IN JULY 1996, when I left the middle school and then the hamlet, all I wanted was to chop off the past. I didn’t expect the process to be so painful. I didn’t know that your past was as vital as your blood. But the bravest soldier swallows his pain. The fiercest shark only cares about going forward. A one-way ticket, a duffel bag, and Wang Hui’s address were all I needed as I headed for the South.
Once I stepped out of the lobby of Guangzhou Baiyun Airport, I realized that I hadn’t just come to a different part of China; Guangzhou seemed like another country entirely. The clouds hung higher in a sky that was bluer and crisper than the one over the hamlet, and the sun shone more ardently. People were smaller and darker, spoke louder and ran faster, and they took up almost every inch of earth. There were cars everywhere, small cars, like toys, and the entire road was jammed up like a pile of tangled linen. All sorts of noises converged into a dome of echoes droning continuously above the city.
Flustered, I didn’t know how to melt myself into this pile of heat and noise, find my way to the bus station, and eventually get to a suburb called Gao Ming, where Wang Hui lived. At first I just stood near the airport entrance, not daring to step out into the city. But then, remembering my experience in Shanghai, I took a deep breath and held my arm out for a cab.
“Could you please take me to Gao Ming?” I asked the driver after I had squeezed myself into the car. He was lean and dark, reminding me of the image of a man working on a Malaysian rubber plantation that I had once seen on television.
He talked in a strange language, as if he had a twist in his tongue. I had no idea what he was saying. People in the South spoke Cantonese. Unlike most of the rest of the country, they didn’t speak Mandarin, our national language. The pronunciation of the two languages is completely different, although they have the same characters.
I repeated myself. He repeated himself in Mandarin, but his accent was so heavy that his words didn’t make any sense to me. Finally I gave up trying to understand him and let him take me wherever he had said he would, praying that I had run into a nice person. After many struggles with the snarled traffic, he stopped at the side of a road, at what appeared to be a gas station, and gestured for me to get out of the car. As soon as I got out he drove away. Full of misgivings, I stood and surveyed my surroundings. Before I could see clearly through the clouds of dust churning everywhere, a loud noise blared from a speaker a few feet away from me, giving me a start.
“Gaooooo-Minggg, Gaooooo-Minggg . . . going to GaoMing?” I saw a man shouting through a huge megaphone. I was stunned. I had never seen anyone crying out for customers with a megaphone as big as the one on top of the flagpole at the middle school, which was only used occasionally for broadcasting. Didn’t he feel ashamed, displaying his desire to make money so out in the open?
“Yes. . . ,” I answered uncertainly.
He grabbed my arm as he shouted to me in barely comprehensible Mandarin, “Gao-Minggg? Come with me, the bus is leaving.” He led me to the gas station’s parking lot, where several buses waited for customers. I was relieved to see the cardboard plates reading Gao Ming on their windshields and quickly got on one of them.
The air was hot and dry. I looked out the window. All the women I saw were petite, with brown skin, their hair put up at the backs of their heads with big plastic clips. Every man wore a suit, though most were crumpled, and the faces above the suits looked twitchy. The guy with the megaphone was still yelling for all he was worth. A man stood next to a gas pump with one hand on his hip, staring at the dust with a look of sheer boredom. In his other hand, I saw a small colorful cardboard box with the characters for waxberry juice printed on it. He was sipping the juice through a straw.
I was amazed that people in the South made juice out of waxberries and sold it for money. Even funnier, they put the juice in a cardboard box so that they could save money instead of using plastic or tin. I was fascinated. I’m really in the South now, I told myself.
Once it was full, the bus started to move. It maneuvered through traffic on the narrow, dirty streets of downtown Guangzhou and soon entered the suburbs, where rows and rows of factory buildings sat in front of small bare hills. About half an hour later, buildings became scarce and we were driving on a winding asphalt road among tall mountains covered in lush greens. I had grown up on a plain; having never seen mountains before, I gazed out the window and greedily enjoyed the breathtaking view.
Two hours later, we reached a small town. The bus driver shouted to me that this was my destination. I got off the bus, perplexed. I saw no sign of Wang Hui at the stop. A wave of disappointment hit me. Maybe my telegram hadn’t reached him. Before I could think further, a group of motorcycles flew toward me and parked right at my feet. The drivers all stretched out their arms and tried to pull me onto their back seats, yelling in Mandarin with funny accents: “Only five yuan gets you anywhere in the city. Where are you goinggggg?” I gave one Wang Hui’s address and hopped on.
Ten minutes later, I stood at the gate of a cement building. I looked at Wang Hui’s postcard to make sure that this was where he lived. It was a shabby, dull apartment complex with clotheslines or sticks protruding from every balcony, draped with clothes swaying in the wind. The alley next to the building was full of hollows and puddles. The air smelled like burning rapeseed oil. I heard two young women shouting to each other behind one of the windows with rusty bars. From their heavily accented Mandarin, I could tell that they were from northern China. They must be migrant workers, I thought, those who had left home and come to the South for jobs. From that day on, I would be one of them, I told myself, a grain of sand surfing on the waves.
I didn’t know which apartment Wang Hui lived in, and I prepared to ask someone for help. But before I could step into the complex, he appeared. With his head lowered, he walked listlessly in shorts and flip-flops toward the gate. He was thinner and darker, and he looked like he had a load on his mind. A spell of tender affection came over me. I was happy to see him. I wondered how he had been doing during the six months we had been apart, whether he had missed me. I sure had missed him. Seeing him made me relax. There would be nothing to keep me away from him now. This was the man I had come to for shelter, the man with whom I was going to build a future.
When he was a few feet away, he looked up and spotted me. I saw his eyes open wide.
“I thought you were picking me up at the bus station.” Though I knew I couldn’t hide the happiness in my eyes, I still made my tone grouchy. I had pictured him opening his arms and embracing me at the station after we had been apart for so long.
“Y-yeah, I was on my way there,” he stuttered.
I glanced at his casual shorts and flip-flops suspiciously. “You would have been so late. Didn’t you get the telegram?” I whined as we entered the complex.
“I left work late.”
I stopped walking and confronted him. “Did you know I was coming?”
I saw him blush. “I got the telegram, but I didn’t believe that you were really coming,” he confessed.
“You didn’t believe? This is what we have been planning all along!” Shocked by his words, I was almost shouting.
He came up with an awkward, guilty smile as a response. All of a sudden, everything I had done—leaving the school, abandoning my running mother in the rain, and traveling hundreds of miles to this man—seemed meaningless. He had never even believed in me. I felt betrayed and angry. We walked up to his apartment in silence.
We stopped at an iron anti-theft door on the third floor. He reached into his pocket for the key, telling me that his older cousin rented this apartment with his girlfriend and let him stay with them. Knowing that migrant workers often crammed together in apartments, I wasn’t surprised that he lived with his relatives, but I still couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. I had thought we would have a place of our own.
He told me that his cousin, a manager at a local joint venture, had gotten him a programmer job at the same company. “Eight hundred yuan a month, less than I thought, but not bad. Three times what I was making as a teacher.” He carried my bag through the door. I felt relieved. At least one of us had a job, though the pay was not as much as I had expected.
He took me to a small room and told me that I was going to share a bed with Rong, another cousin of his who had left her husband and children back home and come here to work on an assembly line at the same company.
“Where’s your room?” I asked, puzzled and displeased by this arrangement.
He pointed to a small room next to mine. “Older Brother doesn’t like young people living together before they get married,” he told me helplessly.
“Why is he living with his girlfriend, then?” What a hypocrite this Older Brother was.
Wang’s face still looked quite pleasant, and his eyebrows were still dashing, but he also looked cowardly. “He’s the oldest cousin in the family. Older Brother is just like your father. You have to obey him.”
So, after years of fighting for my freedom and traveling hundreds of miles, I had just walked into an apartment still ruled by a patriarchal family system.
Dissatisfied, I lay down on the single bed in the room I would share with Rong and told Wang that I was exhausted and wanted to take a nap. He left the room quietly, but just as I was about to doze off he came back and sat next to me. I kept my eyes closed. He bent down and started to take off my clothes. I heard his breathing getting heavier, and when I felt a sharp pain in my groin, disappointment washed over me. It was so different from the romantic lovemaking that I had imagined for our reunion. He was so impatient and hurried that he didn’t even know he was hurting me. As he moved on top of me, I started to have doubts: had he ever loved me? Had we ended up together just because we were so lonely in that small town? I guessed that this was what he had wanted from me all along—sex. But there was nothing I could do now but accept it. I had no way back. Perhaps things would get better.
As the sky slowly turned dark outside the windows, we grew nervous, anticipating his family’s return. We sat on the tiled floor in the living room side by side, absentmindedly watching the tiny 21-inch television and glancing at the doorknob once in a while.
Several times, Wang looked at the black dress I was wearing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It may be a little too transparent. Older Brother doesn’t like that,” he told me hurriedly.
I ran back to my room and changed into the gray suit and skirt I had brought. I had brought little with me to the South: a dress, a suit, a skirt, my toiletries, and my college diploma were all I had.
As soon as I returned to the living room floor, the door opened and Older Brother and his girlfriend walked in. Of medium build with a pair of plain glasses, Older Brother was an ordinary-looking man, the kind you would forget instantly the moment you turned away from him.
“Older Brother!” I called respectfully, standing up.
He nodded his head to me slightly and kept walking toward the kitchen. The tall, thin woman behind him smiled to me like a blossoming flower and said, “This must be Hui’s girlfriend. Hello. Welcome.”
“Older Sister!” I followed Wang and greeted her tensely.
Meeting Wang’s cousin and his girlfriend felt as scary as making a pilgrimage to see the emperor.
Rong soon came home, and we were ready for dinner. Wang Hui whispered to me to go to the kitchen and get rice for everybody. Rong followed me. She looked like an ordinary weatherbeaten middle-aged woman from the countryside who was always worried about something. As soon as I had lifted the rice cooker lid and put it on the counter, she rushed over, looking scared, and turned the lid over.
“Don’t forget to put the lid upside down in the future. She’ll get upset if you put it like that.” She whispered, “She thinks it’s bad luck. She is a typical superstitious woman from Shanghai.”
“I thought Older Brother ruled here. And she seems so friendly,” I said, confused.
Rong shook her head and lowered her voice even more. “Don’t be fooled by her fake laugh. True, Older Brother makes the most money here, but he’s divorced, and it’s not easy for a divorced guy to find a girlfriend. She’s really the one who wears the pants around here.”
Rong and I carried the bowls of rice out to the table in the living room. I walked carefully, holding my breath and feeling like I was in Old China, where a woman had to be approved by a man’s elders before being allowed into his family.
Rong put down a bowl of rice before Older Brother, who sat at the table waiting soberly. Then she placed a pair of chopsticks next to the bowl and said respectfully, “Older Brother, please enjoy your dinner.”
It seemed the only thing the women in the Wang family didn’t have to do was place the food directly into the men’s mouths. While eating, I wondered if they also had to bring their men buckets of water to wash their feet in before bed, an old custom I had read about in books. Later, when Older Brother was ready for bed, Rong proved to me that indeed they did.
I sat at the table and ate, careful not to make too much noise. Wang Hui was sitting next to me, and I could sense his nervous fidgeting. This was ridiculous. Why should I be so afraid of Older Brother? I asked myself angrily, but I remained respectful and quiet. It was my first day in the South, and this group of strangers was all I had.
Older Brother cleared his throat and lifted his chin in my direction. “Ah-Juan, what’s your plan?”
I realized that in the South people usually called each other Ah-something. I guessed that from then on I would be Ah-Juan.
“I want to find a job, of course.” I paused and then gathered all my courage and asked, “Older Brother, could you please see if I can get a job at your company? I heard it’s a big company, and they may need people who can speak English.”
He kept whisking rice into his mouth, and after a moment he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
I was relieved and gratified by his words. Now I had hope. Maybe this was why Older Brother was treated like a ruler in this apartment—because he got jobs for everyone: Wang Hui, Rong, and his girlfriend.
Next came the endless and agonizing waiting. Every day at dusk when Older Brother came home, I fixed my eyes on him and hoped that he would mention a job opening, but every night I went to bed disappointed.
I waited and waited for the entire month of July. The days became longer and more unbearable as I tore more pages off the calendar. While everybody else went to work, I stayed in the apartment alone and learned to cook better and wash everyone’s clothes so that Older Brother would like me more. I often sat in front of the window, lost in my thoughts with soap bubbles all over my hands. Sometimes I took a walk around the building.
“It’s not easy for him to talk to his boss; he’s just a lowlevel manager. Believe me, he always helps family,” Wang Hui would explain to me as I stared sullenly out the window.
I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know where to go to find a job. I wasn’t even sure Wang Hui was my boyfriend any more. The only time I could see him was in the evenings when everybody sat on the floor watching Hong Kong soap operas in Cantonese, which I could barely understand. He and I always sat stiff and still, holding our knees with our arms and avoiding touching each other in front of Older Brother and his girlfriend. Occasionally, when it became really unbearable, we would go out for a walk on the streets of Gao Ming. Only at those times would we talk freely.
That was when I’d see the real South, where there seemed to be a galaxy of migrant workers from everywhere else in China. Along the streets, there were endless rows of factory buildings with awkward English names like “Gao Ming Grand CMOS Chips Joint Venture Co., Ltd” carved at the top of them. Flocks of migrant workers were always making a ruckus and chasing each other in front of them. The guys all wore tank tops, shorts, and slippers and had such messy hair that you would think they hadn’t combed it for at least a week. Some of them parked their grubby bikes against the curb and squatted on the seats like birds, whistling and yelling to the female workers passing by. The female workers all wore plain white shirts and loose darkcolored pants with their hair in two braids behind their ears.
In such a place, where there seemed to be only factories sitting on dirt roads, there was not much for these young men and women to do. Their most popular gathering sites were just some crude pool tables sitting in disorder in the open air. There were a few small restaurants with television sets hung on their back walls, blasting Hong Kong soap operas. The air inside them smelled like cabbage with garlic and stir-fried snails, the cheapest and most popular dishes. Bored workers sat in knots on plastic chairs outside the restaurants, sucking snails like woodpeckers, glancing at the television, and whistling to girls. If there was really nothing left to do, they would sneak to the back rooms of restaurants, which had been secretly converted to small theaters, and goof the night away with some pornography movies.
“These people are the real migrant workers. They have very little education. Left home and the fields to work their asses off here for the big bosses and still only make a few hundred yuan a month.” Wang Hui sighed with sympathy as we walked hurriedly to dodge the groups of workers on the street.
“Still better than starving at home, though,” he continued. “I’m pretty lucky. Got a job not long after I came here, and a good job too, not on the assembly lines.”
I felt uncomfortable with Wang’s self-satisfaction. After traveling hundreds of miles to the South, how could he be content being only a little better off than the “real” migrant workers, who were fresh from the fields? It was becoming clear to me that Wang had no ambition. I looked at him and wondered whether I had really found the right man for myself. Maybe I was just asking for too much.
Disappointed, I stayed silent and kept walking. A crowd of migrant girls passed by, laughing and joking and pretending to hit each other on the shoulder with their fists. They were so young. Their lily-white faces were babyish and innocent, yet they looked content, as if they had found what they had been searching for their entire lives. Looking at their identical backs, I asked myself whether I could possibly become one of them. No. I wanted to be different, because I felt I had a bigger dream. What was that dream, exactly? I wasn’t sure. I only knew that I wanted to make more than eight hundred yuan a month. I felt like a rocket just out of its launcher, full of energy. I wanted more. I wanted a lot.