Adrift in the South

I walk the alleyways of an urban village in Beijing, gloomy in a late-afternoon thunderstorm. My skin is sticky in the moist air. I recently turned thirty-two, and I’ve been drifting around the country for sixteen years, sixteen dreamlike years that began in China’s land of milk and honey in the early 2000s, the southern border city of Shenzhen. A growing city where tropical steam would evaporate from the asphalt roads and fill my trouser legs, soaking me through to my skin. The heat would snatch at every strand of my hair, and remembering it now pulls me against the current of time, hauls me back to the roaring years of Shenzhen, to my coming of age, the summer I turned fifteen.

It was a few weeks after the end of the SARS pandemic in 2003. My family paid 1,000 yuan to my vocational-school teacher to shove me and my classmates into a train to Shenzhen. It was a thirty-hour ride from my village, and there were so many people heading south to look for work that it was impossible to find standing room, let alone a seat. Eventually I found a spot in a vestibule, which felt like the intestine of the train, and squatted my way to Shenzhen. By the second half of the night I was so exhausted that I could no longer keep my eyes open. But as soon as I dozed off, the thunderous noise from the train tracks would wake me again. My head felt like it was on the verge of exploding, as if it would split in half at any moment. Passing out and waking up, passing out and waking up again – this was how I survived the ride to the South, trapped between strangers’ shoulders and legs, suitcases and duffel bags.

The train stopped in Huizhou, the farthest we could go without a border pass. I got off the train, exited the station through its front gate, and gazed at the low mountains and fluffy clouds.

I can still remember the thrill and brightness of that moment. It was the first time in my life that I’d seen such a huge expanse of mountains and tall buildings. It all looked even more beautiful and lucid than what I had seen in movies. It was also the first time in my life that I’d been surrounded by so many people, but that realization wouldn’t sink in until a few days later, when I entered my first factory.

I learned many life lessons in the South – the first came shortly after my classmates and I walked the full length of the station plaza, while our teacher looked for an intercity bus to Shenzhen. A voice came from a nearby speaker: ‘Ten yuan per passenger from Huizhou to Henggang [a town in Shenzhen], only ten yuan per passenger.’ Our teacher thought it was a good deal and shoved all of us into the bus. It took only ten minutes for everything to go terribly wrong. Two men who posed as conductors began to collect ticket fares from the back of the bus. ‘You need to pay fifty,’ they told the first woman, who had taken out a ten-yuan bill, ‘or we’ll drop you off in the middle of nowhere. Come on, even an idiot knows that ten yuan can’t get you anywhere. If you want to go to Henggang, get a fifty ready.’

Nobody was prepared for this: we had become like characters in a TV show, scammed and trapped on an illegal bus. The men’s brazen attitude seemed to have an effect, and the woman decided it would be best to pay the fifty without resisting. The next passenger was a man in a dress shirt – perhaps he’d been in situations like this before. He chose his words carefully. ‘But you said it was ten yuan when we boarded the bus. Please let me out. I don’t need to go all the way.’ The taller fake conductor turned to him. ‘You’re ready to leave? Well, you can fuck off after you pay,’ he said, scornfully. ‘Let me ask you, is the problem that you don’t want to pay us a single dime? Is that right?’ Before the man could respond, the other fake conductor lost his patience. He raised his arm and slapped the man across the face. ‘You piece of shit, you thought there’s nothing we could do, eh?’ he roared. ‘Listen, if you want to get off this bus alive, pay us the goddamn money.’ He turned toward the front of the bus and hollered, ‘Everybody listen up! Get your fifty ready before we have to ask for it. Don’t make us do anything we don’t want to do.’

A few other passengers paid them, one after another. I thought I was doomed. My dad had given my teacher just about every penny he had earned from the last harvest, and all he had saved for me was 200 yuan. The two fake conductors had stopped in front of one of my classmates, who said, timidly, ‘I don’t have any money. I’ve given everything to my teacher. Could you please go ask him?’ They moved on from my classmate and stared at the young guy next to him, who also looked like a student. His response was the same: ‘I don’t have any money either. Go ask my teacher, he has everything.’ Back then, many people had opened new vocational schools. Boasting that they could teach young people useful skills and find them factory jobs, they made poor rural families like mine pay them a ransom just to bring their children to the South.

My teacher and another vocational-school teacher immediately understood what they needed to do. They made eye contact, stood up and yelled, ‘Stop the bus right now! Let us go!’ Their two dozen students also stood and joined them. Now it was the con men’s turn to worry about what they should do. They were clearly outnumbered, so the driver had no choice but to stop. We got off. One passenger pulled the key out of the ignition and suggested we call the police. He told the others to keep an eye on the two con men and not to let them get away. Back then it was rare for people to own mobile phones, so my teacher volunteered to use his to call the police. Someone who had already paid his fifty broke a thick branch from a camphor tree standing by the highway, ready to use force to get his money back.

The police picked up our call, but nobody knew where we were. As we tried to describe our location, the bus suddenly started up and sped away, leaving behind a trail of fumes. Some of the passengers sighed in dismay. One said, ‘They must have had a backup key. Well, it sure looks like I’m not getting my fifty back now.’ ‘How about we try to get out of here?’ another said. ‘We don’t know nothing about this place. What if they come back with more men before the police arrive?’ My teacher stopped another bus that was heading toward Henggang. Before we got on board, he carefully asked the conductor how much the tickets would be, and told her that we all had just been scammed. ‘Fifteen per person. We’re legal. Why did you listen to their nonsense?’ She spoke in Cantonese-accented Mandarin and smiled – she must have understood what had happened to us. With that, we boarded the new bus and stood the entire way to Henggang. I stared out the window in a daze, as if I had been rescued from catastrophe. Under the dazzling sun, rice and plantain silently grew in the fields, the last relics of Shenzhen’s rustic past.

My teacher brought me and my classmates to a cheap hostel. Everyone was given a wooden bunk without even a mattress. Perhaps all the guests this place had ever hosted were vocational-school students needing a temporary stay. We took out the blankets we had brought with us from home and lay down on the wood. We were so thoroughly exhausted that a few of my classmates immediately fell asleep.

I was in the same room as a guy from Lankao, the county next to my village. Neither of us had ever been away from home, and we thought it’d be embarrassing – and inconvenient – to eat a full meal on the train while other people watched. Both of us were starving. All we’d eaten were two packs of instant noodles, dry, through the entire thirty-hour journey. I took out the dozen hard-boiled eggs my mom had packed for me, only to discover that they had been crushed in my bag and rotted in the Southern heat. ‘They’ve gone bad,’ the guy from Lankao said. ‘You should throw them away.’ What a shame, I thought, as I tossed the eggs into the trash can. The memory of those rotten eggs always brings me a sense of bitterness and regret, which is the same thing I feel when I realize I let the best decade of my life slip away from me on the factory floor.

Two days later I set foot in a factory for the first time in my life. It was a big factory called Lianda that manufactured language learning devices, located in Lilang Village in the town of Buji. Our teacher brought us straight there from an employment agency, and we were offered jobs without any formal hiring process, perhaps because of how little they were going to pay us. We went through onboarding, received our ID badges, and were led to our respective production floors. What unfolded in front of my eyes was a spectacle – so many workers, all dressed in the same pale green uniform and repeating the same motions. It seemed like an ocean of robots, but all I felt was a sense of intrigue. I was too intoxicated with pride to think critically. Finally! I thought. Now I get to work in a big factory. I was fifteen and a half years old. I was a child laborer.

My classmates and I were dispatched along the assembly lines, and most of us were given tasks that required little technical skill. I was put at the end of my assembly line. The line captain was kind. He introduced me to another worker and said, ‘Seventy-Two, I got you a new apprentice. Your job is to teach him what he needs to do, and then you can go help the fellows working on motherboards.’ I carefully studied Mr Seventy-Two, who was also wearing the uniform and plastic ID badge, on which was printed his unit, age, initial job and start date. We were about the same age. Later I learned that the number seventy-two referred to the seventy-second step in the assembly line, and anyone could be called ‘Seventy-Two’ as long as they occupied the seventy-second workstation. And so I became the new ‘Seventy-Two’, or Seventy-Two Jr.

My task was to put earpieces into small plastic bags, seal the bags with tape, and pack them into the boxes that contained finished products. Seventy-Two Sr walked me through each step and said, in a low voice, ‘This is the easiest job. You’ll figure it out very fast.’ He watched me practice a few times and said, ‘Good work. All you need is repetition.’ But shortly after he left, I found myself struggling to keep up with the rest of the assembly line. The pile of earpieces on my workstation slowly grew bigger. The worker next to me noticed I was falling behind and shouted, ‘A-Yuan, A-Yuan! We need you here!’ A-Yuan was the utility man on my assembly line. He knew every job on the line, and anyone who needed to use the bathroom had to get a pass from him so he could fill in for them. Nobody was allowed to leave their workstations without a pass, or production on the entire assembly line would have to stop.

A-Yuan came to my workstation, ready to scold me, but he held back when he realized it was my first day. He helped me with the pile of earpieces and taught me how to do my job faster. ‘This is the simplest step in the entire production line,’ he said. ‘If you can’t even get this done, you’ll soon be fired.’ He asked me where I was from, and I told him Shangqiu, Henan. He said he grew up in Zhumadian. We were from the same province. I had never been to Zhumadian, but I felt fond of him because we shared regional roots. And that was how I finished, with overwhelming fear and anxiety, my first morning of work.

The shift ended at noon. Someone came to fetch me and the other newcomers and brought us to the factory’s store, where we could buy lunchboxes and utensils. We asked how much the chopsticks were, but the store owner said that everyone ate with a spoon. When we looked into the cafeteria, we saw it was filled with workers holding their lunchboxes and shoving food into their mouths with spoons, and that was enough to convince us. The cafeteria served stir-fries with steamed rice. Coming from the Central Plain Region, where wheat was the main crop, I was used to eating bread and noodles. It was my first time eating rice, and I found it quite tasty.

I returned to my dorm with my food, only to witness something that nearly made me drop my lunchbox: a few of my roommates were fully naked, sitting on their beds in front of mini-fans, wolfing down their lunch. Was this a tradition from their hometown? Or was the July heat in Shenzhen so unbearable for them? It was true, the weather was hot, but definitely not hot enough that they needed to take off their underpants to cool down. Later, when I was washing my lunchbox and spoon, another roommate told me that they were from one of the central provinces, either Hubei or Hunan. How beautiful their hometown must have been to nourish such carefree spirits, I thought, imagining the gorgeous mountains they could climb, and the pristine rivers they would plunge into and bathe in. This was my earliest exposure to Shenzhen’s inclusivity. In my dozen years working in factories across the nation, I have yet to experience another moment of culture shock like this.

After lunch, my classmates and I went out to look for a telephone booth – we wanted to call our families and tell them the good news: we had found jobs in a factory. The security guard stopped us at the front gate and told us we could only leave the factory campus after 6 p.m. And so, when our afternoon shift ended, without having dinner, we sprinted back to our dorm and grabbed our phone books. Across the street from the factory was a small grocery store that shared a storefront with a telephone room. long-distance calls 50 cents per minute, read the cardboard sign hanging on the front door. We swarmed into the room and crowded around the telephone. My house didn’t have a landline, so I called a distant cousin who lived in the same village. ‘I found a job in a factory,’ I said, asking him to relay the news to my parents. ‘Tell them not to worry about me, and I’ll call back in a few days.’ I didn’t want to rack up a big phone bill, and quickly hung up.

I glanced at the ID badge of the guy from Lankao and saw his name was Tian Guoli. It sounded like the name of some modern-day Casanova. He was a sociable character, and started a conversation the minute we all came out of the telephone room. ‘That was so expensive!’ he lamented, and we all nodded in agreement. A classmate spotted a giant rat grazing on rice grains scattered by a manhole cover. ‘Rats from the South are so big!’ Tian Guoli cried in astonishment, ‘And how are they not afraid of people?’ The rat continued its dinner as if we weren’t there. It was very strange indeed – we were only a few meters away. ‘People are not the only brave species in the South,’ another classmate joked. ‘Even the rats here have guts.’ We laughed as we crossed the road and hurried back to our evening overtime shift, joining our co-workers who had already finished dinner and returned to the production floors ablaze with lights.

Our shift lasted until midnight. For village kids like me and my classmates, who were used to going to bed before eight, our first day working in a factory was very demanding. After we returned to our rooms, we lay down on our bunks without washing and quickly fell asleep. The fatigue of my first day of work carried into my dreams, and to this day has yet to dissipate. Over the past decade I’ve traveled from the South to the North, moving from one factory to another, always living through the same, hazy dreamscape of exhaustion – will I ever awake?

The next day, a few of my classmates approached veteran workers and asked them how much they were paid. It wasn’t uncommon for newcomers to ask their co-workers about their earnings, but managers – especially managers of dysfunctional factories – never wanted them to. They’d just encourage one another to quit. Well, what answer did my classmates get? ‘Low wages, long overtime hours, many overdue payments.’ That was enough to wipe out what was left of our motivation after a difficult first day. The horrible conditions of the factory didn’t surprise us: good factories would be hiring their workers on the open job market; our factory, on the other hand, was forced to pay a recruitment fee to our teacher and an employment agency before it could manage to bring us onto the production floor. My classmates decided to confront our teacher and ask him to find us work somewhere else. Our teacher was in a difficult spot: he would have to forfeit his recruitment fee if we quit within the first three days. He had no choice but to help us look for another factory.

After the morning shift our line captain told me and my classmates to go to the HR office and sign the paperwork for resignation. We decided to go together after lunch, but my teacher pulled me aside and told me I couldn’t leave – my government ID said I was fifteen, and other factories would be reluctant to hire a child laborer. He told me to stay put for now, and that he would come pick me up in six months after I turned sixteen. I was so young, and had so little experience in the real world, that I couldn’t summon up the courage to ask my teacher to help me, even though I was desperate to go onto the next factory with my classmates. I was afraid that if the teacher couldn’t find me another job, he would send me home, charge me for the train ticket, and not return a single penny of what my family had spent to send me south. That 1,000 yuan my dad had paid came from an entire season’s harvest over seven mu of land – how embarrassing would it be to return home without having earned anything! I said to my teacher, tears in my eyes, ‘Okay, mister, that’s all right. Please promise to come back and find me when I turn sixteen, won’t you?’ My classmates had already finished getting their paperwork signed by their line captains, the floor managers and the factory heads. Carrying their luggage on their backs, they headed out and marched toward the next factory.

Little did I expect that the next few days in the factory would be exponentially worse. I had never been so far from home, and all my classmates had left. I was overcome with loneliness – an intense loneliness that submerged through to the concrete floor beneath my feet, splattered over the assembly line, glazed the unfamiliar faces of my co-workers below the fluorescent lights. It soaked through the pile of earpieces on my workstation and infected every cell of my body. It was an unprecedented loneliness, and by the end of my second evening shift it had set all my hopes and teenage innocence aflame.

My hands repeated the same packing and taping motions, but my mind was elsewhere, lost in a whirlwind of fear, uncertainty, and solitude. I felt like a walking zombie who had no control over his body. The pile of earpieces in front of me grew larger and larger, and unfinished products slipped right past me. The worker next to me called my name, but I was too dazed to hear his voice. Later, the line captain came over, took a good look at me, and understood what was going on in my mind. He helped me get through the pile of earpieces and said, gently, ‘No need to think too much, man. We got lots of people coming from your hometown. It won’t take too long before you feel at home. Come on. Don’t we all have a rough time at the beginning of things?’ But after he left, my mind returned again to a state of uncontrollable chaos. I had fallen into an abyss of solitude, and I wasn’t sure I’d make it out alive.

I thought about my middle-school classmates, some of whom were also working in factories in Shenzhen. I lifted my head and dreamed of spotting one of them – I’d sprint to their workstation, reconnect with them, and go back to work filled with energy, as if I were a new man. I even thought of the guy I’d had a big fight with in seventh grade, whose nails had left a scar on my face that is still there today. If I saw him in the factory, I’d drop everything and run over to him; I would shake his hand and tell him that I had forgiven him and that I cared for him, even though he was the only person who had ever hurt me during my eight years in school.

I still don’t know how to articulate what I felt in that first factory: why was I so possessed with fear and loneliness? And how naive I was to believe that I might run into an old friend! I simply didn’t understand how vast a city could be: I had no idea how many people worked on my production floor, and couldn’t possibly grasp the enormity of the total population of the factory, or Lilang Village’s population across all its factories, or the town of Buji’s population across all its villages, or the district’s population across all its towns, or the total population of Shenzhen across all of its districts. It would be harder to find an acquaintance in my factory than to discover a needle in a haystack.

I don’t remember how I survived the rest of the evening shift. At 11.30 p.m., we were finally dismissed. As I left the production floor I was engulfed by the crowd of workers heading back to their dorms. I was too overwhelmed to take another step – all I could focus on was my weeping heart. That night I couldn’t sleep. I was exhausted, but all I could do was lie in bed, listen to my roommates’ snores, drowning in a torrent of emotion. I wanted to escape. I was praying for a miracle, that my teacher would show up and reunite me with my classmates – if someone suddenly came to my room and asked me what my biggest dream was, that would have been my honest answer.

The sky began to lighten, and I finally fell asleep. At 7.30 a.m. I dragged myself out of bed, brushed my teeth, had a quick breakfast, and forced myself back to my workstation. But I was still too dazed to keep up with the rest of the assembly line. My line captain came over. ‘If you really can’t bring yourself to work, then it might be best for you to quit and leave.’ Well, I wanted to quit as much as he wanted me to. But if I quit, where would I go? I didn’t even have my teacher’s phone number, and who else did I know? I would be like a fish washed up on the shore – I would struggle to find a puddle of water, let alone my peers. And that was why I decided to stay put. I was depressed, and felt that I lacked the courage to make difficult decisions and stand up for myself. ‘It’s okay,’ I told my line captain. ‘Please let me stay.’

I was among the last to leave the production floor after the morning shift, followed only by a few line captains and managers who were chatting and laughing loudly. I had no idea how I would survive the long days ahead, and how I would not give up on myself – until I suddenly spotted my guy Tian Guoli from Lankao, who was smiling and waving at me. I thought that I must be dreaming. Behind him stood my teacher and another classmate. I ran like mad toward them. ‘What brought you all back here?’ I shouted, cheerfully. ‘I thought you had all forgotten about me. You have no idea what I’ve been going through.’ ‘We’ve been waiting for you forever,’ Tian Guoli said. ‘The security guard wouldn’t let us onto the production floor no matter what we said. What took you so long getting off of your shift? We were scared you’d had enough and run away. We’re here to pick you up. Tomorrow you’ll start working in our new factory. They agreed to give you a chance even though you’re underage, but you’ll need to work hard. Do you know how hard I begged them before they finally said yes?’ I was so excited that I was almost in tears. ‘How can I thank you enough, my brother,’ I said to Tian Guoli. I told him I’d definitely take this opportunity seriously. I then went to thank my teacher, who told me to grab lunch and then get the paperwork for resignation. But I was too excited to eat – I sprinted back to my dorm and packed up in no time. When the afternoon shift started, I was the first to return to the production floor, where I found my line captain and the floor manager. They signed my documents, and I handed my certificate of resignation to the security guard. And that was how I left Shenzhen Lianda Electronics Factory, the first factory I worked at in my entire life. After packing earpieces for three days without pay, my insufferable loneliness at Workstation #72 had finally come to an end.

In recent years, working one difficult factory job after another, I’ve begun to suspect that my escape from Lianda might’ve exhausted my good luck for the next decade. At the same time, I feel extremely thankful that Lianda was, at the very least, a legitimate factory – if Lianda was an illegal company that abused its workers, who knows what could’ve happened to me?

That afternoon, my teacher and classmates and I took a bus from Upper Lilang Village in the town of Buji to the Jianlong Village Industrial Park in the town of Henggang, home to my new factory, the Sino-Nokia Electronics Factory. The factory’s name reflected the spirit of the time, as Nokia phones were fashionable and dominated the market. Sino-Nokia specialized in radios – workers made radios as big as hens and as small as eggs.

At the factory, I was sent to an assembly line that was manufacturing small radios. My inspector was the line captain, a man with long hair, big eyes, and a medium build. I later learned that he was from Yunnan. My task was to secure battery boxes to the back of radio shells with a screwdriver. My movements were quite clumsy, but I had the right attitude and worked hard. A few minutes in, sweat beads were trickling down my face. ‘All good,’ the line captain said. ‘This isn’t hard. You’ll figure it out soon.’ With that, he signed his name on my recruitment form, and I was officially hired. Later that afternoon I moved into the factory dorm. Man, I was so happy – I felt hopeful about my new life and the immense possibilities before me, and I completely forgot that I was working a factory job with overtime shifts almost every day. The evening breeze carried the stench of burnt plastic across the entire factory campus, but all I could smell was novelty and excitement. Thus began a new chapter of my life, one in which I transformed from a fifteen-year-old knucklehead into a jaded man in his thirties, working factory jobs that took me to every corner of the nation.

My first day of work was 9 July 2003. It was the time of the century when everyone was riding the tide of China’s economic growth – except for us blue-collar workers, who had little access to new opportunities. When looking for work, you had to rely on acquaintances and employment agencies. Or worse, go directly to industrial parks and read through the job listings posted by the front gates of factory campuses, one by one. Some veteran workers started small businesses or dipped their toes into the stock market. But for most of us youngsters from the countryside, factories were the only places where we could be fed and housed. There were exceptions, of course: thefts and robberies were not rare. Regardless of what people did, everybody worked hard to earn their sixpence, and nobody bothered to lift their head and gaze up at the moon hanging over the industrial parks.

Sino-Nokia always withheld one month’s wage from its workers as a deposit, which meant that it wasn’t until after two difficult months that I earned the first paycheck of my life. I needed to be frugal with my cash, which wasn’t too difficult since we had no free time to spend money. Aside from the day off at the end of the month, we worked seven days a week, from eight in the morning to eleven at night. I was too young to be tired. It was as if a powerhouse in my body was generating energy every second I was awake. If I worked every shift of a month I’d get a bonus of twenty yuan, which would bring my monthly earnings up to about four hundred.

I was too young to understand that money was earned to be spent – I didn’t even want to invest in a water bottle. When I was thirsty, I would simply go to the tearoom when nobody was around and have a few big gulps of tap water. I had no idea that the tap water wasn’t safe to drink, or that things like ‘industrial waste’ and ‘pollution’ could damage my body. I didn’t understand why everyone brought their own water bottles, and why nobody drank from the tap. I was used to drinking freshly pumped well water back home, and it had never crossed my mind that water in the city might be dangerous.

My first paycheck was for a little over two hundred yuan, about twenty-two days’ worth of wages. I bought a tube of toothpaste and a prepaid telephone card. A veteran worker told me it was cheaper to buy a prepaid card than to go to a telephone room – I could use the public phone booth by the factory gate for only a dime a minute. I spoke with my parents once every two weeks. Because my parents didn’t have a telephone, I always called my cousin’s house and asked him to get my parents for me.

I always called my family after lunch – if I waited until the end of my evening shift it would be too late. Those lunch breaks were my second-happiest moments during my time at the factory, eclipsed only by when I received my pay. Those long calls sometimes ran over half an hour, and I didn’t hang up until it was time to go back to work. I was always happy to hear my parents’ voices, much happier than I am when I talk to them now. In recent years we don’t even speak so much as twice a month, and I always dread it when their number shows up on my phone screen. Speaking to them makes me anxious, because we run out of topics of conversation quickly, and they always ask me if I have a girlfriend. Well, the answer is always no. And every time they ask, I become a little less confident about finding one.

Back in 2003, it wasn’t so difficult to find love. But I was too young, and a girlfriend was the last thing I was worried about. I remember one time when the evening shift was canceled because the factory ran out of unprocessed parts. After my roommates had all gone out, I lay down on my upper bunk and began writing a letter to my family – it was still quite expensive to use the phone booth, and my mom asked me to write letters to save money. A girl from my production floor came into my room and told me that she wanted to take me out for the night. I said I needed to finish the letter and didn’t want to go out. And so she left, visibly upset. How close I was to having my first taste of romance! It was that beautiful stage of youth when love was within reach of everyone’s fingertips. And yet I’ve always strayed from what people might deem ‘a normal life’, perhaps ever since that night.

Back then, our only entertainment was roller-skating in a nearby park or watching pirated movies in an internet cafe. These were great ways to have fun, but I always needed to save money so I could send cash home. My older brother was in high school, and my younger brother was about to enter middle school – both of them needed money. I sent something home every two months. After I got to know my co-workers, I sometimes borrowed a few hundred from them and sent my parents a little extra. And when I paid them back, they could send their families a few extra bills as well.

Nobody was afraid of not being paid back. Well, there was one exception. A roommate once told me he ran out of cash, and asked if I could lend him fifty. He had a bad reputation in our dorm, and no one else would give him a dime. But I found myself unable to say no. I picked up the backpack next to my pillow, unzipped the pocket where I kept my cash, and took out a fifty – all in front of his eyes. At the end of the month, when I was ready to send money to my family, I discovered that the remaining three hundred in the pocket was gone. I went into a total panic, and all my roommates suspected he was the thief, since he had been absent from work for the past few days. When he came back, my guy Tian Guoli interrogated him, and he finally admitted he had stolen my money – and spent it all. On the next payday, he told me he needed to keep some money, and reluctantly paid me back only two hundred. That was the second important life lesson I learned in Shenzhen.

Another time I had to work an overnight shift, and I was sent to help the workers on the injection molding floor – they were falling behind on making radio shells. New workers like me were always sent on odd jobs like this because veteran workers would simply refuse to go. On the injection molding floor dozens of gigantic machines operated twenty-four hours a day, but even that wasn’t enough for the workers to meet their production goals. The floor manager was a big guy from Shandong. He was a little over thirty years old, but his bald head made him look much older. He spoke softly, and asked me to trim and smooth the rough edges of freshly molded radio shells with a blade. It was a relatively easy and safe job – only veteran workers were allowed to operate the injection molding machines, which could cut off the arm of an inexperienced worker. I had never done an overnight shift before, and by the second half of the night I was finding it increasingly difficult to keep my eyes open. I was on the verge of passing out when my blade suddenly slipped off the plastic shell and sliced open my index finger. I saw blood gushing out and let out a cry, which drew the manager’s attention. He wrapped my finger with gauze. ‘Don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘Why were you dozing off ? Just a few more hours of work, and you can sleep however much you want.’ I no longer felt tired, but the movements of my hands became much slower. When the shift ended at eight in the morning, I had accumulated a big pile of unfinished plastic shells in front of me.

I returned to my dorm and lay down, but the pain in my finger kept me from falling asleep. A co-worker from my nightshift was passing, and he heard me writhing on my bunk and asked to have a look at my wound. When he removed the gauze, he saw that my finger had swollen to twice its size, and the cut was filled with dark liquid. ‘The plastic was poisonous,’ he said, ‘you have an infection.’ He took out his sewing needle, sterilized it with his lighter, waited for it to cool down, then pierced my wound, draining the dark liquid. He went to his room and came back with a bandage, which he put on my wound. The pain finally subsided. I climbed back onto my bunk, agonizing over my stupidity for cutting myself, and fell asleep. Outside, the sun was high up in the sky. My co-workers on the production floors were thoroughly occupied, the beads of sweat on their foreheads shining under the blazing incandescent lamps. Trucks and buses zoomed by on the highway that ran past the factory campus, unable to afford to spend a single moment at a slower pace.

Now, as I sit in my apartment in Beijing on a July afternoon, remembering this overnight shift, I find myself overwhelmed with emotion, as if I were reliving a distant dream that once took place in a magical universe. A few years ago, I wrote a poem titled ‘Production Floor #2’, which was inspired by my time in Sino-Nokia. The first stanza of the poem reads:

The assembly lines are its arms
The computer screens are its eyes
My brain its engine, running day and night
Light bulbs the sun, beneath which we dream in exhaustion
Oh, my production floor
This place is not my home
My home is three thousand li away

And so it was, in the dazzling metropolis of Shenzhen, that I experienced many firsts in my life: my first time getting trapped on an illegal bus; my first time cutting open a finger with a blade on an overnight shift; my first time washing under a tap after an evening shift in winter; my first time waking up from a wet dream in pain, not knowing what had happened; my first time picking wild lychees and mangoes in the woods by the factory campus with co-workers . . . My life was unfathomably enriched in the big city. My teenage years were like wild lychees, growing larger and redder as the weather got warmer. I was oblivious to the time silently slipping away from me.

Some of my firsts were especially meaningful. I remember my first time reading Southern Metropolis Daily, Apple Daily, and Ming Pao, all at my workstation. I was stationed at the end of the assembly line, and my job was to stack up radio shells in a giant plastic bin. My line captain asked me to use old newspaper to separate the different layers of radio shells to protect the paint on their surfaces. It was the easiest job on my production floor, so I had time to skim across the newspaper pages as I laid them in the bin.

I had never read a newspaper in my village. The closest I’d come was watching my middle-school teacher pick up the latest issues of the city education bureau’s internal papers – needless to say, I didn’t have the opportunity to read those. When I first saw the stack of old Apple Daily on my workstation, I was intrigued by the name. A veteran co-worker told me the paper was published in Hong Kong. I opened an issue in the stack and read about the death of Leslie Cheung. The news was almost a year old, but I was still deeply saddened when I learned that Cheung had died from suicide. From then on, reading newspapers became my favorite diversion when I was idle. I read about the Window of the World and Happy Valley, two famous theme parks in Shenzhen; I discovered ‘To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain’, a visually striking photo taken in 1995 in which a dozen naked artists lie on top of one another in a stack on top of a mountain; I learned how scary the SARS pandemic had been; and I learned that short people like me could still grow taller before they turned eighteen if they worked out regularly. I was almost seventeen, and I sat in front of my workstation for over fifteen hours a day, which left me little time to exercise. But the day after reading that article, I managed to get out of bed at 6 a.m. and went on a morning run to the reservoir south of the Sino-Nokia campus. There was a steep climb up to the reservoir, and I was already exhausted before I reached the top. The next morning, I got up at 6 a.m. again for another run. I pushed myself to the top of the slope and immediately collapsed by the reservoir. Twenty minutes later I regained my breath, forced myself to get up, and slowly walked back to the factory. That morning I was ten minutes late for work, which meant I wouldn’t receive the twenty-yuan perfect attendance bonus at the end of the month. I was upset about this for days.

I should also mention the first Lunar New Year I spent away from home. Back then, Guangdong wasn’t a very safe province, and people often got robbed in broad daylight. I didn’t have the courage to go to the city and take the train home alone, so I stayed in Shenzhen for New Year’s break. There were a lot of workers like me who had come from far away and decided to remain in the factory. On New Year’s Eve, I went out to dinner with a few co-workers from my province. We went to a night market within walking distance and ordered a few dishes and a bowl of rice noodles each. We were all spending New Year in Shenzhen for the first time, and no one said anything about missing home. As we worked on the food, my guy Tian Guoli suddenly said he wanted to sing. Back then, many outdoor food stalls offered karaoke for one yuan per song. Tian Guoli chose the powerful song ‘Bawang Bie Ji’ – ‘Farewell My Lady’ – and his voice was full of passion and vigor. Another co-worker took the mic and sang ‘Er Xing Qian Li’ – ‘A Thousand Li Away from My Mother’. He had a beautiful voice, and it was my first time hearing him sing such a soft melody. Two girls who had joined the factory on the same day as us tagged along, and we had a few rounds of toasts.

It was already past midnight when we returned to the factory campus. The security guard stopped us, and asked us to sign a safety pledge before he would let us back in. We walked back to our dorm together and said goodnight at the entrance of the hallway. It was the first time ever when I felt like I was living in a movie, a movie about young people from the city. I’ve come to believe that everyone prizes youth for its lightness. But even before I could start worrying about things beyond the scope of my own life, my youth had already slipped away.

There are two more firsts of my life I want to share. One was my discovery of rock music. Back then I knew nothing about ‘rock’, but when I heard the melody of ‘Lan Lianhua’ – ‘Blue Lotus’ – by Xu Wei, I felt a trembling in my spirit, as if the music had snatched at some portion of my inner self. Later, when I discovered ‘Fei de Geng Gao’ – ‘Flying Higher’ – by Wang Feng, I realized I was listening to something completely different from everything I had been exposed to: it didn’t belong to China’s internet pop genre, and it wasn’t the same breed as Hongkongese or Taiwanese music either. The explosive chords and Wang’s penetrating voice came from the bottom of his soul, and what he howled in the lyrics was exactly what had been buried deep in my heart. From then on, rock music became my spiritual guidance, offering me peace of mind as I moved around the country over the next decade, keeping me sane and strong on production floors, where machines were my only company.

My last important first was what you might call my first series of ‘dates’. No, she was never my girlfriend – I called her ‘big sister’. She was from Nanning, Guangxi, and her name was Li Juhua. ‘Juhua’ means ‘daisy’, and she was as beautiful as her name. My co-workers agreed that she was one of the two most gorgeous women in our factory, and her name always came up in our conversations. I couldn’t remember what exactly happened, but one day she told me she would like to be my ‘Godsister’. She had just turned twenty, and was about four years older than me. I told her ‘Godsister’ sounded weird, and I’d rather call her my ‘big sister’. She was the quality control worker on my production floor, and she promised to always look out for me.

It was an afternoon in the summer of 2004. Li Juhua’s workstation was right next to mine. When I turned to look at her, I could see the curve of her young body, hidden beneath her red-and-white-plaid uniform. My mind went blank. I felt an abundance of passion, sincerity, and beauty radiating from her. I wasn’t thinking about anything sexual, but simply looking at her made me extremely happy. It was the first time in my life when I realized that humans could be so beautiful and delicate. She treated me to my first ever cup of bubble tea, and her portrait was the first photo of a girl that I ever kept. She was the first girl to ever sing to me, the first woman to write me a letter.

In October 2004, I decided to leave Shenzhen and follow my guy Tian Guoli to a clothing factory in Dongguan. When she learned I was leaving, she spent her entire lunch break writing me a long letter on the back of a quality inspection form. I don’t remember exactly what she wrote, but the piece was titled ‘The City That Chases Dreams’. She wrote that Shenzhen was an overnight miracle, a city that held dreams, a city that bore gold, and a place where people must work hard, be ambitious, and have no regrets about their lives. I brought her letter with me from Shenzhen to Dongguan, then on to Ningbo and then Suzhou. But when I left the factory in Suzhou, the letter was gone. I still remember how upset I was with myself for losing the letter. This was before the era of social media – the only way I could reach her was the telephone in her dorm hallway.

My time in Dongguan wasn’t easy, and I continued to feel depressed on the production floor every day. But there was one evening when the telephone in my hallway rang. I picked it up, and it was her. I was so happy that the entire dorm heard my voice and saw me dancing with the receiver in my hand. I was laughing so heartily that all my roommates were utterly mystified. They all asked me why they had never seen me smile before. They were right: it was impossible for me to put on a genuine smile in the factory. Eventually I lost touch with my big sister Li Juhua, and all that remained, hidden at the bottom of my backpack, were a few photos of her when she was young. We were like characters in a Margaret Mitchell novel, drifting in the wind, with no idea where we would eventually go. Big sister Li Juhua – how have you been? I’ve been abandoned in T.S. Eliot’s wasteland. But how about you? Are you living a good life?

My time in Shenzhen only lasted a little over a year, but it left a profound impression on me. It was a time when, driven by my youthful spirit, I was ready to make some noise – and I wanted to hear that noise echo through the rest of my life. It’s true that my colleagues and I worked long evening shifts while others made hundreds of thousands in the stock market, and that we were cutting plastic radio shells in the wee hours of the night while others were asleep, dreaming of becoming celebrities. But you only get to live once in this world, and Shenzhen was the city that witnessed my precious teenage years. It was my coming of age, the place where I discovered the sharpest and most unpolished sides of my personality – even the beating of my heart made waves in the factory. And yes, I was trapped on the production floor from 7.30 a.m. to 11.30 p.m., and all I did was fix radio battery boxes with a screwdriver. But no matter how long the shifts were, I always returned to my dorm with a little strength left, and with that I dreamed the simplest, sincerest, and most fervid dreams.

It’s been many years since I left Shenzhen, but this city has always had – and will always have – a special place at the bottom of my heart. It’s a place that produces the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen. Every flower is destined to wither, but the flower of my youth – which once saw full bloom in that metropolis – will forever remain the prettiest and tenderest.

In the great history of Shenzhen’s development, those of us who worked on the factory floors were no more important than iron nails, piles of mud, or concrete bricks. As the city grows, perhaps our legacy has already been torn down, thrown on the scrapheap. But here’s something nobody can take away from us: we were all, in the not-so-distant past, authentic and irreplaceable parts of the city. Perhaps this is all that matters to us. We may have regrets about our past, but there’s nothing about Shenzhen we can regret. To the City That Chases Dreams – may I, a rootless drifter who has traveled the country with nothing to my name, wish you all the best. May I wish that every drifter who comes to you in pursuit of their dreams arrives at a destination where they feel they belong. Standing in the summer wind in Beijing, on the other side of the country’s great mountains and rivers, I wish you all the best . . .

Artwork by Zhu Mo, Undercurrents – The Bus to Huma County, 2014

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