Chuntao

Chuntao arrived in Dongguan in the depths of winter. The train had carried her from the stilt houses of western Hunan all the way to the Pearl River Delta, and she gripped her crumpled ticket the way one grips a whole family’s hope for the year to come. At the factory gate a sign promised that ten thousand yuan a month was no dream; she could not read the character for “ten thousand,” only saw it written very large, took it for the truth, and let the crowd hand her over to three grey-white buildings.

The mobile-phone-parts plant sat at the far end of the industrial zone. The workshop was always filmed with a dust no one could wash away; the windows were pasted over, and though there was light, it lit nothing in particular. Chuntao was sent to Workshop Three, to Machine Seventeen. The line leader’s surname was Zhou, a sallow, thin man whose eyes were like two nails, pinning people to their stations. The first thing he taught her was not how to work, but how to stay upright through eleven hours on her feet without fainting. “Thirsty, swallow your spit,” he said. “Homesick, don’t be.”

Her task was to dab glue onto a metal plate the size of a palm. The machine fed a part before her; she took the glue gun, dabbed once, dabbed again, the part slid away, and the next arrived. Forty in a minute. The line leader said a single second slow, and the whole group’s bonus was docked. At first Chuntao counted; then she stopped, and her hand moved on its own, as if it were no longer hers. After the shift the six women crowded onto the iron bunks and said nothing; only the creak of the upper bed turning over could be heard. Her roommate Fang had come two years earlier and was missing the last joint of her left ring finger, hidden year-round beneath a white glove. Chuntao asked once; Fang said the machine had bitten it, and said no more.

The canteen meals were cheap, three yuan a serving, the meat in them scarce as stars; Chuntao ordered vegetables only, rounded what she saved into a lump sum, and wired it to her mother at month’s end. On payday she stared long at the number in the message — base wage, overtime, bonus, then minus lodging, water and power, infractions — the sum that reached her hands was always far less than the sign had promised. She did not quite understand the deductions; she only knew that one more hour of work meant one more bowl of rice at home.

She wrote to her mother that the plant was good, with air conditioning and meat at every meal. Her mother wrote back to save, that her brother’s tuition and her father’s rheumatism medicine depended on her. Chuntao folded the letter and pressed it under her pillow, where a family photograph also lay — father, mother, brother crowded before the stilt house, smiling, faces too small to make out.

In the third month her right index finger began to ache. At first a soreness, like a whole day’s hoeing. Then a swelling, throbbing at night, and she would take the finger in her mouth and bite it until a crescent mark showed. The line leader looked at her hand and told her to slap on a plaster and keep working; the plant kept no idlers. She did.

Once a girl at the next row fainted at her station, white as paper, and was carried off to the clinic; when she came back her badge already hung on another’s chest. Chuntao heard the line leader say, faint means no good, the plant is never short of people. After that she never dared close her eyes on the floor, however heavy her lids grew, as if weighted with lead.

In the sixth month, one afternoon, the machine misfired. The belt jammed; Chuntao reached without thinking to free the stuck part — and Machine Seventeen’s press came down faster than she was. She heard a crack, like a dry branch snapped underfoot. The nail and a small strip of flesh of her index finger stayed behind in the seam of the press.

The workshop was loud; no one turned at once. When the blood came, Chuntao froze before anything else — not from the pain, but from fear of the line leader’s nail-like eyes, fear of losing the work. Fang, at the next station, yanked her up and dragged her toward the clinic. A few workers craned their necks, looked, and turned back to their machines. There were onlookers enough; they were only all busy, all poor, all afraid.

The nurse at the clinic rinsed the wound with alcohol, and Chuntao cried out. The sound, beyond the roaring workshop, was thin as a sheet of paper, scattered by any breath of wind. The doctor said the bone was unhurt, two weeks’ rest would do. But Chuntao knew well enough: two weeks off the line was two weeks without pay, and when she returned her station would be another’s, and the eight hundred yuan she had scraped together would be gone.

A man from personnel came and put a paper before her. It stated that she voluntarily waived any work-injury recognition, accepted a one-time compensation of eight hundred yuan, and henceforth bore no claim against the plant. Chuntao could read little; Fang read it for her. At the words “voluntarily waives” Fang paused, and said nothing. Chuntao pressed her thumbprint. Eight hundred yuan would buy her brother half a term of books, her father two rounds of medicine.

She did not rest the two weeks. On the fifth day, her index finger bound in white gauze, she stood again at Machine Seventeen. The glue gun felt heavier than before; her gluing hand shook a little, and the line leader cursed her for slowness and docked that day’s meal allowance. Chuntao said nothing, only dabbed. The machine turned, the parts came, she dabbed. The wound beneath the gauze throbbed, reminding her, again and again, that a piece of her was gone and would not grow back.

At night she could not sleep, and held that hand up to the lamp. The gauze was dazzling white, and underneath a length was missing. She thought suddenly of her mother’s saying, that a country woman’s cleverness lived in her ten fingers, in needlework and cooking. Her finger now fed a family a thousand miles away, and was shorter by a joint for it. She did not dare think further, and pulled on the glove.

In time the finger stopped hurting, but lost all feeling; scalding water did not tell her, a cutting wind did not tell her. Chuntao thought this was just as well — should the machine bite again, she would likely know only after the fact.

Home for the new year, her mother took her hand and, feeling the shortened finger, reddened at the eyes but in the end asked nothing. Her brother had won a prize for a composition and read it aloud: it told of an elder sister who sat in an office in the city, in air conditioning every day. Chuntao laughed, pressed the money left into her mother’s hand, and turned to the kitchen stove to throw on another stick of firewood.

When the year turned she took the train again. Workshop Three had a fresh batch of girls, the youngest only sixteen, eyes bright with fright, just as hers had been that first year. The line leader pinned them each to a station; one of them was given Seventeen. Chuntao watched that girl’s hands from afar — ten fingers, every one of them whole, the tips still flushed with a newcomer’s shy red.

She turned back and went on dabbing her glue. The machine roared on, covering everything over. The dust outside the window lay as always; the light was there, but lit nothing in particular.