I will post requirement and material.All instruction you need to know is WEEKLY READING POSTS partBecause we will use turnitin, 100% original is required.Pls 1.5-2 PAGESpls read Chen – Daughter of Good Fortune (pp. 151-279) and material which I post.I dont have Chen’s book, so hope you can find it:)
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LETTER FROM CHINA
BOOMTOWN GIRL
Finding a new life in the golden city.
by Peter Hessler
MAY 28, 2001
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M
a Li couldn’t tell me exactly why she had left
her home town after graduating from the local
teachers college. “There was something in the heart,”
she said. “My mother says that I just won’t be
satisfied with a happy life. She says that I’m
determined to chiku—eat bitter.” In any event, she
wouldn’t have been satisfied with life as a local
schoolteacher. “Teaching is a good job for a woman,
and it’s easy to find a husband, because men like to
have teachers as their wives,” she said. “It could
have been a very comfortable life. But, if it’s too
comfortable, I think it’s like death.”
She was slipping away even when I first met her.
That was in 1996, when I taught English at the
teachers college in Fuling, a small town on the
Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. My students
were training to become middleschool teachers, and
one day I asked them to respond to a hypothetical
question: Would you rather have a long life with the normal ups and downs, or an extremely
happy life that ends after another twenty years?
Nearly all my students took the first option. Most of them came from peasant homes in the
Sichuan countryside, and several pointed out that their families were so poor that they couldn’t
afford to die in two decades. Ma Li, though, chose the short life. At nineteen, she was the
youngest student in the class. She wrote:
It seems to me that I haven’t been really happy for quite a long time. Sometimes I owe my being dispirited to the surroundings, especially
the oppressive atmosphere in our college. But I find the other students can enjoy themselves while I am complaining, so I think the problem is in
myself.
Everything she wrote that year marked her as different. She contradicted her classmates; she
skirted the Communist Party line; she had her own opinions. She wrote about her father, a math
professor who had spent the Cultural Revolution in political exile, working in a coal mine; and
she wrote about her older sister, who had gone to the city of Shenzhen, seven hundred miles
away, to look for work. When I asked my students to compose a business letter to an American
organization, Ma Li chose the Country Music Association, in Nashville. She told me that she
was curious to learn what country music was like. Another time, she asked if I had any black
friends, because she had never seen a black person, except on television. When my literature
class performed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” she played Titania. She was a good actress,
although she had a tendency to play every role with a touch of a smile, as if she were watching
herself from a great distance. She had high cheekbones, full lips, and dark, fastmoving eyes in
a wideopen face.
After graduation, most of my students accepted governmentassigned teaching jobs in their
home towns. Ma Li went south to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, with her boyfriend
to look for work. He was a squarefaced young man with bristly hair, hard black eyes, and a
quick temper, and he wanted to go on to Shanghai. “I hadn’t decided to break up with him yet,”
Ma Li told me later. “But I knew I didn’t want to go to Shanghai.” Instead, in November of
1997, she went to Shenzhen, and within a few months they had broken up for good. In
Shenzhen, it took her less than a week to find a position as a secretary in a factory that
produced costume jewelry for export. Her starting salary was eight hundred and seventy yuan a
month, or a hundred and five American dollars. Most of her former classmates were earning
about forty dollars a month as teachers in Sichuan.
It was not unusual for former students to call and tell me about various milestones of
independence. Often, these had to do with money and new possessions—a salary raise, a new
apartment. Once, a student called to tell me that he had acquired a cell phone. He talked about
the cell phone for a few minutes, and then he mentioned, in an offhand way, that he had also
become engaged. Five months after starting the factory job, Ma Li called to report that she had
received a raise, to a hundred and twenty dollars a month.
She laughed when I said that she now made as much money as I did. But she sounded a little
funny, and I asked if something was wrong.
”The company has an agent in Hong Kong,” she said slowly. “He often comes here to
Shenzhen. He is an old man, and he likes me.”
”What do you mean by that?”
”Because I am fat.” She giggled nervously. I knew that she had gained a little weight, and in
some ways it made her even prettier.
”Does he want you to be his girlfriend?”
”Perhaps.” Her voice sounded small on the phone.
”Is he married?”
”He is divorced. He has young children in Taiwan. But he usually works in Hong Kong.”
”How often does he come to Shenzhen?”
”Twice a month.”
”Is it a big problem?”
”He always finds a way to be with me,” she said. “He says he will help me find a job in Hong
Kong if I want one. The salaries are much higher there, you know.”
”That sounds like a very bad idea,” I said carefully. “If you want another job, you should
not ask him for help. That will only cause big problems in the future. You should try to avoid
him.”
”I do,” she said. “And I tell my coworkers to always be with me if he is here.”
”Well, if it becomes a big problem, you should leave the job.”
”I know,” she said. “Anyway, it is not such a good job, and if I have to leave I will.”
T
he city of Shenzhen is surrounded by a sixtysevenmilelong chainlink fence. Some of
the fence’s sections are topped with barbed wire. Deep in the center of downtown is a
seventyacre expanse of green called Litchi Park. At its southern end is a billboard that features
an enormous image of Deng Xiaoping against a backdrop of the Shenzhen skyline, with the
injunction “Persist in Following the Communist Party’s Basic Line for One Hundred Years
Without Change.” The billboard has become a symbol of Shenzhen, and locals and visitors
often pose in front of it for photographs. In February of 1997, when Deng Xiaoping died,
thousands of Shenzhen residents gathered to make offerings at the billboard. They left flowers,
poetry, and other memorials, and some of them sang “Spring Story,” which is the official
Shenzhen song:
In the spring of 1979
An old man drew a circle on the southern coast of China
And city after city rose up like fairy tales
And mountains and mountains of gold gathered like a miracle.
Other Chinese cities have history, but Shenzhen’s origins have the flavor of myth—the
miraculous birth, the benevolent god. In 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong, Deng
Xiaoping marked his rise to power by initiating what became known as Reform and Opening—
capitaliststyle innovations that ended almost three decades of Communist economics. Deng
avoided trying out the more radical changes in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where
mistakes would be politically disastrous. Instead, he and his advisers experimented in less
developed areas, in what came to be called Special Economic Zones. Through a system of tax
breaks and investment privileges, the government hoped to encourage foreign firms to set up
shop in these zones. In 1980, they conferred this honor on Shenzhen, a sleepy southern border
town whose economy had depended mostly on fishing and farming. Shenzhen became a
“reform laboratory,” and one of its nicknames was Window to the Outside World.
In 1990, the government established the Shenzhen Stock Exchange—the first bigboard
market in China. (The second one opened later that year, in Shanghai.) Since 1980, Shenzhen’s
G.D.P. has had an annual growth rate of more than thirty per cent, and its residents enjoy one of
the highest standards of living in any Chinese city. A number of major American corporations
have plants in Shenzhen, including I.B.M., Compaq, PepsiCo, and DuPont.
Residents of Hong Kong, which is separated from Shenzhen by only a waterway and a
fence, tend to dismiss their neighbor as a cheap imitation of the former British colony. Indeed,
Shenzhen’s skyscrapers aren’t nearly as impressive as Hong Kong’s, the streets aren’t as clean,
and there isn’t the same dramatic cityscape of steel and lights shimmering across a harbor. But
few mainlanders have been to Hong Kong, and to them Shenzhen is astonishing. The city is
probably the cleanest of any in mainland China. And it is green—official statistics boast that
fortyfour per cent of the city is open space. Parks are sprinkled throughout the downtown area,
and the streets are lined with banyan trees and palms and carefully groomed strips of grass.
There are few bicycles downtown; most people can afford to take buses or cabs. The traffic
moves smoothly. The city center is intersected by Shennan Road, nine lanes of traffic bordered
by the city’s bestknown buildings: the Stock Exchange, a block of glistening bluegreen glass;
the Land King Tower, a narrow, twinspired building of sixtynine stories; and its adjoining
apartment complex, which, with a sevenstoryhigh opening in its façade, is the city’s most
architecturally innovative structure.
Over the past twenty years, Shenzhen has become home to a social experiment that is as
impressive as its economic adventure. Its population has exploded from three hundred thousand
to more than four million. The average Shenzhen resident is less than twentynine years old—a
remarkable statistic in a country whose birth policy has resulted in aging urban populations.
Because many of the factories rely on unskilled, lowwage labor, most of the newcomers are
women. Although there are no reliable official statistics, locals like to say that there are seven
women to every man in Shenzhen, and the city is sometimes described as a “woman’s paradise,”
because it offers so many job opportunites to young women. But this phrase hardly describes
the underside of the boomtown. Shenzhen is notorious as a place where workers in poorly
regulated factories often lose limbs in laborrelated accidents. China’s development over the
past decade has spurred an explosive growth in the sex industry, and nowhere is this
phenomenon more obvious than in downtown Shenzhen, where it’s impossible to walk at night
without being propositioned by young prostitutes, who are known as “street angels.”
Shenzhen feels like a city under siege. Locals, knowing that they have been the beneficiary
of unusual government patronage, are constantly worried that Shenzhen’s special status might
be revoked. (The 1997 offerings to Deng Xiaoping at the billboard in Litchi Park reflected this
fear of political change.) In the midnineteeneighties, when a series of smuggling scandals
broke out in the Special Economic Zones, conservative Communist officials complained that
the loosened restrictions on foreign investment were invitations to corruption and neo
colonialism.
Similar worries prompted the government to erect the encircling fence. It was a distinctly
Chinese “solution”: just as the Great Wall had been built to keep foreigners at bay, so the fence
was intended to keep the capitalist reforms under control. Chinese citizens entering Shenzhen
proper have to go through customs, where they must show a border pass and an I.D. that
requires approval from their home province. The completion of the fence, in 1984, had
unintended consequences. Laborintensive factories inside the Special Economic Zone began
moving to the other side of the fence to take advantage of cheaper rents and less rigorous law
enforcement. Today, Shenzhen is divided into two worlds, which are described by residents as
guannei and guanwai—”within the customs” and “outside the customs.” Satellite towns have
sprung up beyond the fence, most of them squalid and unplanned. In this sprawl of cheaply
constructed factories and worker dormitories, wages are lower, workweeks are longer, and labor
accidents and factory fires are more frequent than they are in Shenzhen proper.
It was here, outside the customs, that Ma Li got her job at the costumejewelry factory,
handling inventory, keeping track of orders, and doing some English translation. The factory
made pewter, brass, and lowgrade silver jewelry, as well as cheap plastic beads that were
painted and lacquered and packaged in ziplock bags to be sent to Hong Kong, Southeast Asia,
San Francisco, and Chicago.
H
er stories drifted up to me from the south. Every two or three weeks, Ma Li telephoned or
wrote, creating the city in my mind. Some of her tales ended abruptly, like the one about
the businessman from Hong Kong who had pursued her. Other stories lasted longer, like the one
about her older sister, who had first worked as a travelling saleswoman and then been recruited
by a company that was running a pyramid scheme. She brought Ma Li to the recruitment
meeting. “A lot of the salespeople had low cultural levels, but they had learned how to talk,” Ma
Li recalled. “I didn’t think it was a good way to make money, but it was a good way to improve
yourself and improve your confidence.” Her sister had known that it was a scam—the
government was cracking down on pyramid schemes, which had run rampant across southern
China—and she said that she had gone to the meeting simply out of curiosity. Afterward, she
had taken a job with a lonelyhearts hot line, talking on the telephone with other people who
felt lost in Shenzhen. “Some people say there is no real love in Shenzhen,” Ma Li said when I
asked why people called her sister’s hot line. “People are too busy with earning money to really
live.”
That, probably, was why a young man named Gao Ming took her by surprise. He had been
trained as a moldmaker, but he came to the jewelry factory as a purchasing agent, because he
wanted a break from manual labor. At his previous job in Shenzhen, Gao Ming had
miscalculated the weight of a metal part, which slipped when he and two other workers were
trying to lift it. Gao Ming let go. The other two workers didn’t, and they lost their fingers. The
workers were promised compensation, and Gao Ming wasn’t blamed for the accident. Still, he
decided to leave the job. Seeing the injured men around the factory made him uncomfortable.
At first, Ma Li didn’t take much notice when Gao Ming arrived at her factory, in March of
1998. He was of average height, with stiff black hair, and his shoulders were broad from
working with the molds. He wasn’t particularly handsome. He kept to himself. But after a while,
she found that she was noticing him. She liked the way he walked—there was a certain
confidence in his gait. Two months later, small gifts started appearing in the drawer of her desk.
She received two dolls and a small figurine of a sheep. She didn’t ask who had put them there.
One day in September, Gao Ming and Ma Li went out with some of their coworkers and
found themselves walking alone in the local park. Ma Li can’t remember how they became
separated from the others. Suddenly she was frightened—things were happening too fast. She
was twentytwo years old. He was twentysix.
”I don’t want to walk with you,” she said.
”Who do you want to walk with?” Gao Ming asked.
”I don’t want to walk with anybody!”
They went back to the factory. Months later, Gao Ming told her that it was then that he could
see she hadn’t made up her mind to reject him.
The jewelry factory had fifty employees. The owner was Taiwanese, as were many of the
bosses who ran plants outside the customs. He told the workers that he hated mainland China
and that he was there only because of the cheap labor. The workers didn’t like the Taiwanese
owner very much. Some of them made as little as twelve cents an hour, which meant that they
had to work overtime to earn a decent income. Whenever they talked about the boss, they used
the words that many workers in Shenzhen use to describe the Taiwanese owners: “stingy” and
“lecherous.” But the jewelryfactory boss wasn’t as bad as many of the other bosses, and
conditions at the plant were better than at many of the others beyond the fence. The workers
had Sundays off, and during the week they were allowed to leave the factory after work hours,
although everybody had to be back in the dormitory by 11 or 12 P.M., depending on the boss’s
whim.
The dormitory where Ma Li lived was on the top two floors of a sixstory building. There
were six workers to a dorm room. It was a “threeinone” factory—production, warehousing,
and living quarters were combined into one structure. This arrangement is illegal in China, and
the workers knew it, just as they knew that some of the production material stored on the first
floor was extremely flammable. What’s more, an electrician had reported to Ma Li that the
building’s wiring was faulty. Afterward, she mapped out an escape route for herself. If a fire
broke out at night, she would run to the dormitory’s sixthfloor balcony and jump across to the
roof of the building next door. That was the extent of her plan—she had no interest in
complaining to the government about the violations, and neither did the other workers. All of
them were far from home, and they knew that such conditions were common in the plants
outside the customs.
One Saturday night in October, Gao Ming took Ma Li’s hand as they were crossing the road.
Gao Ming held on tightly.
”I’m too nervous,” Ma Li said, once they had reached the other side. “I don’t want it to be
like this.”
”What’s wrong?” Gao Ming said. “Haven’t you ever done this before?”
”I have,” she said. “But I’m still scared.”
”It’s going to be like this in the future,” Gao Ming said. “You should get used to it.”
I
made my first visit to Shenzhen in April, 1999. It was a hazy morning, the sky low and heavy
with smog, when my bus arrived at Ma Li’s satellite city, twenty miles outside the Shenzhen
fence. She was waiting for me in front of a local hamburger joint—the sole Americanstyle fast
food restaurant in town and a sign that Western influence had made its way out here from
downtown Shenzhen.
Ma Li looked much the same as when I had last seen her. She wore a simple blue dress, and
her hair was tied back; she smiled and shook my hand. Much of her old shyness had
disappeared; she was the guide now, steering me briskly through town to another bus stop,
where we caught a ride into the Special Economic Zone. Uniformed guards at the border
checked our I.D.s—my passport, her border pass—and the highway led us into the heart of the
city. She was excited: she said that she went inside the fence only once a month or so, because
the city was so expensive and because her factory restricted the workers to oneday weekends.
I visited Shenzhen three more times, and it was always the passage into town and then the
return, the fencedin boundary and the routine of the checkpoint, that were the most memorable
moments of the day. On that first trip, Ma Li and I spent only a few hours downtown. We walked
past the Stock Exchange and glanced at the digital board on its façade. We went to the Safari
Park Shenzhen, where tourists paid twentyfive yuan to throw live ducks to the crocodiles. I
took Ma Li’s photo in front of the Deng Xiaoping billboard. In the Chinese way, she didn’t
smile—a sombre pose with the Old Man waving in the background.
And then we returned, catching another bus north: past the downtown skyscrapers and the
apartment blocks, watching the neighborhoods grow seedier with every mile we travelled from
the center. We cut through the green hills just before the border, wh …
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