Lao Qing's Badge

Lao Qing is forty-eight. For twenty-eight years he turned lathes at the Westgate Bearing Plant, his palms grown thicker with callus than the old master's calipers. Last autumn the plant was restructured; the machines fell silent, and he was bought out along with three hundred others, handed thirty-two thousand yuan and a stamped paper that severed him from the works.

He folded the stamped paper, then fetched an old work badge from the gatekeeper. It carried his name and number, and a photograph taken twenty years before, when his eyes were still clear. He wiped it clean and slipped it into his inner pocket, like a small kept hope.

For the first two months he stayed home. Cuilan cleaned houses in the city and came back each evening sunburned and silent, smashing a basin down if she found him idle. Their son, Xiao Qing, was in his final year of high school; the tutoring fee alone was twelve hundred a month, a sum that ate a family alive. Unable to sit still, Lao Qing began rising before dawn to line up at the East Suburb labor market.

At the market's mouth stood blackboards lettered in chalk: cleaner, women under forty-five; loader, men under forty; guard, men under forty-five, fit for a physical test. Lao Qing searched the boards for his own age and found it nowhere. He touched the badge, then let it be.

The first time, he told a loading foreman he was forty-two. The foreman eyed him, then told him to haul two sacks of cement up three floors. Lao Qing gritted his teeth and did it, his spine creaking, and made the top. The foreman was about to write his name when another man called out: uncle, I need your ID for the record. Lao Qing hesitated, then produced it. The foreman read the birth year and closed his book. Over age, sorry.

Lao Qing did not argue. He had seen it often enough. At the market the men his age were a dime a dozen, all shaving years off, all stopped at the identity card. Someone told him: try minding a gate at a site, that work does not check age. He went north of the city to a construction site and watched over a trailer for two thousand a month and one lunch. Outside the trailer rebar was stacked; he sat at the door listening to the tower crane and felt, briefly, useful again.

But that use was brittle. Site work follows the building; when the floors were capped, the gatekeeper was no longer needed. Three months on, the contractor paid him off and said he would be called next time there was work. Lao Qing carried six thousand yuan home. Cuilan asked when next time would be. He had no answer.

In between he tried a broker. Behind the East Suburb market were a few small storefronts hung with signs reading job placement, and they asked two hundred yuan in referral fees before anything else. Lao Qing paid once through gritted teeth and was sent to pack boxes at an East City food plant; he worked three days, then the plant checked his identity card, said he was over age, and sent him away. He went back for his money; the proprietress did not lift her eyes. You saw the man, you did the work, she said, the referral fee is not returned. Lao Qing stood at the door a long while, made no scene, and wrote the two hundred off as a loss.

Around the new year the market was quietest. Still Lao Qing went, standing against the wall with his hands in his sleeves. Once a young man in a leather jacket came recruiting, glanced at him, and asked: grandpa, you looking for work too? Lao Qing faltered, then understood the word grandpa was for him. He opened his mouth, said nothing of his age, and pulled his sleeves tighter.

Xiao Qing came home for winter break and, seeing his father loitering day after day, said: dad, stop pushing yourself; when I graduate I will support you. Lao Qing heard it and felt both warm and hollow. He touched the badge in his pocket, the clear-eyed young man in the photo who would scarcely know the man he had become.

In early spring a new estate east of the city hired guards, men under forty-five. Lao Qing stood long before the notice, then drew out the badge and held it to the sun. The plastic shell was furred with wear, but the name still read true. He tucked it back against his chest and turned toward the labor market.

The wind was up that day and the chalk characters trembled on the boards. Lao Qing took his place at the wall, hands in sleeves, like a tree that someone had forgotten both to cut down and to prop up.