Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
pages 27-28

Many things I had read about China's migrants were not true. They no longer lived in fear of being picked up by the police; instead, the authorities just ignored them. Discrimination from local residents was not really an issue, because migrants almost never encountered locals. And I was surprised to learn that job mobility was high. Almost all the senior people I met in factories had started on the assembly line. The young women I knew did not appear destined to return to the farm because they had never farmed before. They often did not know how much land their family had or when the planting season began. My assumptions had come from studies of Chinese migrant workers done in the mid-1990s; almost a decade later, this world had utterly changed, but things were happening too quickly to be written down.

I came to like Dongguan, which seemed a perverse expression of China at its most extreme. Materialism, environmental ruin, corruption, traffic, pollution, noise, prostitution, bad driving, short-term thinking, stress, striving, and chaos: If you could make it here, you'd make it anywhere. I tried to fit in as much as I could. I ate twenty-five-cent bowls of noodles for lunch and took buses everywhere. I dressed, in jeans and sandals, more plainly than many migrant girls who wore embroidered shirts and high heels when they went out. I was invisible in Dongguan, and I liked that too. In other places in China, a person staring at strangers and writing things in a notebook might attract attention; here, people were too focused on their own affairs to notice me. Only once did someone interfere: I was in the talent market, copying down instructions from a sign on the wall. A guard asked me what I was doing. I told him I was practicing my English, and he left me alone.

Dongguan is invisible to the outside world. Most of my friends in Beijing had passed through the city but all they remembered — with a shudder — were the endless factories and the prostitutes. I had stumbled on this secret world, one that I shared with seven million, or eight million, or maybe ten million other people. Living in Dongguan was like arriving in it for the first time, hurtling down the highway at seventy miles an hour, the scenery changing too fast to keep track of it. Dongguan was a place without memory.