Mountain Girl River Girl (10 page)

Chapter
Thirteen

The Niavia Shoe Company was virtually hidden from the outside world behind a high red-brick wall, on top of which fragments of glass poked skyward from the mortar, reflecting the glare of the perimeter lights. A tall cast-iron gate marked the entrance, while a sturdy guardhouse stood next to it. Inside, Shui-lian, Pan-pan, and the rest of the recruits followed Mr. Yao along a dirt path and onto a paved road that wound between large, featureless warehouse-style buildings of grey concrete. At the back of the compound, rows of one-storey shacks with whitewashed walls and dark roof tiles stood in rigid columns like soldiers at attention. A wide ditch divided the shacks into two uneven blocks. These long, narrow buildings, Mr. Yao announced, were the workers’ dorms. There were seventy of them altogether, housing about eight hundred workers—five hundred female and three hundred male. Tin-roofed shelters, only one for each block, served as washing areas. “Left side men, right side women,” Mr. Yao asserted.

The farmers had nicknamed the compound “Nightmares of the Red Mansion” after the Chinese classic novel
Dreams of Red Mansions
. They were bitter and angry at the factory’s refusal to hire local residents. The owner, Gong-Da-Xiao-Jie—Elder Miss Gong—claimed that to run a “tight ship,” outsiders were best. From her experience, she had concluded that the farther her workers were from their hometowns, the less chance they would quit, and the less chance still that the locals would get involved in what was going on inside the factory. A stranded ship, some called the factory, because at the foot of the outside wall a ten-metre-wide moat had been dug through the fields of wheat, millet, and vegetables. This design had further enraged the local elders, who accused the owner of making a mockery of the Forbidden City in Beijing, the home of China’s emperors for centuries. It, too, was surrounded by a moat as a defence against attack.

Eleven months after the factory began production and after nearly a million pairs of Niavia-brand running shoes had been shipped across the Pacific, no one in the factory had yet laid eyes on the powerful Elder Miss Gong, although her edicts kept floating down like dandruff, reminding the workers from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning that “We must make more shoes.” Her latest decree had been written on large red cotton sheets hung above the pathways, printed on colourful paper pasted on the walls of the canteen and toilets, and repeated over and over by Mr. Tony and Mr. Tom each time they moved their lips, it seemed. Mr. Tony and Mr. Tom were Elder Miss Gong’s American assistants, or her left and right arms, as they proudly called themselves. Her two furry arms, said the workers behind the men’s backs, because their forearms were covered with thick black hair.

F
OLLOWING MR. YAO’S DIRECTIONS,
the new workers were shown to their assigned dorms. Pan-pan and Shui-lian were taken to Dorm Number 12, a concrete cell about three metres wide and eight metres long, with tiny windows along the top of the side walls. Shui-lian was instantly reminded of the blockhouses she had seen from time to time up on the riverbanks, remnants of China’s civil wars. Six double bunks were lined against the bare cement walls, three on one side of the room and three on the other. A single bare bulb burned feebly at the end of a wire a few centimetres below the ceiling, struggling to illuminate the cramped room and its inhabitants. The air was stale, damp, and musty.

All the top bunks were taken. Since there were no chairs and no room for any other furniture, most of the occupants were sitting on the beds, leaning against their rolled-up bedding, chatting or nibbling snacks. In the narrow aisle running down the centre of the room, two young women stood on the hard-packed dirt floor, facing each other in their panties and tank tops and arguing heatedly, their hands flying rapidly about in the air. Their shouting was brought to an abrupt halt by the arrival and stern voice of Elder Sister Meng, the director of the Sewing Department.

Meng then did a quick introduction, calling out the name of each occupant in the room. Before she turned to leave, she pointed out two vacant lower bunks next to the door, across from each other, and told Shui-lian and Pan-pan that they’d better hurry and unpack their belongings because the light would go out in less than an hour.

Pan-pan began to untie her bedroll and insisted over Shui-lian’s protests that Shui-lian take the new quilt Pan-pan had been given by Xin-Ma. She could make do with a sheet and her cotton-padded jacket until Shui-lian got her own.

“What are you? A diehard Communist?” a woman who was half-lying and half-sitting on the top bunk above Pan-pan sneered, even though her mouth was jammed full of food. “If your pal doesn’t want your quilt, I wouldn’t mind—”

“Who do you think you are?” Shui-lian cut her off fiercely. “Get your own damn quilt!”

“My, my, my.” The woman pulled herself up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed, her eyes narrowed to slits. “Maybe I should come down and teach you some manners.”

“Stop it, Shui-lian,” Pan-pan cried out. “Give me a hand, will you? Do you have to pick a fight with everyone you meet? Please forgive her,” she pleaded with the woman in a shaky voice. “We had a long day. We are both tired.”

The truth was, the cramped dorm alone was frightening enough without Shui-lian’s outburst. Until the night she stayed with Lao Ma’s family, Pan-pan had never lived with strangers. Although the prospect of an independent worker’s life had excited her, suddenly not knowing what it comprised scared her just as much. She was nervous as it was, without a looming conflict.

“Remember Lao Zhou’s final warning, or you’re on your own,” Pan-pan hissed at Shui-lian through clamped teeth. Forcing a smile, she quickly added, “Cousin.”

“Cousin?” A woman whose name was Fang-yuan cut in, her slippers dragging as she approached Pan-pan. “Are you saying you two are related?” she demanded, tilting her head, her eyes moving back and forth as though spinning an invisible yarn between Pan-pan and Shui-lian.

“Yes, Fang-yuan Jie-Jie. On my mother’s side,” Pan-pan answered calmly. “She’s Shui-lian, and I’m Pan-pan.”

“Knock that grin off your face,” Fang-yuan bellowed, her hands resting on her bony hips. Around her, up and down the aisle, all the chatter stopped. Faces turned toward the two newcomers. A couple of the women got off their beds and moved closer, anticipating a showdown.

Red faced, Fang-yuan continued, her voice quivering with anger. “In the past ten months, I’ve tried over and over to get the factory to hire my cousin, but time and again I failed. You know why?” She paused, glaring at Pan-pan. “I was told that the factory doesn’t like relatives working together. Or in their exact words, ‘When village clans get together, they cause trouble.’” She took a deep breath. “Village clans,” she repeated and spat loudly onto the floor. “As if we’re cavemen and -women. The irony is that my cousin no longer lives in a village because it was washed away by the great flood two years ago. She lost her entire family. She would have been dead too if she hadn’t been visiting us when it happened. The last I heard, she had gone south to look for work after Niavia rejected her again, and I don’t know where she is now.”

All of a sudden she thrust her face directly in front of Pan-pan’s. “I know the real reason,” she jeered, spitting again, this time narrowly missing Pan-pan’s foot. “Because I don’t have a pretty face like yours, and I don’t know how to fling cheap smiles around like used goods in a second-hand store and—”

“And?” Shui-lian snarled, stepped in between them, her face so close to the woman’s that she felt the hot air flare out of her nostrils. “Cheap or not, at least they’re smiles. I wonder if you could ever crack a sliver on that stiff board of yours. You’d better untwist your pinched face before someone does it for you.”

“Stop! Stop it, both of you,” Pan-pan shouted, slapping her thigh in frustration. “Fang-yuan, I’m sorry your cousin isn’t here, but you can’t blame us, can you?”

The belligerent woman’s anger seemed to disappear. “I guess not,” she admitted, shrugging her shoulders.

At that moment, a bell rang. “Come on, Fang-yuan. Curfew in ten minutes,” someone called out.

Pan-pan silently spread her sheet on the wooden boards of her bunk. Still upset with her friend and refusing to look at her, she covered her upper body with her jacket and settled down just before the light went out.

A
N HOUR LATER,
wrapped in pitch darkness, Pan-pan lay on her side, face to the wall, waiting anxiously for sleep to come. From a distance she heard the slap of flip-flops beating rhythmically on a pathway, growing louder until they stopped outside her dorm. Her eyes snapped open and her breath caught in her throat when she smelled the cigarette smoke that forced its way through the cracks of the plank door. A sharp clink and clunk echoed in the night air, followed by the rasp of a sliding bolt and the piercing slap of the hasp. Recognizing the noises, especially the clapping shut of a padlock, Pan-pan was seized by panic. She raised herself up to rest on her elbows. The slaps of the flip-flops resumed, moving toward the next dorm. Pan-pan began to tremble.

“Shui-lian,” she whispered in a shaking voice.

“Yes, I’m awake.”

“Shui-lian, we’ve been locked in!”

“I know.”

Why is she so calm? Pan-pan thought with a surge of annoyance. What if there’s a fire? Surely Shui-lian should know that only animals are treated in such a way. Pan-pan recalled her first visit, when she was five years old, to the village barn where three cows were kept at night.

“Why do we lock them up?” she had asked her mother. “They won’t be able to get out if there’s a fire.” Her mother had explained that because good cows were expensive and hard to get, the villagers felt they had to apply double diligence to protect them. “I’m sure that if the cows could secure the door themselves from the inside, there’d be no need to lock them up at night,” her mother had joked.

Early the next day, Pan-pan nervously headed for the public washing station that served the needs of nearly five hundred women. Dozens of taps projected from a naked pipe, suspended horizontally over a long cement sink, that dominated the centre area. The place was already crowded and noisy, alive with clatter and arguments and bodies jostling for access to the sink. Those who were tall like Pan-pan or strong could easily win a spot, hunching over the edge of the sink. Those who were small had to fight their way in, fill their washbasins, then carry them to the side and put them down on the floor. At one end of the building, a row of showerheads poked out of the rough grey wall, appearing lonely and aloof.

From the moment Pan-pan stepped into the washing area she was filled with dread, wondering how she could possibly carry out Ah-Po’s instructions. She clutched her shoulder bag, hiding the tin of white powder, as her eyes wandered from one corner to another, searching in vain for a private spot. She doubted if Ah-Po’s present would ever see light again. If not, it would be only a matter of days before her flaw was exposed. When she left home, she had looked forward to a new beginning. Now it seemed the adventure was about to rip open her secret, which she had kept even from her new friend, fearing public ridicule.

Down at the far end of the sink she saw Shui-lian, who, being shorter than most of the other women, tried to shove her way in to reach a tap. Already Pan-pan longed for the privacy of her home.

Back in the dorm, Pan-pan found herself alone with the dorm leader, a woman from southern Anhui. She confided to Wang-Jie—Sister Wang—her worries about the door being locked at night and related the story of her childhood visit to the barn. Sister Wang shrugged her shoulders and pressed her lips together, forming a thin line.

“Your mother sounds like a smart woman, but her explanation doesn’t apply here. You would think there was a difference between animals and human beings, that the latter are the superior ones, wouldn’t you? Trust me, girl. Just wait a week or two. You’ll be like the rest of us, too tired to lift your eyelids. As soon as your head hits your pillow you’ll hear nothing, see nothing, and be bothered by nothing. Lock or no lock.”

“But it still doesn’t mean we should be treated that way, sleeping or not sleeping. We’re not animals!”

“Mind your manners, girl. Since you’re talking about animals and people in one breath, let me tell you something. In many parts of the world, including China, some animals are treated much better than people. If you’re not happy here and don’t want to be locked up, you know where the door is.”

It took Pan-pan a couple of seconds to realize what the dorm leader was implying. Frustrated and speechless, she returned to her bunk, silently picked up her enamel bowls, and headed to the canteen. Sister Wang’s harsh words spun around in her head as she ate her rice porridge and steamed buns stuffed with pickled cabbage slices, surrounded by slurping and smacking noises. Why is Sister Wang so nasty? It’s totally uncalled for. She sounds so bitter and unhappy—yet she did praise my mom, calling her a smart woman.

Thinking about Mom, Pan-pan unconsciously clenched her arms tightly against her ribcage, her eyes darting nervously about her as though someone out there could see what she was thinking or, worse, pick up the smell she was attempting to conceal. How come Lao Zhou, the recruiter, who had told them so much about this factory, had failed to mention that attending to personal needs was a group activity, that washing and cleaning oneself was so open, like at a town fair?