highlights from factory girls

To come out from home and work in a factory is the hardest thing they have ever done. It is also an adventure. What keeps them in the city is not fear but pride: To return home early is to admit defeat. To go out and stay out—chuqu—is to change your fate.
Migrants are the rural elite. They are younger, better educated, and more enterprising than the people they leave behind. The city people’s name for them—liudong renkou, floating population—suggests an aimless mob, but most migrants leave home with a work objective in mind, in the company of a relative or fellow villager who already knows the way.
Migration picked up speed, and by 1990, the country had sixty million migrants, many of them drawn to the booming factories and cities of the coast.
Today China has 130 million migrant workers. In factories, restaurants, construction sites, elevators, delivery services, housecleaning, child-raising, garbage-collecting, barbershops, and brothels, almost every worker is a rural migrant. In large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, migrants account for a quarter of the population; in the factory towns of south China, they power the assembly lines of the nation’s export economy. Together they represent the largest migration in human history, three times the number of people who emigrated to America from Europe over a century.
On the brick walls of rural villages, pro-migration slogans appeared: GO OUT FOR MIGRANT WORK, RETURN HOME TO DEVELOP. LABOR FLOWS OUT, MONEY FLOWS BACK.
The bus is packed, and it smells of sweat and of clothing that is worn every day and slept in at night—the smell of migrants.
Everywhere is construction and motion, jackhammers and motorcycles, drills and dust; at street level the noise is deafening. The roads are wide and well paved but there are no pedestrian lights or crosswalks. This is a city built for machines, not people.
The city is divided into thirty-two towns, and each one specializes in manufacturing. Chang’an produces electronic components, Dalang is famous for sweaters, and Houjie makes shoes. Samsung and Pioneer operate plants in Liaobu; Nancheng is home to the world’s largest Nokia mobile-phone factory. All the Nescafé instant coffee that is drunk in China is processed at a plant in downtown Dongguan.
Dongguan is unfinished, a city where everything is in the process of becoming something else.
Molding a new life is even faster. A few computer lessons can catapult a person into a different class, and a morning at the talent market is enough to establish a new career.
At night, the factories lining the highways are lit. Look closely and you can sometimes see shadows moving against a window, erratic as fireflies—as long as there is light, people are still working. Each strip of blue-lighted windows against the dark signals a single factory; one strip is set apart from the next, like stately ocean liners on the sea. From a distance, they are beautiful.
The assembly line ran eight hours a day with weekends off, and that was bad too, because overtime would have meant more money. Shoe factories paid more, but they were known to work extremely long days, and the girls constantly debated whether the extra money would be worth the exhaustion.
For months afterward, whenever I came to the city, I looked closely into the faces of the young girls on the streets, hoping to find Yongxia and Dali again. Many of the girls looked back at me, wary or curious or challenging. There are millions of young women, and each one has a story worth telling. I had to look into their faces to begin.
Over the next two years, I spent a week or two of every month in Dongguan. I got to know a few young women well, and I met a great many others who told me their stories and disappeared, like the two girls on the square whom I never saw again. Their tolerance for risk was astonishing. If they didn’t like a factory or a boss or a coworker, they jumped somewhere else and never looked back, and when they recounted their stories to me, there were unexplained gaps in time from stays at factories they no longer remembered. Their parents back home were only dimly aware of what their daughters were up to. Existence, to the factory girls, was a perpetual present, which seemed immensely liberating but also troubling. Making it in the city meant cutting ties to everything they knew.
When I moved to Taiwan two years later, people there frequently asked me what year I had chuqu, gone out, to America—their unspoken assumption that everyone in the world had been born in the Chinese nation. Later after I moved to China, I often heard the same question. That was one of the ways that Taiwan and China, which until recently had been technically at war, were more alike than they imagined.
Many things I had read about China’s migrants were not true. They no longer lived in fear of being picked up by the police; instead, the authorities just ignored them. Discrimination from local residents was not really an issue, because migrants almost never encountered locals. And I was surprised to learn that job mobility was high. Almost all the senior people I met in factories had started on the assembly line.
I came to like Dongguan, which seemed a perverse expression of China at its most extreme. Materialism, environmental ruin, corruption, traffic, pollution, noise, prostitution, bad driving, short-term thinking, stress, striving, and chaos: If you could make it here, you’d make it anywhere.
I was invisible in Dongguan, and I liked that too.
Dongguan is invisible to the outside world. Most of my friends in Beijing had passed through the city but all they remembered—with a shudder—were the endless factories and the prostitutes. I had stumbled on this secret world, one that I shared with seven million, or eight million, or maybe ten million other people.
But there was another history of this place. In the autumn of 1978, the Taiping Handbag Factory of Hong Kong opened the first foreign factory in Dongguan. Income in its first year of operation was one million Hong Kong dollars. The factory processed materials from Hong Kong into finished goods, which were shipped back to Hong Kong to be sold to the world. It established the model for thousands of factories to follow. Over the next two years, China set up four “special economic zones” as testing grounds for freeenterprise practices like foreign investment and tax incentives. The largest zone was Shenzhen, about fifty miles south of Dongguan, which quickly became a symbol of a freewheeling China always open for business. Shenzhen was a planned showcase city, willed into being by leaders in Beijing and supported by government ministries and the companies under them. Dongguan was different. It rose by no one’s decree; it simply grew. While Shenzhen aspired to advanced technology and innovation, Dongguan took what it could get, which meant low-tech factories from Hong Kong and Taiwan that made clothing, toys, and shoes. All they needed was cheap land and labor, as well as local officials who left them alone. What they initially built could not be called modern industry. Many of the early factories were two-or three-story houses where workers sat at desks, fifty to a room, engaged in simple tasks like sewing cloth for a stuffed animal or attaching artificial hair to a doll. Some of the factories were housed in makeshift structures of sheet metal because their owners did not want the expense of real buildings.
But from the Taiping Handbag Factory, which did not appear in any textbook, I could trace a direct line to everyone I ever met in Dongguan, from the migrants studying Microsoft Word to the self-help gurus to the Mercedes salesman who told me that the priciest S- and E-Class cars sold best in Dongguan, because “for a boss to improve his image, this is a good product.” For all of them, modern history began with the handbag factory.
Migrants held the local residents in low regard: They were uneducated farmers who made a living renting out farmland to factories, and they could not survive a day in the factory’s demanding environment. “It’s mutual contempt,” my friend Lin Xue said, to describe relations between locals and migrants.
“If I inspected one factory a day,” he said, “it would take me fifty years to inspect all the factories. So we must rely on the companies to police themselves.”
When you lived in Beijing, you were shielded from many things, but in the hinterland cities you could see the strains of China’s development up close.
China’s economy was growing by 10 percent a year, faster in the south, and it was a miracle that things were holding together as well as they were.
Motion sickness was the terror of people from the countryside, who were not accustomed to car travel.
“Fuck you,” I said in English. “Asshole. Prick.” That broke my cardinal rule about living in China—never play the American card—but sometimes only cursing in English will do. The man looked at me with newfound respect.
Chinese history museums are troubled places. Ancient civilization was great, or so the official narrative went, but it was feudal and backward. Modern China was ravaged by foreigners, but the Chinese people were heroic in humiliation and defeat. China stood up in 1949 when the Communists came to power, but there were other years since—1957, 1966, and 1989 in particular—that went prominently unmentioned. Everything that was jumbled and incoherent and better left unsaid must be smoothed into a rational pattern, because the purpose of history from the time of Confucius has been to transmit moral lessons to later generations.
“Songshan Lake is our high-tech industrial zone. Dongguan has a motto: ‘One Big Step Every Year, A New City in Five Years.’ We are now in Year Three of that plan.”
In the seventh century, the emperors of the Tang Dynasty ordered court historians to compose a chronicle of the previous reign. Every dynasty since has written the history of the preceding one, slanting or omitting facts to bolster the ruling regime; since 1949, the Communist Party has done the same, presenting modern history as a heroic struggle to resist the will of foreign powers. But here in Dongguan, the past contained a startlingly different lesson: History was openness, markets, and foreign investment. History began with a handbag factory, and schoolchildren must be indoctrinated in the merits of good infrastructure.
I was left alone to ponder the unlikelihood of a Chinese history museum that did not make a single mention of Mao Zedong.
You must record every day the things you have seen, heard, felt, and thought, she wrote. In this way, you can not only raise your writing standards but also see the traces of your own growing up.
Time was Chunming’s enemy, reminding her that another day had passed and she had not yet achieved her goals. But time was also her friend, because she was still young.
The new job paid three hundred yuan a month—triple what Chunming had made a year before.
THE STORIES OF MIGRANT WOMEN shared certain features. The arrival in the city was blurry and confused and often involved being tricked in some way. Young women often said they had gone out alone, though in fact they usually traveled with others; they just felt alone. They quickly forgot the names of factories, but certain dates were branded in their minds, like the day they left home or quit a bad factory forever. What a factory actually made was never important; what mattered was the hardship or opportunity that came with working there. The turning point in a migrant’s fortunes always came when she challenged her boss. At the moment she risked everything, she emerged from the crowd and forced the world to see her as an individual.
It was easy to lose yourself in the factory, where there were hundreds of girls with identical backgrounds: born in the village, badly educated, and poor. You had to believe that you mattered even though you were one among millions.
Inside a Dongguan factory, the sexes were sharply divided. Women worked as clerks and in human resources and sales, and they held most of the jobs on the assembly line; the bosses felt that young women were more diligent and easier to manage. Men monopolized technical jobs like mold design and machine repair. They generally held the top positions in the factory but also the dead-end occupations at the bottom: security guards, cooks, and drivers. Outside the factory, women were waitresses, nannies, hairdressers, and prostitutes.
To some extent, this deep-rooted sexism worked in women’s favor. Many rural parents wanted a grown son to stay close to home, perhaps delivering goods or selling vegetables in the towns near the village. Young men with such uninspiring prospects might simply hun—drift—doing odd jobs, smoking and drinking and gambling away their meager earnings. Young women—less treasured, less coddled—could go far from home and make their own plans. Precisely because they mattered less, they were freer to do what they wanted.
Women who had moved up from the assembly line disdained the men back in the village, but city men looked down on them in turn. Migrants called this gaobucheng, dibujiu—unfit for a higher position but unwilling to take a lower one.
over three years in Dongguan, I never heard a single person express anything like a feminist sentiment.
Around the new year holiday, a manager on the factory floor ignored her until she boldly wished him a happy new year; he responded warmly and gave her ten yuan in a red envelope, a traditional gift. From this incident, I understand: Some people who have always seemed unapproachable may not really be so. You just need to make yourself a little more approachable.
People who don’t read books will find their speech dull and their appearance repulsive.
Friends, we were born into the world poor through no fault of our own. But to die poor is a sin.
The rise of chuanxiao companies worried the central government. Some of the companies traded in fake, smuggled, or shoddy goods; their training meetings, where charismatic leaders drove members into an evangelical selling frenzy, came to look disturbingly similar to cults. The more extravagant operations even threatened the social order; in 1994, the police were called out to disperse hundreds of angry distributors after the collapse of a Taiwanese diamond-selling scheme.
By then Chunming was making forty thousand yuan a month—about five thousand dollars, an astronomical sum in the Pearl River Delta in 1998. The company began laminating her weekly pay slips in sheets of clear plastic so she could show them to recruits as a motivational tool.
In April 1998, the cabinet of Premier Zhu Rongji ordered all chuanxiao companies to cease operations. More than two thousand companies shut down, and an industry that had resisted government regulation for years collapsed in an instant.
In the freewheeling Pearl River Delta, where Chunming had learned to talk, where commerce was king and everyone was a winner and to die poor was a sin, the long arm of the government had touched her life, astonishingly, for the first time.
Dongguan came to life after the sun went down; as the day’s wearying heat evaporated, the darkening streets would be flooded with young people getting off work—changelings, turning before my eyes from dutiful workers back into eager teenagers again.
Min took a long look at her Big Mac, lowered her face down to the table until it was eye-level with the sandwich, and ate through it layer by layer—bun, tomato, lettuce, beef. She had never been to McDonald’s before.
Maybe people worried that they would lose momentum if they stopped moving long enough to look backward.
“Nothing is as hard as being an ordinary worker,” I often heard her say. She never forgot where she had come from. That was one of the things I liked most about her.
To me, every town looked the same. Construction sites and cheap restaurants. Factories, factories, factories, the metal lattices of their gates drawn shut like nets. Min saw the city through different eyes: Every town was the possibility of a more desirable job than the one she had. Her mental map of Dongguan traced all the bus journeys she had made in search of a better life.
I saw more charity toward beggars in Dongguan than I ever saw in another Chinese city. The factory workers had compassion for the elderly or anyone with a physical handicap, but toward people their own age they showed no pity. If you were young and healthy, there was no excuse for not working.
Because the assembly line paid by the piece, working faster during busy times meant a bigger paycheck—spending time training others brought nothing. That was the zero-sum logic of the Dongguan factory, where helping someone else meant hurting yourself.
There were many ways to quit a factory. A worker might resign with her boss’s permission and receive all of her back pay. She could take a temporary leave that guaranteed a position upon her return. Some departing workers negotiated with their employers for a portion of the money they were owed. But nothing was worse than kuangli—literally, “crazy leaving”—which was what Huang Jiao’e had done.
She had worked in her factory’s human resources department for exactly twenty-four days, and on that she could build a new career.
Height was a universal Chinese obsession. In a country that had experienced malnutrition and even famine in living memory, height signaled fortune, and it functioned as a proxy for class: On any construction site, the armies of peasant workers were a head shorter than the city people whose homes they were building. Manual laborers in the West might be larger than their white-collar counterparts, but in China the opposite held true—the educated could literally look down on the lower classes.
Not everyone who came to the talent market dared to go inside. Throngs gathered on the sidewalk before a giant electronic job board, like people fated only to look upon a promised land they would never enter. The listings moved upward in a continuous crawl, like stock prices, and the crowd stared, mesmerized.
The boss smiled. “When you have to speak,” he said, “you should speak. If you don’t have to speak, don’t speak.” That was the secret rule of Chinese workplace survival, but no one had ever shared it with Min.
Her new boss, like her old one, was insecure and status-conscious. Min was learning that many Chinese men had this flaw.
In a universe of perpetual motion, the mobile phone was magnetic north, the thing that fixed a person in place.
In the migrant world, the mobile phone was a metaphor for the relentless pace of city life.
People referred to themselves in the terminology of mobile phones: I need to recharge. I am upgrading myself.
Manufactured, sold, stolen, repackaged, and resold, the mobile phone was like an endlessly renewable resource at the heart of the Dongguan economy.
It takes two hundred pairs of hands to make a running shoe.
Imagine the entire population of Santa Fe, New Mexico, under the age of thirty and engaged in making athletic shoes. Inside the compound’s brick walls, workers sleep in factory dorms and eat in factory cafeterias and shop at factory commissaries. Yue Yuen runs a kindergarten for employees’ children and a hospital with a 150-member staff; it has a movie theater and a performance troupe, volunteer activities and English classes. It operates its own power plant and fire department, and sometimes the city of Dongguan borrows Yue Yuen’s firetruck ladder, the tallest one around, to put out fires. Yue Yuen bottles its own water.
Nothing short of apocalypse could cut off the world’s supply of what the industry calls “branded athletic footwear.”
All of the Yue Yuen bosses, the workers say, have raspy voices from years of shouting orders over the din of the machines.
Provincial stereotypes color hiring, and a boss can ban an entire province if he believes that a hundred million people from one place can share a personality trait. Henan people get into fights. People from Anhui are hardworking but untrustworthy.
In the universe of Chinese counterfeiting, theirs is a distinctive sub-specialty—the illicit assembly of authentic parts. The gangs are organized along provincial lines, and the ones from Hunan are most feared.
Now they were working only ten and a half hours a day plus half or full days on Saturdays; in the world of Dongguan manufacturing, that was considered the slow season.
China is a quarter century into the largest migration in human history, and the profiles of the people on the move are changing. Those who came out from their rural villages in the 1980s and early 1990s were heading into the unknown, often driven by a family’s need for cash and the desire to build a house back home. It was considered risky, even shameful, for a single woman to go out on her own. These early migrants often found seasonal work, and the seasons were those of the farm. They returned home to help out during the sowing season and again at harvest time. When they had made enough money, they returned to the village for good. The new generation came of age when migration was already an accepted path to a better life. Younger and better-educated than their predecessors, they are driven out less by the poverty of the countryside than by the opportunity of the city. There is no longer any shame attached to migration. The shame now lies in staying home.
It took willpower for any migrant worker to change her situation. But inside a factory as large as Yue Yuen, the pressure to conform felt especially intense. The girls all claimed in front of one another that they didn’t approve of finding a boyfriend in the city, although many of them already had one; they disparaged further education as useless even as some quietly took classes in an effort to improve themselves. Yue Yuen was a good place to work—everyone who worked there said that. But if you wanted something different, it took all your strength to break free.
The effort required to keep in touch explained why the factory girls had so few true friends. The easiest thing in the world was to lose touch with someone.
On the cavernous factory floors of Yue Yuen, making sneakers is a science measured with stopwatches. A plastic sign in front of every station on the assembly line displays how many seconds a worker needs to complete a given task. It takes a Yue Yuen assembly line ten hours to make a shoe, down from twenty-five days four years ago, and the number of shoes produced per worker has gone up 10 percent.
The Yue Yuen plant for Adidas used to issue workers’ uniforms free of charge. Because of cost-cutting pressure from Adidas, Yue Yuen started charging workers for uniforms, but Adidas objected to this practice too. Yue Yuen abolished uniforms altogether, and workers now wear their own clothes on the job.
The accelerating pace of the global fashion cycle increases the pressure. A decade ago, the big athletic-shoe brands gave factories ninety days from receiving an order to delivering a product; several years ago it was sixty days, and now it is thirty days. Orders are getting smaller, to allow for a rapid response when fashions change, and workers live inside this unpredictable cycle.
LATER THAT MONTH, the workers were transferred to new dorms. In a factory the size of Yue Yuen, girls who had seen one another every day suddenly did not know how to find their friends again. Many lost touch for good.
My relatives did not like telling their own stories. They often began by insisting they had nothing to say. Their narratives frequently opened with ignorance, a denial, even a death, as if to end the story before it could properly begin. Not one of them, it seemed to me, had faith that their memories mattered. In fact, my experience of China was very shallow was the first thing my aunt Nellie told me. We don’t know much about family history, said my uncle Luke, because we never had a chance to talk about it. My father’s story began with absence: My grandfather’s father. Nobody knew his name. They brushed over details and they downplayed drama. Sometimes when they were relating something particularly painful, they laughed. Perhaps in a world where so many people had suffered, one person’s story did not matter. Suffering only made you more like everyone else.
But at heart these journeys were different enterprises. The factory girls go to the city to improve their lives; my grandfather left home so he could return one day and better serve his country. You could say that my grandfather left home for home, while the girls leave home only for themselves.
The isolation of these places traced my grandfather’s idealism. Most students returning from abroad lived in the big cities, but my grandfather thought his work might matter more in the backward parts of the country.
China under Mao was an aristocracy in reverse: Pedigree had always been a national obsession, but now the higher a family’s standing had once been, the worse off it became.
And what took its place? For a while, radical fervor was enough. But when the Cultural Revolution finally ended and pragmatic leaders like Deng Xiaoping took over, the Chinese would find themselves living in a vacuum—stripped of all belief and blank as newborns, looking upon a ruined world they must somehow make anew.
Every time she said goodbye to a child, she knew it was for the last time.
But Chinese immigrants are different: No matter what terrible things happened to their families in China, they go back, on whatever terms the government allows. This is in part the pragmatism that runs so deep that it excuses the past, but it is more than that.
The pull of China is strong, which is why I resisted it for so long.
Viewed from Dongguan, the needs of the Chinese economy were changing so fast that the education system was not even trying to keep up anymore.
No action was so elementary that it didn’t require instructions; the class sometimes felt like a crash course for Martians trying to pass as human beings.
But education remains one of the most conservative areas of Chinese society, burdened by hidebound teachers and administrators, political constraints, and a historical obsession with test scores.
That act of Confucian self-sacrifice concealed a ferocious will to get ahead.
Formal education was not valued in Dongguan, but until then I had not realized how little it was worth.
My Chinese friends in Beijing were hopeless at parties—they stuck with whatever group they came with, locked into position like a squadron of fighter planes flying into combat in the one formation they knew.
Ma Xiaonan never came to class again. That was the only sign of her success: that she had disappeared.
In traditional Chinese society, maintaining harmony with others was the key to living in the world. The moral compass was not necessarily right or wrong; it was your relationship with the people around you. And it took all your strength to break free from that.
Whenever I watched Chinese people interact in a group setting, I understood in my bones how the Cultural Revolution happened. People were terrified of being singled out, but from the safety of the group they could turn on someone with a speed and ferocity that took your breath away.
her voice: sharp as a scythe, and unashamed of its broad peasant accent that no number of years in the city could erase.
Chinese entrepreneurship was nothing if not opportunistic, and many businessmen were involved in a string of specialized and completely unrelated ventures.
the Silverworld Hotel had a digital capacity for ten thousand girls. There were parts of Mongolia where phone numbers weren’t even that long.
The karaoke world is dreamy and unreal. Young women in evening gowns laugh at all your jokes, until their flattery feels as natural as breathing.
After many drinking games, a young woman threw herself at a man who was probably a work colleague. She wrapped her arms around his neck and nestled into his chest. The man did not embrace so much as endure: He stood with his arms hanging stiffly at his sides, like a soldier consigned to guard duty during a rainstorm.
English was the path to riches and satisfaction; to them I was like someone who had won the lottery but refused to cash in my ticket.
The ubiquity of English study seemed only to increase the respect for it: Despite many attempts and much effort, the language continued to defy mastery.
Sometimes aspiring English speakers drew me into conversations as disjointed as the dialogue in a Beckett play.
“How do you say ‘international trade’?” she asked me in Chinese. I told her. Her aspirations seemed as wide as the world, and as easy as speaking a word aloud.
A different deception involved foreign teachers. Young black men who said they were from Canada or England showed up at schools around Dongguan, offering their services as English instructors. It could have been a watershed moment in China’s march toward racial diversity, except that it wasn’t. One parent told me her daughter’s kindergarten class cried at the sight of their new teacher, because they had never seen a black person before. The school fired him.
I finally understood the mystery of the black teachers. They were Africans, coming to backwaters and passing themselves off as native English speakers to school administrators who didn’t know the difference.
It felt strange to me to sit in a Dongguan factory and watch young people so constrained by their own timidity. The city was built on making do and getting by; the secret of success was learning just enough to talk your way into a clerk’s job or a teaching position or whatever else you wanted. But in Liu Yixia’s classroom I saw the limits of that way of thinking. Learning a foreign language properly took time, and there were no shortcuts. You could not fake your way into English.
it was infuriating to interact with somebody so dogmatic. Mostly I could tell that human beings frustrated him. He preferred to talk about them in parts: their eyeballs, their hands, their brains. But people as a whole did not make sense to him. They were inefficient; they used only 5 percent of their cerebrums; they had a maddening aversion to sitting in front of a machine eleven hours a day to learn a language. People basically didn’t work—it was as if their creator had used first-rate parts but then botched the assembly.
In the village, everyone knew everyone else and people were connected in multiple ways. But Min’s friends in the city were linked only through her; at one stroke, she had lost ties to almost everyone she knew. “I have no more friends now,” she said.
when he spoke to strangers, he blushed to the rims of his ears.
Migration now made it possible for two people from towns a thousand miles apart to meet and marry. To a young woman’s parents, that was a catastrophe: Unaccustomed to long-distance travel, they worried that a daughter who married a man from far away would virtually disappear from their lives.
The life in the countryside was pleasant, but you could go from one end of the year to the other and almost never see money.
Agriculture brings little economic benefit now; family plots, of just under one acre on average, are too small to be profitable. But across China, the family farm is still being tended, because that is what people have always done.
The continuing link to a family farm has stabilized China in an age of mass migration. Its cities have not spawned the shantytown slums of so much of the developing world, because the migrant who fails in the city can always return home and find someone there.
No matter how fondly they recall their rural childhoods, in truth the village cannot take them back.
The train station in Guangzhou was mobbed; every year at this time, four and a half million people passed through on their way home and back out again.
Nobody on earth generates trash faster than the traveling Chinese.
Electricity was used sparingly to save money, and most dinners were eaten in near-darkness. There was no plumbing and no heating.
Wuxue had things you no longer saw in the modern cities of the coast, like a grain storage warehouse and a military grain supply station—both relics of a time when people relied on the government for their grain ration.
Generations have lived and died here without traveling twenty miles from home.
The Chinese countryside is not relaxing. It is a place of constant socializing and negotiation, a conversation that has been going on for a long time and will continue after you are gone.
Maybe it’s impossible to write the history of a small place in China, because everyone with talent or ambition goes out. History happens elsewhere.
The genealogy reflected the traditional Chinese view that the purpose of history was not to relate facts or record stories, but to establish a moral standard to guide the living. History was not simply what happened, but what ought to happen if people behaved as they should.
The absence of other details indicated that a man had achieved nothing notable in life: he was a farmer.
Traditional Chinese culture had always held learning in the greatest reverence. That schools became the sites of humiliation and torment was one of the things that made the Cultural Revolution so terrible.
Across China, more than half a million people had been named Rightists—all but ninety-six, it was eventually decided, had been labeled by mistake.
During the summer, personal ambition often lay dormant, like an animal in hibernation.
For a long time I thought of Dongguan as a city with no past, but now I realize it isn’t so. The past has been there all along, reminding us: This time—maybe, hopefully, against all odds—we will get it right.
In death, my grandfather was inscribed into the landscape of China. And then the names all changed after the Communists took power.
There are still millions of Chinese who see an overnight bus trip to a factory as a vacation.