The Ghost Shift (28 page)

“Women here, men there,” she called.

The old warehouse smelled sweet—it must have been used to store a fragrant crop once. Now, it had been split up into boxlike rooms leading off a corridor. The supervisor collected their identity cards and led them along the passage, pointing them to the rooms where they would sleep.

Jia’s dormitory came second. The supervisor handed her a tag with a number and pointed inside. It was on the first floor, with windows that had been draped with cloths to dim the light. The room was crammed with triple-decked bunks, like a night train, and women were dozing or reading or flicking phones in about half the beds—the others were empty. Jia walked slowly through, searching for her bunk.

She found it in the corner, on the bottom of a stack of three. The upper bunks were taken, but no one was in them. Setting down her
bag, she took out most of her things, laying the clothes in a box next to the bunk. She unfolded the sheet and blankets on the bed and made it. Then she tucked her panda by the pillow and sat, hearing whispers and faint music. She still hadn’t eaten.

At seven-fifteen, the other bunks started to stir, their occupants climbing down and putting on shoes. They drifted out of the room in a crowd, emptying it. Two walked past Jia without pausing. For a while, she was by herself. Then she heard noises, and ten women entered the room, laughing and joking. Two came to the bunks above her but did not acknowledge her, changing clothes before wandering out again. Picking up her card, she followed them.

Outside, she joined the crowd walking across a courtyard to another building. It wasn’t like the eruption of the afternoon—there was no urgency in the progress. Some paused to smoke, and others strolled, their arms entwined. She smelled the destination from fifty feet away—a canteen. She walked past women washing at a trough and entered a dining hall packed with trestle tables. The intense warmth and the odor of the cooking tempted her to pile a tray with food, but her card was empty.

There was nothing for her here. She walked back to the dormitory and reached into her bag, retrieving her radio. Then she took a jacket and went out into the night, which was still humid. Four men in tracksuits were taking wild kicks at a soccer ball on the field that stretched in front of her, lofting it high into the air. She headed for a bench on the far side and sat alone, tuning her radio.

She knew this place—the dormitory blocks deep inside the campus and the smoking chimneys. The glow of the furnaces about half a mile away, closer to the river. She was familiar with its nighttime presence—the shapes that loomed in the dark sky and the whine of electric carts.

She took the badge and looked at her photo, cursing the haircut she’d suffered. The badge was like the other one, but, with another name—not Tang Liu, but Jiang Jia. They were flags of convenience, identities stolen or borrowed. She didn’t know if Feng had found this one or concocted it. It had come with everything she’d needed—a
hukou
resident permit, a high school card, a story. She had practiced for two days as Lockhart quizzed her about Jia’s family, the place they lived, and her father’s illness from the tungsten mine.

Mei turned on the radio, with the volume low. It was a Han opera, the high voices swooping like birds. When she plugged in earphones, the music died and she could hear only a hiss.

She spoke quietly. “Hello?”

“Where are you, Song Mei?” Lockhart asked.

“Inside. No problems.”

“Are you okay?”

“Hungry, but okay.”

“Be careful.”

The hiss resumed and, when she extracted the cord, the voices declaimed their love again. Mei walked back to the dormitory slowly, hoping to find a cake or even fruit—any scrap of comfort.

“Love. Respect. Discipline.”

The instructor intoned the words slowly and solemnly from the front of the training room. It was eight o’clock in the morning, the start of the day shift, and Mei sat with ten others behind Formica desks, trying to look eager. There was no air-conditioning and the room smelled of sweat, but she was at least doing something, rather than roaming around, fearing discovery.

The man pointed to the girl beside Mei. “You. What are our values?”

The girl was nervous, and faltered as she repeated the words. “Respect. Discipline.… Love.”

“Wrong. You?” He turned to Mei. She tried to appear eager, but he looked like a time-server of the kind the Party seemed to attract to positions of petty authority. His stomach bulged over the belt of his regulation pants, and he’d greased a lick of black hair to his head.

“Love. Respect. Discipline.”

“Correct. Love comes first. Love always comes first at Long Tan. How many of you know our founder’s story?”

No hands were raised, and he pursed his lips sullenly, as if the class had already proved itself unworthy. Mei kept her eyes fixed on him. Every official was a door to be unlocked.

“Cao Fu was born in Hubei in 1949, the year of the revolutionary victory. His parents were peasants, but they loved their son, and they taught him that he could be great. Cao fulfilled their love by building a business that is the envy of the world. It shows other nations what
our people can achieve when they have unity born of love. Love of the family and of others. Long Tan is a family. We eat together, we sleep in the same house, and we work as a team. We are building a new world.”

He nodded several times. “This is a good way to work, isn’t it? With love for others. Isn’t it?”

“Yes. Very good,” Mei said firmly, and the others joined in, murmuring the word obediently.

“Respect.” The instructor was now on a roll. “We respect each other. Cao trusts you to join his workplace. Weaklings are turned away. Everyone in this room already has our respect. You will be paid very well, you will eat good food. There are many things on our campus. Feel free, we want you to enjoy them. But treat our instructions with respect. We know what is best for you.”

“We are honored.” This time, the student next to Mei was the fastest to respond, earning a nod from the instructor.

“Discipline. Cao was taught discipline by his loving parents. Without discipline, he could not have created this company. He would not be a billionaire and own a private jet. He could not show his love by building a mansion for his mother. He was hungry, but he never wavered. You will have a far easier time than Cao Fu did. Ten hours a day? No! He worked fourteen. Six days a week? No, seven days! He wasn’t paid for overtime work. He wasn’t pampered.”

The whole class murmured approvingly before anyone could grab the lead, and the instructor beamed. Mei nodded, smiling the way that Pan did, to lend her own authority to others.

“Now, to show you respect, we will have a break. Stretch your legs! Enjoy our tea, made with our own Long Tan leaves, prepared especially for us. Welcome to our happy family.”

Outside, the ground was wet with rain from an earlier shower and it steamed in the sunshine. The girl who’d messed up her reply to the instructor smiled shyly at her as she sipped tea.

“He was friendly. I’ve heard stories about how unhappy people are here. But I feel better now. I am Han Jun. What is your name?”

“Jiang Jia,” Mei said. She envied the girl for being so easily pleased by a free cup of tea. She’d been as trusting herself not long ago, but
that innocence had been snatched from her, leaving distrust and doubt.

“I’m from Guizhou,” Jun said. “I came to Guangdong to study but I need to earn money. The courses are very expensive.”

When they were called back, the instructor was grinning as if he couldn’t believe their luck.

“I have exciting news. Our plan for the day has changed. We usually spend time practicing the tasks you must master. But we are so busy, we have so much to do, that you will go to your new positions to allow you to learn faster. It is an amazing privilege. Our finest workers will teach you. I will take two of you, and supervisors will escort the others.”

He consulted a list. “Jiang Jia and Han Jun. Come with me.”

A golf cart waited outside, and the instructor turned to address them as it bumped up the avenue.

“This is a special day, and you are luckiest of all. Guess which line you have been chosen to join?”

Looking at his glowing face, Mei wondered if he could be as much of an idiot as he appeared. Had he been brainwashed into this state of euphoria at everything that Long Tan did, or was he a fraud?

“Might it be Poppy?” She was able to slip into the voice of Jia easily—that naive wonder was how she’d felt on her first morning in Guangzhou when she had arrived in the city from Guilin, forever ago.

“Yes!” He slapped the seat delightedly. “You are so lucky, girls. You will build these magical devices.”

The plant was in the newest part of the complex, a fifteen-minute drive away. From a distance, it looked like a hangar by the side of a runway—a white structure with an arched roof, punctuated by a line of windows about a hundred feet in the air. The walls below were solid, offering no clue as to what was happening inside. To penetrate it, Mei, Jun, and the instructor had to pass through two sets of electronic doors, separated by a hallway. The second door opened with a pop, as if the vacuum inside had been punctured.

In the changing rooms, a woman supervisor gave them each a set of slip-on rubber shoes, white overalls, and cotton caps. She mimed how to fold their hair under the cap, and tie it at the back. Mei looked
into the mirror and a gowned technician stared back at her, one disguise layered upon another.

The instructor clapped his hands as they walked out. “Excellent. Let’s take a look. You have never seen anything like it.”

He led them into an elevator, and the doors opened two levels up, onto a walkway high above the factory floor. Mei pressed her back to the rear wall of the elevator as the instructor walked out, oblivious to the height. She saw tiny, white figures through the slats and felt faint.

“Come on!” He waved to Mei, with Jun by him. “This is your only chance to see the view!”

Fixing a smile on her face, Mei grasped the handrail on both sides of the walkway and strode toward him, fixing her eyes on his face. She didn’t like looking at him, but it was better than gazing down. As she reached him, trying not to tremble, he gestured expansively at the view.

“Wow!” Jun cried.

Mei pulled one arm over and clamped it to the rail on the open side, then dragged her stare from him to the far side of the facility, a few hundred feet away. In the canyon below, at the bottom of her field of vision, white shapes twitched and moved. She kept her focus blurred.

“There. One billion dollars of investment. The finest factory in all of China—that’s where you will work. Now let’s go and try.”

“Wonderful,” Mei said, already scurrying to the elevator.

Even on the ground, the scale of the plant was stunning. Hundreds of workers were packed like worker bees, each with an allocated task. Mei saw eight assembly lines, each several hundred feet long, along which frames were slowly passing, with parts being clipped into place and screws fastened. The hum of the conveyor belt was the only sound. Some workers sat silently on stools and others stood, taking parts from plastic bins with one movement and fixing them with a second. Supervisors watched nearby, in case of errors. It was a giant, human machine.

“This is assembly. The parts are delivered over there.” The instructor pointed to bays on the far side of the hangar, where forklift
trucks were unloading boxes from huge trucks. They were scanned by teams of workers and unpacked into bins, ready to be digested.

“This is amazing,” Jun said.

“Isn’t it? Now we’ll go to work.”

They found a space by the end of the line, where the audio port was clipped on the frame and the structure folded, like metal origami, into its final shape. A team of six was finishing the job—fastening four tiny screws into the frame with miniature electric tools. Mei stood by a girl with bitten fingernails and strands of hair snaking from her cap. She watched as the worker held each frame, fixed her screws, and with two prods of a tool—
zzzp, zzzp
—sealed one side. Then the boy opposite her fixed the other side.

They did the same again, and again. It was hypnotic to watch. After an hour of it, Mei’s feet were sore and she was bored, but she couldn’t move. A supervisor watched the other workers while the smiling instructor observed her and Jun. Everyone was locked in position until, at four-thirty, a buzzer sounded. The line stopped, and the girl by Mei put down her tools as chatter replaced the electronic hum.

The other workers walked off the line, leaving only Mei and Jun standing there with two supervisors and the instructor.

“One hour until overtime starts. Now we can start welcoming you into Long Tan’s family. Would you like that?”

“I am eager for the opportunity,” Mei said quickly.

They stood at the line, trying to fix the screws in place as supervisors passed them tablets. It was far harder than Mei had imagined. The tiny screws slipped in her long fingers, and twice she stabbed herself with the sharp tool.

“Faster! Faster!” the instructor cried happily. “Now you can respect yourself. Now you learn to work.”