Like Spilled Water by Jennie Liu

Author:Jennie Liu [Liu, Jennie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: China, Coming of age, contemporary fiction, Family & Relationships, Family, Fiction-Young Adult, Fiction, Siblings, Suicide, Teenagers, women's empowerment, young adult fiction
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group
Published: 2020-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

17

My job at the recycling plant begins the next day. Mama walks to the bus stop with me, pointing out landmarks to help me remember the way, repeating the bus number several times to drum it into my head. The bus pulls up, and I’m surprised when Mama boards and goes with me to the plant. She explains that she’s been given permission to train me the first day and will only do a half shift of her own tonight.

The plant is beyond the outskirts of the city, the last stop on this line. Everyone on board disembarks and walks the long dusty approach road to the sprawling facility, North China Scrap Metal Recycler. Mounds of material are piled under a high open-air shed, spilling out beyond its shelter. The noises of heavy machinery and the scrape of metal on metal are all around the plant. Men are shoveling the scrap into two-wheel carts and pushing them to another building, where Mama leads me.

We enter through another door and go to a locker room where we stash our purses and don green uniforms, gloves, and white cloth masks before entering the main sorting room. Here, huge square tables are piled with jumbles of metal scraps. Everything in the room is gray—the carts, the plastic bins under the tables, the high concrete walls and metal supports of the building, the second-story offices in the corner with windows that look down onto the floor. There must be more than thirty tables in the workroom, and the workers, six to eight per table, are the only dots of color.

Mama sets to work, telling me to watch her. She grabs a long pronged cultivator like Nainai uses in the fields and rakes several rusty hunks of metal toward the edge of the table. She hands me a heavy magnet and shows me how to touch it to each piece of metal.

“If it sticks, put it here.” She points to a bin on the floor between us. “These are ferrous. Everything else goes in the other bin where they’ll go to another table and get sorted into the different types of metal. That’s my usual post.”

I spend another minute listening to the thunk, thunk of metal being chucked into the bins and watching her hands fly before I take the pronged tool and get to work. Mama glances at me frequently while she works, making comments and pointing to the bins as I sort. “That one goes there, right? Okay, and that one goes in the other one. Yes! Don’t get them mixed up.”

She works swiftly and speaks sharply as if she’s left her sorrow at home, and she is again the parent with the instructive voice on our phone. Na, listen to what I say. Study hard. Help your Nainai.

After an hour of monitoring my work she prods me to go a little faster. The work isn’t hard, but it’s dull, and after several hours I begin to lose focus.

“You dropped it in the wrong bin!” The woman on the other side of the table catches me in an error.

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