The ladies packed into the bathroom, the only forum in the seamstresses’s living quarters large enough for a mass audience. The barracks-style living quarters were a squat two stories—twelve rooms on each floor, four girls in each room. With girls standing in the showers and draped on the sinks, most of the seamstresses were present and accounted for. Wei Ling and Shi Shi Wong’s roommates, twin sisters from Thailand with unpronounceable names, laid out their plan and asked for volunteers. The punishment for being caught was going to be severe. Physical abuse, fines they couldn’t afford to pay, and the continued suspension of privileges that began when Wei Ling moved into the infirmary.
The women nodded. They understood.
The girls returned to their rooms and began quietly and methodically looking through their belongings for anything made of paper. The writing tablets were first to go, followed by napkins, paper towels, torn pieces of tissue boxes. Nothing was considered too outrageous and nothing was turned down. Old letters from family members, envelopes, the borders from old newspapers. They were all ripped into manageable pieces.
The girls stayed up all night. With cramping hands and watering eyes, they wrote identical sentences on every piece of paper. They shared the pens and the half dozen short golf pencils someone had brought back from a trip into town. Eyeliner worked well, and was in plentiful supply. They finished twenty minutes before the morning wake-up call, split the piles of paper among themselves, and waited for an opportunity. They didn’t have to wait long.
The emergency shipment of khaki shorts was nothing short of a catalogue order from God. The summer fashion season was in full swing and the popularity of the knee-length, double-pocket, Army-drab-green shorts was a surprise hit at the Republic Outfitters. Every store on the East Coast was sold out and the backorders were growing at an outstanding rate. A rush order for twenty thousand pairs sent the busy sweatshop floor into a pace of delirium rarely seen. The fabric was scheduled to arrive the following morning and the ladies were told to prepare for serious work. They had two days to complete the order. Twenty thousand pairs of shorts. Ten thousand pairs a day. Sleep was optional, dictated by Lee Chang.
The smell of oiled machinery and the acrid stench of dye filled every corner of the vast sweatshop floor. Dust hung in the air, tiny particles of fabric sent into motion by the relentless crisp snipping of scissors powered by calloused hands. Each worker hunched over her identical workspace—a sewing machine, a single drawer, and a two-square-foot chunk of smooth tabletop that was barely enough room to sew a pair of pants. Heads down, they silently ran fabric under the bobbing needles of their machines, the non-stop mechanical hum as constant as the summer heat. It was tedious, carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing work. Conversation was limited to work-related topics, and there wasn’t much to discuss when you are sewing fabric at a pace of one pair of shorts every five minutes.
The girls worked in teams, the sweatshop floor divided into different groups. The seamstresses were the majority of the floor’s workforce, but everyone took turns learning the ropes and honing their skills in three other areas: inspection, packing, and fabric preparation. The seamstresses passed the shorts to the finishing group who added the zippers, buttons and appropriate tags. Once they were completed, the goods went through inspection and were then packed according to the customers’ specifications. Chang Industries’ lone female henchwoman oversaw the activities in the inspection room. She grabbed a pair of shorts from the finished stack at random, yelling as necessary when she found a defect. Once the goods passed through her station, the strongest of the seamstress workforce folded and packed the goods.
Starting first thing in the morning, the girls in packing took on another responsibility. Each pair of shorts was packaged with a piece of paper. Careful not to draw the attention of the foreman, the packing team removed the pieces of paper hidden in their own pockets, socks, and sleeves, and stuffed a note into every pair of shorts that came through their hands. Beneath the plastic bag in the dirty trashcan in the bathroom, other seamstresses stashed additional notes for the girls in packing to replenish their supplies. For one full shift, the routine was the same. A note in the pocket, the shorts folded, and then placed in boxes according to their size.
The group functioned well as a team. Chang Industries, if nothing else, ran efficiently. And the girls were counting on that efficiency to get the shorts off the island before the shit hit the fan.