Blue Gold (31 page)

“You're always on my case about taking responsibility, Dad.”

“Look, when you grow up, you'll understand that things are a lot more complicated in the real world…”

“Let's talk about the real world,” agreed Fiona. She took another sheet of paper from the pile of research. “This is Sylvie—you remember her,” she said, holding up a copy of the famous photo, forcing her dad look at it. “She's my age, fifteen. Her father was killed because of coltan, and her village was burned to the ground. She was raped when she was ten years old by a soldier who also cut her face with a machete and gave her the scar. Coltan is one of the things your company mines, isn't it?” He flinched at this, but he didn't look away. “Her family's been living in a refugee camp ever since, and now if they don't get to come to Canada, they could all be murdered.”

“Fiona, what do you expect me to do about it? It's just the way things work over there.” The moment he spoke the words, he seemed to regret them. “I don't mean to sound callous,” he said, “but we're just one company. We didn't kill this girl's father.”

“Personal responsibility, Dad.”

“Okay, let's talk personal responsibility. Are you saying you're willing to give up your new phone, your laptop—all of your electronics—in some useless gesture that isn't going to help anybody?”

“No. I'm saying the least you can do is try to get them out of that embassy, and into Canada.”

A half-dozen different protests formed on his lips. He started to speak, sputtered, started again. Finally he gave up.

“Look, I know a guy pretty high up in the government,” he told her. “Maybe I can talk him into intervening with immigration and speeding things up—but I'm not making any promises.”

“Thank you,” said Fiona, getting to her feet.

“Stay for dinner?”

Fiona thought about it for a moment. Was she really willing to put up with Joanne's glowering disapproval through an entire meal?

“Sure,” she said at last.

She figured somebody had to stick around to watch out for Brandon and Katie. Somebody who
got
things.

AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER
, the company at last released Laiping's back pay. She wired it home, and her parents used it to go to the hospital in Heyuan. When Laiping spoke to her mother by phone after Baba's surgery, she was relieved to hear that he was recovering well. But her mother complained that the cost of Baba's medicine would leave them with barely enough yuan to buy food. Laiping promised she would keep sending money from her paychecks, every two weeks.

“You are a good daughter, Laiping,” her mother told her.

But Laiping didn't feel like a good daughter. She felt angry and resentful. She remembered what Fen had said about her mother—that she cared more about money than she did about her. Laiping was beginning to feel that way, too.

September was also the launch of the new product. After that, work slowed down a little in the factory. Laiping was switched back to her old job, soldering capacitors to circuit boards, and usually got two days off a week. But with Kai gone, and with her and Fen still not speaking, Laiping was lonely. Min was her only friend, but when the trembling and weakness in her hands finally made it too painful for her to do her job polishing laptop cases, she applied to Human Resources to quit. She decided to return home to the village, where there was a boy who was interested in marrying her. Once she left, Laiping would have no one.

“You should quit, too,” Min told her. “Find a better job, in a better factory.”

But Min was still waiting to hear if permission to quit would be granted. If it didn't come through soon, she planned to give up the money she was owed and leave anyway. Laiping was tempted to do the same, but then she thought about who would pay for Baba's medicine, and realized she had no choice but to stay.

 

ONE EVENING
when Laiping was coming down the wide staircase on her way out of the factory after her shift, she was surprised to see Fen waiting at the bottom. She looked older, smartly dressed in a slim skirt, a frilly blouse and heels, her hair pulled back neatly—there was nothing of the factory girl left. Laiping felt ordinary by comparison.

“Laiping!” she called to her. “Come here!”

Reluctantly, Laiping cut across the two streams of workers, one going up and the other coming down.

“What do you want?”

“There's something you need to see.” She had a smartphone in her hand, the new product. “This email arrived in our office,” she explained as she tapped an icon. “It was forwarded to me, because I understand English.”

Laiping rolled her eyes, but Fen was too busy with the smartphone to see. She opened an email and showed it to Laiping, who was stunned to see herself on the screen. She was wearing the white smock of the testing line, and the bruise around her left eye was very noticeable—so the photo must have been taken about a month ago.

“Where did this come from?” asked Laiping, baffled.

“Some girl in Canada sent it. Look.” Fen scrolled down the email to a second photo, of a gweilo girl with a broad face and curly brown hair, and some writing that Laiping supposed was English. “She found the photo of you on her new smartphone. She has a message for you. Here.”

Fen handed Laiping a piece of paper, on which she had written a translation in Cantonese. Laiping read, “
Thank you for making my phone! I hope your eye is better. I am happy to know who you are. Love, Fiona.
”

“‘I am happy to know who you are'?” Laiping said out loud, puzzled. “Are you sure that's what it says?”

“Yes, I'm sure!” replied Fen, defensively. “I looked it up.” Then she said, shrugging, “Look at this—she sent another photo, too.”

Fen scrolled down further on the screen. Laiping couldn't believe it—she was looking at the picture of the African girl with the scar, the photo that was on the prohibited website that Kai had shown her, all those weeks ago, when he told her that people in Europe and America cared about conditions in the factory. Laiping was wary—was Fen still spying for the company, trying to trap her into admitting she had looked at an illegal site? Would she be sent away, like Kai? But Fen prattled on, oblivious to the danger she was holding in her hand.

“This
gweilo
Fiona must have mental problems,” she said. “Why would she send a picture of
that
girl?”

Laiping had no idea, except that obviously the
gweilo
girl thought there was a connection between them. She looked at Fen's translation again.
I hope your eye is better
. She found herself smiling. In a bizarre way, she realized, Kai had been right—somebody in another country
did
care about her.

“What does that girl with the scar have to do with you?” Fen pressed her. “Who is she?”

“Her name is Sylvie,” Laiping told her. “She lives in Africa, where they get the tantalum powder that goes into the capacitors.”

Fen looked impressed that Laiping would know this, and more than a little suspicious. “You better watch yourself,” she said. “Some people already think you're a troublemaker.”

“Just like your father,” Laiping replied, enjoying the furious look on Fen's face.

She walked out into the cool evening air and joined the mass of workers heading for the cafeteria, clutching the piece of paper on which Fen had written the translation. For the moment, at least, Laiping felt a little less alone.

FIONA AND HER MOTHER
sat at either end of the living room sofa watching the nightly news on TV, feet up and meeting in the middle.

“It's about time!” remarked her mom, keeping up a running commentary on the night's lead story.

On the screen, Sylvie and her family could be seen coming through the arrival doors at Trudeau International Airport in Montreal. There was a zoo of cameras and reporters waiting for them. The two youngest kids had wide grins, and seemed to be enjoying the attention, but Sylvie had the dazed look of a deer caught in headlights, and her mother appeared tiny and terrified. There was another boy in the family, a teenager, who looked kind of hostile—until the young black doctor who'd been on the news for weeks fighting for the family to come to Canada greeted him with a hug. He got a big broad smile then, which made him look younger—and less scary.

Fiona's smartphone pinged. She picked it up from where it was lying beside her on the couch and checked to find a text from her dad.

“Happy now?” the text read.

“Very,” she texted back, thumbs flying.

“Who's that?” her mom asked.

“Just Dad.”

She took in Fiona's pleased look. Her eyes narrowed.

“What's going on?”

“Nothing.”

“Fiona?”

“He's just saying that he's glad Sylvie made it to Canada.”

“Your father,” she repeated, disbelieving. “Mister Mining.
He
said that.”

“Jeez, Mom,” Fiona replied. “People can change.”

WHILE THE CHARACTERS
in this novel are fictional, their experiences and circumstances reflect the lives of millions.

The death toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo over the past two decades due to fighting over coltan and other conflict minerals was estimated at over five million in a report released by the International Rescue Committee in 2008. Many have characterized the mass killing as genocide. The systematic rape of women, children, and men has been used as a weapon of war in the ongoing fighting. The United Nations recently stated that one hospital alone in eastern Congo is treating three hundred rape survivors a month. Because of the cultural taboo against reporting sexual violence, authorities presume the actual number of rapes to be far higher.

So the violence goes on, affecting millions in the eastern DRC and causing thousands, like Sylvie and her family, to flee the country for refugee camps like Nyarugusu, where they struggle with family breakdown, poverty, and the effects of what can be seen as mass post-traumatic stress disorder. Without the rights of citizens, they live in limbo, facing uncertain futures. And girls like Sylvie are hardly safe in Nyarugusu, where between January and September of 2012, eighty-one rapes were reported—sixty-five of which involved girls under eighteen. One thirteen-year-old girl told the Women's Refugee Commission, “Even if they [the rapists] are reported, nothing is done to put them in jail. They still live among us. This happens often.”

In China, statistics for 2012 indicate that in that year alone, 250 million migrant workers made the choice to leave rural villages in search of factory wages in cities like Shenzhen that specialize in high-tech manufacturing. Predominantly young and female, workers like Laiping set out with the dream of a better life, and in some ways they may achieve it—but it comes at the price of oppressive rules, illegally withheld wages, and punishing working conditions. Hundreds of workers have threatened to throw themselves off of dormitory roofs en masse in protest, and at least fourteen have committed suicide.