For The Win (54 page)

Jie's mouth was opening and closing like a fish. She held her hand out and snapped her fingers at Wei-Dong, who passed her his phone. Her face was terrible, her lips pulled away from her teeth, which clicked rhythmically as she looked at the photos.

"Oh," she said, as if she hadn't heard the girl's question. "Oh," she said, as if she'd just realized some deep truth that had evaded her all her life.

"Jiandi?" the girl said.

"You might be shot," Jie said, slowly, as if explaining something to a child. "I might be shot. But they can't shoot us all."

She paused, considering. Tears rolled off her chin, stained the collar of her shirt.

"Can they?"

She clicked something and a commercial started.

"I can't finish this," she said in a dead voice. "I can't finish this at all. I should go home."

Wei-Dong looked down at his hands. "I don't think that would be safe."

She shook her head. "
Home
," she said. "The village. Go back. There's a little money left. I could go home and my parents could find some boy for me to marry and I could be just another girl in the village, growing old. Have my one baby and pray it's a boy. Swallow pesticide when it gets to be too much." She looked into his eyes and he had to steel himself to keep from flinching away. "Do you know that China is the only country where more women commit suicide than men?"

Wei-Dong spoke, his voice trembling. "I can't pretend that I know what your life is like, Jie, but I can't believe that you want to do that. There are 42 dead. I don't think we can stop here." Thinking
I am so far from home and don't know how I'll get back.
Thinking,
If she goes, I'll be all alone.
And then thinking,
Coward
and wanting to hit his head against something until the thoughts stopped.

She reached for the keyboard and he knew enough about her work environment to see that she was getting ready to shut down.

"Wait!" he said. "Come on, stop." He fished for the words. In the weeks since he'd arrived in China, he'd begun to think in Chinese, even dream in it sometimes, but now it failed him. "I --" He beat his fists on his thighs in frustration. "It won't stop now," he said. "If you go home to the village, it will keep going, but it won't have you. It won't have Jiandi, the big sister to all the factory girls. When Lu told me about you, I thought he was crazy, thought there was no way you could possibly have that many listeners. He thought you were some kind of god, or a queen, a leader of an army of millions. He told me he thought you didn't understand how important you are. How you --" He paused, gathered the words. "You're shiny. That's what he said. You shine, you're like this bright, shiny thing that people just want to chase after, to follow. Everyone who meets you, everyone who hears you, they trust you, they want you to be their friend.

"If you go, the Webblies will still fight, but without you, I think they'll lose."

She glared at him. "They'll probably lose with me, too. Do you have any idea what a terrible burden you put on me? You
all
put on me? It's absolutely unfair. I'm not your god, I'm not your queen. I'm a broadcaster!"

The heat rose in Wei-Dong. "That's right! You're a broadcaster. You don't work for some government channel like CCTV, though, do you? You're underground, criminal. You spent years telling factory girls to stand up for their rights, years living in safe-houses and carrying fake IDs. You set yourself up to be where you are now. I can't believe that you didn't dream about this. Look me in the eye and tell me that you didn't
dream
about being a leader of millions, about having them all follow you and look up to you! Tell me!"

She did something absolutely unexpected. She laughed. A little laugh, a broken laugh, a laugh with jagged shards of glass in it, but it was a laugh anyway. "Yes," she said. "Yes, of course. With a hairbrush for a microphone, in front of my parents' mirror, pretending to be the DJ that they all listened to. Of course. What else?"

Her smile was so sad and radiant it made Wei-Dong weak in the knees. "I never thought I'd end up here, though. I thought I'd be a pretty girl on television, recognized in the street. Not a fugitive."

Wei-Dong shrugged, back on familiar territory. "The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids. Look at gold-farming, how weird is that?"

She grinned. "No weirder than making rubber bananas for Swedish department-store displays. That was my first job when I came here, you know?" She rolled up her sleeves and showed him her arms. They were crisscrossed with old burn-scars. "Then making cheap beads for something called 'Mardi Gras.' Boss Chan liked me, liked how I worked with the hot plastic. No complaining, even though we didn't have masks, even though I was burned over and over again." She twisted her forearm and he saw that she had the Nike logo branded backwards, in bubbled, wrinkled scar there. "Afterwards, I worked on the same kind of machine, in a shoe factory. You see the logo? Many of us have it. It's like we were cattle, and the factory branded us one at a time."

"Are you going to talk to the people again?"

She slumped. Slipped in her earwig. Began to prod at the computer. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I must. As long as they'll listen, I must."

#

Matthew wept as he walked, pacing the streets without seeing. He'd been one of the first ones out of the building when the police raided, and he'd slipped through the cordon before they'd tightened it, slipping into another handshake building, one he'd played in as a boy, and running up the stairs to the roof, where he'd lain on his belly amid the broken glass and pebbles, staring down at the street below as the police chased down and caught his friends, one after the other, a line of Webblies face-down on the ground, groaning from the occasional kick or punch when they violated the silence and tried to speak with one another.

The police began to methodically cuff and hood them, starting at one end, working in threes -- one to cuff, one to hood, and one to stand guard with his rifle. It seemed to go on forever, and Matthew saw that he was far from the only person observing the sick spectacle: the laundry-hung balconies of the handshake buildings shivered as people piled out onto them, their mobile phones aimed at the laneway below. Matthew got out his own phone, zooming in methodically on each face, trying to get a picture of each Webbly before he was hooded, thinking vaguely of putting the images on the big Webbly boards, sending them to the foreign press, the dissident bloggers who used their offshore servers.

Then, sudden movement. Ping was thrashing on the ground, limbs flailing, head cracking against the pavement hard enough to be heard from Matthew's perch six stories up. Matthew knew with hopeless certainty that it was one of his friend's epileptic seizures, which didn't come on very often, but which were violent and terrifying for those around him. The cops tried to grab his arms and legs, and one of them got a hard kick in the knee for his trouble, and then Ping's arm cracked the hooded prisoner beside him, who rolled away, stumbled to his feet, and the cops waded in, rifle-butts raised and ready.

What happened next seemed to take forever, an eternity during which Matthew struggled not to scream, struggled on the edge of indecision, of impotence, of being driven to run to the street below for his comrades and of being too scared to move from the spot.

A policeman cracked the hooded Webbly who was on his feet across the kidneys, and the boy screeched and staggered and happened to catch hold of the rifle-butt. The two grappled for the gun while the boys on the pavement shouted, other policemen closing in, and then one of them unholstered his revolver and calmly shot the hooded boy in the head, the hood spattered and red as the boy fell.

That was it. The boys leapt to their feet and
charged
, warriors screaming their battle-cries, unarmed children scared and brave and stupid, and the police guns fired, and fired, and fired.

The cordite smell overpowered his senses, a smell like the fireworks he and his friends used to set off on New Year's. Mingled with it, the blood smell, the shit smell of boys whose bowels had let go. Matthew cried silently as he aimed his phone at the carnage, shooting and shooting, and then a policeman looked up at the crowd observing the massacre and shouted something indistinct, the camera lens on his helmet glinting in the dawn light, and Matthew ducked back as the rest of the policemen looked up, and then he heard the screaming, screaming from all around, from all the balconies.

He pelted across the roof, headed for the next building, vaulting the narrow gap between the two with ease. Twice more he leapt from building to building, running on sheer survival instinct, his mind a blank. Then he found himself on the street, with no memory of having descended any stairs, walking briskly, headed for the center of town, the streets with the fancy shops and the pimps, the businessmen and the Internet cafes filled with screaming boys killing orcs and blowing space-pirates out of the sky and vanquishing evil super-villains.

The tears coursed down his cheeks, and the early morning rush of people on their way to work gave him a wide berth. He wasn't the first boy to walk the streets of Shenzhen in tears, and he wouldn't be the last. He randomly boarded a bus and paid the fare and sat down, burying his face in his hands, choking back the sobs. He'd ridden the bus for a full hour before he bothered to look up and see where he was headed.

Then he had to smile. Somehow, he'd boarded a bus headed for Dafen, the "oil painting village," where thousands of painters working in small factories turned out millions of paintings. He'd gone there once with Ping and the boys, on a rare day off, to wander the narrow streets and marvel at the canvasses hung everywhere, in outdoor stalls and in open shops and in huge galleries. The paintings were mostly in European style, old fashioned, depicting life in ancient European cities, or the tortured Jesus (these made Matthew squirm and remember his father's stories of persecution) or perfect fruit sitting on tables. Some of the shops and stalls had painters working at them, copying paintings out of books, executing deft little brushstrokes and closing out the rest of the world. The books themselves were printed in Dongguan -- Matthew knew a factory girl who worked at the printer -- and something about the whole scene had filled Matthew with an unnameable emotion at the thought of all these painters creating work with their artist's eyes and hands for use by foreigners who'd never come to China, never imagine the faces and hands of the painters who made the work.

And here they were, pulling up at the five-meter-tall sculpture of a hand holding a brush, disgorging dozens of passengers by the side of the road. All around him rose the tall housing blocks and long factory buildings, the air scented with breakfast and oil paint and turpentine .

Matthew came out of his funk enough to notice that many of his fellow passengers wore paint-stained work-clothes and carried wooden paint-boxes, and he joined the general throng that snaked into Dafen, amid the murmur of conversation as workers greeted friends and passed the gossip.

The time he'd visited Dafen, he'd wandered into a gallery that sold contemporary paintings by Chinese painters, showing Chinese settings. He'd never had much use for art, but he'd been poleaxed by these ones. One showed four factory girls, beautiful and young, holding mobile phones and designer bags, walking down a rural village street at Mid-Autumn Festival, the house-fronts and shop-windows hung with lanterns. The village was old and poor, the street broken, the people watching from the doorways with seamed peasant faces, pinched and dried up. The four girls were glamorous aliens from another world, children who'd been sent away to find their fortunes, who'd come back changed into a different species altogether.

And there'd been a picture of an old grandmother sleeping in a Dongguan bus-shelter, toothless mouth thrown open, huddled under a fake designer coat that was streaked with grime and torn. And a picture of a Cantonese man on a ladder between two handshake buildings, hanging up an illegal cable-wire. The images had been poignant and painful and beautiful, and he'd stood there looking at them until the gallery owner chased him out. These were for people with money, not people like him.

Now, passing by the same shop, he felt a jolt of recognition as he saw the picture of the four factory girls, arms around each others' shoulders, in the shop's windows. It hadn't sold -- or maybe the painter turned them out by the truckload. Maybe there was a factory full of painters devoted to making copies of this painting.

He became conscious of a distant hubbub, an indistinct roar of angry voices. He thought he'd been hearing it for some time now, but it had been subsumed in the sound of the people around him. Now it was growing louder, and he wasn't the only one who'd noticed it. It was a chant, thunderous and relentless, with tramping, rhythmic feet. The crowd craned their necks around to locate the disturbance, and he joined them.

Then they turned the corner and he saw what it was: a group of young men and women, paint-stained, holding up sheets of paper with beautifully calligraphed slogans: "NON-FORMULA PAINTING FACTORY UNFAIR!" "WE DEMAND WAGES!" "BOSS SIU IS CORRUPT!" The signs were decorated with artistic flourishes, and he saw that at the far end of the picket there was a trio of painters crouched over a pile of paper, brushes working furiously. A new sign went up: "REMEMBER THE 42!" and then one that simply said "IWWWW" in the funny Western script, and Matthew felt a surge of elation.

"Who are the 42?" he asked one of the painters, a pretty young woman with several prominent moles on her face. She pushed her hair behind her ears. "It was three hours ago," she said, then looked at the time on her phone. "Four hours ago." She shook her head, brought up some pictures on her phone. "The police executed 42 boys in Cantonese town. They say that the boys were criminals, but the neighbors say they were just gold-farmers." She showed him the pictures. His friends, on the ground, heads in hoods, being shot by policemen, reeling back under the fire. The policemen anonymous behind their masks. The girl saw the expression on his face and nodded. "Terrible, isn't it? Just terrible. And the things the fifty-cent army have been saying about them --" The fifty-cent army was the huge legion of bloggers paid fifty cents -- 4 RMB -- to write patriotic comments and posts about the government.