The Secret Mother (15 page)

After the episode with Fatty in the sanitary room I knew I needed to be more generous and so I told the girl she could try my shoes on if she wanted. “They’re not like other shoes, they’re finished with real satin,” I added and passed them to her.

She put them on and teetered towards her bunk. “Look at me. A proper Miss Canton!” she laughed.

“A tall
mei
,” said another girl, flicking her toenail clippings on the floor.

“Worker, you have thirty seconds to clear that mess or I’ll fire you on the spot!” she stamped on the toenail clippings with my beautiful shoe.

We all laughed.

“Have you been mixing with the managers, Waisheng
mei
?” jibed Fatty. “You sure sound like a boss.”

“She plays mahjong in high places, don’t you Waisheng
mei
?” said the girl cutting her toenails.

Ren, who was combing her hair in the mirror, spun round and shot me a warning glance. “Take the shoes off her, Sky Eyes,” she hissed, “it’s you they mock.”

The afternoon passed slowly. In Zhi’s absence, we got away with listening to the radio. Some of the girls brought in sweets they’d bought on their day off and passed them down the line. Manager He didn’t seem bothered, so long as we were getting through the work. The noise of the conveyor belt droned on, punctuated by the sudden blare of the klaxon which kept my head from dropping onto my chest.

My period pains were dreadful. I disappeared to the sanitary room and climbed onto the toilet to look at the beautiful square of daylight. I spent as long as I could by the window, staring at the mountains above the city skyline. I hoped Little Brother had forgiven me for leaving.

When I returned to work, one of the workers from Zone B gave me a mock salute. Another kowtowed all the way to the floor. Her accomplice shrieked with laughter and before long everyone in circuitry had joined in, calling me ‘Hong Kong cat’ and ‘Miss bossy top’. The girl who had tried on my shoes laughed along. Xiaofan put down her circuit board and the others followed suit, abandoning their stations to gossip. The conveyor belt ground to a halt.

Suddenly, a loud whistle pierced the chaos. Two young men entered and stood imposingly at the managers’ entrance.

Manager He stepped out of his bureau. “Workers, meet Mr. Chen and Mr. Ting.” He paused. “Men, I trust you’ll deal with this situation?”

Mr Chen bowed and Manager He scuttled back inside his office.

Chen wore horn-rimmed glasses and stood straight-backed, feet together. Ting was younger and shorter, with a perfectly proportioned frame, his clothes immaculate. A dopey young worker on my line grinned like a buffoon, silly
mei,
as if they’d be interested in her.

“Back to your stations, girls,” said Ting. “What we have to say won’t take long.”

Chen read from a sheet. “This week, a worker was caught wearing another worker’s ID badge in her absence. This violation is unacceptable and will incur a fine of 50 yuan. There is no excuse for anybody who covers up for best friends, relatives or fellow villagers. Remember the factory is not like the field. You are each responsible for yourselves.”

Ting continued, “Also this week, production tools were found in a worker’s dorm. Remember, workers are not permitted to take anything outside the circuitry room, not even waste material. Everything in this room belongs to Forwood. Let me repeat, you must put an end to the bad habits from the field. Theft is a serious violation of factory rules and incurs dismissal.”

There was a pause as Chen and Ting scanned the room. The two girls from Zone B who had mocked me were singled out. I clapped inwardly as Ting muscled them towards the door.

One cried like a baby, “I never stole a thing!”

The other hung her head in resignation.

“We will return next Wednesday and every week thereafter, until you are all fully compliant with factory regulations,” said Chen.

The door slammed behind them, and we were left stunned by the girls’ sudden eviction.

Manager He spoke over the tannoy, “Let that be a lesson to all of you. I will not let unruly workers jeopardise the productivity of my department.”

The company song resumed along with the conveyor belt. My hands trembled as I picked off a board and I vowed never, ever to be caught.

The next day, during evening meal, I posed next to Fei Fei as she plastered more of my posters to the canteen walls. Workers from every department gawped in our direction.

“Do you think they’re jealous of me like they were of Zhi?” I asked.

Fei Fei hesitated. “They say your cousin was not a nice line leader and that she forgot her place in the factory hierarchy. I believe you are much wiser.”

“But a line leader needs to be firm. They are almost impossible to control. Yesterday, they mocked me on the line – and for what? Being a worker with ambition?”

“Workers don’t like being bossed around by an uppity
dagongmei.
The trick is to inspire them from within, not rule over them like a proud tyrant – I believe. But then, I’m young and not all that clever, what do I know?”

Her words sounded uncannily like Manager He’s, I thought, as I passed her another of my posters.

Suddenly, there was a commotion in the dinner queue. Fei Fei and I left the posters and hurried over to where Damei was squaring up to another worker from personnel.

“You bitch, you think you can play with me? You think I’ll take it?” Damei held the girl by her wrists. She was of an equally scrawny build, but with fire in her belly. She retaliated with a stream of insults.

“Fight! Fight! Fight!” Called out the factory girls.

Kwo appeared, pushing his way to the centre of the crowd that had formed in a circle around them, and shouted for the girls to stop.

Damei pulled her adversary by the hair. The girl’s fingernails clawed back at Damei’s face, making her eyes bulge.

“No-one messes with my stuff!” yelled Damei.

“You crazy bitch, I never touched your dirty uniform. If you washed, it wouldn’t get so filthy!”

Damei stamped on her toes and the girl hopped like a startled chicken.

“Slum-bitch.”

Damei’s eyes flashed. “What did you just call me?”

“Look around. There’s no-one to stick up for you. You have no family.”

Damei punched the girl square on the jaw, sending her sideways to Kwo’s feet. I hurried from the crowd, knowing that the bloodied heap of flesh on the canteen floor should have been me.

Later that night, after overtime, I flung myself onto the bunk and grappled for Mr and Mrs Nie. I started to ask them what I should do, but whispering to a wooden doll suddenly seemed childish.

It was all going wrong. No-one was taking me seriously. There was only Fei Fei and what did she matter? I needed to pull myself together.
If you can’t impress Manager He, you’ll be out on your ear. Help me, Mrs Nie, help me! I need all of them to like me.
I need …

The door creaked open. Ren was returning from her shift.

I shoved my figurines beneath the pillow and lay still, pretending to be asleep.

She sat on the edge of my bunk, lit an illicit cigarette and asked, “What’s all this about Damei punching someone’s lights out in the canteen?”

I inched back the blanket. “I’m too tired for gossip, Ren. I need sleep.”

“Is it anything to do with the uniform you’ve been stealing? You’d better take care, Sky Eyes. Damei would eat you for breakfast if she found out it was you. Whatever you’re doing, stop now, before it’s too late.”

She leant into my bunk, her cigarette almost suffocating, her face ghostly in the smudge-grey light of the dorm.

“I’m so scared, Ren,” I whispered.

She touched my arm, then seemed to remember something.

Over by the door, Ren knelt and inched up the loose floorboard using the stolen screwdriver from her overalls. There was something hidden in the cavity.

She handed it to me. “I want you to have this.”

It was a battered tin box. “Where did it come from?” I asked, shivering.

“I didn’t pinch it if that’s what you mean,” said Ren, climbing in beside me.

The box was decorated with a picture of a factory. Inside a brooch glinted in the half-light. It was a pricey-looking pearlescent dragonfly.

“I can’t let her go …” Ren stared past me at the wall. “In my nightmares, she’s always standing by a river; it’s the canal that runs through the Kingmaker Factory.”

“Du?”

“They found her in the canal … A manager dragged her out and took her away. No-one knew what happened after that, not even her family came for her body. I don’t think the factory told them.”

“Oh, Ren.”

“No-one cared, Sky Eyes, so long as it went unnoticed – do you understand? I need you to understand.” Her tired eyes searched mine. “We shared a dorm, there were ten of us. The rest were from Guangdong, but we were both Hubei
mei
so we stuck together, always side by side. But the day they made her a line leader she changed, almost overnight. They made her work harder than her body could bear. They told her not to associate with her kin or her villagers … They separated us into different dorms and transferred me to another department where I had to learn the bonding process from scratch. For a while we lost touch completely.”

“Did the brooch belong to Du?” I asked, sensing it was the last trace of something precious.

Ren’s teeth chattered. “She gave it to me in secret the day before …”

I pulled my blanket over her shoulders. Her feet were icy and she slipped them between mine.

“We weren’t allowed any personal effects and belongings. She made the dragonfly using scraps of leftover silver from the factory floor. I don’t know where she got the jewels, or how she got them past the factory gates. It was her last gift to me. She said dragonflies represented summer, times when we’d been happy, before she got so tired. I should have known, I should have realised she was saying goodbye …” Ren covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

“I didn’t know how much I loved her until she was gone. Du was the only one who made the factory bearable. After she died, my days became endless … I stopped eating and tried to starve myself. It was hard to get up for work, harder than you can imagine. I was punished for not working fast enough. When I saw your posters the other day it set this rage off in me, because you wouldn’t listen … But you have to listen, Sky Eyes, you have to know that sooner or later whoever’s controlling you will try and take away every scrap of what’s precious. You don’t know it yet, but one day what happened to Du will happen to you too. There’ll be no past, no family waiting to welcome you home, no Hunan. They’ve already got rid of your cousin like she’s some cheap part.” Ren’s grief rioted from her like a ball of flames.

I wished she hadn’t said I was being controlled. I wanted to remind her of all the rewards I received. Manager He wasn’t like the other factory managers. He aspired to be a different kind of leader, a better one that would take us to victory in the workplace. He was young and wanted change. Ren was wrong, things were improving all the time. Soon I would ask him for more days off for workers. As for Zhi, perhaps she’d brought it on herself – that’s what the gossips were implying and maybe they had a point.

“What made you want to work here if you hated factory life so much?” I said.

She laughed bitterly. “Isn’t that obvious?” she said and pulled at her damaged leg beneath the blanket, like it was a piece of rotten meat attached to one of Kwo’s chicken feet. “You really don’t see what’s in front of you, do you? But you can trust me, Sky Eyes,” she softened and drew me into her ashen embrace.

But I didn’t want her. I only wanted Manager He – to be his star, to light up the night sky, to lie with him, to be his woman in a sequinned dress. My eyelids closed, I could bear their weight no longer.

When I opened them, a minute or a day may have passed, I wasn’t sure – all I knew was that Ren had vanished from my bed and the wires overhead rasped as she turned in her bunk. The dorm was completely black.

An envelope inside an envelope. Jen’s hands trembled as she opened the red
hongbao
to read May’s letter for the second time. It had been such a shock to find the smaller of the two envelopes, its cool manila coated in a fine layer of dust. The seal had lost its tackiness, shrunken by time. It was addressed simply,
To my babies,
and written in Chinese on faded paper ripped from a notebook.

My dear child,

Who grows inside me as secret as a flower in the soil; who turns and moves and is stirring me up at night. A small grain of goodness in this bitter agony of life. I love you before you are even born.

I think of you all the time, from the start to the end of the day, and all during the night … I cannot sleep in my bed tonight … Thoughts of you burn like a fire over wild plains. When will I see your face? I see it already … I know your eyes and nose. I feel your tears inside the secret place. How much longer until these arms hold you?

You are my shadow … flesh not for cutting … essential as the beating of a heart …

Jen pressed it to her face. The note paper smelled of unknown places. She tried to imagine May pregnant, but saw only her teacher, standing in the living room, talking interminably about time and tense, nagging her to practise her tones. This May couldn’t be her mum. Hers was poor, illiterate, unloving, without any notion of how to be a good mother. That was an easier version, everything neat. But adoption was not neatly boxed with a taffeta bow.

Jen’s only knowledge of her past was that she had been abandoned on the steps of The Nanchang Welfare Institute. A member of staff had found her and Ricki wrapped up in a blanket. May had wanted them to be found, but had left no other clues – until now.

She was not reserved like some Chinese women. May was loud and full of things to say about education, food, China, Britain. About the strangeness of being a stranger. It made Jen laugh when May talked about
shavs
on the bus, who gossiped all their business into mobile phones. “Have they no shame?” May asked. During lessons, she would lean in so close that Jen could smell her shampoo; joss sticks from Shared Earth. There was a spicy tang to her skin. Her teeth were small, child-like. Could May be the origin of Jen’s bad teeth?