“At home,” he said. “I print them up at home, bring them here. No electricity here.” Up north in Baoding she’d always bought them in a store where they let you pick your pattern online and then printed them there. More to pick from.
On the other hand, he had a whole box full of ones that hadn’t sold that he would let go for cheap. In the stack she found a purple one with kittens that wasn’t too bad. Very Japanese, which was also very fresh this year. And only one hundred yuan for phone and three hundred minutes.
He took the flat plastic sheet from her and dropped it in a pot of boiling water big enough to make dumplings. The hinges embedded in the sheet were made of plastic with molecular memory and when they got hot, they bent, and the plastic folded into a rough cell phone shape. He fished the phone out of the water with tongs, let it sit for a moment, and then pushed all the seams together so they snapped. “Wait about an hour for it to dry before you use it,” he said and handed her the warm phone.
“An hour,” she said. “I need it now. I need a job.”
He shrugged. “Probably okay in half an hour,” he said.
She bought a newspaper and scallion pancake from a street food vendor, sat on a curb, and ate while her phone dried. The paper had some job listings, but it also had a lot of listings from recruiters. ONE MONTH BONUS PAY! BEST JOBS! and NUMBER ONE JOBS! START BONUS! People scowled at her for sitting on the curb. She looked like a farmer, but what else was she supposed to do? She checked listings on her new cell phone. Online there were a lot more listings than in the paper. It was a good sign. She picked one at random and called.
The woman at the recruiting office was a flat-faced southerner with buckteeth. Watermelon-picking teeth. But she had a manicure and a very nice red suit. The office was not so nice. It was small, and the furniture was old. Jieling was groggy from a night spent at a hotel on the edge of the city. It had been cheap but very loud.
The woman was very sharp in the way she talked and had a strong accent that made it hard to understand her. Maybe Fujian, but Jieling wasn’t sure. The recruiter had Jieling fill out an application.
“Why did you leave home?” the recruiter asked.
“To get a good job,” Jieling said.
“What about your family? Are they alive?”
“My mother is alive. She is remarried,” Jieling said. “I wrote it down.”
The recruiter pursed her lips. “I can get you an interview on Friday,” she said.
“Friday!” Jieling said. It was Tuesday. She had only three hundred yuan left out of the money she had brought. “But I need a job!”
The recruiter looked sideways at her. “You have made a big gamble to come to Shenzhen.”
“I can go to another recruiter,” Jieling said.
The recruiter tapped her lacquered nails. “They will tell you the same thing,” she said.
Jieling reached down to pick up her bag.
“Wait,” the recruiter said. “I do know of a job. But they only want girls of very good character.”
Jieling put her bag down and looked at the floor. Her character was fine. She was not a loose girl, whatever this woman with her big front teeth thought.
“Your Mandarin is very good. You say you graduated with high marks from high school,” the recruiter said.
“I liked school,” Jieling said, which was only partly not true. Everybody here had terrible Mandarin. They all had thick southern accents. Lots of people spoke Cantonese in the street.
“Okay. I will send you to ShinChi for an interview. I cannot get you an interview before tomorrow. But you come here at 8:00 a.m. and I will take you over there.”
ShinChi. New Life. It sounded very promising. “Thank you,” Jieling said. “Thank you very much.”
But outside in the heat, she counted her money and felt a creeping fear. She called her mother.
Her stepfather answered, “Wei.”
“Is Ma there?” she asked.
“Jieling!” he said. “Where are you!”
“I’m in Shenzhen,” she said, instantly impatient with him. “I have a job here.”
“A job! When are you coming home?”
He was always nice to her. He meant well. But he drove her nuts. “Let me talk to Ma,” she said.
“She’s not here,” her stepfather said. “I have her phone at work. But she’s not home, either. She went to Beijing last weekend, and she’s shopping for fabric now.”
Her mother had a little tailoring business. She went to Beijing every few months and looked at clothes in all the good stores. She didn’t buy in Beijing; she just remembered. Then she came home, bought fabric, and sewed copies. Jieling’s stepfather had been born in Beijing and she thought that was part of the reason her mother had married him. He was more like her mother than her father had been. There was nothing in particular wrong with him. He just set her teeth on edge.
“I’ll call back later,” Jieling said.
“Wait, your number is blocked,” her stepfather said. “Give me your number.”
“I don’t even know it yet,” Jieling said and hung up.
The New Life company was a huge, modern-looking building with a lot of windows. Inside it was full of reflective surfaces and very clean. Sounds echoed in the lobby. A man in a very smart gray suit met Jieling and the recruiter, and the recruiter’s red suit looked cheaper, her glossy fingernails too red, her buckteeth exceedingly large. The man in the smart gray suit was short and slim and very southern looking. Very city.
Jieling took some tests on her math and her written characters and got good scores.
To the recruiter, the human resources man said, “Thank you, we will send you your fee.” To Jieling he said, “We can start you on Monday.”
“Monday?” Jieling said. “But I need a job now!” He looked grave. “I … I came from Baoding, in Hebei,” Jieling explained. “I’m staying in a hotel, but I don’t have much money.”
The human resources man nodded. “We can put you up in our guesthouse,” he said. “We can deduct the money from your wages when you start. It’s very nice. It has television and air conditioning, and you can eat in the restaurant.”
It was very nice. There were two beds. Jieling put her backpack on the one nearest the door. There was carpeting, and the windows were covered in gold drapes with a pattern of cranes flying across them. The television got stations from Hong Kong. Jieling didn’t understand the Cantonese, but there was a button on the remote for subtitles. The movies had lots of violence and more sex than mainland movies did—like the bootleg American movies for sale in the market. She wondered how much this room was. Two hundred yuan? Three hundred yuan?
Jieling watched movies the whole first day, one right after another.
On Monday she began orientation. She was given two pale green uniforms, smocks and pants like medical people wore and little caps and two pairs of white shoes. In the uniform she looked a little like a model worker—which is to say that the clothes were not sexy and made her look fat. There were two other girls in their green uniforms. They all watched a DVD about the company.
New Life did biotechnology. At other plants they made influenza vaccine (on the screen were banks and banks of chicken eggs), but at this plant they were developing breakthrough technologies in tissue culture. It showed many men in suits. Then it showed a big American store and explained how they were forging new exportation ties with the biggest American corporation for selling goods, Wal-Mart. It also showed a little bit of an American movie about Wal-Mart. Subtitles explained how Wal-Mart was working with companies around the world to improve living standards, decrease CO2 emissions, and give people low prices. The voice narrating the DVD never really explained the breakthrough technologies.