姜小白对《Factory Girls》的笔记(2)

“And then the bus started driving again. It had failed to dispose of its cargo, so it kept going. Passengers continued to get off at their stops as if nothing had happened. “These buses are very black,” said a young woman with a slender dark face who was sitting next to me. “You should only take buses where the driver is wearing a uniform.” Yet she was on this bus, just like me.

“The people who work on this bus are evil,” she said loudly, “and every word out of their mouths is an obscenity.” I felt safe just being next to her, but then she got off too.

The bus pulled to the side of the road and stopped again. “Okay, everyone off,” the ticket seller yelled. This time he walked up and down the aisle, giving two yuan to each person.

I walked down the aisle to where he was. “I paid twenty-five yuan to get to Dongguan, and I want my money back.”

He turned around to face me. Of course, he was taller than I was, and he was a man. At that moment, I realized how powerless I truly was.

“If you paid a hundred, should I give you a hundred?” he yelled. “If I take my pants off, will you give me a hundred?”

It didn’t make sense and it wasn’t funny, but he liked the sound of it and he said it again. “If I take my pants off, will you give me a hundred?”

“Fuck you,” I said in English. “Asshole. Prick.” That broke my cardinal rule about living in China—never play the American card—but sometimes only cursing in English will do. The man looked at me with newfound respect.

I pushed past him to the front of the bus and looked for something to throw. I wanted to grab his money belt and toss it out the window, but of course he kept that close to him. There was a dirty towel on the dashboard, and I flung it in the driver’s face. Then I got off the bus and ran. My heart was pounding; I thought he might come after me. Then I stopped running, and I realized how stupid I must have looked.”

“She was thinking of studying Japanese.

“I’ve heard it takes a Chinese person one year to learn English but only three months to learn Japanese,” she told me. “I’ve heard that Beijing college graduates can earn one thousand yuan more a month for each language they speak. Is that true?”

I told her she should probably focus on improving her English first.

“I’m killing myself trying to increase my vocabulary,” she said. “I am memorizing fifty words a day.”

“Fifty words a day?” I repeated, amazed.

“Is that a lot or a little?”

“The last time I saw Liu Yixia, she had engineered yet another makeover. She had dyed and permed her hair so it was long and crinkly, like caramel taffy. She had decided that an English teacher with ordinary black hair was tu, unsophisticated. “I did this to look more Western,” she said. She had memorized an entire book of Grade Six vocabulary, five thousand words. The young women at Mr. Wu’s school had shaved their heads again to express their dedication to learning English. And Mr. Wu had offered Liu Yixia a partnership in his new venture and promised her a third of the profits, but she didn’t trust him. His people skills had not improved.

“With your level of English,” he had told her recently, “you can muddle along for at most a year or so as a teacher. After that, there will be no more room for you here because I will have cornered the entire market. You can still go teach elsewhere, though.”

“Why would he say something like that?” I asked.

“I think he was trying to force me to go back to work for him.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yes,” she said, “but I feel sympathy for him. He is all on his own.”

She rejected Mr. Wu’s offer. Instead she jumped to an Internet company to run its English-language Web site aimed at foreign clients. A month after she arrived, the company collapsed and the owner disappeared, owing more than one hundred thousand yuan in staff salaries. Liu Yixia had joined a lawsuit with the other employees to get their back pay, though they were not hopeful about it.”