, you shared your bunk despite the risk of a ten-yuan fine, about $1.25, if you got caught. If she worked far away, you would get up early on a rare day off and ride hours on the bus, and at the other end your friend would take leave from work—this time, the fine one hundred yuan—to spend the day with you. You might stay at a factory you didn’t like, or quit one you did, because a friend asked you to. Friends wrote letters every week, although the girls who had been out longer considered that childish. They sent messages by mobile phone instead.

Friends fell out often because life was changing so fast. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.

The best day of the month was payday. But in a way it was the worst day, too. After you had worked hard for so long, it was infuriating to see how much money had been docked for silly things: being a few minutes late one morning, or taking a half day off for feeling sick, or having to pay extra when the winter uniforms switched to summer ones. On payday, everyone crowded the post office to wire money to their families. Girls who had just come out from home were crazy about sending money back, but the ones who had been out longer laughed at them. Some girls set up savings accounts for themselves, especially if they already had boyfriends. Everyone knew which girls were the best savers and how many thousands they had saved. Everyone knew the worst savers, too, with their lip gloss and silver mobile phones and heart-shaped lockets and their many pairs of high-heeled shoes.

The girls talked constantly of leaving. Workers were required to stay six months, and even then permission to quit was not always granted. The factory held the first two months of every worker’s pay; leaving without approval meant losing that money and starting all over somewhere else. That was a fact of factory life you couldn’t know from the outside: Getting into a factory was easy. The hard part was getting out.

The only way to find a better job was to quit the one you had. Interviews took time away from work, and a new hire was expected to start right away. Leaving a job was also the best guarantee of getting a new one: The pressing need for a place to eat and sleep was incentive to find work fast. Girls often quit a factory in groups, finding courage in numbers and pledging to join a new factory together, although that usually turned out to be impossible. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.

*  *  *

For a long time Lu Qingmin was alone. Her older sister worked at a factory in Shenzhen, a booming industrial city an hour away by bus. Her friends from home were scattered at factories up and down China’s coast, but Min, as her friends called her, was not in touch with them. It was a matter of pride: Because she didn’t like the place she was working, she didn’t tell anyone where she was. She simply dropped out of sight.

Her factory’s name was Carrin Electronics. The Hong Kong–owned company made alarm clocks, calculators, and electronic calendars that displayed the time of day in cities around the world. The factory had looked respectable when Min came for an interview in March 2003: tile buildings, a cement yard, a metal accordion gate that folded shut. It wasn’t until she was hired that she was allowed inside. Workers slept twelve to a room in bunks crowded near the toilets; the rooms were dirty and they smelled bad. The food in the canteen was bad, too: A meal consisted of rice, one meat or vegetable dish, and soup, and the soup was watery.

A day on the assembly line stretched from eight in the morning until midnight—thirteen hours on the job plus two breaks for meals—and workers labored every day for weeks on end. Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon they had no overtime, which was their only break. The workers made four hundred yuan a month—the equivalent of fifty dollars—and close to double that with overtime, but the pay was often late. The factory employed a thousand people, mostly women, either teenagers just out from home or married women already past thirty. You could judge the quality of the workplace by who was missing: young women in their twenties, the elite of the factory world. When Min imagined sitting on the assembly line every day for the next ten years, she was filled with dread. She was sixteen years old.

From the moment she entered the factory she wanted to leave, but she pledged to stick it out six months. It would be good to toughen herself up, and her options were limited for now. The legal working age was eighteen, though sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds could work certain jobs for shorter hours. Generally only an employer that freely broke the labor law—“the very blackest factories,” Min called them—would hire someone as young as she was.

Her first week on the job, Min turned seventeen. She took a half day off and walked the streets alone, buying some sweets and eating them by herself. She had no idea what people did for fun. Before she had come to the city, she had only a vague notion of what a factory was; dimly, she imagined it as a lively social gathering. “I thought it would be fun to work on the assembly line,” she said later. “I thought it would be a lot of people working together, busy, talking, and having fun. I thought it would be very free. But it was not that way at all.”

Talking on the job was forbidden and carried a five-yuan fine. Bathroom breaks were limited to ten minutes and required a signup list. Min worked in quality control, checking the electronic gadgets as they moved past on the assembly line to make sure buttons worked and plastic pieces joined and batteries hooked up as they should. She was not a model worker. She chattered constantly and sang with the other women on the line. Sitting still made her feel trapped, like a bird in a cage, so she frequently ran to the bathroom just to look out the window at the green mountains that reminded her of home. Dongguan was a factory city set in the lush subtropics, and sometimes it seemed that Min was the only one who noticed. Because of her, the factory passed a rule that limited workers to one bathroom break every four hours; the penalty for violators was five yuan.

After six months Min went to her boss, a man in his twenties, and said she wanted to leave. He refused.

“Your performance on the assembly line is not good,” said Min’s boss. “Are you blind?”

“Even if I were blind,” Min countered, “I would not work under such an ungrateful person as you.”

She walked off the line the next day in protest, an act that brought a hundred-yuan fine. The following day, she went to her boss and asked again to leave. His response surprised her: Stay through the lunar new year holiday, which was six months away, and she could quit with the two months’ back pay that the factory owed her. Min’s boss was gambling that she would stay. Workers flood factory towns like Dongguan after the new year, and competition for jobs then is the toughest.

After the fight, Min’s boss became nicer to her. He urged her several times to consider staying; there was even talk of a promotion to factory-floor clerk, though it would not bring an increase in pay. Min resisted. “Your factory is not worth wasting my whole youth here,” she told her boss. She signed up for a computer class at a nearby commercial school. When there wasn’t an overtime shift, she skipped dinner and took a few hours of lessons in how to type on a keyboard or fill out forms by computer. Most of the factory girls believed they were so poorly educated that taking a class wouldn’t help, but Min was different. “Learning is better than not learning,” she reasoned.

She phoned home and said she was thinking of quitting her job. Her parents, who farmed a small plot of land and had three younger children still in school, advised against it. “You always want to jump from this place to that place,” her father said. Girls should not be so flighty. Stay in one place and save some money, he told her.

Min suspected this was not the best advice. “Don’t worry about me,” she told her father. “I can take care of myself.”

She had two true friends in the factory now, Liang Rong and Huang Jiao’e, who were both a year older than Min. They washed Min’s clothes for her on the nights she went to class. Laundry was a constant chore because the workers had only a few changes of clothes. In the humid dark nights after the workday ended, long lines of girls filed back and forth from the dormitory bathrooms carrying buckets of water.

Once you had friends, life in the factory could be fun. On rare evenings off, the three girls would skip dinner and go roller-skating, then return to watch a late movie at the factory. As autumn turned into winter, the cold in the unheated dorms kept the girls awake at night. Min dragged her friends into the yard to play badminton until they were warm enough to fall asleep.

The 2004 lunar new year fell in late January. Workers got only four days off, not enough time to go home and come out again. Min holed up in her dorm and phoned home four times in two days. After the holiday she went to her boss again, and this time he let her leave. Liang Rong and Huang Jiao’e cried when Min told them her news. In a city of strangers, they were the only ones who knew about her departure. They begged her to stay; they believed that conditions at other factories were no better, and that to leave or to stay would be the same in the end. Min did not think so.

She promised she would return for a visit after she got paid at her new job. Min left that same day with a few clothes in a backpack and the two months’ wages that the factory owed her. She did not take her towels and bedding with her; those things had cost money, but she couldn’t bear the sight of them anymore.

In ten months on the assembly line, Min had sent home three thousand yuan—about $360—and made two true friends.

She should have been scared. But all she knew was that she was free.

*  *  *

In the village where Lu Qingmin was born, almost everyone shared her family name. Ninety households lived there, planting rice, rape, and cotton on small plots of land. Min’s family farmed half an acre and ate most of what they grew.

Her future appeared set when she was still a child, and it centered on a tenet of rural life: A family must have a son. Min’s mother had four girls before finally giving birth to a boy; in those early years of the government policy limiting families to one child, enforcement was lax in much of the countryside. But five children would bring heavy financial burdens as the economy opened up in the 1980s and the cost of living rose. As the second-oldest child, Min would bear many of those burdens.

She disliked school and did poorly. As long as she could remember, she was in trouble. She climbed the neighbors’ trees to steal their plums; if she was caught she got a beating. Once when her mother ordered her to do chores, Min refused. “There are so many people at home. Why do I have to do it?” Her mother chased her for a quarter mile and hit her with a stick.

She was good at having fun. She learned how to swim and to drive a truck; she loved roller-skating and hid her injuries from her mother. “I have fallen every way there is to fall,” Min said. “But you can’t think about that.” She was her father’s favorite. One summer, he rented a truck and she traveled the countryside with him, selling watermelons from their farm. They drove during the day and slept in the truck at night; it became one of Min’s fondest memories. Most migrants associated the place they came from with poverty and backwardness, and some were even reluctant to say the name of their village. But long after Min came to the city, she still talked about her hometown as if it were something beautiful.

In the late 1990s, both of Min’s parents went out to work to earn money for their children’s schooling. Her father worked in a shoe factory on the coast, but poor health drove him back. Later her mother went out for a year. Min boarded at a middle school in a nearby town but returned home every weekend to cook and wash clothes for her father and the younger children.

Almost all the young people in her village had gone out. When Min was still in middle school, her older sister, Guimin, went to work in a factory in Dongguan. Soon after, Min failed the national high school entrance exam and her parents considered having her go out, too. Guimin phoned home and urged them to keep Min in school; Guimin’s factory wages, she said, would help cover the tuition. Their parents agreed, and Min enrolled in a two-year vocational high school. That made her one of the most educated people in the village—more educated than Guimin, who had sacrificed her own schooling to help the family.

Guimin came home for the 2003 lunar new year holiday and took Min away with her when she left. Min had one more semester of school, but she wanted to save the tuition and get a jump on the job hunt. She was thrilled to be leaving home; she had never ridden on a train or seen a factory. “I wanted to get out early, learn some things, and see the world,” she said.

In Dongguan, Guimin rented a cheap hotel room for Min and found her a job in a Japanese factory that made liquid crystal displays. Min worked there for a month and left. She had never been in a place where she didn’t know anyone, and she was so lonely she couldn’t bear it. She returned to the hotel and found a job at another factory but didn’t take it. Her sister offered to continue paying for the hotel room, but Min felt herself becoming a burden. At a bus station, she spotted a help-wanted flyer for a quality-control job on the assembly line of an electronics factory. She dialed the number on the ad—many were just scams to trick migrants out of their money—and the person who answered the phone gave Min directions to the factory. It was a three-hour bus ride to the southeast tip of Dongguan and Carrin Electronics, the place where Min spent her hard year alone.

The minute she entered the factory grounds, Min realized the place was worse than the Japanese factory she had just left behind. But it was too late to turn back, and she did not want to ask her sister’s help again. She was getting used to being on her own—it was better that way.

*  *  *

Migrant workers use a simple term for the move that defines their lives: chuqu, to go out. There was nothing to do at home, so I went out. This is how a migrant story begins.

The city does not offer them an easy living. The pay for hard labor is low—often lower than the official minimum wage, which ranges between fifty and eighty dollars a month. Work hours frequently stretch beyond the legal limit of forty-nine hours per week. Get hurt, sick, or pregnant, and you’re on your own. Local governments have little incentive to protect workers; their job is to keep the factory owners happy, which will bring in more investment and tax revenue. But suffering in silence is not how migrant workers see themselves. To come out from home and work in a factory is the hardest thing they have ever done. It is also an adventure. What keeps them in the city is not fear but pride: To return home early is to admit defeat. To go out and stay out—chuqu—is to change your fate.

Migrants are the rural elite. They are younger, better educated, and more enterprising than the people they leave behind. The city people’s name for them—liudong renkou, floating population—suggests an aimless mob, but most migrants leave home with a work objective in mind, in the company of a relative or fellow villager who already knows the way. And most of today’s young migrants don’t come from the farm: They come from school. Farming is something they have watched their parents do.

Migration was an accidental consequence of economic reforms. In 1958, the Chinese government set up a household registration system that assigned each person rural or urban residency. City dwellers were allocated jobs, housing, and ration coupons for food and other necessities; residents of the countryside, with none of these privileges, were stuck on the farm.

In the late 1970s, reforms allowed farming households to sell part of their harvest on the market rather than supplying it all to the state. Agricultural production soared. Suddenly, food was available in local markets across the country, and rural residents could survive independently in the cities for the first time. A 1984 government directive permitted farmers to settle in small market towns; to be on the move was no longer a crime. Migration picked up speed, and by 1990, the country had sixty million migrants, many of them drawn to the booming factories and cities of the coast.

Today China has 130 million migrant workers. In factories, restaurants, construction sites, elevators, delivery services, housecleaning, child-raising, garbage-collecting, barbershops, and brothels, almost every worker is a rural migrant. In large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, migrants account for a quarter of the population; in the factory towns of south China, they power the assembly lines of the nation’s export economy. Together they represent the largest migration in human history, three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century.

Yet the government has been slow to acknowledge the reality of migration. For years, migrants in the cities had to dodge the police; those caught without residency permits were fined or sent home. Finally in 2003, the State Council, China’s cabinet, issued a comprehensive document calling migration key to the country’s development. It banned job discrimination against migrants and advocated better working conditions for them and schooling for their children. On the brick walls of rural villages, pro-migration slogans appeared: GO OUT FOR MIGRANT WORK, RETURN HOME TO DEVELOP. LABOR FLOWS OUT, MONEY FLOWS BACK.

Migration is emptying villages of young people. Across the Chinese countryside, those plowing and harvesting in the fields are elderly men and women, charged with running the farm and caring for the younger children who are still in school. Money sent home by migrants is already the biggest source of wealth accumulation in rural China. Yet earning money isn’t the only reason people migrate. In surveys, migrants rank “seeing the world,” “developing myself,” and “learning new skills” as important as increasing their incomes. In many cases, it is not crippling poverty that drives migrants out from home, but idleness. Plots of land are small and easily farmed by parents; nearby towns offer few job opportunities. There was nothing to do at home, so I went out.

*  *  *

Long afterward Min would remember the first time she went to the talent market, puzzling over its details like a dream she could not interpret. On a Sunday morning in February 2004 after she had quit the Carrin factory, she went to the market and spent four hours there. She was nervous. She carried nothing with her. The whole of her job-hunting strategy could be summarized in two words: Aim low. She interviewed at half a dozen companies that were hiring clerks. A clerk might type, answer phones, fill out forms, file documents, greet guests, and pour tea; a clerk was the lowest person in the office hierarchy. “You don’t want to find a company whose standards are too high,” she said later. “Then you’ll be rejected and quickly lose confidence.”

At the booth of a company called Yidong Electronic, a recruiter asked for Min’s résumé. She had not thought to prepare one. The woman told her to write her job history on an application form. Min did not even have a pen, so the woman lent her one. And the woman smiled at Min. “I don’t know. She smiled at me. Maybe that was it.” Thus Min would return over and over to this day, trying to unravel the mystery of the moment when her luck changed.

The woman told Min to go to the factory for a follow-up interview, but Min didn’t go. The place was too far away. But at the headquarters of Yidong Electronic, a manager named Li Pengjie was looking over applications, and he stopped at Min’s. He noticed that she had good handwriting.

In traditional China, calligraphy was the mark of an educated person. Good calligraphy showed refinement and literary accomplishment; calligraphy could also reveal the subtle weaknesses in a person’s character. Li Pengjie had something more mundane in mind: He needed a clerk to keep files on the factory’s machines, and the files were written out by hand. In a factory that made connectors and backlights for mobile phones, it was this antique skill that mattered most.

Li Pengjie called Min’s cousin on his mobile phone—she did not have one of her own—and asked Min to come in for an interview that would last three hours.

First she flunked the computer test. “The other girls all know computers better than you,” Li Pengjie told her.

Next he asked about her work experience.

“I haven’t done this work,” she said. “I don’t have any experience.”

Then he gave her a writing test, and she wrote well. Li Pengjie told Min that she was hired, and that he would be her new boss. He told her to go get her things so she could move into the factory that day.

The offer was so unexpected that Min did not know what to say. But as she got up to leave his office, the words suddenly came. “So many people wanted this job,” she said to her new boss. “Why did you choose me? I don’t know anything.”

“You are very straightforward,” he said. “And you are more honest than the others.”

Min started work the next day as a clerk in the equipment division. Her department tracked the punches and grinders and roll-plating lines that made the pieces of a mobile phone. A bound book recorded the condition and history of every machine, like the medical file of a giant mute patient. Min’s job was to keep these files in order. Workers slept eight to a room; a meal was rice, three meat or vegetable dishes, and soup. A day in the office stretched ten hours, with sometimes a Saturday or Sunday off. Min would make eight hundred yuan a month—one hundred dollars, double the base pay at her old factory.

I MET MIN for the first time three weeks later. She was short and sturdily built, with curly hair and keen dark eyes that didn’t miss a thing. Like many young people from the Chinese countryside, she looked even younger than she was. She could have been fifteen, or fourteen, or even twelve—a tomboy in cargo pants and running shoes, waiting impatiently to grow up. She had a child’s face. It was round and open to the world, with the look of patient expectation that children’s faces sometimes wear.

We met at the apartment of a woman named Lin Xue, who wrote articles for a local magazine that targeted migrant readers. I had told Lin Xue I wanted to write about young migrant women for the Wall Street Journal; her younger sister worked in a factory and invited Min, one of her coworkers, to come. I was meeting many migrants then, and Min’s story was already familiar to me.

“I’m from a farming village in Hubei Province, the second of five children,” she told me. “Our parents work on a farm. Our conditions are not good.

“I went out with my older sister, who went to work in Shenzhen. We wanted to work in the same place, but we can’t work in the same place.”

She paused dramatically.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because we always fight.” And then she laughed.

Min was willing to talk about anything; unlike most of the Chinese people I knew, she clearly enjoyed telling her own story. And she was as curious about me as I was about her: She had come to Lin Xue’s apartment that day because “I wanted to see what an American looked like,” she told me later. My only worry was that she might be too settled—with a stable office job in hand, perhaps the great dramas of her life were already past. But I needn’t have worried about that.

On the day we met, Min told me her life plan. She would work in the city for seven years, sending money home all the while to repay her mother and father for raising her to adulthood; that reflected the traditional Chinese view that children should be grateful to their parents for the gift of their existence. When she turned twenty-three, the debt repaid, Min would return home and find someone to marry.

She was in a good mood that day. She had “walked out of the factory,” as the migrants say, crossing the class divide between those who work with their hands and those who work with their heads. “God is still fair,” she said. “He let me be so tired for a year, but now he lets me have a new beginning.” She had just turned eighteen and she was already an expert in new beginnings.

2 The City

Long journeys end at the Guangzhou railway station, where the passengers pour off the trains after rides that have lasted twenty or thirty or fifty hours. They are mostly young and they arrive alone, dragging a suitcase or a backpack or a coarse burlap sack that once held rice. The vast plaza in front of the station seethes with travelers, and the first thing you hear is the jangle of announcements for people who, newly arrived, are already lost. Someone from Henan, your brother is looking for you. Older brother’s wife, come to the exit area. WELCOME TO THE BEAUTIFUL FLOWER CITY: A bus company is offering tours. But the city does not look beautiful and there are no flowers here.

Up a steep ramp and across an overpass is the long-distance bus station, where the express to Dongguan, thirty miles away, leaves every ten minutes. The bus is packed, and it smells of sweat and of clothing that is worn every day and slept in at night—the smell of migrants. The bus races down the elevated highway and the factories emerge below: printing factories, paint and plastic factories, mobile-phone and screw and sofa factories. The buildings, faced in white tile, resemble giant public bathrooms; worker dormitories rise beside them, their balconies blooming with laundry. Chinese factories are named for their auspicious associations, and the journey to Dongguan is a high-speed tour of virtue and fortune: HIGH REFINEMENT AIR-CONDITIONING. ETERNAL SINCERITY GARMENTS. NEW ERA ZIPPER COMPANY.

Two decades after the first factories were built, development still feels new. The innards of a mountain spill out, red-earthed and raw, where its face was blasted away; exit ramps off the highway disappear in fields of marshy weeds. A brand-new corporate headquarters looks out on rice paddies, fishponds, and duck farms; miraculously, people are still farming here. In the seventeenth century, settlers turned the floodplains of the Pearl River Delta into one of China’s most fertile regions, supplying fish, vegetables, and rice to the country and exporting silk to Europe. Today in the land of full-throttle industry, it is these glimpses of nature that are unsettling. The farmers are mostly migrants, the lowest of the low, for they have traveled a thousand miles from home but have still not left the farm behind.

The bus slows for the Dongguan exit, and now the factories appear up close. Red banners stretch across the fronts of buildings in sagging smiles of welcome: SEEKING EXPERIENCED WOMEN WORKERS. At the gate of one factory, migrants have gathered to stare, in mesmerized silence, at a help-wanted sign: MEET 1:30 EVERY AFTERNOON AT THE SIDE GATE. A company called Jobhop Limited is, appropriately enough, seeking workers. The bus passes through another giant construction site—no, this is the bus station—and releases its passengers.

The best way to understand the city of Dongguan is to walk it. Bank headquarters of mirrored glass tower over street-side shops selling motorcycle parts and plastic pipes and dental services. Roads are ten lanes wide, high-speed highways in place of city streets. Migrants walk along the shoulders carrying suitcases or bedding, while buses and trucks bear down from behind. Everywhere is construction and motion, jackhammers and motorcycles, drills and dust; at street level the noise is deafening. The roads are wide and well paved but there are no pedestrian lights or crosswalks. This is a city built for machines, not people.

The offices of the government bureaucracy that appear on almost every block in other Chinese cities are nowhere to be seen. Men on motorcycles accost pedestrians, each one touting a taxi ride, and all of them illegal. Counterfeit college diplomas are for sale at street corners. In Dongguan there is a fake IKEA and a fast-food chain whose name translates as “McKFC” and a ten-story building that calls itself the Haiyatt Hotel, with a marble lobby and a decidedly lax attitude toward copyright violation (“We have an ‘i’ in our name, they don’t,” explains a young woman at the front desk). The city is divided into thirty-two towns, and each one specializes in manufacturing. Chang’an produces electronic components, Dalang is famous for sweaters, and Houjie makes shoes. Samsung and Pioneer operate plants in Liaobu; Nancheng is home to the world’s largest Nokia mobile-phone factory. All the Nescafé instant coffee that is drunk in China is processed at a plant in downtown Dongguan. Factories are the bus stops and the monuments and the landmarks, and everything exists to serve them. Dongguan’s highway network, already the densest in the country, is under constant expansion in hopes of delivering goods to the world faster. Luxury hotels and golf courses have sprung up to pamper factory clients. The buyers of the world stay at the Sheraton Dongguan Hotel, which gives guests a card listing every destination they will ever need:

GUANGDONG INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION CENTER

DONGGUAN INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION CENTER

MUSEUM OF OPIUM WAR

TAI PING JETTY

WAL-MART

CARREFOUR

PARK ’N’ SHOP

HARBOUR PLAZA GOLF CLUB

HILLVIEW GOLF CLUB

LONG ISLAND GOLF CLUB

No one is sure how many people live here. According to the city government, Dongguan has 1.7 million local residents and almost seven million migrants, but few people believe these official figures, and speculation about the city’s true population is rife. Dongguan has eight million migrants. Dongguan adds one million migrants a year. Dongguan has ten million migrants, but it reports only seven million to avoid paying higher taxes. The city’s mayor might know more, but he’s not telling: “Dongguan’s population is far more than the publicly announced figure,” he told reporters at a forum in 2005. His personal estimate—“conservative,” in his words—was over ten million.

Dongguan is unfinished, a city where everything is in the process of becoming something else. A stretch of sidewalk is piled high with stone tiles, under a sign promising EUROPEAN STYLE PALACE-LEVEL OFFICE BUILDINGS. The central business district yawns with open pits. On the east side of town, a new city center is rising, which will one day have government offices, a library, a science museum, and a theater. For now, the area’s wide boulevards are empty of cars and its grassy malls perfectly still, the hedges trimmed in tidy geometries. Dongguan’s motto is “One Big Step Every Year, a New City in Five Years.”

Molding a new life is even faster. A few computer lessons can catapult a person into a different class, and a morning at the talent market is enough to establish a new career. Twenty yuan at a photo studio buys a package of snapshots, taken against a painted backdrop of picket fences or formal gardens; these prints are mailed home or given to friends or taped to a dormitory wall, a reminder that the person in the picture is already someone new. On walls around the city, next to flyers for job openings and syphilis clinics, are the advertisements for the missing. HE LEFT HOME FIVE YEARS AGO, DARK-SKINNED, WITH A POCKMARKED FACE, speaks rather fast, likes to play video games. The notices are posted by family members searching for loved ones who have disappeared into the great maw of the city.

On weekends, teenagers take over Dongguan, giving its parks and squares the feel of an open-air high school. Girls roam in cliques, wearing frilly tops and tight jeans, with their arms around one anothers’ shoulders. Boys travel in smaller packs, the sleeves of their factory shirts rolled up under their armpits. Couples parade apart, the girls proud in ownership, the boys slouchy and nonchalant. On Monday mornings, the parks and the squares of Dongguan are eerily empty. The long avenues of factories show only blank faces to the world, the packs of girls and boys swallowed up inside. Industry does not require movement and activity, but their opposite—street after street, there is only silence.

At night, the factories lining the highways are lit. Look closely and you can sometimes see shadows moving against a window, erratic as fireflies—as long as there is light, people are still working. Each strip of blue-lighted windows against the dark signals a single factory; one strip is set apart from the next, like stately ocean liners on the sea. From a distance, they are beautiful.

*  *  *

The girls were twenty days out from home, so new to the city they didn’t know who owned the factory where they worked. They carried nothing with them: no drinks, no plastic bags of fruit or snacks. They just sat, under the blazing sun, in the public square of a district of Dongguan known for its small shoe factories.

Their names were Tian Yongxia and Zhang Dali. They were sixteen years old and this was their first time away from home. They had left their farming village in Henan Province on the ninth day of the lunar new year, which was regarded as an auspicious moment to depart. A girl from their village worked in a factory here for eight hundred yuan a month, and they wanted that too. They each paid four hundred yuan, about fifty dollars, to a husband and wife who promised them factory jobs and brought them out on a three-day bus journey. But when they got to the city there were no jobs, and the couple disappeared.

The girls spent four nights in the bus station and finally got in touch with someone from home, who found them work in an electronics factory for three hundred yuan a month. It was a poor salary, but they were in no position to negotiate. “By that time I wanted to join a factory just so I could get a good night’s sleep,” said Yongxia, who had a broad face and small eyes and smiled a lot. She did most of the talking. Dali was slimmer and prettier, with delicate features and uneven teeth.

The girls quickly learned the hierarchy of factory life, and that they were at the bottom. Workers who had joined the previous year looked down on newcomers and did not talk to them. Theirs was a smaller subsidiary factory, which paid less, but to work at a company’s main facility you needed skills and a proper identity card; both girls had joined the factory with borrowed IDs because they had not applied for their own cards yet. The assembly line ran eight hours a day with weekends off, and that was bad too, because overtime would have meant more money. Shoe factories paid more, but they were known to work extremely long days, and the girls constantly debated whether the extra money would be worth the exhaustion. Soon after Yongxia and Dali arrived in the factory, they started talking about how to leave.

Before they went out from home, the two girls had made a pact: If jobs at the first factory fell through, they would go straight home. But when jobs at the first factory fell through, they stayed. They had come to the city, and already they were changed.

I MET YONGXIA AND DALI on my second day in town. It was a hot February morning, the sky bleached a dingy white and the air humming with heat and motorcycle exhaust; in the Pearl River Delta, summer would begin in another month. I took the girls to a noodle shop and ordered Cokes. They sipped them carefully through straws as they told me the story of how they had left home.

I explained that I was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Yongxia turned my business card over and over, mulling its unfamiliar Beijing address. “Can we write you letters?” she said suddenly. “We miss our mothers. We are so lonely.” Through the restaurant window, one of the girls spotted something outside. Both rose and scattered, like a pair of startled birds. “Sorry, we have to go now.”

By the time I caught up with them they were halfway down the block, standing on the sidewalk with a girl in their midst—the prize, the one who had come out from their village the previous year, the one who made eight hundred yuan a month. She was going somewhere, and they weren’t letting her get away this time.

I asked Yongxia for the phone number in her dorm, but she was so new to her job that she didn’t know it yet. She promised to write me a letter. We agreed to meet in two weeks, on the spot in the square where we had met that morning. And then they vanished. They were sixteen years old, on the loose in one of China’s most chaotic boomtowns, raising themselves with no adults in sight. They were prey to all sorts of cons, making life decisions on the barest bits of information. They missed their mothers. But they were also having the time of their lives.

______

I FLEW DOWN FROM BEIJING two weeks later to wait for them on the square. We had agreed to meet at ten o’clock, but there were many reasons they might not come. Perhaps they had found better jobs with overtime and couldn’t get away. Possibly they had decided they didn’t trust me. Or they simply forgot, or had something more interesting to do; maybe they had already joined the ranks of the disappeared. Why would they come? My only hope came from something Yongxia had said: We are so lonely.

I waited until almost noon. By then I knew they were not coming, but I also knew that once I left the square, they would be lost to me forever. They were sixteen years old from Henan Province; that was all I knew about them, and their names. In their frilly tops and jeans and ponytails, they looked just like the millions of other young women who had come to Dongguan from somewhere else. I couldn’t bring myself to meet anyone else that day. I wandered under the hot sun for hours, looking at people and talking myself out of approaching them for the pettiest of reasons. If they were in a group, they might be hard to talk to; if they were eating or drinking, they were too well-off. The sight of so many girls I would never know was paralyzing—it seemed inconceivable that any single story mattered at all.

For months afterward, whenever I came to the city, I looked closely into the faces of the young girls on the streets, hoping to find Yongxia and Dali again. Many of the girls looked back at me, wary or curious or challenging. There are millions of young women, and each one has a story worth telling. I had to look into their faces to begin.

I CAME TO DONGGUAN for the first time that February, in 2004. Migration in China was two decades old, and most foreign newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, had done stories about the harsh conditions inside the factories. I wanted to write about something else—how the workers themselves thought about migration. I was especially interested in women, who seemed to have the most to gain in leaving the village but maybe also the most to lose. The assembly lines of Dongguan, one of the largest factory cities in China, drew the young and unskilled and were estimated to be 70 percent female. That seemed a good place to start.

Over the next two years, I spent a week or two of every month in Dongguan. I got to know a few young women well, and I met a great many others who told me their stories and disappeared, like the two girls on the square whom I never saw again. Their tolerance for risk was astonishing. If they didn’t like a factory or a boss or a coworker, they jumped somewhere else and never looked back, and when they recounted their stories to me, there were unexplained gaps in time from stays at factories they no longer remembered. Their parents back home were only dimly aware of what their daughters were up to. Existence, to the factory girls, was a perpetual present, which seemed immensely liberating but also troubling. Making it in the city meant cutting ties to everything they knew.

The young women I became closest to had something in common: They understood the drama of their own stories and why I wanted to know about them. I think they also understood me, better than I might have expected. I was from America and I had gone to college; in education and class, I was a million miles away from them. But I knew what it was like to be alone, as a single woman, in the city. I was also bullied by Chinese men, and yelled at by police, and cheated by bus drivers; I also had boyfriend dilemmas and parents who worried that I was still single. When I got married in the spring of 2006, one of the migrant women who knew me best surprised me. “Your mother must be very happy” was the first thing she said. “I have a feeling that she is a traditional Chinese person.”

Perhaps my strongest link to the girls was one they never knew: I, too, had left home. After graduating from college in America, I moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia. Altogether I lived abroad for fifteen years, going home to see my family once every couple of years, as the migrants did. For a long time I resisted the pull of China. In college, I avoided Chinese American organizations and took only one Chinese-language class; I majored in American history and literature and wrote my undergraduate thesis on Larry McMurtry’s novels of the American West. In Prague, I reported on Czech politics and society for an expatriate newspaper. One winter day in 1992, a Chinese couple dragging their suitcases along the slushy sidewalk asked me for directions in Mandarin. I waited a long moment before answering, resentfully, in their language—as if they were forcing me back into a world I had already left behind.

Initially, China’s appeal for me was pragmatic—in the early 1990s, its booming economy began to attract global attention, and my fluency in Chinese suddenly became an asset. I went to Hong Kong in 1993 to work as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and began to read books on Chinese history for the first time, eventually to the exclusion of everything else; to me, China has always felt like the test I neglected to study for. When I moved to Taiwan two years later, people there frequently asked me what year I had chuqu, gone out, to America—their unspoken assumption that everyone in the world had been born in the Chinese nation. Later after I moved to China, I often heard the same question. That was one of the ways that Taiwan and China, which until recently had been technically at war, were more alike than they imagined.

One of the first things most Chinese Americans do when they go to China is to visit their ancestral hometowns, but for twelve years I lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China without making the journey. I worried that I wasn’t ready to understand what I would find in my family village; secretly, I was afraid it would mean nothing at all. Either way, I understood the factory girls when they spoke of their complicated feelings for home.

______

YOUNG WOMEN from the countryside taught me the city. From them I learned which factories were well run; without ever leaving Dongguan, these workers had figured out the global hierarchy of nations. American and European bosses treated workers best, followed by Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong, and then Taiwanese factory owners. Domestic Chinese factories were the worst, because “they always go bankrupt,” one migrant explained to me. They also knew when major policies were about to change—in early 2005, some workers told me that the minimum wage would rise, before it was officially announced.

Many things I had read about China’s migrants were not true. They no longer lived in fear of being picked up by the police; instead, the authorities just ignored them. Discrimination from local residents was not really an issue, because migrants almost never encountered locals. And I was surprised to learn that job mobility was high. Almost all the senior people I met in factories had started on the assembly line. The young women I knew did not appear destined to return to the farm because they had never farmed before. They often did not know how much land their family had or when the planting season began. My assumptions had come from studies of Chinese migrant workers done in the mid-1990s; almost a decade later, this world had utterly changed, but things were happening too quickly to be written down.

I came to like Dongguan, which seemed a perverse expression of China at its most extreme. Materialism, environmental ruin, corruption, traffic, pollution, noise, prostitution, bad driving, short-term thinking, stress, striving, and chaos: If you could make it here, you’d make it anywhere. I tried to fit in as much as I could. I ate twenty-five-cent bowls of noodles for lunch and took buses everywhere. I dressed, in jeans and sandals, more plainly than many migrant girls who wore embroidered shirts and high heels when they went out. I was invisible in Dongguan, and I liked that too. In other places in China, a person staring at strangers and writing things in a notebook might attract attention; here, people were too focused on their own affairs to notice me. Only once did someone interfere: I was in the talent market, copying down instructions from a sign on the wall. A guard asked me what I was doing. I told him I was practicing my English, and he left me alone.

Dongguan is invisible to the outside world. Most of my friends in Beijing had passed through the city but all they remembered—with a shudder—were the endless factories and the prostitutes. I had stumbled on this secret world, one that I shared with seven million, or eight million, or maybe ten million other people. Living in Dongguan was like arriving in it for the first time, hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour, the scenery changing too fast to keep track of it. Dongguan was a place without memory.

*  *  *

Dongguan was also a city of contradictions, because modern Chinese history had begun here. During the nineteenth century, British smuggling of opium into China devastated the country and drained the treasury. In the summer of 1839, a Qing Dynasty imperial commissioner named Lin Zexu ordered the public incineration of twenty thousand cases of opium in the harbor at Humen, a town in Dongguan. That act set the two nations on course for the First Opium War, which was fought in Guangdong Province and ended quickly when British warships overwhelmed Chinese forces. The Treaty of Nanking ceded Hong Kong to Britain, forced open Chinese ports to international trade, and gave foreign nations unprecedented commercial and legal privileges within China. In the history that is taught in Chinese classrooms, the burning of opium in Humen ignited the modern era: the subjugation to foreign powers, followed by the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, revolution, war, and the Communist victory in 1949.

But there was another history of this place. In the autumn of 1978, the Taiping Handbag Factory of Hong Kong opened the first foreign factory in Dongguan. Income in its first year of operation was one million Hong Kong dollars. The factory processed materials from Hong Kong into finished goods, which were shipped back to Hong Kong to be sold to the world. It established the model for thousands of factories to follow. Over the next two years, China set up four “special economic zones” as testing grounds for freeenterprise practices like foreign investment and tax incentives. The largest zone was Shenzhen, about fifty miles south of Dongguan, which quickly became a symbol of a freewheeling China always open for business. Shenzhen was a planned showcase city, willed into being by leaders in Beijing and supported by government ministries and the companies under them.

Dongguan was different. It rose by no one’s decree; it simply grew. While Shenzhen aspired to advanced technology and innovation, Dongguan took what it could get, which meant low-tech factories from Hong Kong and Taiwan that made clothing, toys, and shoes. All they needed was cheap land and labor, as well as local officials who left them alone. What they initially built could not be called modern industry. Many of the early factories were two-or three-story houses where workers sat at desks, fifty to a room, engaged in simple tasks like sewing cloth for a stuffed animal or attaching artificial hair to a doll. Some of the factories were housed in makeshift structures of sheet metal because their owners did not want the expense of real buildings.

In the early days, there was no train service from Hong Kong. Businessmen traveled to the British colony’s border with Shenzhen, crossed on foot, and caught a taxi to their Dongguan factory on the other side, passing farms on the way. “There were no roads around here, no cars, no TVs, not even curtains,” recalled Allen Lee, a Taiwan shoe industry executive who moved to the city in 1989. “You couldn’t buy stuff like that here.” In June 1989, he bicycled forty minutes to watch the news on TV about the shooting of protesters around Tiananmen Square.

The local labor supply was soon exhausted and migrants began arriving from neighboring provinces. Lin Xue, the woman I knew who wrote for a migrant magazine, had come to Dongguan from rural Sichuan in 1990. “We came here blind,” she told me. “I would go to someone selling tickets and ask, ‘Where should I buy a ticket to?’ and we would do what they said.” Lin Xue got a factory job that paid seventy yuan a month, and her younger sister pressed plywood in a lumber factory.

In the 1990s, the city’s manufacturing shifted to electronics and computer parts. Today Dongguan makes 40 percent of the world’s magnetic heads used in personal computers and 30 percent of its disk drives. Economic growth over the past two decades has averaged more than 15 percent a year. Some things have not changed. The migrants are still arriving. Labor-intensive factories still dominate, and though their products have gotten more sophisticated, the work itself has not. There are still a great many apartment buildings where workers sit at desks engaged in simple tasks with their hands.

So Dongguan was a place with conflicting versions of its past—one a high-profile rejection of the foreign presence in China, the other stealthy embrace of it. Every Chinese schoolchild learns about the burning of opium. But from the Taiping Handbag Factory, which did not appear in any textbook, I could trace a direct line to everyone I ever met in Dongguan, from the migrants studying Microsoft Word to the self-help gurus to the Mercedes salesman who told me that the priciest S- and E-Class cars sold best in Dongguan, because “for a boss to improve his image, this is a good product.” For all of them, modern history began with the handbag factory.

*  *  *

I went for months without meeting a native of Dongguan. The world of the factory, from the top managers to the assembly line, was the exclusive domain of migrants, though the top boss was sometimes from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Local residents spoke the Cantonese dialect, but the factory world functioned in the official dialect of Mandarin, because that was the only way people from different provinces could talk to one another. Migrants held the local residents in low regard: They were uneducated farmers who made a living renting out farmland to factories, and they could not survive a day in the factory’s demanding environment. “It’s mutual contempt,” my friend Lin Xue said, to describe relations between locals and migrants.

Six months after I started coming to Dongguan, I interviewed the deputy mayor. His name was Zhang Shunguang and he was a Dongguan native: my first. We sat in a big reception room in a city government building and drank tea out of tiny paper cups. Several of his assistants gathered, speaking to one another in Cantonese. I had never met a Dongguan person and here they all were, inside the government.

“Do you speak Cantonese?” one assistant asked me.

“Sorry, no,” I said. No one in the city had ever asked me this question before.

“Is this your first time in Dongguan?”

“No, I’ve been here many times.”

“Oh, were they all secret trips?”

“Is it a secret if you don’t know about it?”

We already disliked each other. In the middle of the interview, I looked over at the assistant and he stared blankly back at me. The young woman next to him had fallen asleep. The phrase mutual contempt popped into my mind.

The interview was useful: Without seeing for myself, I never would have believed how completely the government ignored the migrants. The deputy mayor did not have an accurate count of the migrant population—that was up to the national census, not his department. He admitted that the local government lacked the resources to check conditions in the factories. “If I inspected one factory a day,” he said, “it would take me fifty years to inspect all the factories. So we must rely on the companies to police themselves.”

The deputy mayor then talked of a plan to “lift the quality of the Dongguan people,” but the effort excluded those who were not native-born. Like all city people, he had a reflexive contempt for waidiren, outsiders, the common term for migrants. “The quality of migrant workers is not high,” he said, “but this is the responsibility of the companies. They should be running classes for workers.”

I asked the deputy mayor why there were no Dongguan people in the factories, even at the highest levels, and he contradicted what he had just said without missing a beat.

“The people from outside,” he said, “have higher quality and lower wages.”

After the interview, the deputy mayor shook my hand and praised my knowledge of the city. I didn’t tell him my informants were all teenage girls—migrants of low quality and even lower wages.

AFTER A YEAR of visiting the city, I rented a one-bedroom apartment downtown for $160 a month. The high-rise complex was called Dongguan City Holiday, and it targeted single women; hot-pink billboards around town advertised one PERSON’S HOUSE, ONE PERSON’S SPLENDOR. I thought I would meet young women and hear their stories, but no one ever said a word to me in the lobbies and elevators, and I never saw a single person in the common room. People were too busy with their own lives to bother with anyone else’s. I got most of my news from the bulletin boards in the apartment complex, which portrayed a community of petty crime and round-the-clock construction.

FOR THE PEACE OF RESIDENTS, RENOVATION WILL STOP ON JANUARY 1. IT WILL RESUME ON JANUARY 2.

WHEN A PERSON KNOCKS ON YOUR DOOR, DO NOT CASUALLY OPEN IT UNTIL YOU HAVE CONFIRMED THE PERSON’S IDENTITY.

ANYONE WITH INFORMATION ABOUT THE THEFT RING IN THE NANCHENG AREA SHOULD CONTACT THE POLICE.

My landlady had moved to the city years before from rural Guangdong. She often showed up at my apartment in pink pajamas and house slippers to collect the rent, and I once heard her say “Fuck your mother” on the phone to her husband because he had just told her he was returning late from a business trip. She worked the night shift at a hotel, doing sales. I wondered what kind of sales had to be done between midnight and six o’clock in the morning, but I never found the courage to ask. My landlady had a way of deflecting questions.

“How did you have two children?” I asked her once. Most urban families were limited to one.

“How do you think I had two children?” she answered.

The retail environment outside my apartment was in constant flux. On the day I moved in, I was excited to see a BRICK OVEN PIZZA sign beside the entrance to my building, a welcome taste of home. By my next visit, that had morphed into the GREAT AMBITIONS MOBILE PHONE DIGITAL SUPERMARKET. Just what China needed: another store selling mobile phones. Over the following two weeks, the space below my apartment transformed from an empty shell with cables dangling from the ceiling into a full-on mobile-phone store, with robotic salespeople and music blasting from giant speakers into an empty parking lot. On my next stay, marketing had begun, in the form of a young woman who stood at the store entrance and read phone model numbers and prices into a microphone, one after another. Another sign had materialized in front of my building: HAVE KFC AS YOUR NEIGHBOR! EARN 8% ANNUAL INTEREST WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING. I wasn’t thrilled to have KFC as my neighbor. The only constant in the neighborhood was the Nescafé plant across the street. On summer days, the smell of coffee enveloped me as soon as I walked outside, a warm bath at once sweet and bitter.

When you lived in Beijing, you were shielded from many things, but in the hinterland cities you could see the strains of China’s development up close. Public buses often diverged from their routes to fill up on gas; fuel shortages were common, so an open station was worth a stop even with a load of passengers. Full-day power stoppages were regular events, and factories had to juggle their production schedules because of government rationing. Among the notices on my apartment bulletin board was one that never varied: THE ORIGINAL POWER SUPPLY TRUNK LINE CANNOT KEEP UP WITH THE NEEDS OF DEVELOPMENT AND MUST BE CHANGED.

During the summer of 2005, the power went off for at least one day on each of my trips to Dongguan. With some advance notice I could plan ahead, but sometimes the power went dead without warning, consigning me to a day indoors in ninety-degree heat and as little movement as possible. I would call the building’s management office, fuming, but it was not their fault. It was not anyone’s fault. China’s economy was growing by 10 percent a year, faster in the south, and it was a miracle that things were holding together as well as they were.

*  *  *

I took the bus everywhere. In part this was to see as much of the migrant world as I could, but it was also practical. Taxi drivers were some of the biggest cheats around—more than once I found myself speeding down a dark highway while a cabbie threatened to leave me by the side of the road if I didn’t give him more money. Another high-speed negotiating tactic was to offer to take a passenger partway to his destination for a smaller fare; drivers were such short-term thinkers that they would rather earn less money but get paid sooner. Even honest cabdrivers suffered the shortcomings of peasants: Once they left the patch of turf they knew, they were as lost as I was.

The employees of the bus system worked in pairs: The driver was usually a local man, the ticket seller a female migrant. Sometimes they shouted conversations the length of the bus over the heads of passengers, and sometimes there was a small television screen mounted in the dashboard so the driver could watch TV as he drove. When approaching a stop, the ticket seller leaned out the door while the bus was still moving and called out destinations in a hoarse voice. The waiting people were usually susceptible to pressure; if they were yelled at long enough, some would get on.

The young men on the bus smelled of gamy sweat, the scent of people who walked long distances outdoors and never enjoyed the luxury of air-conditioning. The young women were immaculate: They never smelled, and their hair was always sleek and shiny. On every bus there were several migrants holding plastic bags to their mouths and throwing up quietly. Motion sickness was the terror of people from the countryside, who were not accustomed to car travel. Brown plastic bags hung from bus ceiling hooks in bunches, like overripe bananas beginning to go bad. Passengers on buses carried an amazing variety of things; in the way of the countryside, nothing was ever thrown away. On different journeys, I saw people carrying an ancient TV set, a wicker basket of electric cables, a mud-encrusted bucket of stonemason’s tools, and a murderous-looking wrench a yard long. Once I saw a young woman with a six-foot-long broomstick handle.

Bus stops were unmarked, and there were never signs showing the routes. You had to ask: Information was conveyed by word of mouth, as if we lived in ancient times before the invention of writing. Twice I bought city maps with bus schedules but both times the routes were already out of date; things were happening too quickly to be written down. The other passengers were as confused as I was, often calling out the names of stops that had already passed and making panicked departures. Wherever I went, I was asked directions. One afternoon, I puzzled over routes with a migrant woman, who asked me after a while, “Are you from Hubei?” Was that an insult or a compliment? I just wanted to get home.

At night the buses stopped running early, an injustice to everyone who could afford no other form of transportation. After eight o’clock, people arranged to spend the night in friends’ dorms, even though most factories banned overnight visitors and getting caught would mean a large fine.

I never saw old people on the bus.

ONE NIGHT I caught a bus from Shenzhen back to Dongguan. About halfway to our destination, the bus stopped and the driver yelled at the passengers to switch to another vehicle. This was common, though illegal: Late at night, half-empty buses preferred to pool their passengers rather than continue on money-losing journeys alone. The driver of one bus would pay another a set price for each passenger taken off his hands.

After the second bus was on the highway, the new ticket seller announced that we weren’t going to Dongguan after all. This was common, too: Once the second bus had been paid for taking passengers, its sole purpose was to get rid of them as soon as possible.

The bus stopped. “All passengers for Houjie get off here.” The ticket seller was a skinny Cantonese man who yelled everything in a nasal voice. He walked down the aisle, pointing at certain people and ordering them off. He pointed at me.

A passenger ahead of me got off the bus and disappeared into the night. I walked to the front of the bus and leaned out from the bottom step. We were on a pitch-black highway beside a deserted construction site.

“There are no taxis here,” I said to the ticket seller. “I’m not getting off.”

“There are taxis,” he yelled in snarling Cantonese.

“I’m not getting off.”

He came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” I climbed back up the stairs and sat in a front-row seat. None of the other passengers had budged.

And then the bus started driving again. It had failed to dispose of its cargo, so it kept going. Passengers continued to get off at their stops as if nothing had happened. “These buses are very black,” said a young woman with a slender dark face who was sitting next to me. “You should only take buses where the driver is wearing a uniform.” Yet she was on this bus, just like me.

“The people who work on this bus are evil,” she said loudly, “and every word out of their mouths is an obscenity.” I felt safe just being next to her, but then she got off too.

The bus pulled to the side of the road and stopped again. “Okay, everyone off,” the ticket seller yelled. This time he walked up and down the aisle, giving two yuan to each person.

I walked down the aisle to where he was. “I paid twenty-five yuan to get to Dongguan, and I want my money back.”

He turned around to face me. Of course, he was taller than I was, and he was a man. At that moment, I realized how powerless I truly was.

“If you paid a hundred, should I give you a hundred?” he yelled. “If I take my pants off, will you give me a hundred?”

It didn’t make sense and it wasn’t funny, but he liked the sound of it and he said it again. “If I take my pants off, will you give me a hundred?”

“Fuck you,” I said in English. “Asshole. Prick.” That broke my cardinal rule about living in China—never play the American card—but sometimes only cursing in English will do. The man looked at me with newfound respect.

I pushed past him to the front of the bus and looked for something to throw. I wanted to grab his money belt and toss it out the window, but of course he kept that close to him. There was a dirty towel on the dashboard, and I flung it in the driver’s face. Then I got off the bus and ran. My heart was pounding; I thought he might come after me. Then I stopped running, and I realized how stupid I must have looked.

On a side street, I saw a taxi and asked the driver how much to Dongguan. Eighty yuan—ten dollars. I got in. I was so mad I was shaking. I thought of all the young women I knew who lived here, and how every single one had been cheated, abused, and yelled at by someone just like the skinny Cantonese man, who probably woke up in the morning already angry at the world. There was no recourse but tears and fury at your own impotence. In a confrontation, everything boiled down instantly to brute force, and a woman would always lose. I had money, and with money I could buy my way to comfort and safety. They didn’t have that.

And yet there were also people who were kind, like the woman on the bus who had cursed out the driver on my behalf. You had to focus on that or you would never survive.

*  *  *

Dongguan might feel like a place without a past, but city officials did not see it that way. In the new downtown, they had erected a museum of history—an immense building of gray stone, as squat and permanent as the mausoleum of a dead dictator. Cabdrivers didn’t know the place—invariably they took me to a commercial exhibition center down the street—and the museum was deserted all three times I went in the summer of 2005.

Chinese history museums are troubled places. Ancient civilization was great, or so the official narrative went, but it was feudal and backward. Modern China was ravaged by foreigners, but the Chinese people were heroic in humiliation and defeat. China stood up in 1949 when the Communists came to power, but there were other years since—1957, 1966, and 1989 in particular—that went prominently unmentioned. Everything that was jumbled and incoherent and better left unsaid must be smoothed into a rational pattern, because the purpose of history from the time of Confucius has been to transmit moral lessons to later generations.

In Dongguan, the museum’s yawning lobby was a monument to wasted real estate and powerful air-conditioning. Signs pointed to History, straight ahead, and Economy, second floor. On my initial visit, I entered History. The first room stretched from prehistoric marine fossils to the Qing Dynasty, with glass cases displaying what looked like piles of rocks. On closer inspection, they were piles of rocks with incomprehensible English captions: Whetstone appearing from Haogang shell mound remains. A room-size diorama of women weavers illustrated Dongguan’s early talent in handicrafts. A tape of the scraping sound of the loom played in a continuous loop and haunted me through the rooms.

More piles of rocks followed, and then history lurched forward with startling accuracy. The population increased and reached 150,378 by the sixth year of the Tianshun reign of the Ming Dynasty (1462 A.D.). Markets developed; the salt industry flourished; agriculture thrived. In a large open room, a fake tree cast its shadow over a fake lake, a fake rowboat, a fake arched footbridge, three fake geese, and two fake ducks. The continuous loop quacked.

That was another difficulty of telling about the past. Every place had to reflect the continuity of five thousand years of Chinese history, but in most places little had been recorded and nothing concrete remained. Valuable artifacts would have been claimed by Beijing or lost in wars and political campaigns, so museums were forced to invent the rest. They forged cannons and bells and suits of armor, and printed texts of old documents on Formica tablets and hung them on the walls. Dioramas occupied whole rooms—a favorite display method, probably because they took up lots of space. The only authentic artifacts in the Dongguan museum were the piles of rocks.

Once modern history began with the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, things got really confusing. A display entitled “Fury Against the British” featured mannequins of British naval officers and an angry Chinese mandarin. The defeat in the Opium Wars has always been a deep-rooted humiliation and agony to China. But perhaps in a city of thriving commerce it was impossible to summon the necessary fury against the British, because the adjoining display had already moved on. In 1878, the governor of Hong Kong suggested founding the Inferior Protection Bureau to protect Chinese women and children. The exhibit marched quickly through the Second World War and straight to Communist victory, a blurry photo of happy faces. Millions of people rejoiced at the liberation.

In the next room, a title stretched across one wall: “A Vision Made Real: From Agricultural County to IT City.” A light board showed photos of the Communist Party meeting at which Deng Xiaoping set forth his program for economic reform and opening to the West. That was in 1978. From one room to the next, the exhibit had jumped thirty years, skipping over the founding of Communist China, the land reform and the execution of counterrevolutionaries, the attacks against “class enemies” and the establishment of the communes, the Great Leap Forward and the famine that killed at least twenty million people, and the decade of the Cultural Revolution.

I had exited History and entered Economy, and now the exhibit came to life. A vast diorama showed the Taiping Handbag Factory with four women bent over a table sewing shoes. A mock-up of the government office where businesses applied for licenses featured the familiar figure of Dongguan Man: a businessman with a potbelly and a pleather briefcase. History picked up speed—Decades passed in a wink—and giant photographs featured highway overpasses and sewage-treatment plants and investment conferences.

A BENIGN CIRCLE OF INPUT-OUTPUT-INPUT

FIRST PREFECTURAL CITY TO HAVE ONE MILLION MOBILE-PHONE SUBSCRIBERS

BUILD ROADS, BRIDGES, AND POWER PLANTS TO GENERATE FUNDS FOR MORE ROADS, BRIDGES, AND POWER PLANTS

An interactive demonstration showed the city’s GDP, exports, balance of deposits, and tax revenue. The final display was a photo of the signing ceremony of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

A NEW TIME IS COMING!

AS I WAS LEAVING THE MUSEUM, third- and fourth-graders on a field trip were lining up in the lobby in jostling rows. The students wore school-issue sweatpants with Young Pioneers scarves tied around their necks. A museum guide, a young woman with a stern face and sticklike legs, picked up a megaphone. I braced for the Opium War and 150 years of humiliation.

“On the third floor, you will see a model of the city,” she began. “I want you all to find your own house on this model. Do you all know Songshan Lake?”

“Yes,” the students replied in chorus.

“Songshan Lake is our high-tech industrial zone. Dongguan has a motto: ‘One Big Step Every Year, A New City in Five Years.’ We are now in Year Three of that plan.”

She paused. “Do you all know ‘Build the City, Construct the Roads, Renovate the Mountains, Harness the Rivers’?”

Silence. Nobody knew that one.

“It is government policy. Dongguan also has a harbor that is open to foreign ships . . .”

In the seventh century, the emperors of the Tang Dynasty ordered court historians to compose a chronicle of the previous reign. Every dynasty since has written the history of the preceding one, slanting or omitting facts to bolster the ruling regime; since 1949, the Communist Party has done the same, presenting modern history as a heroic struggle to resist the will of foreign powers. But here in Dongguan, the past contained a startlingly different lesson: History was openness, markets, and foreign investment. History began with a handbag factory, and schoolchildren must be indoctrinated in the merits of good infrastructure.

The museum guide urged the children to be “civilized spectators,” and the third- and fourth-graders filed into History in ragged lines. Soon the huge lobby was deserted, and I was left alone to ponder the unlikelihood of a Chinese history museum that did not make a single mention of Mao Zedong.

3 To Die Poor Is a Sin

May 25, 1994
After I was fired from the Yongtong factory, fortunately my wages were fully paid. I had more than one hundred yuan on me and I was not frightened at all. Still I was a little worried, since after all I did not even have an identity card. But with no way out I could only take an ID card that said I was born in 1969 and try my luck. Who knew my luck would be pretty good? I made my way into this factory’s plastic molds department.

Since I have come to Guangdong, I have jumped factories four or five times, and each factory was better than the last. More important was that at each instance, I relied on myself. I never begged for help from anyone. Although I have a few good friends, not one helped me at the time when I most needed it.

I remember when I fled back from Shenzhen. At that time, I truly had nothing to my name. Other than my own self, I had nothing else. I wandered outside for a month, completely penniless, once even going hungry for two days, and no one knew . . . Although older cousin and his wife were in Longyan, I did not want to go find them, because they could not really help me. I often wanted to rely on others, but they cannot be relied on. You can only rely on yourself.

Yes, I can only rely on myself.

The first time Wu Chunming went out she did not tell her parents. It was the summer of 1992 and to migrate was something bold and dangerous. In her village in Hunan Province, it was said that girls who went to the city would be tricked into brothels and never heard from again.

Chunming was seventeen years old that summer. She had finished middle school and was peddling fruits and vegetables in a city near home; she migrated with a cousin who was still in school. The two girls borrowed money for train tickets to Dongguan and found jobs in a factory that made paint for toys. The smell of the chemicals gave them headaches, and they returned home after two months as broke as before. Chunming went out again the following spring. Her parents objected, and argued, and cried. But when she decided to leave anyway, with a few friends from nearby villages, her mother borrowed money for her train fare.

Guangdong in 1993 was even more chaotic than it is today. Migrants from the countryside flooded the streets looking for work, sleeping in bus stations and under bridges. The only way to find a job was to knock on factory doors, and Chunming and her friends were turned away from many doors before they were hired at the Guotong toy factory. Ordinary workers there made one hundred yuan a month, or about twelve dollars; to stave off hunger, they bought giant bags of instant noodles and added salt and boiling water. “We thought if we ever made two hundred yuan a month,” Chunming said later, “we would be perfectly happy.”

After four months, Chunming jumped to another factory, but left soon after a fellow worker said her cousin knew of better jobs in Shenzhen. Chunming and a few friends traveled there, spent the night under a highway overpass, and met the girl’s cousin the next morning. He brought them to a hair salon and took them upstairs, where a heavily made-up young woman sat on a massage bed waiting for customers. Chunming was terrified at the sight. “I was raised very traditionally,” she said. “I thought everyone in that place was bad and wanted me to be a prostitute. I thought that once I went in there, I would turn bad too.”

The girls were told that they should stay and take showers in a communal stall, but Chunming refused. She walked back down the stairs, looked out the front door, and ran, abandoning her friends and the suitcase that contained her money, a government-issued identity card, and a photograph of her mother. Footsteps came up behind her. She turned in to one alley and then another, and the footsteps stopped. Chunming ran into a yard and found a deserted chicken coop in back. She climbed into the coop and hid there, all day and all night. The next morning, her arms laced with mosquito bites, Chunming went into the street and knelt on the sidewalk to beg for money, but no one gave her anything. A passerby brought her to the police station; without the name or address of the hair salon, the police couldn’t help her either. They gave her twenty yuan for bus fare back to her factory.

The bus driver dropped her off only partway back to Dongguan. Chunming started to walk, and a man on the street followed her. She spotted a young woman in a factory uniform and asked if she could sneak into her factory for the night. The young woman borrowed a worker’s ID card and brought Chunming in, where she hid that night in a shower stall. In the morning, Chunming stole clean pants and a T-shirt that were hanging out to dry in the bathroom and climbed the factory gate to get out. By then she had not eaten in two days. A bus driver bought her a piece a bread and gave her a lift back to Dongguan, where her cousin and his wife worked.

Chunming did not tell them what had happened to her. Instead she wandered the streets. She befriended a cook on a construction site who let her eat with the other workers, and at night she sneaked into friends’ factory dorms to sleep. Without an ID card, she could not get a new job. After a month of wandering, Chunming saw an ad for assembly-line jobs at the Yinhui toy factory. She found an ID card that someone had lost or left behind and used it to get hired. Officially she was Tang Congyun, born in 1969. That made her five years older than she really was, but no one looked closely at such things.

Chunming worked at the Yinhui factory for a year, mixing vats of plastic that was poured into molds to make toy cars, planes, and trains. She was bold and she liked to talk, and she made friends easily. Her new friends called her Tang Congyun. She had become, quite literally, someone else.

For years after she left the factory, she received letters addressed to Tang Congyun. Chunming never found out who she was.

I HAD KNOWN CHUNMING for two years before she told me this story. It was a Sunday afternoon at the end of 2006, and she was sitting in a Dongguan juice bar after a day of shopping for birthday presents. “I’ve never told anyone about what happened to me then,” she said, sipping her mixed-fruit juice. “When I tell this story it’s like it happened yesterday.”

“Did you ever find out what happened to the friends you left behind in the hair salon?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I don’t know if it was a truly bad place or just a place where you could work as a massage girl if you wanted. But it was frightening that they would not let us leave.”

Chunming’s best friend had been among the ones she left behind. They had met in the city on the assembly line, so Chunming didn’t know the name of her friend’s village or how to find her again. Years later, Chunming met a girl who had known the friend; she said the friend had gone home and had later come out to Dongguan again. Chunming had to conclude from that brief account that her friend had turned out fine. But there was no way of knowing for sure; perhaps she had been tricked into a brothel and was never heard from again, just as the people in the village had said. Chunming’s good friend was lost to her, like so many people she had met along the way. A year in Dongguan is a long time, and Chunming had lived in the city for thirteen years.

*  *  *

May 24, 1994

We start work at seven in the morning and get off work at nine at night. Afterward we shower and wash our clothes. At around ten, those with money go out for midnight snacks and those without money go to sleep. We sleep until 6:30 in the morning. No one wants to get out of bed, but we must work at seven. Twenty minutes to go: Crawl out of bed, rub your swollen eyes, wash your face, and brush your teeth. Ten minutes to go: Those who want breakfast use these ten minutes to eat breakfast, but I have seen many people not eat. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t want to eat, or to save money, or to stay thin . . .

I certainly would not ignore my health for the sake of thinness or saving money. After all, what is the point of doing migrant work? Can it be that it is just to earn this bit of money?!

Soon after she came to the city, Chunming began to keep a diary. In notebooks with pastel-pink covers she described life in the factory, the tyranny of the timekeepers, and the rare moments of leisure that were given over to gossip, snacks, and crushes on boys. You must record every day the things you have seen, heard, felt, and thought, she wrote. In this way, you can not only raise your writing standards but also see the traces of your own growing up. In these same pages, she plotted her escape from this world through a relentless program of self-improvement: reading novels, practicing her handwriting, and learning to speak—both to erase her Hunan accent and to master Cantonese, the language of the factory bosses. Her greatest fear was of getting stuck where she was. Time was Chunming’s enemy, reminding her that another day had passed and she had not yet achieved her goals. But time was also her friend, because she was still young.

The diary entries were often undated and out of order. Chunming wrote quickly, describing her days, drafting letters to her parents, copying inspirational slogans and song lyrics, and goading herself to work harder. Sometimes her sentences marched in diagonal formation across two pages, growing until each character was an inch high. Inside her head she was shouting.

I HAVE NO TIME TO BE UNHAPPY BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY THINGS I WANT TO DO.

“TIME IS LIFE”

WE CAN BE ORDINARY BUT WE MUST NOT BE VULGAR.—WU CHUNMING

RIGHT NOW I HAVE NOTHING. MY ONLY CAPITAL IS THAT I AM STILL YOUNG.

It is almost one o’clock! I cannot bear to put down this issue of Migrant Worker but I must work at seven tonight again. I might as well go to sleep.

Ai! I truly hate that there is too little time. Every day I work for twelve hours; in the remaining twelve hours I must eat, shower, wash my clothes, and sleep. How much time is there left to read? Working on the night shift, time is even more fragmented: After I get off work and eat, I must wait an hour to shower. I sleep in the afternoon until six and then must get up. Dinner is another hour wasted . . . I read at night until midnight; that leaves not even six hours for sleep. There is one hour left for other things.

I HAVE BEEN DEFEATED, DEFEATED

CAN IT REALLY BE THAT ON THIS ROAD OF LIFE I AM DESTINED TO BE DEFEATED?

I DON’T BELIEVE IT

I ABSOLUTELY DON’T BELIEVE IT

Wu Chunming, you cannot go on living every day like this! Think about it: You have already been at this factory an entire half year, but what have you really gained? You know that to do migrant work in the plastic molds department for your whole life does not have any prospects, so you want to job-hop and find a satisfactory job. First you must learn to speak Cantonese. Why are you so useless? Are you truly so stupid?

Why can’t you learn the things other people learn?

You are also a person, Wu Chunming. Can it be that you are a useless thing?

You have already had more than two months but made no progress in Cantonese. Do you remember your goal when you entered this factory was to learn Cantonese? If you cannot learn Cantonese in this year, then you are a dumb pig, a dumb ox, and you need not do migrant work in Guangdong anymore. With this two or three hundred yuan a month, you would be better off at home.

March 23
Ai, there are really too many things I want to do, and too little time. Some people say they are annoyed to death, hai! Other people are annoyed, but I have no time to be annoyed.

One, I must exercise my body. To be fat is not acceptable.

Two, I must read a lot and practice my writing, so that I can live happily and richly.

Three, I must learn to speak Cantonese. This must not be hurried but slowly learned.

As for sleep time, six hours at most is enough.

March 29
We were paid today. I got 365 yuan. After repaying a fifty-yuan debt, I still have three hundred yuan. I want to buy a watch, clothes, and personal items. How will I have any left over? . . . Summer is here and I don’t have any clothes . . . and I must buy a watch. Without a watch, I cannot make better use of my time.

As for sending money home, that is even less possible. Next month after we are paid, I will register at the Shorthand Secretarial Correspondence University. I must get a college diploma. I certainly did not come to Guangdong just to earn this two or three hundred yuan a month . . . This is merely a temporary stopping place. This is definitely not the place I will stay forever.

No one will understand me, and I don’t need others to understand me.

I can only walk my own road and let other people talk!

May 22
A lot of people say I have changed. I don’t know if I have changed or not . . . I am much more silent now and I don’t love to laugh the way I used to. Sometimes when I laugh it is forced. Sometimes I feel I have become numb. “Numb.” Numb. No! No! But I really don’t know what word I should use to describe the me that I am now.

Anyway, I am so tired, so tired.

Really, really, I feel so tired.

My body and my spirit feel so tired.

Too tired, too tired.

I don’t want to live this way anymore.

I don’t want to live this way anymore.

Never to live that way anymore.

How should I live?

*  *  *

Even as Chunming plotted her rise in the factory world, in her letters home she struggled to be a good traditional daughter.

Mother, I have knit you a sweater . . . If I weren’t knitting a sweater, I could have used this day to read so many books. But Mother, sometimes I think: I would rather be Mother’s obedient daughter, a filial daughter, and even throw away those books I want so much to read.

Mother, I have knit my love for you into this sweater . . . Mother, remember when I was still at home, you always said other people’s daughters knew how to knit sweaters but that I lacked perseverance. But today, do you see that your daughter also knows how to knit? Remember, your daughter will never be dumber than other people!

The expectations of family weighed on her. Young women from the countryside felt particular pressure from home. If they didn’t progress quickly, their parents would urge them to return home to marry.

I finally got a letter from home . . . Other than Father, who else can write me a letter? Mother did not include even a single line to tell me that she misses me . . . In the last letter, she added on a line telling me not to find a boyfriend outside. Although it was only one line, it made me happy, as if Mother were at my side teaching me.

How badly I want to pour out to my mother all the words in my heart, but I cannot. Mother! My mother, why are you an illiterate? It’s all right that you are an illiterate. Why can you not even write a letter? It’s all right that you cannot write a letter. It would be fine if you could write a few words. Even if you made up a few words to say what you wanted to tell me, I would understand your true thoughts.

Mother, I know you have many things to say to me, only that Father did not write them . . .

Father and Mother, it looks like we cannot communicate between us. You will never know and never understand what is really in your daughter’s heart. Maybe you think that I have already found my ideal factory, with three hundred yuan a month. Maybe you think that I will never again jump factories. Maybe your wish is that I never jump factories again, that I work at this factory for two years and then come home to get married, to have a family like all the girls in the countryside. But I am not thinking any of these things . . .

I want to carve out a world for myself in Guangdong . . . My plan is:

1.  To study at correspondence university

2.  To learn to speak Cantonese

3.  With nothing to my name and without any accomplishment, to absolutely not marry

During her first three years in the city, Chunming did not return home once. She told friends that the factory break was too short, but in her diary she wrote: Who knows why I am not going home for the new year? The main reason: I really do not want to waste time. Because I must study! She also rejected her mother’s advice and wrote love letters to a good-looking young man who worked on the factory floor. Young men in the workplace were a rarity, and the better-looking ones were spoiled by the attentions of multiple girls. This one was not interested in Chunming, and he passed her letters around for others to read.

After six months on the assembly line, Chunming learned that her factory was hiring internally for clerks, and she wrote a letter to the head of her department expressing interest. The boss had heard of her boy-chasing reputation and ordered her transferred to another department. But his order was somehow misstated, and Chunming reported to work as a clerk. She performed well and the boss changed his mind about her. The new job paid three hundred yuan a month—triple what Chunming had made a year before.

THE STORIES OF MIGRANT WOMEN shared certain features. The arrival in the city was blurry and confused and often involved being tricked in some way. Young women often said they had gone out alone, though in fact they usually traveled with others; they just felt alone. They quickly forgot the names of factories, but certain dates were branded in their minds, like the day they left home or quit a bad factory forever. What a factory actually made was never important; what mattered was the hardship or opportunity that came with working there. The turning point in a migrant’s fortunes always came when she challenged her boss. At the moment she risked everything, she emerged from the crowd and forced the world to see her as an individual.

It was easy to lose yourself in the factory, where there were hundreds of girls with identical backgrounds: born in the village, badly educated, and poor. You had to believe that you mattered even though you were one among millions.

April 1, 1994

Yes, I am a person so ordinary that I cannot be more ordinary, so plain I cannot be plainer, a girl like all the other girls. I like to eat snacks, I like to have fun, and I like to look pretty.

Don’t imagine that I can be superhuman.

You are just a most ordinary, most plain girl, attracted to anything that is pretty or tasty or fun.

So from being ordinary and plain I will make my start.

*  *  *

Inside a Dongguan factory, the sexes were sharply divided. Women worked as clerks and in human resources and sales, and they held most of the jobs on the assembly line; the bosses felt that young women were more diligent and easier to manage. Men monopolized technical jobs like mold design and machine repair. They generally held the top positions in the factory but also the dead-end occupations at the bottom: security guards, cooks, and drivers. Outside the factory, women were waitresses, nannies, hairdressers, and prostitutes. Men worked on construction sites.

This gender segregation was reflected in help-wanted ads:

GAOBU HANDBAG FACTORY SEEKS TO EMPLOY

SALESPERSON: FEMALE ONLY, GRADE FOUR ENGLISH RECEPTIONIST: FEMALE ONLY, CAN SPEAK

CANTONESE

SECURITY GUARDS: MALE, UNDER 30, 1.7 METERS

OR ABOVE, EX-MILITARY, KNOWS

FIREFIGHTING, CAN PLAY BASKETBALL A PLUS

The divide implied certain things. Young women enjoyed a more fluid job situation; they could join a factory assembly line and move up to be clerks or salespeople. Young men had a harder time entering a factory, and once in they were often stuck. Women, in the factory or out, came into contact with a wider range of people and quickly adopted the clothes, hairstyles, and accents of the city; men tended to stay locked in their outsider worlds. Women integrated more easily into urban life, and they had more incentive to stay.

Women make up more than one-third of China’s migrants. They tend to be younger than their male counterparts and more likely to be single; they travel farther from home and they stay out longer. They are more motivated to improve themselves and more likely to value migration for its life-changing possibilities. In one survey, men cited higher income as the chief purpose of leaving home, while women aspired to “more experience in life.” Unlike men, women had no home to go back to. According to Chinese tradition, a son was expected to return to his parents’ house with his wife after he married; a son would forever have a home in the village where he was born. Daughters, once grown, would never return home to live—until they married, they didn’t belong anywhere.

To some extent, this deep-rooted sexism worked in women’s favor. Many rural parents wanted a grown son to stay close to home, perhaps delivering goods or selling vegetables in the towns near the village. Young men with such uninspiring prospects might simply hun—drift—doing odd jobs, smoking and drinking and gambling away their meager earnings. Young women—less treasured, less coddled—could go far from home and make their own plans. Precisely because they mattered less, they were freer to do what they wanted.

But it was a precarious advantage. If migration liberated young women from the village, it also dropped them in a no-man’s-land. Most girls in the countryside were married by their early twenties, and a migrant woman who postponed marriage risked closing off that possibility for good. The gender imbalance in Dongguan, where 70 percent of the workforce was said to be female, worked against finding a high-quality mate. And social mobility complicated the search for a husband. Women who had moved up from the assembly line disdained the men back in the village, but city men looked down on them in turn. Migrants called this gaobucheng, dibujiu—unfit for a higher position but unwilling to take a lower one.

The migrant women I knew never complained about the unfairness of being a woman. Parents might favor sons over daughters, bosses prefer pretty secretaries, and job ads discriminate openly, but they took all of these injustices in stride—over three years in Dongguan, I never heard a single person express anything like a feminist sentiment. Perhaps they took for granted that life was hard for everyone. The divide between countryside and city was the only one that mattered: Once you crossed that line, you could change your fate.

*  *  *

Moving up came easily to Chunming. In 1995, she jumped to a factory in a remote part of Dongguan that made water pistols and BB guns. She finally learned to speak Cantonese. Within a year, her monthly salary increased from three hundred yuan to six hundred and fifty, then eight hundred, then one thousand yuan. She discovered that the department heads above her made more money though she did the same work. If you don’t increase my salary to 1,500 yuan a month, she wrote her boss, I refuse to do this anymore. She got what she wanted; no one in the factory had ever received a five-hundred-yuan raise before. But the promotion did not satisfy Chunming. It cast her into a new world where there was so much to learn.

Her dealings with other people immediately became more complicated. In the village, relations between people were determined by kinship ties and shared histories. In school and on the assembly line, everyone was in the same lowly position. But once a person started to rise in the factory world, the balance of power shifted, and that could be unsettling. A friend could turn into a boss; a young woman might be promoted ahead of her boyfriend.

March 26, 1996
My promotion this time has let me see the hundred varieties of human experience. Some people cheer me, some envy me, some congratulate me, some wish me luck, some are jealous of me, and some cannot accept it . . .

As to those who envy me . . . I will only treat them as an obstacle on the road to progress, kicking them aside and walking on. In the future there will be even more to envy!

Making a good impression on strangers became important. Chunming studied the higher-ups in her factory, as intent as a biologist with her specimens. She observed that when the head of the human resources department gave a speech, he was so nervous that his hands trembled. Around the new year holiday, a manager on the factory floor ignored her until she boldly wished him a happy new year; he responded warmly and gave her ten yuan in a red envelope, a traditional gift. From this incident, I understand: Some people who have always seemed unapproachable may not really be so. You just need to make yourself a little more approachable.

Her plan to remold herself kicked into high gear. In her diary, Chunming no longer recorded the details of her days but copied the rules for becoming someone else, a task for which she read widely if not always coherently.

Self-confidence, dignity, and elegance are the image that professional women should have.

Benjamin Franklin’s Thirteen Rules of Morality

1.  Moderation: Do not eat to saturation or drink to excess.

2.  Silence: Do not engage in unimportant talk.

3.  Order: Place things in fixed positions and do tasks at fixed times.

4.  Decisiveness: Decide what you want to accomplish, be unyielding.

5.  Thrift: Do not waste money. Spend money on things that benefit yourself and others . . .

Receiving Criticism

1.  When other people criticize you, you must be calm and dispassionate and show that you are listening attentively.

2.  Look at the person who is speaking to you.

3.  Do not criticize someone who has just criticized you.

4.  Do not be dejected.

5.  Do not make jokes . . .

The ideals in Chunming’s diary bore an inverse relationship to the world she lived in. One of her lists, entitled “The Fifteen Traits of Unqualified Leaders,” could easily have been called “How to Be a Dongguan Boss,” including trait three:

Busies himself over small things and participates in everything.

and trait fifteen:

When the group is given bonuses or awards, he appears first on the name list; among the executive members, he sits in the front row.

She enrolled in a correspondence course to learn secretarial skills, but gave up because the textbook looked too complicated. An effort to learn public relations also foundered.

How do you plan to learn public relations studies?

Answer: To learn public relations properly, you must first learn how to behave as a person.

At one point, Chunming decided to learn English on her own. She made a list of vocabulary words—

ABLE

ABILITY

ADD

AGO

ALWAYS

AGREE

AUGUST

BABY

BLACK

BREATH

—but gave up before she got to C.

So many things would have to be learned, and the rules for getting ahead bled together in her diary. Sixty percent of people do not have a goal. For a look of “Gorgeous Radiance,” blend black, gray, golden yellow, sapphire blue, and bright red eye shadow.  Can be drycleaned; “A” means any detergent can be used. The exchange of greetings is the catalyst and lubricant of conversation. When you drink soup, don’t let the soup spoon rattle against the plate. People who don’t read books will find their speech dull and their appearance repulsive.

*  *  *

With their mothers far away, migrant workers looked elsewhere for advice. Magazines for migrant readers appeared in the mid-1990s, particularly in the factory cities of southern China. They were published on cheap newsprint and sold for about four yuan, or fifty cents, an issue. The magazines investigated migrant work conditions and gave advice on legal questions, job-hunting, and relationships. In first-person stories that traced the lives of individual migrants, life followed one of two trajectories: A young woman went to the city, endured hardship, and triumphed, usually by starting her own business and buying an apartment. Or a young woman went to the city and was brought low, typically by a man who turned out to be lazy, faithless, or married with a child. These could have been the heroines of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, for upon such narratives was built the modern Western tradition of the novel. But in the pages of the migrant magazines, the moral was always the same: You can only rely on yourself.

Every success story ended with a personal triumph that could be tallied on an accountant’s ledger: the monthly turnover of a business, the square-footage of an apartment. In “Ambition Made Me Who I Am,” a teenage nanny taught herself to read and write and put herself and her brother through college by selling Popsicles, delivering goods, cutting hair, and peddling insurance. At the story’s end, she headed an insurance company’s sales department and owned a 1,300-square-foot apartment. In “Be Your Own Master,” a young woman worked as a hairdresser for two years without pay in order to learn the trade and set up her own shop. Turnover is more than three thousand yuan a month, six hundred yuan for rent, and one hundred yuan for taxes, and the rest is all hers. In “The Girl Who Wanted to Make Television Dramas,” a young woman worked diligently at a menial office job—she often typed for ten hours without interruption—and rose to be vice-president of an entertainment company with an eight-hundred-square-foot apartment.

The path to success was long and hard, and many strayed from it. A young woman might dream of finding a man who would love and support her. But this was always the wrong way.

When I got home, I burst into loud sobbing, not daring to believe that my own true love was a fraud.

What he saw in me was how easy it would be to deceive me.

If I leave him the way I am now, who will still want me?

Articles described the indignities of daily life as a migrant. A young woman sneaked into the bathroom at McDonald’s because her own building’s facilities were so poor: The environment inside a McDonald’s bathroom is so good. It is not only very clean, but there is toilet paper and there are hand dryers. A migrant worker was ashamed to tell his boss that he couldn’t afford a mobile phone. Those lucky enough to land office jobs found an environment as ruthless as anything described by Darwin:

Because some of my clients are behind in their payments, the company says I am responsible for collecting these debts and will withhold 30 percent of my salary every month until all the money is paid. Is this reasonable?

Our company rule is that every month the person with the worst sales record is fired. Is this legal?

Sometimes the message of self-reliance went too far. An article about a physically abused maid did not address the vulnerabilities of domestic workers but celebrated her daring escape from her employer’s apartment. The only person who could rescue Wang Li was Wang Li herself. An account of a deadly department store fire skirted the bigger issues—poor construction and prevention measures—to focus on fire survival tips: When the fire burns your body, take off your clothes or roll around on the floor to extinguish the flames.

Against the staid and preachy Chinese media, the migrant magazines broke new ground. They did not insist on upbeat endings; many of the stories ended in anguish or confusion. They described a world in which people cheated one another and did nothing to aid the lonely and the lost. They did not preach about laws that must be amended or behaviors that must be improved, and they never mentioned the Communist Party. They wrote about how to live in the world just as it was.

*  *  *

In the summer of 1996, Chunming wrote in her diary:

Friends, we were born into the world poor through no fault of our own. But to die poor is a sin.

In the course of life, have we not worked hard and persisted in the struggle? To be a success in network sales, we must honestly achieve these four points:

1.  Have determination.

2.  Have a clear goal.

3.  Deeply study and thoroughly understand the company’s products and plans.

4.  Study the techniques of network selling.

That summer, a friend from the factory took Chunming to a lecture that changed her life. The speaker worked for a company called Wanmei Daily Use Products. Wanmei, which means “perfect,” sold health supplements, but what it really offered was a dream of wealth and personal fulfillment encapsulated in the magical word chuanxiao. The Chinese phrase, which translates as “network sales,” does not distinguish between legitimate direct sales and fraudulent pyramid schemes. Corruption, which sometimes seemed to be in the air people breathed, had also seeped into the language they used.

Chunming started selling Wanmei health products to supplement her income, mostly to fellow factory workers. She bought Wanmei tapes and attended Wanmei lectures, and her diary turned into a Wanmei sales manual mixed with some bizarre health claims.

THE SUCCESS OF A SALE LIES IN THE FIRST THREE

SECONDS OF MEETING.

WHEN YOU SPEAK, LOOK INTO THE OTHER PERSON’S EYES.

GET TO KNOW THREE PEOPLE A DAY.

THE ALOE MINERAL CRYSTAL CAN REGULATE THE HUMAN

BODY’S FIVE SYSTEMS.

A PERSON LOSES HIS HAIR BECAUSE HE LACKS COPPER.

By the end of 1996, Chunming had an influential job in the factory as head of its general affairs department, but she quit to sell Wanmei products full-time. She spent ten thousand yuan in savings to rent out meeting rooms and equipment for training sessions. She recruited former colleagues from the factory to join her network, with the promise that they would all get rich together. In the back pages of her diary, Chunming listed the salespeople she had recruited. Many of them were still in their teens; the oldest person in her network was twenty-five years old.

Why have we come together today? Simply to let everyone discuss the topic: “How should a person live one’s entire life?”

Think about it: Why are we still so ordinary? Why are so many people who have worked hard their entire lives still not living the lives they imagined? We all had dreams once. We all once struggled and worked hard. But why is there such an imbalance between what we spent and what we have gained? How many regrets have been played out upon us!

We have gradually understood one truth: A person who wants to develop must grasp opportunity. Merely to have a dream and determination is not enough . . . If the choice of vehicle is not good, you will be bustling about your whole life. Just as our mothers and fathers chose farming: They have been busy their whole lives, but when the hair on their heads is white, they must still scrape together money for oil and salt.

My friends, do we want to follow the road of our mothers and fathers?

No!

Give yourselves a round of applause!

Direct-sales companies had taken off in the United States during the economic boom that followed the Second World War. Unlike traditional retailers, companies like the Amway Corporation and Avon Products sold their goods through independent distributors rather than stores. These distributors made money in two ways: through selling goods themselves and through recruiting a network of salespeople and receiving bonuses based on their sales.

In the mid-1990s, a craze for network sales swept China, with some of the chuanxiao companies copying the American sales model. Others simply charged new recruits a hefty fee to join, with the promise of riches when they recruited additional members. These were pyramid schemes: Their money came not from selling actual products but only from the high entry fees they charged. The schemes made money for the earliest entrants but collapsed when they ran out of new members, defrauding many people out of their savings.

The network-sales model was ideally suited to a Chinese society in which traditional morality had broken down and only the harshest rules—trust no one, make money fast—still applied. The companies relied on traditional networks of extended family and friends; the first thing a chuanxiao salesman usually did was to browbeat every friend and relative into buying something. They promised wealth and fulfillment. And they offered a clear road map to success: Get to know three people a day. The industry flourished in the small towns and migrant communities of the Pearl River Delta. Here where rural and urban worlds met, people envied the success of others and were hungry to have it themselves. If someone they knew promised instant wealth and a miracle cure, they were easily swayed.

The rise of chuanxiao companies worried the central government. Some of the companies traded in fake, smuggled, or shoddy goods; their training meetings, where charismatic leaders drove members into an evangelical selling frenzy, came to look disturbingly similar to cults. The more extravagant operations even threatened the social order; in 1994, the police were called out to disperse hundreds of angry distributors after the collapse of a Taiwanese diamond-selling scheme. Beijing passed many regulations to bring the network-sales industry under control, but local governments rarely enforced its orders. This was partly because the companies brought welcome tax revenue and employment to local areas, and partly because moonlighting as a chuanxiao distributor was a popular sideline for government officials.

*  *  *

For Chunming, the sales meetings were a training ground for learning how to speak. In traditional China, the art of oratory was not an important skill—to write an elegant essay in beautiful calligraphy was what mattered—and speeches in China have always been dismal affairs. Speakers often read directly from a script, and the script is usually tedious. A person like Chunming—young, rural, and female—would have many reasons to stay silent in the presence of her betters. But in a modern China driven by commerce and competition, knowing how to speak had become a necessary skill.

The network-sales companies imported the ethos of America direct to the Chinese lower classes. Their style of speaking combined the call-and-response of old-time preachers with the tireless haranguing of motivational speakers. They spread the news that the individual was important and that everyone was a winner. And they brought with them the very American faith that wealth and virtue could go hand in hand.

In her diary, Chunming collected drafts of her speeches:

My name is Wu Chunming, a very plain and ordinary name. But I believe that someday in the future I will make my name no longer ordinary . . .

Friends, what kind of person do you want to become in the future? This is a question worth thinking about. What kind of person are we today: Is that important?

Not important!

What’s important is: What kind of person do you want to become in the future? For what purpose have we traveled thousands of miles and left our homes behind to come out to work?

To earn money!Correct, to earn money. But until today, have we earned the money we wanted?

No!

Is the life we live today the one we want to live or the one we can live?

Correct, the one we can live . . .

Friends, what kind of person do you want to become? That is all up to you. If you never dare to want to succeed, then you will never succeed . . . What is important is that you must dare to think, dare to want . . .

Really, each of us is unique in the world. When we are born, we are not doomed to failure. Because we are all born winners.

Friends, please believe me! But more important, believe in yourself! Because you can!

At Wanmei, Chunming rose quickly from trainee to manager. In 1997, she quit to join a Taiwanese company called Tangjing Soul Pagoda Garden Development Company. Its business was constructing high-rise buildings to store the ashes of the dead. The buildings were known as “soul pagodas,” and the company’s sales pitch married the spiritual, the practical, and the Chinese passion for real estate. For the dead, the Tangjing Soul Pagoda Garden promised an eternal resting place with excellent feng shui. For the living, the pitch focused on the garden’s prime location, its limited number of spaces, and the burgeoning population of the Pearl River Delta. An investor could purchase an entire soul pagoda and then flip individual spaces to buyers at a profit.

Chunming’s job was to run training sessions for the company’s salespeople. She had learned to talk, and now she taught others how to do it—as with the factories, what was actually being sold was the least important facet of the enterprise. Chunming’s pitch blended Buddhism, the environmental benefits of cremation, and the near-certainty that a soul pagoda would appreciate 300 percent. Death, in other words, was the best long-term investment there was.

Let our ancestors take life’s last journey in the most civilized, dignified, and stately way.

Guangdong alone has more than one million dead each year.

For our company’s regular pagoda spots, the July 1995 price of 3,500 yuan has grown to 5,600 yuan today.

We offer a full line of services (from cremation to entering the pagoda, including the expiation of sins of the dead and so on).

Our operating time is from July 11, 1994, to July 10, 2044.

Chunming was on a more abbreviated schedule. In late 1997 she jumped again, to a chuanxiao company that charged new members one thousand yuan for a box of traditional Tibetan medicine. It was a pyramid scheme, pure and simple, and Chunming got in early enough to make some real money. She recruited a dozen people, all proven earners, and within a few months she headed a network of ten thousand people. By then Chunming was making forty thousand yuan a month—about five thousand dollars, an astronomical sum in the Pearl River Delta in 1998. The company began laminating her weekly pay slips in sheets of clear plastic so she could show them to recruits as a motivational tool. On a visit home, Chunming gave her parents thirty thousand yuan to renovate the family house, install tile floors, and buy new appliances and a twenty-nine-inch television set. Her success in the city had made her famous beyond her village. “Everyone living in our area had heard about me,” she said.

But the industry was getting out of control. In a town called Danshui, about forty miles from Dongguan, a Taiwanese scheme to sell foot vibrators had become all the rage. To join the enterprise, a participant had to buy a foot vibrator for 3,900 yuan, or almost five hundred dollars—about eight times the market price. Participants were told they would receive 40 percent of the admission fees of anyone they recruited. Migrants flocked to Danshui; some sold their houses, furniture, and oxen to pay the admission fee. But it turned out that selling 3,900-yuan foot vibrators in a poor town was not easy, especially when thousands of other people were doing the same thing.

When the scheme collapsed, some defrauded members assaulted the people who had recruited them, while others demonstrated in front of government offices to get their money back. Police were called in to quell the crowds, restore order, and send migrants home. By then, the organizers had moved inland to a town in Hunan Province, where they set up the same operation and recruited about thirty thousand participants before that scheme, too, fell apart.

In April 1998, the cabinet of Premier Zhu Rongji ordered all chuanxiao companies to cease operations. More than two thousand companies shut down, and an industry that had resisted government regulation for years collapsed in an instant. Chunming found herself out of a job; her life as a wealthy person had lasted exactly two months. She took the blow hard, and she knew who was to blame. “After Zhu Rongji came on,” she said, “he wouldn’t allow network sales anymore, so I stopped.” In the freewheeling Pearl River Delta, where Chunming had learned to talk, where commerce was king and everyone was a winner and to die poor was a sin, the long arm of the government had touched her life, astonishingly, for the first time.

4 The Talent Market

In the evenings after Min got off her shift, I would take the bus to meet her at the front gate of her factory. Dongguan came to life after the sun went down; as the day’s wearying heat evaporated, the darkening streets would be flooded with young people getting off work—changelings, turning before my eyes from dutiful workers back into eager teenagers again. Min and I would walk the few blocks around her factory and choose a cheap restaurant for dinner. She always ordered a meat dish, stir-fried greens, a whole fish for the two of us that invariably turned out to be mostly bone; if we met up around payday, she would insist on treating me. Min ate like someone starved for good food. Long after I had finished, she would continue picking at the dishes, extracting flavor from the tiniest morsels like a discerning gourmet.

Once when her cousin was in town, he took us to McDonald’s. Min took a long look at her Big Mac, lowered her face down to the table until it was eye-level with the sandwich, and ate through it layer by layer—bun, tomato, lettuce, beef. She had never been to McDonald’s before. When I gave her two small picture frames one birthday, I had to show her how to open the back to slip a photograph inside. Once she asked me what a stock was. She was completely uninterested in the affairs of the nation. During a meal with two older coworkers from her factory one afternoon, the conversation turned to growing up in the 1970s under Mao Zedong. “We were always hungry,” one of the men recalled. “It wasn’t until the 1980s that we stopped being hungry.”

“Who is Chairman Mao now?” Min asked suddenly. “I don’t even know.”

“Hu Jintao,” one of the men said.

A hint of recognition. “Then it isn’t Jiang Zemin anymore?” she said.

I said no, that Jiang Zemin had retired and Hu Jintao had taken his place.

“Oh. I thought Jiang Zemin was dead.” Then she said, “These people seem very far away from me.”

The details of her own life crowded out everything else; almost every time I saw Min, she had something new to tell me. It sometimes felt as if the laws of the physical world did not apply to her, that she had only to think of something—a job switch, a breakup—to make it so. If I didn’t see her for a while, she might forget to tell me that she had quit a factory or gotten a raise, because in her mind she had already moved on. She rarely stopped to take stock of everything she had done since coming out from home, a common trait in Dongguan. Maybe people worried that they would lose momentum if they stopped moving long enough to look backward.

When my first article about Min was published in the Wall Street Journal, I brought her a translated copy when we met up one night in a pastry shop near her factory. Her pound cake and iced mungbean shake sat untouched while she read. On page three, she giggled—“You remember it in great detail,” she said—and again on page four. She read the story through to the end and flipped the last page over, looking for more. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” I said.

“It leaves you wanting more,” she said.

“There will be more.”

“Really?” she said. “Are you writing it now?”

“You’re living it,” I said. “It’s happening now.” Min gave me an odd look, as if she weren’t sure whether I was joking with her.

She read the article several more times, and afterward she sent me an e-mail. Seeing the self I used to be, she wrote, I realize that I have really changed.

One thing Min never forgot was how hard her year on the assembly line had been. In the factory world, it was common to hear people speak almost nostalgically about their days on the assembly line, a time of few worries and responsibilities. Min did not do that. “Nothing is as hard as being an ordinary worker,” I often heard her say. She never forgot where she had come from. That was one of the things I liked most about her.

*  *  *

In April 2004, Min got her first two weeks’ pay at her new job, but she did not send the money home. Instead, she went to the mall and she bought a fitted black shirt and white capri pants. She was keeping a promise to visit old friends, and to visit old friends required new clothes. The next morning at eight o’clock, Min and I boarded the bus for a remote district of Dongguan, where she had worked her first year out from home. The bus was packed with migrants on their weekend outings. Young women sat in pairs wearing their Sunday best—white shirts, clean jeans, sleek ponytails—and the overflow passengers in the aisle snaked merrily, like a conga line, with every lurch of the bus. A few carsick young women clutched the railings, their heads bowed and their eyes squeezed tightly, as if to shut out the suffering.

Min talked the entire two-hour ride. She was hoping to convince her friends to jump factories, as she had done. She kept up a running commentary on the places we passed.

Zhangmutou: “They call this Little Hong Kong. It is very luxurious here. I came here many times looking for jobs but couldn’t find one.”

Qingxi: “There are a lot of computer factories here, but you need more skills to get in.”

Fenggang: “This isn’t as developed as the place I am now, right?”

To me, every town looked the same. Construction sites and cheap restaurants. Factories, factories, factories, the metal lattices of their gates drawn shut like nets. Min saw the city through different eyes: Every town was the possibility of a more desirable job than the one she had. Her mental map of Dongguan traced all the bus journeys she had made in search of a better life.

MIN’S FRIENDS WAITED for us at the bottom of a highway overpass, looking anxiously in the wrong direction. Liang Rong was tall with a pretty face; Huang Jiao’e was short and plump, with bright eyes and cheeks still soft with baby fat. Both were a year older than Min. The three girls held hands and squealed and jumped up and down, like game-show contestants who had just won a big prize.

“Wow! You lost weight!”

“You’ve grown taller!”

“You cut your hair!”

“I just bought these clothes,” Min said urgently. “Are they pretty?” Her friends agreed that they were.

Next to the highway was a small park with a concrete plaza. Its stone benches had baked white in the sun, like ancient tombs; they were shaded by a few skinny saplings that looked like they were drawing their final breaths. The girls found a vacant bench and sat down and played with one another’s hair. They admired Min’s new clothes and she told them what each item cost.

“So, have I changed?” Min demanded. She had been gone exactly two months.

“Yes, you’ve changed,” Huang Jiao’e said.

“How have I changed?”

“You look more mature.”

Liang Rong and Huang Jiao’e shared the news from the factory: who had found a new job, who had cut her hair. This was their first day off in a month, because the factory’s power had been cut. The pay was still the same and often late, depending on the boss’s mood.

Min couldn’t help boasting a little about the place where she worked now. “The people in this factory are really low-quality,” she said. “My factory now is much better. The boss has a lot of money.

“Come on over to where I am,” Min said suddenly. “I’ll invite you out to dinner. When will you come?”

“But if we come,” said Liang Rong, “you might not have a day off.”

“You come visit me and I’ll introduce boyfriends to you,” Min said boldly. “There are many boys in my factory.”

The two girls’ eyes opened wide. They said “Ooh!” at the same time, and then all three of them laughed.

A beggar with a cane walked up, and the girls stopped talking. Liang Rong hesitated and then gently placed an apple in the old man’s bowl, like a scene out of a fairy tale. Dongguan was a hard place to live in, and maybe because of that people could be surprisingly kind to one another. I saw more charity toward beggars in Dongguan than I ever saw in another Chinese city. The factory workers had compassion for the elderly or anyone with a physical handicap, but toward people their own age they showed no pity. If you were young and healthy, there was no excuse for not working.

MIN’S OLD FACTORY was a half hour’s walk from town, where industrial China broadened into open farmland. A stream flowed sluggish and shiny black, like a river of gasoline. The road turned from pavement to packed dirt, a dusty strip lined with noodle stalls and pool tables set out in the open air. Knots of young men in factory shirts and slippers shot pool. Min walked along with a friend on either side, her head held high like a centurion returning from battle. Teenage boys and girls called out to her: “When did you get back?” “Where are you now?” They were impressed that she was working in downtown Dongguan.

“Have I changed?” Min asked of everyone who came up to her.

“You’re thinner and darker,” one young woman said.

Min was disappointed. “I want you to say I’m more mature than I used to be.”

Liang Rong and Huang Jiao’e went into the factory to pick up their wages; apparently the boss was in such a good mood that he had consented to pay his workers that day. Min waited outside the gate, peering in at the tile buildings and a mountain of dirt in the middle of the yard. The factory was expanding.

“How do you think it looks?” Min asked me.

“It looks okay,” I said.

“It looks all right from the outside,” she said, “but you never see the inside until you’ve agreed to work there. And then you have nowhere else to go.”

______

IN THE AFTERNOON, the girls met up with two other friends from the factory and went to a nearby park. Part of being a migrant worker was having no idea how to spend leisure time. At Tangxia Park, they watched a girl of about six aiming pebbles at the head of a turtle squatting in a shallow pool. But most entertainments at the park cost money. Visitors could use air rifles to shoot fish in a pond; Min looked at the few skinny fish awaiting execution and said solemnly, “This is what happens when you don’t have freedom.” A cable car brought passengers to a nearby hilltop, but that cost fifteen yuan. The girls sat at a picnic spot far below and watched the cars pass overhead.

Huang Jiao’e had enrolled in a computer class. She wanted to leave the factory, go to the talent market, and find a better job, as Min had done. “I have already made plans,” she said shyly.

“Do you know how to go online yet?” Min asked.

“I haven’t been online yet.”

“I’ll teach you.” Min looked at her watch; it was four o’clock. “Maybe not today, though—next time.

“Just try to learn what you can,” Min advised. “If you learn something, you can always take it with you to your next job. At least that has been my experience,” she concluded modestly. Somewhere during the course of the day, she had realized she could do little to help her friends. Finding the courage to leave a factory was something a person had to do alone. It was as the migrants always said: You can only rely on yourself.

At five o’clock, the girls parted with the most casual of goodbyes. “I’m not tired yet,” Min said as we found seats on the bus. “I’ll be tired later. Right now I’m too excited.” But as the bus passed through the towns of her job searches, now falling into evening, Min’s mood darkened. She had visited her old life and knew it was past. Yet her new life, too, was somehow wanting. On the street outside, the lights in the factories started to come on, and shadows moved soundlessly against the windows; even on Sunday night, people were going to work. “If I only go to school, come out and do migrant work for a few years, then go home, marry and have children,” Min said, “I might as well not have lived this whole life.”

IN THE BLUE LIGHT OF EVENING, Min and I stood outside the gate of her factory. An electrician friend of hers was joining us for dinner, and we waited while he changed his clothes. A good-looking security guard in camouflage pants—1.7 METERS OR ABOVE, CAN PLAY BASKETBALL A PLUS—passed by with the flash of a smile and tossed Min a bunch of keys; she had given them to him for safekeeping. People trickled back to the factory from their Sunday outings. Min called out to a young woman, who peered into the shadows and barked roughly, “I’m starving to death!” She went into the factory without coming by to say hello.

Min seemed taken aback by her rudeness. The woman had recently tried to abort a pregnancy using herbal medicine, Min told me, but it didn’t work. Min had gone with her to the hospital for surgery. “She’s one of the people I pretend to have good relations with, but really we are not friends,” she said.

An older man with glasses and a potbelly walked past us into the factory. “Was it you who left the office door open?” he asked.

“I’ve been out all day,” Min shot back.

That was Min’s boss; she hated him. “He is very proud,” she said. “Not a single person in the factory likes him.” Her boss passed by again a few minutes later, going out, and glared at her. Min stood her ground and glared back. Neither of them said anything.

“Tomorrow he’ll ask me who you are,” Min said. “I know he will. I’ll tell him you’re a friend, that’s all.” Privately she called him Liu Laotou, “Old Fogey Liu.”

In ten minutes by the factory gate, I felt as if I had seen Min’s world: the easy friendship with the guard, the young woman’s coldness and her botched abortion, the gratuitous cruelty of bosses. The fact that she stood her ground.

MIN’S ELECTRICIAN FRIEND APPEARED—he had muscular arms, an open face, and a shy smile—and we went to a street-side restaurant for grilled beef, braised fish, and beer. At the end of a long day, Min’s discontent poured out all at once. “In my old factory, I cried once for half an hour and my friends tried to console me but couldn’t,” she said. “Since I’ve been at this factory I’ve cried twice, but no one even knew.”

The electrician looked into his bowl of rice and didn’t say anything.

Min’s fury turned to the two friends who had gone to the park with us that afternoon. “We’re not close. We just pretend to be friends,” she said. “The fatter one? All she cares about is trying to find a boyfriend. When she gets paid, she doesn’t send any money home. She’ll just pay her boyfriend’s mobile-phone bill or invite boys out to dinner. And she isn’t even good-looking! The other one had a boyfriend but she broke up with him when she found out he was cheating on her. He gave her a watch and she still wears it.

“Do you see how they are all unhappy when they get their month’s pay? They are all thinking: I work so hard and this is all I get? To work every day in the factory is so hard.”

And then she turned on me. “You can’t know what it feels like,” she said. “Only someone who has experienced it knows.”

*  *  *

Min tired of things she had so recently wanted. The thrill of joining an office gave way quickly to the realization that she was the lowest person in it. Everybody dumped work on their newest and youngest colleague, and Min’s only workplace ally had disappeared: Two weeks after she arrived, the kindly man who had hired her decamped to a better job in Beijing. Left on her own, Min learned about the complicated politics of the white-collar world. Her new boss, the man with the potbelly, had been fired from the factory the previous year for keeping a mistress—because no one respected him, it made things harder for Min. Her coworkers appeared eager to see her fail: When she entered a room, conversations stopped, and no one helped her in her new job. She discovered that a person could say one thing and mean another, and that she must learn this skill too. “In the office, they may be very friendly to you, but they say things behind your back,” Min told me. “You can’t have a single friend in that factory.”

Crossing the class divide added to her loneliness. The workers on the assembly line were closest to her in age and background, but she was no longer of that world. Her office colleagues were older, many of them married, and they had nothing in common with her. The dorm room emptied out on weekends when the others visited their boyfriends or husbands. Min pretended not to care, and she never let anyone see her cry.

In April, her former boss called from Beijing to offer her a job. He was assembling computer parts to sell in the provinces, and he needed someone to mind the store. He was in his thirties, had attended elite Tsinghua University, and was the only adult in Dongguan who had shown her any kindness: That was all she knew. She decided to go.

She phoned her older sister in Shenzhen.

“What will you do there?” her sister asked.

“Mind the store,” Min said.

“How much is the salary?”

“I don’t know. But it must be better than here.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Yes.”

“Be careful.”

Min sent me a letter about her plans:

I have decided to go to Beijing after all, to give myself an opportunity. I will handle these feelings between “Big Brother”and “Little Sister” well. But having gotten used to this work here at last, I am really loath to leave . . .

A person cannot grow up through happiness. Happiness makes a person shallow. It is only through suffering that we grow up, transform, and come to a better understanding of life!

But in a place with no moorings, Min was prone to wild changes in mood. She decided it wouldn’t be proper to join her boss in Beijing. He was a man, he was not family, and she didn’t trust him after all. She would stay where she was.

Production in the factory was picking up; her dorm room now housed nine people, up from six. With so many people working different shifts, it was hard to sleep at night, and Min thought again about leaving. Next door to her office was the human resources department, where Min sometimes saw people lined up for job interviews. Ten people were interviewed for every one hired, and many of them had college diplomas. Min felt lucky then to have the job she did.

The assembly-line workers in Min’s factory made 320 yuan a month. That was low for Dongguan, and it bothered Min. She always said hello to the workers but she never got to know them better. “Some of the people in the office won’t even speak to the workers, because they look down on them,” Min said. “But I used to be a worker too.”

*  *  *

In late May, Min sent me a message from her mobile phone. I have a pleasant surprise for you. I won’t tell you now. Ha ha.

I was on my way to see her, and I raced through the possibilities in my mind. She had quit her job. She had found a boyfriend. She was going to Beijing after all.

I answered her: I’m very curious.

Maybe you’ll think it’s not good, she wrote back. Ha ha. I hope you won’t be disappointed.

She was waiting for me at the factory gate, and I saw that she had straightened her hair. It was sleekly cut in an asymmetrical line; her girlish long curls were gone. The chemical treatment had taken three hours and cost one hundred yuan at a salon, Min told me. She had just gotten her first full month’s pay.

She shared the gossip from work. Her immediate superior, who was a few years older than Min, had fought with his girlfriend. She was smart and made twice as much money as he did, a fact that everyone in the office knew and relished. She had saved eighty thousand yuan; everyone knew that too. If they were going to split up, the girlfriend demanded ten thousand yuan in compensation for the seven years she had spent with him. That was a breakup, Dongguan style: Emotional hurt gave way to financial calculation, and everyone in the factory knew every last detail. Now her young boss was quitting the factory, Min said, and several others with him. There was no reason to stay, so she had resigned yesterday.

“You’ve decided to leave?” I asked. The swiftness of her decisions took my breath away.

“I handed in my resignation letter yesterday,” Min said.

Her boss, the one she disliked, had asked why she wanted to leave.

“I want to go home,” Min had lied.

“Have you found another job?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I just have things to take care of at home.” Another lie.

“You’re doing well here,” her boss said. “Why do you want to leave?” For once he was not rude to her. But he didn’t approve her departure either; he told her he would decide within a month.

This was Min’s surprise: She had straightened her hair. She had also made a move to quit her job and jump back into the unknown, but apparently she did not consider that news.

THAT AFTERNOON, we went to a small park near Min’s factory. It was ringed by apartment buildings, with a pond of greenish yellow water the color of Mountain Dew. Children waded up to their knees, filling shallow pans and glass jars. “At home the ponds where we go swimming are deep and the water is clear,” Min said.

“In the summers when I was a child,” she continued dreamily, “we would plant watermelons. About ten minutes’ walk from home, the adults would build a shed with tree trunks for posts and put a plank of wood with grass on top. We would sit under it all day guarding the watermelons and my father would sleep there at night.

“My older sister, my cousin, my two younger sisters, and I would go there during the day. We’d play cards, fish, and swim. We had schoolwork during the summer and our mother would tell us to do it but we wouldn’t.

“We would put a few watermelons in the fast-rushing river. We’d tie them to the bank with a rope so they wouldn’t float away. When we ate the watermelon, it was really cold.”

I had never heard a migrant speak of the countryside as Min did.

“If I were you, if I had your qualifications and your money,” she said then, “I would work very hard while I was young. But when I was older I would go to the countryside and find someone to marry and live in a small house there. You could live in a hut and raise a few chickens.” She was silent for a while, spinning out in her mind a fantasy that we both knew would never come true.

*  *  *

In early June, a newly hired worker in Min’s factory lost four fingers of his left hand on the single-punch machine. A week later, the same machine ate the tips of three fingers of another recent hire. Neither employee had been properly trained. On the city’s factory floors, injuries hewed closely to the demands of production. During the slow winter months, factories could afford to train new workers; when orders picked up in the spring, such training was often cut short even as inexperienced people flooded in. Because the assembly line paid by the piece, working faster during busy times meant a bigger paycheck—spending time training others brought nothing. That was the zero-sum logic of the Dongguan factory, where helping someone else meant hurting yourself.

Later that month, Min was unexpectedly promoted to her factory’s human resources department. Her job was to stand on the sidewalk under a scorching sun and convince people who passed by to join her factory; she signed up ten workers her first day. She also ran orientation sessions for the new workers, most of whom were older than she was. Min had no weekends now, so we met one Friday night in late June when her overtime shift ended at nine, at a fruit-drinks shop outside the factory gate. Her friend from the old factory, Huang Jiao’e, arrived just after I did with a small suitcase. She had come to work on the assembly line.

Min told us about her new job. “I stand by the side of the road and convince people to come work at our factory.”

“What do you say to them?” I asked.

“I tell them, ‘You may think that other factories look better. But every factory has its own difficulties that you may not be able to see. Isn’t it better to stay here and be more stable? Save some money, get some experience, and then decide what you want to do.’ ” The words were familiar; this was what her parents always told her.

“But that’s the opposite of what you have done,” I said.

“Yes.” She nodded and smiled. “It goes against what I believe in.”

“I’ve never heard you speak in such an exaggerated way!” Huang Jiao’e said.

“This is my responsibility,” Min said defensively. “You would do the same if you were in my place.” Though the conversation was teasing, there was an edge to it. The two girls had been friends and equals, but now Min worked in the office, far above assembly-line workers like Huang Jiao’e.

Min went to the stall next door to buy me some noodles for dinner. “If it weren’t for Min, I wouldn’t have come here,” Huang Jiao’e confided after she had gone. Two days earlier, she had visited the factory but had not liked the conditions. Originally she was to move over yesterday, but she hesitated; finally today she had left her factory without asking anyone or getting her two months’ back pay. There were many ways to quit a factory. A worker might resign with her boss’s permission and receive all of her back pay. She could take a temporary leave that guaranteed a position upon her return. Some departing workers negotiated with their employers for a portion of the money they were owed. But nothing was worse than kuangli—literally, “crazy leaving”—which was what Huang Jiao’e had done.

I asked her how long she planned to stay.

“We’ll see,” she said. “I am testing them, and they are testing me.”

Min returned to the table. “If you do well, you will move up.” She added, still defensively, “Our salary is not high either: eight hundred yuan. If you have overtime, you may get more than me.”

“But I would be tired to death!” Huang Jiao’e said.

“There are different ways of being tired,” Min said. “In my job now, my body is tired and my heart is tired.” She was moving up in the world. Her new responsibilities included pouring tea for visiting clients, and she had enrolled in a weekly English class for the factory’s managers. “Do you know what ‘pardon’ means?” Min asked Huang Jiao’e, saying the single word in English. She looked disappointed when her friend said yes.

MIN’S OTHER NEWS did not emerge until after repeated prodding from Huang Jiao’e. A boy from home had come out to Dongguan and found a job as an assembly-line worker. He and Min had dated briefly in middle school, but she had not seen him in three years. The previous week, he had come to visit.

“There is still feeling between us,” she announced. Then, immediately—“But he is very short: only 1.65 meters.” She reported the details: “He smokes, he drinks, and he gets into fights. His family situation is not good. He has a stepmother.”

“What does his family do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t want to know. In the end we must rely on ourselves.”

The two of them had spent the day together. At lunch, Min poured tea for her former boyfriend while he stared at the television set mounted somewhere above Min’s head. In cheap Chinese restaurants, there is always a television playing at top volume, and the eyes of the patrons and wait staff are usually glued to it.

“Why don’t we talk?” Min prodded him. “Why do you keep looking at the television?”

After he left, Min sent him a message on his mobile phone. How did you feel about our day together?

I feel a lot of pressure, he wrote back. My feelings are very complicated.

They had talked on the phone the night before. Min got right to the point. “Do you think we have a future together?”

He told her he needed three days to think about it.

“So I will have my answer in two days,” she said. “Whatever he answers is fine with me.” But she was already spinning her dreams around the boy, who had some training as a cook. “We could go home and start a small restaurant,” she said. “There is no future in this migrant work.”

“Do you want to get married?” I asked her. The entire conversation astonished me.

“That’s not what this is about,” she said impatiently. “I’m eighteen years old now. I don’t want to waste my time. If he’s not serious about me, I want him to tell me now.”

IN THE END, everything was decided for Min. Three days after the conversation with her former boyfriend, she got a message on her mobile phone at seven in the morning: I’m here at the factory gate. She didn’t believe it and ran downstairs to see. He had gotten off the night shift and taken the bus straight to her factory. Min had to work, so the boy waited outside from eight o’clock until noon. The two of them ate lunch together, then he left and Min returned to work.

“Did he say you have a future?” I asked.

“No,” said Min. “But because he came, I knew.”

She had recently taken the bus—a two-hour ride—to spend an afternoon with him. “He is not tall, he is not handsome, he has no money, his job is not good,” Min said.

I waited for something to follow this declaration of shortcomings.

“But you like him,” I said at last.

Min didn’t say anything, but she smiled.

Now the boy was leaving Dongguan because his father wanted him to work closer to home. No sooner had Min found a stable prospect than he was disappearing too, but she was unfazed. “We will keep in touch by mobile phone,” she said. She was not staying put either. Later that month, her boss approved her departure and returned her two months’ back pay. Min went to the talent market again. She had worked in her factory’s human resources department for exactly twenty-four days, and on that she could build a new career.

*  *  *

In an unforgiving city, the Dongguan talent market was the toughest place of all. For ten yuan, about $1.25, anyone could enter and interview for the hundreds of jobs on offer at the company booths inside. But going in required courage—to talk to strangers, to sell yourself, to face rejection while everyone within earshot listened. Min hated the talent market because it made her feel “replaceable.” The job listings reduced human beings to the only characteristics that mattered, and rarely did these essentials require more than twenty words:

RECEPTIONIST. SWEET VOICE. GOOD APPEARANCE AND DISPOSITION. KNOWS OFFICE SOFTWARE AND CANTONESE.

LATHE WORKER. 18- TO 22-YEAR-OLD MALE, EXPERIENCE AT A FOREIGN FACTORY. NOT NEARSIGHTED. NO SKIN SENSITIVITY.

SALES SPECIALIST. CAN EAT BITTERNESS AND ENDURE HARDSHIP. OPEN TO MEN AND WOMEN WITH RURAL RESIDENCY. NO ONLY CHILDREN.

On a busy Saturday, Dongguan’s biggest job fair might draw seven thousand visitors. By midmorning, all these people would have congealed into a single bloated mass, making individual movement all but impossible; occasionally, a group would break off and swamp a certain booth, though it was unclear what suddenly made one job more desirable than all the others. The most popular booths featured airbrushed posters, usually of long, windowless buildings set in concrete landscapes; a simple booth consisted of a man or a woman with a clipboard. The talent market stretched a full city block and filled a four-story building that had once housed a karaoke lounge and a bowling alley. Trading in the futures of people, it turned out, was a more lucrative business than entertainment.

SECRETARIES. 18 TO 25, 155 CENTIMETERS OR TALLER, REGULAR FEATURES.

SECURITY GUARDS. 20 TO 26, 172 CENTIMETERS OR TALLER.

Discrimination was the operative rule. Bosses liked their clerks female, pretty, and single, and they would only consider men for certain technical jobs. One factory might impose a blanket ban on people from Henan Province; another could refuse to hire anyone from Anhui. Sometimes an applicant’s entire family would come under scrutiny, because people who had siblings were deemed more likely than only children to chiku nailao, eat bitterness and endure hardship. Being less than 160 centimeters tall, or about five feet three inches, guaranteed a frustrating day at the talent market.

Height was a universal Chinese obsession. In a country that had experienced malnutrition and even famine in living memory, height signaled fortune, and it functioned as a proxy for class: On any construction site, the armies of peasant workers were a head shorter than the city people whose homes they were building. Manual laborers in the West might be larger than their white-collar counterparts, but in China the opposite held true—the educated could literally look down on the lower classes. For women, height requirements were attached to the more glamorous trades. “If I were only ten centimeters taller,” a young woman who worked in a hair salon told me once, “I could sell cars.”

Age was another liability—in the talent market, that meant anyone over thirty-five, which was the upper age limit for many positions. “People over thirty-five are inferior in their thinking and drive,” explained a factory manager in a promotional newspaper put out by the company that operated the market. The paper’s advice to this demographic: “Don’t always talk about your past experience. You must have a mentality of starting from zero.” In a perverse way, age limits were evidence of upward mobility. At the booth of a company that made headboards for beds, the list of jobs and target ages seemed to be a timetable for career advancement:

COST ACCOUNTANT: 25
MARKETING DEPARTMENT MANAGER: 30
PRODUCTION DEPUTY MANAGER: 35

The most common openings were for clerks, receptionists, salespeople, security guards, and cooks, with mold design and machine repair also in high demand. One company was looking for people “skilled in operating Mitsubishi and Fujitsu machinery.” Job titles were specific and sometimes bewildering: PATTERN GROUPERS. APPLIQUE WORKERS. PRESSURE VESSEL WELDERS. Here the industrial might of modern China was broken down into pieces, and the pieces were people.

Interviews at the talent market were brief and brutally honest. Recruiters did not pretend that jobs were anything to write home about; candidates freely admitted their ignorance. It was the rare interview that lasted more than five minutes. Hiring was usually done on the spot, and no one checked references.

At the booth of the Hengfeng Molds factory, a young woman sat down.

“Our pay is not high,” the recruiter said immediately. Then: “Have you worked with computers?”

“Yes, I learned computers in school.”

“Well, our pay is only six hundred.”

Another booth, another woman: “What can you do?”

“I keep in touch with customers, mostly through e-mail, and if they come to the office, I can receive them. If the job is more technical, I don’t know anything about that.”

What can you do? In most Chinese cities, where finding a job required a college diploma, money, and connections, that was a rare question. At the Dongguan talent market, you never heard: Where did you go to school? Whom do you know? Or least of all, Are you from around here? It was always: What can you do? Do you know computers? Do you know English? Job listings, which were usually written out by hand on preprinted cards, mocked the standard categories that were provided. In the space for residency, an employer usually specified the sex of the person sought: instead of profession, a company might list height requirements instead.

Not everyone who came to the talent market dared to go inside. Throngs gathered on the sidewalk before a giant electronic job board, like people fated only to look upon a promised land they would never enter. The listings moved upward in a continuous crawl, like stock prices, and the crowd stared, mesmerized.

*  *  *

Her second time at the market, Min knew exactly what to do. She aimed high, approaching only those companies with jobs in the human resources department. “Clerk is a very low position, so I didn’t look for that.” In her interviews, she asked about employee turnover and company size; she was looking for a smaller factory with fewer superiors to please. She sidestepped questions about why she had left her old job. That was a personal matter, Min said, that she would rather not discuss.

And this time she was not more honest than the others. At the booth of the Shenxing Rubber Products Company, she told the recruiter that she had worked in human resources for a year. “If you say less,” she explained to me afterward, “they think it’s not enough experience.” She was hired with a six-dollar-per-month raise above the salary of the person she was replacing.

Min started work two days later in the human resources department of the company, which made rubber components for mobile phones and computer keyboards. Her workday lasted eight hours, with every Sunday off. Workers at her level slept four to a room, and her room had its own bathroom and phone. She made eight hundred yuan a month, including room and board—the same as her last job, with a chance of a raise if she did well.

In her new job, Min kept track of the employment records, performance, demerits, and salaries of the factory’s four hundred workers. Where she had once looked after machines, now she was in charge of people, and it seemed a better fit. When workers came to the factory gate, she screened them for hiring. Do you have an ID? How long do you plan to stay?

Thank you, she told those who did not answer to her liking. We don’t have jobs right now.

On the tenth of every month, the Taiwanese wife of the factory owner came to pay the workers and seek the Buddha’s blessing. Min would follow the boss’s wife around the factory—to the canteen, the front gate, and each of the dangerous machines—and the two of them would ask the Buddha to protect the workers and let business prosper. Min would silently seek blessings for her family and friends and for her grandparents in the next world, but she didn’t tell the boss’s wife that.

She was getting better at office politics. Not long after she arrived, the top boss called Min into his office. The previous person in Min’s position, he told her, had been talkative and made mistakes. “You don’t like to talk much,” he observed.

“No,” she agreed.

The boss smiled. “When you have to speak,” he said, “you should speak. If you don’t have to speak, don’t speak.” That was the secret rule of Chinese workplace survival, but no one had ever shared it with Min.

This time she handled her parents more adeptly. She didn’t tell them she was quitting her job. Instead she found a new one, wired home $120, then called her parents with her news; the cash transfer was a preemptive strike that stunned them into silence. “They don’t know how things are outside,” Min told me. “So I do something first, and then I tell them about it.”

Everyone she knew was in flux, and many were on their way up too. Her sister in Shenzhen had been promoted to executive secretary; her cousin was now a manager in Guangzhou. Her two friends from the old factory had scattered. Liang Rong had gone home to marry someone of her parents’ choosing. Huang Jiao’e, who had moved over to Min’s factory, quit the same day Min did and landed a job as a production clerk elsewhere in the city. And Min’s old boss was back in Dongguan. He had returned from Beijing to work in a Taiwanese socket factory, but Min refused to see him. Workers in her old factory said he was romantically interested in her. She went through his old phone messages to her—Your big brother misses you—and decided it was true. The only adult who had been kind to her was not to be trusted, after all.

Small factories had their own problems, and Min soon discovered what they were. The workplace was disorganized, and her own responsibilities were never made clear; she scrambled to keep up with all the tasks thrown her way. Her new boss, like her old one, was insecure and status-conscious. Min was learning that many Chinese men had this flaw. He didn’t like it that Min did not get his approval for everything she did. He didn’t like it that she was friendly with the security guards. His response was to begin interviewing candidates for her position—a colleague, rival, or replacement for Min—without telling her. She heard about it from the office receptionist.

In August 2004, two months after she arrived, Min collected her pay and left without telling anyone. A former colleague had joined a factory in Shenzhen and invited her to go work for him, and she decided to go. She spent the night in a hotel near her factory; while she slept, someone broke the lock on her door. The thief took nine hundred yuan and Min’s mobile phone, the only place where she had stored the numbers of everyone she knew in the city: the excolleague who was her only link to her new job, the friends she had made since going out, and the boyfriend who had gone home.

*  *  *

The mobile phone was the first big purchase of most migrants. Without a phone, it was virtually impossible to keep up with friends or find a new job. Letters between factories often went missing, and calling up a worker in her dorm, where a hundred people might share a single hallway phone, was difficult. Office phones inside factories were often programmed not to allow outside calls or to cut off automatically after several minutes. Anyway, people jumped jobs so often that dorm and office numbers quickly went out of date. In a universe of perpetual motion, the mobile phone was magnetic north, the thing that fixed a person in place.

I learned all of this painfully. In my early days in Dongguan, I befriended many new arrivals who did not have mobile phones yet, and I lost track of them, one by one. When I met Min, I decided to buy her a pager, but that industry had collapsed so suddenly and completely in the past few years that salesmen in electronics stores just laughed at me when I said I wanted one. I gave Min a mobile phone so I would not lose her too.

In the migrant world, the mobile phone was a metaphor for the relentless pace of city life. An executive at a shoe factory summed up the disjunctions of migration this way: “At home they have no phones, then suddenly they are here and it is Nokia 6850.” A young woman who sold insurance said to me, “At home they hand down a mobile phone from one person to another” to describe rural life. People referred to themselves in the terminology of mobile phones: I need to recharge. I am upgrading myself. The parents of migrant girls instinctively distrusted the phones, and some forbade their daughters from buying one. The mobile phone, which allowed and even encouraged private contact with strangers, was everything that communal village life was not.

A girl might signal her interest in a young man by offering to pay his mobile-phone bill. Couples announced their allegiance with a shared phone, though relationships sometimes broke up when one person secretly read text messages intended for another. The migrants I knew spent a great deal of time managing their phones—changing numbers constantly to take advantage of cheaper calling plans, and switching phone cards when crossing to another city to save on roaming fees. That was the short-term mentality of Dongguan: Save a few pennies, even if it meant losing touch with some people for good.

Migrant workers are a major reason the Chinese mobile-phone market is the world’s largest, yet the industry has mixed feelings about them. Migrants were behind the market’s poor economics, one friend in the telecommunications industry told me; they supposedly drove down prices because they were willing to pay for only the cheapest services. Popular culture also felt their negative impact: The quality of Chinese pop music had deteriorated in recent years, I was also told, because migrants chose the least sophisticated songs for the ring tones of their phones.

Hundreds of Dongguan factories made parts for mobile phones, and every third retailer in the city seemed to be a mobile-phone store. The city also did a thriving trade in stolen phones. Certain districts were known for a high incidence of phone theft; one tactic was to speed down a sidewalk on a motorcycle and rip a phone from a pedestrian’s ear, mid-sentence. The stolen phones might be fitted with new covers and then sold as new. Manufactured, sold, stolen, repackaged, and resold, the mobile phone was like an endlessly renewable resource at the heart of the Dongguan economy.

It was also Min’s link to the city. With the theft of her phone, the friendships of a year and a half vanished as if they had never been. She was alone again.

5 Factory Girls

It takes two hundred pairs of hands to make a running shoe. Everything begins with a person called a cutter, who stamps a sheet of mesh fabric into curvy irregular pieces, like a child’s picture puzzle. Stitchers are next. They sew the pieces together into the shoe upper, attaching other things—a plastic logo, shoelace eyelets—as they go. After that, sole-workers use infrared ovens to heat pieces of the sole and glue them together. Assemblers—typically men, as the work requires greater strength—stretch the upper over a plastic mold, or last, shaped like a human foot. They lace the upper tightly, brush glue on the sole, and press the upper and the sole together. A machine applies ninety pounds of pressure to each shoe. Finishers remove the lasts, check each shoe for flaws, and place matched pairs in cardboard boxes. The boxes are put in crates, ten boxes to a crate, and shipped to the world within three days. Every shoe has a label on its tongue: MADE IN CHINA.

If you wear athletic shoes, chances are you have worn a pair that was made at the Yue Yuen factory in Dongguan. The Taiwanese-owned factory is the biggest manufacturer for Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, along with smaller brands like Puma and Asics, all of whom stopped making shoes years ago and farmed out production to factories that could do it more cheaply. Yue Yuen’s secret is vertical integration: It controls every step of the manufacturing process—from initial design to making glues, soles, molds, and lasts to cutting, stitching, and assembling the finished products. One-third of the world’s shoes are made in Guangdong Province, and the Yue Yuen plant is the biggest of them all.

Seventy thousand people work at its Dongguan factory. Imagine the entire population of Santa Fe, New Mexico, under the age of thirty and engaged in making athletic shoes. Inside the compound’s brick walls, workers sleep in factory dorms and eat in factory cafeterias and shop at factory commissaries. Yue Yuen runs a kindergarten for employees’ children and a hospital with a 150-member staff; it has a movie theater and a performance troupe, volunteer activities and English classes. It operates its own power plant and fire department, and sometimes the city of Dongguan borrows Yue Yuen’s firetruck ladder, the tallest one around, to put out fires. Yue Yuen bottles its own water. Locals will tell you that it grows its own food, which is not true, although the company at one point contracted with farmers in the area to guarantee its food sources. Nothing short of apocalypse could cut off the world’s supply of what the industry calls “branded athletic footwear.”

For young migrants, Yue Yuen offers stability. An assembly-line job brings only an average salary—about seventy-two dollars a month in take-home pay, in line with the city’s minimum wage—but it is paid every month, on time. Work is capped at eleven hours a day and sixty hours a week with Sundays off, rare for an industry in which laboring through the night is not unheard of. Yue Yuen workers sleep ten to a room in metal bunks, and this too is better than average. Young women typically pay middlemen one hundred yuan to procure a job here; men pay several times that. Eighty percent of the workers at Yue Yuen are women, most between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five.

A migrant who lands a job at Yue Yuen may never work anywhere else. Over the years, she may quit and go home—to see a sick relative or settle a marriage engagement, to have a rest or a child—and then return to Yue Yuen. A worker may introduce a sibling or a cousin or a fellow villager into the factory, and the company encourages this; in one instance, ten members of an extended family all worked inside the factory. Employee turnover is high—5 percent a month, meaning that more than half the workforce changes in a year—but that does not take into account the many workers who quit only to return again. Zhou Yinfang joined Yue Yuen in 1991, when she was seventeen. She met her husband in the factory, took time off to have two children, talked her way into a promotion, and now manages 1,500 workers as a factory chief. “I would like to work here until I retire,” she told me; she was thirty years old, but her voice was already the harsh whisper of an old woman. All of the Yue Yuen bosses, the workers say, have raspy voices from years of shouting orders over the din of the machines.

Upward mobility is possible; the demands of production are so intense that Yue Yuen must promote from within. Almost all of the company’s managers, from supervisors of single lines to the heads of whole factories, are rural migrants who started out on the assembly line. An intricate hierarchy orders this world. Managers are divided into thirteen grades, from trainee to managing director; they typically address each other by title and not by name. One cafeteria is reserved exclusively for production line leaders, while another caters to supervisors, the next step up from them. A child is a status symbol: Only line leaders and above are allowed to live inside the factory as a married couple with a child. Ordinary workers usually leave their children at home in the village, to be minded by grandparents.

Factory society divides along provincial lines. Workers from the same province stick together, speaking dialects that outsiders cannot understand. Those from provinces with large migrant populations further segregate based on which county they come from. Natives of the adjoining provinces of Anhui, Henan, Shaanxi, and Shandong can speak to one another in their own dialects; they call one another “half-fellow provincials,” which brings a sense of closeness. The company doesn’t fight these regional prejudices: Its cafeterias offer workers a choice of Hunan, Sichuan, or Cantonese dishes. Provincial stereotypes color hiring, and a boss can ban an entire province if he believes that a hundred million people from one place can share a personality trait. Henan people get into fights. People from Anhui are hardworking but untrustworthy.

Workers can spend their days without venturing beyond Yue Yuen’s guarded gates, and many of them do, saying the world outside is luan—chaotic, dangerous. Yet life inside Yue Yuen’s walls can be turbulent too. Petty theft is rampant; workers are banned from dorms during work hours in an effort to reduce such crimes. Factory-floor quarrels carry over into the dorms, where workers on the same production line are required to room together for the sake of efficiency. Gangs thrive inside Yue Yuen. Some rob workers of their wages on payday; others focus on stealing shoe parts. The gangs practice a vertical integration of their own. One group may spirit shoelaces out of the factory, while another smuggles out soles. The parts are assembled into shoes and distributed in other parts of the city. In the universe of Chinese counterfeiting, theirs is a distinctive sub-specialty—the illicit assembly of authentic parts. The gangs are organized along provincial lines, and the ones from Hunan are most feared.

Love triangles and extramarital affairs are common, as are out-of-wedlock pregnancies and abortions. A few years ago, a young woman committed suicide over a failed love affair; another gave birth in her dorm bathroom and threw the baby into the toilet. The baby died, and the young woman was sent home. “We have seventy thousand people. It is a city,” says Luke Lee, a Yue Yuen executive who oversees worker health and safety. “Whatever problems a city has, we have in the factory.”

*  *  *

On weekends when the production lines shut down, the mood inside the Yue Yuen compound changes. Girls who walked with purpose and poker faces during the week turn slow and languorous. They stroll hand in hand with girlfriends, their factory IDs on straps around their necks or on chains linked to their belts, like American school janitors. They talk loudly in their native dialects; they show skin. They wear tank tops and jeans, or black party dresses with high heels; sometimes several friends step out in identical outfits, announcing their shared loyalties to the world. They eat ice-cream cones and sit barefoot on patches of grass in twos and threes, reading magazines or sharing confidences. Sometimes one girl sits alone staring dreamily at nothing.

The dorms offer no privacy. Girls stand in doorways combing their shampooed hair in hand mirrors; girls in shorts and flip-flops lug buckets of water to mop the dormitory floors. Residents of the upper floors lean on bare arms over balcony railings, checking out the goings-on at ground level and calling out to friends many stories below. A pop ballad blasts from a tape deck into the muggy morning. I love you, loving you, as a mouse loves rice. The air smells of laundry hanging out to dry; bleach, detergent, and damp are the perpetual scents of the Yue Yuen factory.

On a Sunday morning in June 2004, several young women lay chatting in their bunks in Building J, Room 805. The room had the disheveled feel of the last stage of a slumber party, and the girls lounged in their pajamas although it was already eleven o’clock.

“When you meet a man outside the village,” one girl said, “you don’t know his real character and you don’t know about his family.”

“If you get a boyfriend while you are outside, your parents will have no face at home.”

“You may make friends with someone, then you go home and lose touch.”

“When you go home, you find out people know all sorts of things about you.”

Ten girls lived together in J805, an eighth-floor room measuring two hundred square feet with two rows of metal bunk beds. The room smelled, like everywhere else at Yue Yuen, of wet laundry. Each girl was assigned a wall cabinet that held clothes, snacks, makeup, and jewelry; they decorated the insides with magazine pictures of movie stars, like the lockers of American high school girls. The spaces under the bunks were a graveyard for shoes: high heels, sneakers, Hello Kitty flip-flops. Room J805 was on a long hallway of identical rooms, with toilets and showers at each end. The building housed two thousand workers.

Back home on the farm it was the busiest season of the year, the time for the summer harvest and the summer planting. But the global cycle of shoe manufacturing was slowing down. The girls in J805 worked in the Yue Yuen Number 8 factory, which made shoes for Adidas and Salomon. Now they were working only ten and a half hours a day plus half or full days on Saturdays; in the world of Dongguan manufacturing, that was considered the slow season. Some of the girls were planning to go home on leave, but their paths diverged depending on which part of the shoe they made. The ones who worked on shoe soles could leave. Cutters and stitchers had to stay on.

Jia Jimei, a twenty-one-year-old Henan native who worked in the sole department, rushed into the room from a shopping trip and showed off her purchases: snacks for the train ride and a cassette player for her family. She had just been granted a one-month home leave. “I haven’t been able to sleep these past two nights,” she said. “Once you know you’re going home, you can’t think about anything else.” She had a snub nose and wide-set eyes in a round face that turned softer when she smiled. She sat down on her lower bunk, clutching a stuffed panda bear to her chest.

Zhang Qianqian, a young woman from Anhui Province who was visiting from down the hall, watched the going-home preparations. She was solidly built, with broad shoulders and a hard unsmiling face; she wore jeans and a black sports watch that made her look tough. She was a cutter, so she was staying. “When I go home, I’m bored to death,” Qianqian said. “There’s no TV and no cassette player. And almost everyone from home has gone out, so I’m all by myself all day.

“My grandmother gets up at dawn to make breakfast,” she continued, “and calls me to come eat, and sometimes I’m still sleeping. Then my father says, ‘You’re lying in bed and won’t even come to eat breakfast your grandmother has made for you.’ At home they are always criticizing you.”

“When you go home, you can’t stay,” agreed Li Xiaoyan, a roommate from Hunan who was also a cutter. The girls had a complicated relationship with home. Out in the city, they were tired and lonely and talked constantly of going home; once home, they quickly grew bored and longed to go out again. If a girl decided to leave the factory, it sent ripples of shock and uncertainty through everyone around her. To be a migrant was to be constantly abandoned by the people closest to you.

Qianqian was a veteran of departures and returns. She had come out from home three years before, worked at Yue Yuen for a year and a half, quit because of conflicts with her boss, and gone home for a while. Back in Dongguan, she joined a small electronics factory where conditions were much worse than at Yue Yuen. She quit and went home again, this time for her grandmother’s eightieth birthday. Four months ago, she had rejoined Yue Yuen. “I’ve moved here and there, and I always seem to end up in this factory,” she said.

Jia Jimei was less certain. “I may return to Yue Yuen but I’m not sure yet,” she said. She left for home a week later without telling her roommates if she was coming back.

*  *  *

China is a quarter century into the largest migration in human history, and the profiles of the people on the move are changing. Those who came out from their rural villages in the 1980s and early 1990s were heading into the unknown, often driven by a family’s need for cash and the desire to build a house back home. It was considered risky, even shameful, for a single woman to go out on her own. These early migrants often found seasonal work, and the seasons were those of the farm. They returned home to help out during the sowing season and again at harvest time. When they had made enough money, they returned to the village for good.

The new generation came of age when migration was already an accepted path to a better life. Younger and better-educated than their predecessors, they are driven out less by the poverty of the countryside than by the opportunity of the city. There is no longer any shame attached to migration. The shame now lies in staying home.

Newer migrants have looser ties to their villages. Their trips home are no longer dictated by the farming calendar or even by the timing of traditional holidays like the lunar new year. Instead, younger migrants come and go according to their personal schedules of switching jobs or obtaining leaves, and these are often tied to the demands of the production cycle. It is the seasons of the factory, rather than the fields, that define migrant life now.

Migrants increasingly look and act like city people. Migrant magazines launched in the 1990s have folded or are struggling to find readers now. Songs about the migrant experience are no longer heard in the factory cities of the south; the workers on the assembly line now listen to the same pop tunes as urban teenagers. Today’s migrants spend money freely on themselves—on clothes, hairstyles, and mobile phones—and may send home cash only in instances of need. The newer migrants are more ambitious and less content than their elders were. One survey found that 12 percent of migrants who had left home in the 1990s were satisfied with their situations in life, compared with 27 percent of the generation that had come out a decade earlier. That does not necessarily mean that the newer migrants want to return to the village. But it suggests that their basis of comparison is already the city, and perhaps these greater expectations promise a greater chance of success. Or it may mean that this new generation is only bound to be disappointed.

GETTING TO KNOW the factory girls of Yue Yuen was not easy. Girls would make dates to meet me and not show up; if I found them later, they gave no explanation or apology. No one was willing to accept the mobile phone I offered so we could stay in touch, perhaps not wanting the responsibility. They might be friendly to me one day and cold the next, and if I struck up a conversation with one girl in a dorm, the others in the room would shun me. One girl instructed her roommates to lie and tell me she had left the factory, because her friends had told her I was not to be trusted. The company granted me free access to its dormitories, but winning the trust of those who lived there was the hard part. In the shadow of the giant shoe factory they flitted, insubstantial as moths, and more elusive than anyone I met in the city.

The girls were equally wary with one another and often spoke roughly among themselves. They frequently knew nothing about the people with whom they lived and worked; as I got to know them better, they often asked me for news of one another. Most girls seemed to have one or two true friends who lived far away, perhaps in another factory, preferring to confide in them rather than in the many close by. Maybe this was their defense against living in a colony of strangers: They took it for granted that someone who slept in an adjoining bunk one night would disappear the next.

It took willpower for any migrant worker to change her situation. But inside a factory as large as Yue Yuen, the pressure to conform felt especially intense. The girls all claimed in front of one another that they didn’t approve of finding a boyfriend in the city, although many of them already had one; they disparaged further education as useless even as some quietly took classes in an effort to improve themselves. Yue Yuen was a good place to work—everyone who worked there said that. But if you wanted something different, it took all your strength to break free.

*  *  *

In July, the hottest season of the year in the farmer’s calendar, work at Yue Yuen slowed to a crawl. Dorm rooms gaped empty as more workers went home on leave. Those who stayed behind were working only eight hours a day, five days a week. The normal work schedule of the Western white-collar world was paradise here.

Qianqian woke up past ten o’clock one Sunday just as I arrived to see her. She yawned, stretched, and slowly swung herself out of her top bunk. She pulled on a green tank top, jeans with floral embroidery stitched down one leg, and scuffed high heels with pointy toes. “In the whole year, only these few months are a bit more fun,” she said. Two bunks over, a roommate sat in bed practicing English phrases under her breath. She took a weekly class run by the factory. The sentences in her well-thumbed book were strange.

THIS IS LOO. HE’S FROM PERU.

One made sense:

DON’T LOSE THE OPPORTUNITY.

Qianqian walked downstairs, past the other dormitory buildings, and through the factory gate. Out on the sidewalk, the sun’s glare was so strong that the street appeared blinding white, like an overexposed photograph. Qianqian entered a department store and gravitated toward the racks of sequined high-heeled shoes. She fingered a yellow platform shoe whose strap had three glittery pink hearts, like Valentine’s Day candy. “This is very fashionable this year,” she said. In the gifts section, she pointed out a picture frame with fake roses embedded inside; she had given one to a friend for her birthday.

Back on the near-deserted street, she shouted at a girl walking past. “Qu Jimei! Where have you been?”

A girl with dyed red streaks in her hair stopped walking. She was carrying a nylon Nike backpack. “I’m going home,” she said.

“You’re going home? Now?”

“Now.”

Qianqian held the girl’s hand for a moment. “Well, goodbye then,” she said. She watched the girl walk away. “You meet so many friends in the factory like this, and then they go home.”

“Do you keep in touch?” I asked her.

“It’s hard. Sometimes we exchange addresses.” Her closest friend in the city was someone she had met during her first stint at Yue Yuen. They had quit the factory at the same time, gone home to their respective villages, and arranged to come out again together. Qianqian frequently visited the friend on her days off. The effort required to keep in touch explained why the factory girls had so few true friends. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.

We sat down in a sunbaked plaza outside a department store and ate ice-cream cones. A girl in a blue-and-white striped factory shirt who appeared to know Qianqian sat down with us. She idly fanned herself with a postcard she was on her way to mail. “I have left the factory,” she announced. It was so hot that no one responded. The two girls sat in silence and watched me writing in my notebook.

“Do you read English?” Qianqian asked the girl.

She laughed harshly. “I didn’t even finish elementary school!”

After the girl left, Qianqian explained that they had worked together at a small factory nearby. “Yue Yuen is better,” she said. “The welfare benefits are better. There is a library and an activities center. You can play chess or join the Hula-Hoop club.” I asked her if she took part in any of those activities, and she said no.

She walked down the street, encountering other friends who were going home, saying hello and goodbye to people who in all likelihood she would never see again. From afar, Qianqian’s parents were pressuring her to go home too, and yet they wanted her to send more money. She had given them almost five thousand yuan in her first two years out but nothing since. In her village, parents traditionally built a house for a grown son to live in after his marriage; Qianqian’s younger brother was only fourteen, but her parents were already worrying about the expense.

“All the other people in the village have built their houses,” her father had said to her. “How come mine hasn’t been built yet?”

“I was going to ask you the same question,” Qianqian retorted.

From their homes in the village, families tried to influence their daughters. Send money home. Don’t get a boyfriend outside. Get married sooner. Come back. For the most part the girls did as they pleased. Qianqian’s parents didn’t even know her phone number inside the factory—when she wanted to talk, she would call them. They were always home.

*  *  *

The streets around the Yue Yuen factory teemed with opportunities for spending or self-improvement. On weekend afternoons, the Hopeful Computer Training Center was crowded with workers sitting at computers learning Word and Excel. (A sign outside advertised, in English, MICROSOFT WORB.) A shop sold men’s white dress shirts for twenty yuan, and a photo studio offered a choice of aspirational backdrops: Pastoral Landscape, Corinthian Columns, Suburban Villa. Retailers catered to the homesick with geographically specific offerings. HENAN ZHOUKOU SESAME CAKES. WUHAN BARBER. One store consisted of a row of plastic phone booths crammed along the wall, an enterprise that existed only in migrant towns. Pasted to the opposite wall was a train schedule to cities all over China: twenty-five hours to Ningbo, forty to Chengdu. The Shangjiang City Health Station advertised one-minute pregnancy tests, venereal disease cures, and abortions. The hospital inside Yue Yuen also performed abortions, but almost no one went there. The sidewalk clinics offered the same procedures and no one had to know.

Outside the gates of Yue Yuen, I once saw a man speaking rapidly, like an old-time carnival barker, into a microphone headset. “If you have stomachache, if you have backache, if you have rheumatism, this is for you.” The air reeked sourly of alcohol, and a blanket spread out on the sidewalk displayed preserved snakes, a starfish, and bottles of brownish liquid the color of strong iced tea. Several snakes, apparently dead, were entwined in a plastic bucket; the man stirred them with a stick, like a stew. He was a chain-smoker with a hacking cough, and he did not look in the least qualified to be giving out medical opinions. Yet a crowd of young men and women clamored for the flyers he was handing out.

SNAKE WINE TO NOURISH KIDNEYS

Prescription: This product’s main components are king cobra, krait, silver-ringed snake, and so on, in all seven types of poisonous snakes and many kinds of herbal medicines. Usage: Mornings and evenings take half or one liang.

Another day on the same stretch of sidewalk, a man lay on his stomach with his crippled legs curled under him, writing on the pavement with a stub of chalk. A crowd of young migrants gathered to read his story: His wife had died, his son was sick, and he had traveled far from home to beg for money. The man had some bills in his cup already, and two more people gave money as I watched.

From the main street in front of the Yue Yuen factory, alleys ran straight back at intervals between the stores. These passages were strewn with garbage and the walls of the buildings were plastered with ads for gonorrhea and syphilis clinics; in China these flyers broke out like rashes wherever prostitution thrived. Down one of these alleys, I once looked through the window of a single-story building. Young women were sitting in the shadows with their heads bent over, sewing. That was a factory too, the worst kind.

The girls who worked at Yue Yuen seldom ventured down this way. The alleys did not open onto more streets of computer schools and hair salons: They ended in farmland. Just beyond the border of the factory world, men and women past middle age worked in fields of leafy green vegetables, under a cloudy sky that did not protect them from the glare of the sun.

THE TRADITIONAL CHINESE calendar divides the year into twenty-four segments and gives farming instructions for every two-week interval. The year begins with lichun, the start of spring on February 4 or 5 and the time for spring sowing. The calendar dictates when to plant melons, beans, coarse cereals, beets, and grapes and when to harvest rice, wheat, apples, potatoes, radishes, and cabbage. It predicts heat and heavy rains. It sets the proper time to protect crops from the wind, to kill pests and collect manure, to weed and to irrigate, to fix fences for livestock and to welcome in the new year. The calendar was standardized during the Former Han Dynasty—with regional variations, it has governed the rhythms of life on the farm for two thousand years.

The girls at Yue Yuen know nothing of the farming cycle. When they go home, their parents don’t usually want them to work; if they help out in the fields, they suffer sunburns and blisters from the unfamiliar labor. One migrant worker described to me a typical day at home: She kept farmers’ hours with the rest of the family but spent most of her day watching television.

I get up at 6:30. I watch TV—News Focus, then the serials. I watch TV until one or two in the afternoon. I take a nap and walk around a bit. I eat dinner and go to bed at ten.

The global calendar of shoe manufacturing also picks up in the spring. The machines gear up in March and quicken in April, May, and June, turning out footwear ahead of the summer shopping season in the United States and Europe. In July—when the farmer’s calendar urges moving fast to bring in the summer harvest before the rains come—the shoe industry falls into a lull. Orders drop to their lowest in August, with production lines sometimes running at only 20 percent of capacity. In September and October, business picks up and the machines run full-time in anticipation of the production crunch to come. November and early December are the go-for-broke periods, with everyone clocking lots of overtime to meet the Christmas rush. After the holidays, the cycle slows until spring comes again.

The girls know the seasons of the shoe intimately, and also its daily rhythms. On the cavernous factory floors of Yue Yuen, making sneakers is a science measured with stopwatches. A plastic sign in front of every station on the assembly line displays how many seconds a worker needs to complete a given task. It takes a Yue Yuen assembly line ten hours to make a shoe, down from twenty-five days four years ago, and the number of shoes produced per worker has gone up 10 percent.

The factory floor has its own hierarchy. The best jobs are in the development department, where workers produce small quantities of shoes for samples and don’t have much production pressure. Cutters and sole-workers are next: As the first people on the assembly line, they set the pace and enjoy more freedom. The highest-stress jobs are in stitching and assembly, where workers are locked into the middle of the production chain. Pressure bears down on them from both ends—people up the line push work on them, while those farther down implore them to move faster. There is little room for error here: Quality inspectors and customers alike zero in on these lower sections of the assembly line, because it is easier to spot flaws in a finished shoe. The workers have a saying:

Those in stitching are scolded to death,
Those in shoe assembly are worked to death,
Those in cutting play to death.

When Yue Yuen set up its first factory in China in 1989, South Korea dominated the global sneaker market. In its first decade here, Yue Yuen often worked employees through midnight and gave them a single day off each month. “As long as you gave the brands the goods at a certain price, they didn’t care how you ran your factories,” says Allen Lee, the head of Yue Yuen’s manufacturing operation for Adidas in Dongguan. “We didn’t talk about whether to pay overtime, or whether to put toilet paper in the bathrooms, or whether workers should wash their hands, or how many slept in each dorm. We used repressive management methods: This is your task and if you have to stay up three days and nights, you do it.”

China’s cheap, motivated workforce was suited to the labor-intensive business of sewing shoes, and in the 1990s China became the global leader. After the big American brands came under attack from unions and workers’ rights groups for harsh conditions in their factories, Nike and Adidas began pushing their suppliers to improve the working environment. Yue Yuen changed to an eleven-hour workday and gave employees every Sunday off; many workers quit, complaining that the overtime pay was no longer enough. The company set up a business unit to oversee working conditions and a counseling center where workers could seek help and file complaints. It improved safety measures, banned hazardous chemicals, and abolished military-style calisthenics. Yet even as the brands have pushed factories to treat workers better, they are also pressuring them to cut costs. At times these goals work at cross-purposes. The Yue Yuen plant for Adidas used to issue workers’ uniforms free of charge. Because of cost-cutting pressure from Adidas, Yue Yuen started charging workers for uniforms, but Adidas objected to this practice too. Yue Yuen abolished uniforms altogether, and workers now wear their own clothes on the job.

In 2001, Adidas initiated a program called Lean Manufacturing to increase efficiency and reduce waste at Yue Yuen. Workers say that while they work shorter hours now, the time on the line is more stressful; tasks are parceled out precisely and there is almost no downtime. Assembly lines have been restructured into small teams so workers can switch tasks every few days, whereas before they might have done the same thing for a month at a time. This makes production more flexible, but it is exhausting for the workers. Also in the name of efficiency, living arrangements have been reshuffled so workers live with their assembly-line colleagues rather than with their friends.

The accelerating pace of the global fashion cycle increases the pressure. A decade ago, the big athletic-shoe brands gave factories ninety days from receiving an order to delivering a product; several years ago it was sixty days, and now it is thirty days. Orders are getting smaller, to allow for a rapid response when fashions change, and workers live inside this unpredictable cycle. Only on Thursday does their boss tell them if they must work overtime on Saturday. During busy times, the sole department runs double shifts; employees take turns working the day shift one month and the night shift the next, their internal clocks scrambled and their bodies struggling to catch up.

Executives say that the demands of the market have only made Yue Yuen better. “If we didn’t have pressure, we wouldn’t improve,” says Allen Lee. “As Darwin said, only the strongest survive.” An Adidas study found that workers initially felt stress from the Lean Manufacturing program, but over time, the study said, they got used to it.

*  *  *

August is the time to irrigate corn and prepare to plant the winter wheat. Inside the Yue Yuen factory, a new season was starting earlier than expected: the long approach to Christmas. After the easy pace of summer, the girls were working overtime every weekday and all day Saturday. On the assembly line, they worked faster and talked less. But their bodies rebelled.

“I have the worst headache,” complained Qianqian one morning in early August. “This is supposed to be the low season, but we have so many orders.” The day before, she had turned twenty-two; she had planned to visit her best friend to celebrate but spent her birthday working overtime instead.

Down the hall in Room J805, Jia Jimei had returned to the factory from her visit home. She sat on her lower bunk, listless and unsmiling.

“How was home?” I asked her.

She smiled briefly. “It was good.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I thought about not returning,” she said slowly, as if she were just waking from a dream. “But there is nothing to do at home. If there were something to do near home, it would be better to be close to home. But there isn’t. I feel very uncomfortable being back here. I don’t really want to go back to work again.”

In the bunk above, Wu Yongli was more cheerful. She was nineteen years old, with pretty features in a slender face, and on this summer morning she wore an elegant black dress with spaghetti straps and a choker with a heart-shaped locket. “Don’t mind her,” Wu Yongli said. “She hasn’t adjusted to being back yet.” More jarring change was on the horizon: Once a year, the factory reassigned workers to new dorms. The purpose was to take into account people who had left or arrived during the year and to ensure that production teams were living together, but it turned everyone’s lives upside down. “We already have friends here,” said Jia Jimei. “Now there is a chance we will all be scattered again.”

LATER THAT MONTH, the workers were transferred to new dorms. In a factory the size of Yue Yuen, girls who had seen one another every day suddenly did not know how to find their friends again. Many lost touch for good.

After the move, Qianqian disappeared, and I searched for her through September. I visited her new dorm many times—it was four floors down from her old one—but her roommates did not know where she had gone. They asked me for news of other workers they had lost touch with as well. I called Qianqian’s family in a farming village in Anhui; her father told me she was still working at Yue Yuen. According to the factory, Zhang Qianqian, employee 28103, Number 8 Factory, Building B, Second Cutting Group, was still registered as an employee. On paper she was living in the dorm, working on the assembly line, cutting materials for the uppers of Adidas shoes. But in person she had vanished, a disappearance that mocked the rule of schedules and stopwatches that had seemed to order factory life so well.

*  *  *

From the gate of the Yue Yuen factory, down the main street, and through a maze of dirt roads lined with restaurant stalls and shops, there is a neighborhood of low red-tiled apartment buildings. The doors to the apartments are pieces of sheet metal. The area is pockmarked with vacant lots and half-finished buildings, and it feels at once overcrowded and abandoned. In the relentless delta summer, neighbors sat outside in their undershirts or pajamas playing mahjong, as chickens pecked in the dirt underfoot.

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-October, I was brought here by a young woman I had met in Qianqian’s old dorm. She led me through the alleys, into a red-tiled building, up a flight of stairs, and through a sheet-metal door. We entered a one-room apartment with a double bed, and a poster hanging on the wall above it.

SUCCESS

Success feels very, very far from you, while failure in contrast seems to always follow you. You must bravely vanquish one failure after another, and then success will walk toward you.

Next to this poster was a picture ripped from a calendar of a topless woman holding a Grecian urn. Sitting on the bed, in a T-shirt, cutoff shorts, and bare feet, was Qianqian. When she saw me, she gave me a smile that was fleeting but also reluctant, as if she were not entirely happy at being found.

After payday in August, she had quit the Yue Yuen factory, walking off the line without permission and without the back pay that the company owed her. Since then she had stayed with various friends, including a young woman named Ge Li who shared this apartment with her boyfriend. She was thinking of going home or joining another factory.

“Why did you leave Yue Yuen?” I asked Qianqian.

“It isn’t fun anymore,” she said. And though I asked her several different ways, she would not say anything more.

IN THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED, production pressure in the factory continued to build as Christmas approached. In the countryside it was lidong, the beginning of winter, the time to fix fences for livestock. On a Sunday afternoon in November, I went by the red-tiled apartment building with the sheet-metal doors and asked Ge Li if she had news of Qianqian.

She hadn’t seen her friend in a while. “She’s still trying to decide between going home and rejoining the factory,” Ge Li said.

“What exactly is she trying to decide?” I asked.

Ge Li shook her head. “I don’t know what she’s thinking in her heart. We haven’t spoken about it.” Ge Li had recently quit Yue Yuen and was planning to go home soon to introduce her new boyfriend to her parents. Once she left, there would be no way for me to find Qianqian anymore. Maybe this was what failure in the migrant world meant—not any incident or tragedy you could name, just a gradual drifting away, until a person was lost from view.

THE LAST TIME I went to Yue Yuen was in January 2005. The factory girls wore thin cotton jackets, their shoulders hunched against the cold. Being cold appeared to be a pragmatic decision: Winter in Dongguan did not last long enough to justify spending money on a warm coat. Jia Jimei was just returning to her room when I stopped by, and she smiled when she saw me. She had dyed her hair with dark crimson streaks.

Work in the factory had slowed once Christmas passed, and now the traditional calendar took over, filling the streets with festive crowds returning home for the new year. Migrants who had just arrived in the city often wandered solitary and lost, but the ones heading home were different. They walked with purpose, in groups; they looked happy, and they knew the way. They carried cash in their pockets and shopping bags of gifts for their families—CD players, comforters, candy for the younger children. At home on the farm it was dahan, the Great Cold, the season to welcome in the new year, but by the Dongguan calendar it was time to reap the rewards of a year’s hard work. This was the only harvest that mattered now.

6 The Stele with No Name

The parents of migrants had terrible instincts. At every stage, they gave bad advice; they specialized in outdated knowledge and conservatism born out of fear. Some initially forbade their children, especially their daughters, from going out at all. But once a migrant got to the city, the parental message shifted dramatically: Send home money, the more the better. Some parents pressured their daughters to marry, though only someone from their home province—which seemed as unreasonable as telling a person living in New York to date only natives of Ohio. On the job front, their advice was invariably bad: They warned against jumping factories, which was usually the best way to get ahead.

Migrants learned quickly how to deal with their parents: They disobeyed, they fought, and they lied. They kept their distance; Chunming did not go home during her first three years in the city. The girls were matter-of-fact about such transgressions. “They don’t know how things are outside, so I do something first, and then I tell them about it,” Min said. A new life began the day they arrived in the city, and they would do what they needed to protect it. The past did not matter, and the present was everything. Family was a trap that would pull you backward if you weren’t careful.

After I moved to China, I had always resisted the pull of my own family, and perhaps some of the reasons were the same. My parents’ China was fifty years out of date; the Chinese have always respected scholars and disparaged merchants, they had taught me as a child, but the people I was meeting now contradicted all of that. I didn’t try to find relatives who were still living here. I wanted to learn about this country on my own terms. And family history seemed like a trap—a ready-made way to see China in tragic terms, a view that had little to do with how things were now.

Around the time I started meeting migrant workers in Dongguan, I began to investigate my own family history. Initially these were separate projects, a study in contrasts—there could be no common ground between the teeming chaos of the south China factories and the sober gray cities of the Northeast, with their steel mills and stone monuments aging and proud. I enjoyed the rhythms of these journeys as I shuttled south and then north, from the future to the past and back to the future again.

But the more I learned, the more I saw connections. Almost a hundred years ago, my grandfather had been a migrant too. He had left his village, changed his name, and tried to remake himself for the modern age. In his youth, China was emerging from a long, self-imposed isolation to rejoin the world—and so it is again today. My grandfather left home for good when he was sixteen years old—although he probably did not know it then, just as today’s migrants might not know it now. Chuqu, to go out: This is how the story of my family also begins.

*  *  *

When I was growing up in America, my parents rarely talked about the past. There is a mode of exile that dwells on everything that was lost—the twilit boulevards of the capital city, the large house and the servants, the shaded garden with the persimmon trees where we will return one day when the regime falls and we reclaim what is rightfully ours. But the Chinese who fled the Communists seldom indulged in such reveries. Their way was to move forward and make a new life; to linger on loss was pointless. The migrants and immigrants I have known have shared this pragmatism, which seems so deeply ingrained in the Chinese character. The present is everything, and the past recedes.

As a child I heard only fragments of our family history from my father, and I turned them over and over in my mind until each fragment became its own story, mysterious and complete. The stories never connected, or they connected in a secret way I did not know.

The four best mining schools in America are in Michigan, Colorado, New Mexico, and West Virginia.

We carried the gold bars in our belts when we traveled.

We left our stamp collections behind when we fled the Communists. We left everything behind.

Every day I went to the American consulate in Taipei and waited for the officer to call my name.

China came in pieces, too. China was the sweaters that my maternal grandmother sent us from Taiwan, wrapped in mothballs and emerging from their cardboard boxes smelling like the insides of attics. Wearing one to school, I felt acutely that I looked different, smelled different, from everyone else. China was the Kuomintang newspaper that arrived in our mailbox from Taiwan, folded into tight bands that would spring open, as if in their eagerness to tell the news from afar. It was the Chinese Ping-Pong players with rubbery limbs and pasty faces whom my parents rooted for—to me, inexplicably—when the Olympics came around. China was, thrillingly, the vinyl records my father brought back from his first trip to the People’s Republic of China in 1975, when Mao was still alive.

The sun in the east is rising,
The People’s Republic is growing;
Our supreme leader Mao Zedong
Points our direction forward.
Our lives are improving day by day,
Our future shining in glorious splendor.

The song is called “In Praise of the Motherland.” When I first heard it I was six years old, and the sunny Communist paradise it celebrated had disintegrated long ago. Yet even now the song’s opening bars make me shiver.

I knew many of these songs by heart. Chinese was my first language, and its lullabies and ballads threaded through my childhood from its earliest days, like the memory of a life I had lived before this one. My father’s family was from Manchuria, the region that the Chinese call simply Dongbei, the Northeast, and many of my earliest songs came from there. I did not feel a strong tie to China when I was growing up, but I knew I was from Dongbei.

My home is on the Songhua River in the Northeast
Where there are forests and coal mines
And soybeans and sorghum over slopes and fields.
My home is on the Songhua River in the Northeast
Where there are my compatriots
And also my aging father and mother . . .
I have fled my home village,
Forsaken its inexhaustible treasures.
Wandering, wandering,
Wandering all my days inside the pass.

The pass was the Shanhai Pass, an imposing stone fortress on China’s east coast where the Great Wall runs into the sea. Built during the Ming Dynasty to guard China’s northern frontier, it marked the point at which civilization ended and Manchurian wilderness began.

To me, the saddest song was about the Great Wall, sung by a Northeasterner exiled from home after the Japanese invasion. The wall’s watchtowers and battlements had been constructed over centuries to protect China from its northern enemies. After the Japanese army overran Manchuria in 1931, the wall took on a different meaning—it delineated the lands that were under the Japanese yoke. The song was a tacit admission that the Great Wall had failed, because the enemy was already in Dongbei.

The Great Wall is ten thousand miles long
Outside the Great Wall is my hometown.
The sorghum is fat, the soybeans fragrant
Gold is everywhere, and calamities rare.
Ever since the great catastrophe started suddenly
Rape, plunder, and capture, miseries too bitter to bear
Miseries too bitter to bear, fleeing to unknown lands
Family pulled apart, parents dead
Remembering all my life the enmity and hatred
Day and night thinking only of returning home . . .

Let four hundred million compatriots rise together:
The Great Wall of our hearts will be ten thousand miles long.

My mother and father learned these songs as children, just as I did. The songs told the story of their parents’ generation, living far from home and cut off by war from parents they would never see again. In the Chinese tradition, poetry conformed to a tight schematic pattern—at its best, the self disappeared inside the experience of the poem. Compressed in the verses of these songs was an emotion that was never spoken.

AFTER YEARS OF FRAGMENTS, snatches of song, and pieces of memory, I finally sat down with my father and asked him to tell me everything he knew about our family history. He told me about our family’s rise from humble origins in the waning years of the Qing Dynasty. He described how badly my grandfather had wanted to leave home and see the world. He remembered the chaotic retreat from the Japanese army and the air-raid sirens that meant there would be no school that day. But my father’s story was full of gaps: His memories of China were the memories of childhood, couched in a child’s apprehension of the world.

We were playing hide-and-seek. My father was taking a nap. I hid in the bay window on the other side of the bed from where he was sleeping, and I was afraid to come out. But he discovered I was hiding there, and he said, “Come out,” and he played with us. That was my only memory of him.

I spoke with my father’s brother and sisters, all of whom had emigrated to America in their twenties. An incident from half a century ago would be recalled differently, with each person’s version fixed and distinct—pieces of China they carried with them that had hardened over time, like precious pebbles worn smooth. I met the part of my family who had stayed behind in China, including my father’s cousins and distant relatives who had never left our ancestral village.

A few were trying to make sense of the past, but most were not—whether you had left China or stayed, it hurt less to let it go.

My relatives did not like telling their own stories. They often began by insisting they had nothing to say. Their narratives frequently opened with ignorance, a denial, even a death, as if to end the story before it could properly begin. Not one of them, it seemed to me, had faith that their memories mattered. In fact, my experience of China was very shallow was the first thing my aunt Nellie told me. We don’t know much about family history, said my uncle Luke, because we never had a chance to talk about it. My father’s story began with absence: My grandfather’s father. Nobody knew his name. They brushed over details and they downplayed drama. Sometimes when they were relating something particularly painful, they laughed. Perhaps in a world where so many people had suffered, one person’s story did not matter. Suffering only made you more like everyone else.

The young women in the factory towns of the south did not think this way. In a city untroubled by the past, each one was living, telling, and writing her own story; amid these million solitary struggles, individualism was taking root. It was expressed in self-improvement classes and the talent market, in fights with parents and in the lessons that were painstakingly copied into notebooks: Don’t lose the opportunity. To die poor is a sin. The details of their lives might be grim and mundane, yet these young women told me their stories as if they mattered.

*  *  *

Sometime during the reign of the Kangxi emperor, maybe around 1700, a farmer named Zhang Hualong left his home on the crowded North China Plain for the Manchurian prairie, where virgin land was so plentiful that anyone could make a fresh start. In those days, every village in north China seemed to have someone who had migrated; then as now, it was often the younger and more enterprising people who went out. Zhang Hualong had two sons, who traveled farther north to settle in a village called Liutai, in the Manchurian province of Jilin. The site they chose was known as Pauper’s Valley because of its poor climate and swampy land. Fourteen generations of Zhangs have lived there. I am of the eleventh.

As with Chinese migrants of the 1980s, the journey of my earliest known ancestor was not legal. In 1644, the Manchus, an ethnic group living on China’s northeastern frontier, conquered China and established the Qing Dynasty. Soon after, the Qing rulers declared Manchuria off-limits to the Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group of the rest of the country. Their aim was to monopolize the region’s natural resources and to preserve their homeland: As long as the frontier remained intact, they believed, their people would retain their vitality and forestall the corruption and decadence by which dynasties inevitably fell. To seal off Manchuria, the emperors ordered the construction of a two-hundred-mile mud wall planted with willow trees. It stretched from the Great Wall northeast through most of present-day Liaoning and Jilin provinces, with fortified checkpoints along its length.

The border was called the Willow Palisade, and it was even more porous than the Great Wall. It was completed in 1681, and perhaps twenty years later my ancestor breached it to settle in Liutai, which means “sixth post”—one of the fortified towers along the border that was built expressly to keep out people like him. The Chinese who entered illegally to farm were called liumin, wanderers. Over the next two centuries, my pioneer ancestors farmed—planting sorghum and soybeans, and living in log cabins surrounded by primeval forest.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Manchuria’s population began to swell as farmers from north China fled drought and famine. This migration, of twenty-five million people over the next half century, would be the largest in the country’s history until the present wave. The region’s economy boomed, new railroads linked the interior to coastal and foreign markets, and foreigners spouted prophecies as breathless as those heard today. In 1910, the British consul-general posted in Tianjin wrote:

There is little doubt that Manchuria is to become, in the not far distant future, a competitor of America in supplying agricultural products for the markets of Europe. The flour mills of Harbin . . . are placing their products upon the local markets at prices with which it is impossible for American mills to compete . . . What the United States may lose through diminished sales of farm products must more than be made up through increased trade in manufactured goods.

My family rose to prominence in this economic boom. My greatgrandfather, Zhang Ya’nan, bought an oil press and a flour mill and used the money from these ventures to become the biggest landowner in Liutai. Around 1890, Zhang Ya’nan oversaw construction of a family compound with five central rooms and eight wings. The ancestral tablets and portraits occupied the central rooms, while the living ate, worked, and slept along the sides. That was how a Chinese family lived—the dead intruding on the living, and filial devotion built into the very architecture of the houses. The compound was named Xinfayuan, which means “New Origin.” It was surrounded by high walls, with Mauser pistols mounted at each corner and an armed militia to protect against bandits. The measure of a family’s prosperity was in the food they ate, and at Xinfayuan even the hired hands dined on steamed buns filled with sweet bean paste. Portions were so generous that they inspired a song whose lines my father would recall a century later.

Xinfayuan, a fine place
The dogs lead the way, the people bring the food,
Two and a half jin of bean-stuffed buns.

In the last years of the Qing Dynasty, my great-grandfather was awarded a degree in the imperial civil service and given three hundred taels of silver by the imperial court to build an ancestral temple. This was standard practice: Once someone became an official, he had to observe the proper Confucian respect for his ancestors. My great-grandfather took four wives—also standard practice—and set up a school inside the family compound for his nine children, both sons and daughters, to attend. Perhaps because of my great-grandfather’s rise, the court awarded his own father an imperial military title, general of the third rank of the Qing Dynasty, and gave the family money to build a memorial arch praising his filial piety. Thus was created an illustrious family pedigree out of nothing at all. A farmer became a general, and a mill owner a government official: Here on the frontier, molding a new life did not take so long.

My great-grandfather fulfilled the other duties of a Confucian patriarch. He oversaw the writing of a family genealogy that stretched back to the ancestor who had migrated to Manchuria. And he laid out a sequence of names that his descendants would carry for the next twenty generations, which together formed a poem.

Feng Li Tong Xing Dian
Hong Lian Yu Bao Chao
Wan Chuan Jia Qing Yan
Jiu Yang Guo En Zhao

The phoenix stands in the palace of prospering together
The swan connects and nurtures the dynasty of treasures

Ten thousand generations pass on the continuing family celebration
Nine ornaments display the favor of the nation.

My family prospered late, coming into glory at the very moment the Qing way of life was ending. The estate, the temple, the tablets and portraits and relics would all be destroyed in the tumultuous century to come; many lives would be cut short. But not everything was laid waste. My Chinese name is Tonghe: The first character in my name was decided a century ago by a great-grandfather I never knew.

*  *  *

In the village where my grandfather Zhang Chun’en was born in 1899, almost everyone shared his family name. As a child he attended the family school, where he memorized long passages from the Four Books and the Five Classics dating to the time of Confucius. That he did not comprehend a word of these texts was unimportant; education was intended to shape a child into proper behavior, imprinting him early with the virtues of obedience, respect, and restraint. The ultimate aim of learning was to pass the civil-service examination and become an imperial official—a system that had persisted, virtually unchanged, for a thousand years.

But this world was already breaking apart by the time my grandfather was a boy. The nineteenth century had seen traumatic encounters with the West; following China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1850s, the monarchy was forced to sign a series of “unequal treaties” that opened ports to foreign trade and gave legal and economic privileges to the Western powers and Japan. Reformers blamed traditional education for China’s humiliating decline. Their efforts led to the abolition of the civil-service exam in 1905 and the spread of schools that taught modern subjects. In 1911, when my grandfather was just entering his teens, the Qing Dynasty collapsed and a republic took its place.

Even as a child, my grandfather was determined to leave home—then as now, all paths to success led away from the village. His older brother, whose name was Zhang Feng’en, would someday run the family estate. But as the second son of the first wife, my grandfather was in a privileged position: He could go away. In the spring of 1913, he enrolled in the Jilin Provincial Middle School. It was the first school in the province to teach what was called the New Learning, which dispensed with the classics in favor of mathematics, history, geography, and the natural sciences. He left home three years later to attend Peking University, the head of a national network of modern schools.

Most of the students there came from the wealthy merchant families of the coast; my grandfather was an outsider, like a scholarship boy from a Colorado mining town showing up at Harvard. But as a center of progressive learning, the university also attracted other ambitious young people from the provinces. One contemporary of my grandfather who worked in the school library was Mao Zedong. My grandfather likely struggled with the New Learning. In the Peking University archives, I found a book bound with string that listed, in spidery calligraphy, the exam results for pre-law students in 1917. Foreign subjects were not my grandfather’s strong suit.

WESTERN HISTORY: 70
ENGLISH LITERATURE: 70
CHINESE LANGUAGE: 80
LOGIC: 90
BEHAVIOR: 100

If the traditional value system had been intact, my grandfather would have obtained the highest university degree and gotten a job in government. But the New Learning was taking him in unexpected directions: My grandfather won a provincial scholarship to study in America, so he quit school after his sophomore year. He married a young woman named Li Xiulan who had been chosen by his family—three days after the wedding, he boarded a ship for America.

My grandmother was then studying at Peking Women’s Normal College, one of the first colleges in the country to accept female students. She majored in physical education and music; she marched in student protests and smoked cigarettes and chose a new name, Li Xiangheng, because it had more unusual characters than her old one. After graduation she taught high school in Jilin City, the provincial capital.

For seven years she wrote letters to America, the land that had consigned her to spending her twenties alone, and the land that would later claim her children, one by one. Her letters have not survived. All that remains of the young woman she was is contained in a few terse sentences in my grandfather’s diary, like the bright flash of a forest animal glimpsed through the trees: her solicitude, loneliness, sparks of ill temper.

Xiangheng plans to return home because my mother is sick.

I bought a pair of shoes to send home for Xiangheng.

In Xiangheng’s letter she creates an uproar, saying she has suffered a great wrong.

I got three letters from Xiangheng, all urging me to go home. Because my own plans are not finished, I cannot return yet.

My grandmother wished to go to America too, but my great-grandfather laid down the law. Foreign countries were not for women, he said. A woman should stay home.

*  *  *

January 1, 1926
China’s internal chaos is a cause of much worry. China will surely have one day when it is prosperous. I will see this in my lifetime. Every person must work hard for the coming of this day.

My personal conduct must be honorable and in my dealings I must be more frugal.

I had lunch with my landlord, Harry Weart. His neighbors, an old couple, like to play with dogs and birds and they spoke of their pets. I am disgusted by this kind of talk.

My grandfather arrived in America in 1920. It was the era of bathtub gin, petting parties, and Al Capone, but he barely noticed. In the pages of his diary, he wrote about his search for a proper course of study and about the political situation in China. These two subjects were connected: By acquiring the right skills in America, he would learn what was necessary to help his homeland become a modern nation. He flirted with literature and economics before settling on mining engineering: Industrial development would be China’s salvation.

During his seven years in America, the situation back home deteriorated. The national government basically ceased to exist, as warlords with personal armies fought one another across the country. In my grandfather’s American diaries of the 1920s, the people who loomed largest were the Chinese warlords Wu Peifu and Zhang Zuolin.

January 26
Zhang Zuolin has already set free Ivanov [the Russian director of the Chinese Eastern Railway], so the Harbin question is temporarily resolved. The cause of the incident in Harbin was directly related to Feng Yuxiang’s return to the North-east. One man favors an alliance with the Russians and the other with the Japanese, but each is pursuing his own interest.

China still does not have a person who manufactures machinery. To have it begin with me in the future would be a most wonderful thing.

January 28
Today there was heavy snow and winds and the roads were almost impassable. My colleague Backland got married today at five o’clock . . .

Manchuria and Mongolia have become one of the world’s big problems. If we don’t handle this properly, it will be hard to prevent their becoming a second Korea. This is the homeland of my ancestors. How can I offer it up to someone else? I swear that I will take the defense of the territory and the welfare of the people there as my own responsibility.

March 4
My glasses were broken so I went to the eye doctor for a new pair. They cost twenty-four American dollars. So expensive!

Jilin’s forests are naturally suited for manufacturing paper, and Jilin exports large quantities of leather products each year and even more of fur, while its railroads are very convenient. I will look into working in the paper industry.

June 4
I did surveying at Mount Franklin today. The trees were lush and fragrant and the air fresh. The early mornings are very cold and at night my throat itches . . .

If China wants to become prosperous and strong, it must develop its steel industry; otherwise it cannot resist the encroachments of foreign nations. Right now its machinery relies entirely on imports. If a war begins and resources from the outside world are cut off, then China will surely be defeated.

November 12
I cleaned a coal-cutting machine today and took it apart. It was most interesting.

To govern a nation and teach its people, or to occupy a place, one must have good propaganda. To rely solely on military power will lead to defeat.

Thousands of Chinese students went to America during the first two decades of the twentieth century, the first large wave of people to go abroad for study. They saw Western learning as the best way to help China, and they gravitated toward practical subjects like economics, the natural sciences, and especially engineering—the chosen major of more than a third of the Chinese students in America between 1905 and 1924. My grandfather attended the Michigan College of Mines, in an old copper-mining region near the Canadian border. He graduated in 1925, thirty-third in a class of forty-four; apparently the New Learning was still giving him trouble.

I CAME UPON my grandfather’s diaries by accident. My father said that the family had abandoned everything they owned through the years of the Second World War, the civil war, the flight to Taiwan, and the trip to America. More than a year after I started researching our family history, I was talking on the phone with my father and I asked him if he owned anything that had belonged to his father. Unexpectedly, he said he had two diaries, one from my grandfather’s time in America and the other from when the family lived in Chongqing during the war. They ran close to a thousand pages.

“It isn’t very interesting,” my father said. “He just writes things like, ‘Today the Japanese army is closing in around the city.’ Stuff like that.”

“Actually,” I said, “that’s pretty interesting.”

Through the pages of his diary, I came to know the grandfather I had never met in life. He was a young man searching for a purpose, dreaming of a wide range of careers. He found and quit jobs about as often as the migrants did, quickly growing bored and anxious that he wasn’t learning enough. He was lonely and adrift.

July 14
In the factory when I have free time, I think of all kinds of troubles. I feel like a single boat floating on the great ocean. Even if the heart desires quiet, it cannot be.

November 18
I have worked almost two years. Sometimes I feel I am not interested in it. But you must handle work yourself even if it has no interest for you. Now with China’s situation so bad, this is precisely the time for men to make a firm resolution to establish their own enterprises. I must try hard 120 percent.

Self-improvement was a constant theme in the diary. After he finished his schooling, my grandfather spent two years doing practical training at mines and factories in the Northeast and the Midwest. He enrolled in a Chicago night school to study electrical machinery. The diary entries bristle with alien English words he was trying to learn: Goodman Standard Shortwall Machine. Ratio of cement sand and slag. Pyramid Pump Open Hearth Mixer Blast Furnace Corrugated Underframe Door. He copied down inspirational advice from the titans of American industry.

Marshall Field’s Ten Things Worth Remembering

1.  The Value of Time

2.  The Success of Perseverance

3.  The Pleasure of Working

4.  The Worth of Character

5.  The Dignity of Simplicity

6.  The Improvement of Talent

7.  The Joy of Originating

8.  The Virtue of Patience

9.  The Wisdom of Economy

10.  The Power of Kindness

From afar, his family pressured him to come home. Reading my grandfather’s response in his diary—My desire to return home is strong, but my studies are not finished yet—reminded me of Chunming, who had expressed an almost identical thought in hers. Who knows why I am not going home for the new year? The main reason: I really do not want to waste time. Because I must study!

But at heart these journeys were different enterprises. The factory girls go to the city to improve their lives; my grandfather left home so he could return one day and better serve his country. You could say that my grandfather left home for home, while the girls leave home only for themselves. Chunming in her diary never stopped circling her favorite subject, which was herself: how the city was changing her, how others might see her, and the minute details of her physical appearance: My eyes do not have double eyelids, she wrote, but they are not too small. Their being single-lidded has not affected their vision. I don’t have thin lips but my mouth can speak persuasively. I speak loudly and boldly, not gently, but this has been my nature from birth. Through hundreds of pages of his diary, no such selfportrait of my grandfather ever emerges. The entries read like classical poems—terse and controlled, the individual implied but never visible.

During his time in America