Blue Gold (9 page)

In the open aisles between the rows of work stations, workers in blue smocks and caps identical to Laiping's and Fen's were lined up in formation, eyes forward—like soldiers at attention. There must have been over a hundred people in each line, and four lines in each aisle—more than a thousand workers altogether on this floor alone.

“What should we do? Should we join them?” Laiping whispered to Fen.

Fen shrugged her shoulders, yes. The girls hurried to the end of the nearest line of workers, almost to the back wall. Someone they couldn't see blew a whistle. Over a loudspeaker, a cheerful but firm female voice told them, “Good morning!”

“Good morning!” the thousands of workers repeated, as one.

“How is everyone this morning?”

“Fine! Fine! Fine!” replied the workers in unison.

“On the count of three, we will march on the spot, right foot first. One…two…three!”

The workers began marching on the spot in near-
perfect unison. Laiping and Fen joined them.

“Lift those knees!” warned the pleasant voice from the loudspeaker. “Remember what our leader Mr. Chen says, ‘Fit body, fit mind—fit for work!'” Laiping looked up to a giant portrait of Steve Chen, the company's founder, on the wall, smiling down on the factory floor, like a father smiling down on his children. Laiping's glance strayed to a giant poster near the portrait of Mr. Chen:
“
Work hard today, or work hard to find another job tomorrow
.”
She lifted her knees higher, anxious to show her willingness to work hard. The lady told them to run on the spot, then to march again. After ten minutes or so, she told them to stop marching and to punch their time cards in a machine. New workers, like Laiping and Fen, were to find a supervisor to be assigned work stations.

The supervisors were not hard to find—they were the ones walking up and down the aisles, telling the workers to hurry up and get to work. Fen nudged Laiping toward one of them, a pudgy man in his forties. His eyes were set too close together for his broad face and he had a big mole near his nose that Laiping tried not to stare at.

“Excuse me,” she said politely, “but we don't know where we're supposed to go.”

“Country mice, eh?” replied the man. “Let me see your hands.”

The girls held out their hands.

“Yours are nice and small,” the supervisor told Fen. Then he shifted his attention to Laiping's hands. “Your fingers are like sausages! Big and clumsy!” he pronounced. “What are they thinking sending you here? This is very delicate work.”

Blushing, Laiping pulled her hands back. But Fen spoke up.

“My sister does the finest embroidery,” she told the foreman. Once again, Laiping marveled at Fen's quickness with a lie. “Back home, everyone admires how delicate her work is.”

The supervisor looked from tiny Fen to Laiping, who was taller than he was, and got a crooked smile. “If you're sisters, I'm a millionaire,” he said with a laugh, but not unkindly. “I get it. You want to stay together. Come with me.”

The supervisor, whose name was Mr. Wu, led them down the production line where worker after worker was seated in an identical pose, head bent over tiny squares on a mat in front of them, to a spot where there were two open stations. Laiping was happy to see that there were stools at each work station, so they wouldn't have to stand while they worked. Mr. Wu told her and Fen to pull on plastic gloves and face masks to cover their mouths and noses, like the other workers were wearing.

“Show me how you work,” he said, waiting expectantly.

Laiping took her seat, her hands shaking with nerves. Gingerly, she used tweezers to lift a circuit board from a bin onto the mat. The tiny capacitor was hard to pinch. She hoped that Mr. Wu didn't notice her hands trembling. From the way he was focusing most of his attention on her, she assumed that Fen was faring better than she was.

“Now the soldering iron,” he prompted, noting Laiping's hesitation.

Laiping picked up a soldering iron, its fine tip giving off a wisp of heat. She took a deep breath, willing her hand to be steady. Bending close to the circuit board, she managed to touch the soldering iron to just the right point. Next she took a string of solder and melted the tiniest amount on the tip of the iron, applying it to the exact spot where the capacitor joined the circuit board, just as she had done a hundred times in training. She looked over at Mr. Wu for his reaction. He nodded his head slightly, eyeing Laiping as though he suspected she was cheating somehow. Otherwise, how could her fat fingers have managed such a delicate task?

“For today,” he pronounced, “take your time and make sure to do your job perfectly. But by tomorrow we expect you to work as quickly as everyone else.”

Laiping glanced down the line and saw how the other workers performed the procedure in seconds, without ever looking up.
Circuit board-capacitor-solder; circuit board-
capacitor-solder.

“Your shift is ten hours,” said Mr. Wu, “with a half-hour break for lunch. Any questions?”

“No, sir,” said Laiping.

“No, sir,” said Fen. “Thank you, sir.”

“Then get busy.” He gave Laiping an appraising look and added, “Sloppiness will be punished.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and bowed her head.

After Mr. Wu walked on, Laiping reached her tweezers into the first bin and laid a circuit board on the mat. She took a tiny capacitor and dropped it onto the proper spot on the board. She picked up the soldering iron and touched it to the capacitor and the circuit board to heat them. She melted the solder with the iron just as she had practiced and applied just the right amount to create the joint. Perfection! Pleased with herself, Laiping glanced down the line of blue-capped heads bowed to their task in quiet efficiency—in the shared certainty of three meals a day and a warm bed at night—and pondered what on earth could make workers so unhappy with their lot that they would throw themselves off the roof of a dormitory rather than face another day.

OLIVIER DIDN'T COME BACK
the next day as Kayembe promised, or the day after that. When finally he returned late in the afternoon of the third day, he was angry that Sylvie had been to see his boss.

“How does it make me look, to have my sister checking up on me?”

His offended pride filled the small hut up to bursting. He seemed to have grown suddenly taller, and broader through the shoulders. From his body odor, he obviously hadn't washed in the few days he'd been away.

“It makes you look like you have a family where you belong,” snapped Sylvie, refusing to be bullied.

“Stop arguing with him, Sylvie, and give him some food,” commanded Mama.

But Sylvie noticed that, as relieved as Mama was that Olivier had returned, she had not gotten up from the sleeping mat to greet him. She was keeping her distance, almost as though she was afraid of him. Sylvie knew what she was thinking, because she was thinking it, too.
He's beginning to look like a soldier.

Pascal and Lucie came in, lugging the plastic jerry can full of water between them.

“Olivier!” shouted Pascal with excitement. “Where have you been? Is it true you learned how to drive a truck?”

Sylvie turned a sharp look on Olivier. “You're driving for Kayembe? Where to?”

“None of your business!” He took a tin of meat from the sack he was carrying over his shoulder and tossed it to her. “Mr. Kayembe sent this for you,” he said, and headed outside.

“Where are you going now?” Sylvie called, but he didn't bother to reply. In a way, Sylvie was relieved that he was gone. Pascal started after him. “Pascal!”

He stopped, turned—frowning with annoyance. “What?”

“You stay here.”

“No! I want to go with Olivier!”

“Stay here, and I'll make
fufu
. Real
fufu
,” she cajoled.

“How,” asked Mama, suddenly interested, “without cassava?”

Sylvie took out the small bag of flour that Kayembe had given her from where she'd hidden it, under the dried beans.

“I bought some,” she lied. “I got paid at the hospital.”

Mama struggled to her feet and came over to help Sylvie mix the flour with the water that Pascal and Lucie had brought.

“But we don't have a fire to cook it on!” Lucie pointed out.

“From now on,” said Sylvie. “Making the fire is Pascal's job.”

Sylvie met Pascal's eyes. For a moment, he looked as though he was going to complain. But then his expression became thoughtful, and he seemed to understand that he'd been promoted within the family. Without arguing, he fished the matches out from the battered cooking pot and went outside to start the fire. Sylvie was grateful that he, at least, had listened to her.

 

ON SATURDAY MORNING
, Mama felt well enough to go with Sylvie the short distance to the communal laundry tubs, located in an open area at the center of their block of huts. Sylvie filled a bucket with water from a pump and poured it into a tub, while Mama sat under the sparse shade of a eucalyptus tree and supervised. Sylvie lathered a bar of soap she'd bought with her clinic money, then swished the few pieces of clothing the family owned through the sudsy water. She was careful to keep the school uniforms clean, especially after one girl in her class had left school because she couldn't afford soap to wash her uniform, and the teacher told her she was dirty. Sylvie heard she was selling herself now, as so many girls in the camp were forced to do to bring in a little money for extras that the food center didn't supply.

“You're not scrubbing hard enough,” complained Mama.

Sylvie managed to hold her tongue. Getting no reaction from Sylvie, Mama began chatting with the other women who had brought their family's laundry to the tubs, comparing notes about what part of the Kivus they had come from. But nobody talked about what tragedies they had endured there. It was taken for granted that everyone in the camp had lost someone they loved—a child, a spouse, sometimes a whole family. Talking about it was too painful. It seemed to Sylvie that everyone here was waiting for pain to end and for life to begin again.

As she wrung out Lucie's spare dress against the concrete tub, Sylvie listened to her mother boasting to the other women about how clever Sylvie was, how she regularly stood first at the high school. Sylvie was at once thrilled and mortified—thrilled because her mother so rarely praised her; mortified because she hated to have attention drawn to her.

“What are you staring at?” Mama said sharply to a little girl who had become fixated with Sylvie's scar. The little girl hid behind her mother's ample skirt.

“There's no need to scare her,” replied the woman indignantly. “She's just curious.”

“Where I come from, we teach children to have manners,” Mama stated bluntly.

For a moment, Sylvie was reminded that her mother hadn't always been this thin shadow of herself. Once she'd been a proper lady who took pride in her house and her family, the wife of an educated man who, while never wealthy, knew how to behave in the world.

“You should have seen how pretty my girl was, before,” Mama told the frightened child in a warmer tone. “Pretty like you, and smart,” she added, trying to make amends but at the same time managing to imply that while the girl might be pretty, she was probably a dimwit compared to Sylvie.

Without commenting, the other mother packed her damp laundry into a woven basket and, lifting it onto her head, herded her little daughter away. The remaining women scrubbed their families' clothing in silence. Mama went silent, too, seeming to understand that she was the source of an unpleasant shift in the mood around the tubs. Sylvie was sad for her—feeble and lost, and barely thirty-five.

“I'm finished,” Sylvie announced, packing the last of their sodden garments into their basket.

Mama got to her feet and gave an uncertain half-nod to the other women, who kept their gazes averted, pretending not to see her farewell glance. They walked side by side back to their shanty in silence, Sylvie balancing the laundry on her head. All the while, Sylvie was thinking of how to tell Mama about her plans. However she put it, she knew Mama would call her selfish for thinking of leaving the family behind.

“Mama,” Sylvie said as they drew near to the hut, “something's happened.”

“What is it?”

“I may have a chance to leave Nyarugusu. To go to Canada.”

Mama stopped walking and turned on Sylvie, speechless at first—then furious. “What about going home?” she said.

It was exactly the reaction that Sylvie had feared.

“We don't know if we'll ever be able to go home,” she replied. “And even if the fighting stops, there's nothing to go back to.”

“Of course there will be nothing if everyone leaves! You think you are so much better than us that you would leave us here, and save yourself? Move to a rich country so you can live in a big house and buy fancy cars, while we starve?”