Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Chang Leslie T

Author:Chang, Leslie T. [Chang, Leslie T.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385528528
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-09-26T16:00:00+00:00

Her first boyfriend was a driver at the building-materials company where she worked. Chunming did not particularly like him at first, but they spent a lot of time together and he knew how to charm women. Already twenty-five, she had never slept with a man before.

Soon after they started dating, Chunming sensed he wasn’t right for her. He frequently borrowed money from his parents and lacked her gift for hard work. “He couldn’t accomplish the big things and didn’t want to bother with the small things” was how Chunming put it. Twice when they fought, he hit her.

“He used his hand like this, and slapped me hard on the face,” Chunming told me, holding her hand out stiffly, palm up, to demonstrate. “The first time he hit me, I cried and cried. He promised he would never do it again. The second time he hit me, I didn’t respond at all. I was just very calm. There is a traditional saying that the man who hits once will hit again. Now I know that it’s true.” That was in 2002, but Chunming stayed with her boyfriend for another year and a half. They shared a rented three-bedroom apartment across from the Wal-Mart in downtown Dongguan.

“Whenever I told him I wanted to break up with him, he wouldn’t answer, or he would say I was just toying with his emotions. I didn’t know how to get rid of him,” Chunming said. “I would tell him we should break up, then I would come home from work and he would be there. I didn’t know what to do.” Resorting to indirectness, she wrote him letters in her diary: This time I have really decided I must break up with you. We have no future. The ink on the pages ran, because she was crying as she wrote. She left her diary on the kitchen table, but if he read it, he never let on.

It took another woman to resolve the matter. One day a woman from her boyfriend’s hometown called Chunming and informed her they were having an affair. Chunming was relieved, and when she told her boyfriend that she knew about the other woman, he packed his things and left without argument. Since then she had not had a serious relationship, though she had many flings. Sometimes this was enough for her; in the future when she had made her money, she dreamed, she would have an apartment and a car and lovers whenever she wanted. At other times, these casual affairs made her more lonely. “If you just have lovers,” she told me, “it’s like you’re always floating on the sea and can never come into harbor.”

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