Propuesta

Upon leaving school, Madam Chao spent a year at home helping around with household chores before her mother suggested that she learn a skill. For this reason, she became an apprentice to a seamstress in the village. “My family paid her 100 rmb to take me on as an apprentice and I went to work with her for a whole year, learning the skills necessary for the trade.” Even then, this was no guarantee for paid work. “I was full of confidence at the completion of my apprenticeship but, unfortunately, still failed in my efforts to leave the countryside.” Yet this was not because of a lack of work opportunities but the cultural constraints imposed by rural society at the time.

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In fact, not long after she had completed her apprenticeship, Madam Chao had seen on (black-and-white) TV an advertisement placed by the Changsha Trading Clothe

Manufacturing Factory (Changsha Waimao Zhiyi Chang) calling for applicants with sewing skills.³⁹ The employment opportunity seemed ideal and Madam Chao made the application, caught the bus to Changsha four hours away, passed the requisite tests and was recruited. But when it boiled down to moving out of home to take up employment in the city, her parents intervened and objected to her going. This was something that Madam Chao conveyed with a sense of regret; it was a sense of disappointment about not having the chance to put her training to full use and to realize her potential.

Because her attempt to work in Changsha never materialized, Madam Chao stayed home to work as a seamstress for roughly a year in the village. Her customers would bring her cloth and ask her to make Western-style clothes (xizhuang), such as dresses and trousers, for which she would charge roughly 5 rmb as labour cost (shougong fei).

It turned out that leaving home was not so straightforward because of the relatively conservative attitudes prevailing around marriage at the time, particularly in rural society.

According to Madam Chao, her parents were afraid that she would get mixed up/involved with the wrong company, which would then would jeopardize her chances of marriage. While this might appear on the surface to be an overreaction, it was in fact a significant rural

concern, one whose seriousness could only be understood with respect to the mores and modes of reproduction of rural life.

To begin with, Madam Chao’s acquiescence to her parents’ wishes on the topic of marriage is consistent with Fei Xiaotong’s (1983) observation that it was typical for village boys and girls to give their parents control of their marriage affairs. Furthermore, Fei (1983) also notes that the Chinese patrilineal tradition in rural life meant that a girl could not be retained in her parent’s home for too long, for she had no inheritance rights to her parents’

property. Accordingly, her future and livelihood could only be safeguarded through marriage.

This being the case, it was understandable why Madam Chao’s parents reacted as conservatively and cautiously as they did.

Moreover, unlike many whom she knew had successfully relocated to the city, her family did not have relatives already established in the city who could recommend her to an employer. This practice of kin-based referrals as a means to secure urban employment was the standard procedure at the time for those wishing to find work in the cities. It had also

39 Changsha was the capital city of Hunan province.

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been the means by which Yan as well as Wai’s siblings, whom we encountered earlier, were able to make their start in Shenzhen.

Eventually, Madam Chao’s conundrum of lacking the necessary contacts was

resolved when the county’s (xiancheng) labour ministry (laodong ju) made all the necessary logistical arrangements for her employment, taking Madam Chao and considerably many others out from the province. Madam Chao’s first employment stint was in Jiangmen, which like Shenzhen, was also in Guangdong province. The county’s labour ministry was

responsible for taking care of all aspects of their life and work, including housing and healthcare. And if they had to return home for some reason, the ministry would help make sure they would return safely to the county. As local county-level banks were looking for depositors, employees from the local branches even went to Jiangmen to organize for their wages to be deposited directly into their accounts back home.

But Madam Chao worked in Jiangmen for only about three to four months before returning home. She had worked at a plastic flower factory, doing what she tells me was the unskilled, “ordinary” work (pugong) of attaching flowers to stems. She had left the job in part because of the laborious nature of the work and also due to the frequent

misunderstandings that occurred between workers from Guangdong and Hunan. These stemmed from vernacular differences, which caused frequent conflicts. “Not everyone from Guangdong understood Putonghua (Mandarin), and while most from Hunan could speak it, it was often not proper, giving rise to frequent misunderstandings and fights between the two groups.”

According to Madam Chao, these were conflicts whose participants took sides purely on the grounds of their ethnic and village affiliations. They were, in other words, tribal in nature. Often the actual cause of such conflicts was lost upon those who participated in them.

Not that it mattered since self-preservation seemed to be at stake. As Madam Chao pointed out, “We could not allow our people to get bullied; we were outsiders and could not let the locals bully us.”

6.4 Early 1990s: Coming to Shenzhen

It was not long after returning home from Jiangmen that she came to Shenzhen. The year was 1992 and she was able to come to the city after a distant relative, specifically, her uncle’s wife, who was by then working in the city, recommended her. She began work at a factory making bags in Nantou, just within the borders of the Special Economic Zone.

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As Madam Chao recounts, living conditions were difficult, again deploying the adjective “ku” (bitterness) to describe her situation. She had to live in a worker’s dormitory adjacent to the factory and recalls not having adequate running water. Water had to be rationed, with each person receiving only a bucket a day: “Don't you think it was ku? One bucket of water and one had to use it for washing clothes as well as washing ourselves. We stayed in a dormitory with 10 of us altogether. The toilet was common and shared by everyone on the floor. But things gradually got better every year.”

There was a factory line (流水线) and, as such, a division of labour that organized the work process. Those who took care of the bag’s zippers managed only zippers. And those who attached straps onto buckles did nothing else. Wages were calculated on the basis of the quantities she produced since there was a per piece wage rate for everything. Hence, the more one produced, the more one got paid. Work started at 0730 hrs every morning and the shift would run for 8 hours.

“The latest we could wake up was 0700 hrs, when we would wash our faces, brush our teeth, and quickly have our breakfast, often while walking to the factory. But there was overtime (jiaban) everyday, and the workday effectively ended at 2300 hrs. We worked overtime everyday except for the day we received our wages. So it was extremely hard,” she said rhetorically. “After we finished, we would have to shower and wash our clothes before going to bed.”

“And we had to use our water rations sparingly, making sure to save enough for washing up and brushing our teeth the next morning. We had to bathe with the water we washed our hair in,” she said with a laugh. “What else could we do? (Mei banfa) There was not enough water.” It seemed that the demands of the fledgling factories were greater than the city’s planners could deal with initially. “There were thousands of people there. In my four-story tall dormitory alone, there were some 1000 people. Add to that the needs of all the factories around.”

But things began to improve after several months, and some six months later, there was adequate water running into the area with the installation of bigger pipes. According to Madam Chao, such water shortages were likely occurring because the growth of the city was constantly exceeding projections. And accompanying such growth were concomitant

increases in the population. “That was quite a remote place with a small population initially.

But the number of people kept increasing year after year. It was a relatively poor area compared with other areas. ”

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It was evident that the hardships Madam Chao encountered at home were not, if at all, mitigated after her arrival in Shenzhen. At least, it was apparent that she still faced

considerable challenges going about the everyday life necessities of life, reproducing her physical existence, to say nothing about the 17-hour days she had to endure in the course of it.

In any case, Madam Chao worked at the factory for a total of nearly two years, which was a stint spread over a period of three or four years as she had left Shenzhen to get married, then bear a child. It is to this subject that we now turn.