A Literary Young Man in an Industrial Park, and His Ten Years

We said we'd tell three stories about a place called Shenxiang Village in the industrial city of Suzhou. This is the last one.

He Jun has three big wishes right now: to talk his wife out of reselling goods on WeChat, to pay off the mortgage, and to improve the family's finances. Marrying three years ago and having a daughter two years ago taught him more about what family responsibility means. Going to the park together on weekends, which felt so romantic before the wedding, no longer seems important — it was only ordinary life all along.

At six in the evening on January 31, he sat in the library at Starlight Home in Shenxiang Village, Suzhou, working up the guitar number he would play at the company's annual gathering three days later. It was an adapted version of the song Chengdu:

"The girl loops her arm through his sleeve, the boy lays a hand on her shoulder; we walk in through our workshop door and sit down at our own stations."

"The loveliest time is always late autumn, the ginkgoes lush along Daoqian Street. The cold night wind off Jinji Lake scatters the sorrow of the misty rain. In the lamplight of Songhelou on Guanqian Street, I can just make you out. The only thing I can't take with me from Suzhou is you."

He Jun is about 1.7 meters tall and wears black-framed glasses. He is from Linyi, in Shandong, and is 30 this year. He works in the manufacturing department of a German electronics company in Suzhou's High-Tech Zone: more than nine hours a day, 60 hours of overtime a month, handling deliveries on the shop floor and one handoff step in the middle of the production process. A frontline production worker.

1

In ten years in Suzhou, He Jun has changed jobs three times; seven of those years were spent at this German company.

After high school he left Linyi for a vocational school in Qingdao, where he studied CNC machining. While interning at Tyco Electronics' Qingdao plant in late 2008, he heard from coworkers that Foxconn in Kunshan — a competitor of Tyco's — paid better, as much as 3,000 yuan a month, and the idea of leaving home to work took hold.

Another reason behind it was that he didn't want to be pushed into marriage. "I was 20 then, and every day someone was at me to get married. But I really didn't want to start a family yet. For my first two years in Suzhou I didn't go home for New Year because of it."

In October 2009, He Jun settled on Kunshan. A coworker told him he had friends in Suzhou and suggested He Jun get off there first and ask them what things were like — with people he knew to show him around, work and a place to stay would surely be easier to find. He stayed more than ten days. The friends were barely any help; instead they cheated him out of several thousand yuan. He won't go into the details, and doesn't want to dwell on it. "It's all in the past," he says.

For his first two years, He Jun worked as an agency-dispatched laborer at Epson, a Japanese-owned company on Jinfeng Road in the High-Tech Zone, assembling display screens on the line for a base salary of only 850 to 940 yuan. A year and a half in, he decided the job had no future and quit — even though he had already qualified to be taken on as a regular employee.

He had heard that real estate sales paid well, so he tried an interview at Ruiao Real Estate, a company on Yangdong Road in the Industrial Park run by a local Suzhou boss. Asked what annual salary he expected, He Jun decided caution was safer and answered "40,000 to 50,000 yuan a year." After he was hired, a coworker chatting with him said this hadn't been the best answer. "You should have said 500,000. Bosses at property agencies like that — it shows drive, ambition."

But drive and ambition also need the right moment. On March 2, 2011, Suzhou brought in home-purchase restrictions, and the agency business suffered. The senior colleagues with all their drive and ambition grew anxious about their numbers; He Jun sold on commission alone, so if he sold no home he earned nothing at all. He also saw that a job built on "ambition" didn't fit his character. Twenty days in, he quit again.

Not until late March 2011 did things start to fall into place.

Work settled first. He Jun found a job in his own field at the German company in the High-Tech Zone, running CNC machines on the shop floor. He started at 2,000 yuan a month, with a raise of 8 to 10 percent a year, and never thought about leaving again — even as coworkers left all the time. In a diary entry dated July 26, 2012, he wrote: "In a few days I've lost three coworkers... Finding a better job is what every migrant worker wants, but does changing jobs often really mean you'll find the right one?"

Housing took longer. Over his seven years at the German company, He Jun moved four times. "That's how people are — you always want to live somewhere better. At first I just wanted a place where I could cook. Then somewhere I could cook and shower. Once I had both, I wanted more space."

The first move came because the attic room he was renting got too much sun, and he wanted somewhere to cook. The new address was in Shenxiang Village: a single room of six or seven square meters at 230 yuan a month, where he could use an induction cooker. After a year or so, tired of trekking to the shared bathroom, he moved to a newly built resettlement flat in the Fenhu complex near Shenxiang Village — nine square meters, 430 yuan a month. Two years later, in 2013, he moved again, to a partitioned room in Kangyue Garden. The room grew to 12 or 13 square meters at 650 yuan a month, though the utilities were split, which cost another 70 or 80 yuan.

For the last move, He Jun bought an apartment by Lingyan Mountain in Wuzhong District: 60 square meters in all, a high-ceilinged loft layout, 320,000 yuan, with 160,000 down and another 70,000 to 80,000 spent on renovation. This was 2014; he hadn't even had a girlfriend yet. He bought mainly because prices had bottomed out that year, and most of his coworkers were rushing to buy too, before the second round of purchase restrictions. The monthly payment worked out to about the same as rent. Looking back, he regrets not being more careful — the place came with only a 40-year land-use right.

Yet right up to his marriage in 2015, what gave He Jun a sense of belonging was not the apartment on Lingyan Mountain. It was the library at Starlight Home.

In April 2010, when he was still in that rented attic in Shenxiang Village, he was walking down the main shopping street after work and came across copies of Fellow Workers Newsletter being handed out by the library — every article written by migrant workers themselves. He felt they were about him, and started going to Starlight Home for its events.

Starlight Home was then getting ready for a community show for May Day, and He Jun took part in two numbers: the skit Who Is the Greatest Person and a recitation of the poem Believe in the Future. After that he went to the library four or five times a week, dropping to once or twice only after 2014, when he bought the apartment farther from Shenxiang Village.

Over four years, He Jun became a core member of Starlight Home's literature group — organizing regular book-sharing sessions and community poetry readings, interviewing migrant workers, and editing Fellow Workers Newsletter, a collection of workers' poems and essays. He also set about educating himself in literature, though most of what he read was about rural and working-class life: Ordinary World, How the Steel Was Tempered, China in Liangzhuang, a biography of Che Guevara. In his free time he liked music too — in his own words, old songs "about wanderers making a new start," like Song of the Wanderer, The Child Who Left Home, and Father.

It was in this library, too, that He Jun met a young woman from Gansu. "When I first got to know her I felt sorry for her. Her family was poor, her father had a tendency to violence at home, her mother had mental health problems — a lot of painful things had happened. I wrote her poems, we went hiking together, and slowly we got close."

The two married in 2015. Their daughter was born early last year.

2

He Jun thinks now and then about where his career might go from here.

At a foreign company, management jobs usually demand strong foreign languages and academic credentials, and the people in them are often outsiders parachuted in by headhunters; He Jun reckons he has no shot. And after seven years on the front line, even a promotion would leave him somewhere between technician and operator. The way up is, in truth, fairly short.

His pay now is 7,000 to 8,000 yuan, about 6,000 after tax, and for the moment He Jun is content. His definition of a successful life is plain: live a good, steady life.

In a diary entry dated July 8, 2012, he wrote down what he hoped for from life: "Enjoy every moment... Don't wait for class to end, don't wait for work, don't wait to get married, don't wait for Friday night or Sunday morning, don't wait for a new car, don't wait to pay off the mortgage, don't wait for spring, summer, autumn, winter, don't wait for the start or the end of the month, don't wait for death..."

But more of the people around him are in a hurry to make money.

Lü Tu, who wrote China's New Workers: Lost and Rising, came to Shenxiang Village to do fieldwork, and He Jun still remembers a young woman she interviewed at the library. The girl was only 20. The first time they met, she seemed innocent and straightforward, working and dreaming of a good life ahead. The second time, all she talked about was how to make money reselling on WeChat. "Teacher Lü just couldn't understand how someone could turn into a different person in a year."

In He Jun's WeChat Moments, a friend who plays guitar listed three New Year's wishes. One of them was: "Next year, write a single that sells for 10 million yuan."

He Jun rejects the cult of success. In a piece he wrote for Starlight Home's Fellow Workers Newsletter, he put it this way: "Desire has no end. I think the wages I earn away from home only need to cover the various needs of life — my family's and my own, including whatever emergencies come up... But without overtime my wages would be pitifully small... so I want overtime too, so I can take home a bit more."

Plenty of people in Shenxiang Village are hooked on reselling goods over WeChat, and Zhang Tao, from Lianshui County in Huai'an, is one of them. He turns up at the library often, and he never forgets to push a rose-red ballpoint pen he says prevents nearsightedness.

Zhang Tao is 50 this year and has worked in Suzhou for 20 years, changing jobs five times as factories closed or conditions got bad. From 2000 until now, his wages have gone from 1,380 yuan to 2,500. His family of four lives close to the bone, packed into a 13-square-meter room at 600 yuan a month; his two daughters are in elementary and middle school in Suzhou. Last year a stranger in a parenting group on WeChat added him as a contact and pitched him the anti-myopia pen, and Zhang Tao took up reselling it himself. He still had some on him during the interview, and pulled them out to show us.

It is an ordinary ballpoint pen. Write with it, and if your face gets too close to the desk, the tip retracts. Zhang Tao explained that the product was developed by a man in Xiamen he calls Teacher Lin Wen, and that sales are tiered: 158 yuan for a single pen, 110 each if you buy four, 90 each for a box of 20, and 75 each once you have bought five boxes in total.

Zhang Tao has bought 35 pens in all, and in four months has sold 10. This hasn't discouraged him — he says he plans to sell 10,000 next year.

Sometimes, when they run into each other at the library, He Jun argues with Zhang Tao and tries to talk him out of it. "That kind of WeChat selling is a pyramid scheme at heart. If you want to make money at it, in the end you can only pull in your own relatives — the people you're cheating are the ones closest to you."

The person closest to He Jun, his wife, wasn't talked into selling anti-myopia pens — but she didn't escape WeChat reselling either.

She once worked at an insurance company in Shanghai, and was probably just the kind of employee that property boss would have liked: "drive, ambition," the sort who, asked about pay in an interview, says "500,000 a year" out loud.

After deciding to marry He Jun, she came back to Suzhou and took a job at a rubber factory. The shop floor stayed above 40 degrees Celsius all year, ventilation was poor, and the toxic gases given off as the rubber evaporated had nowhere to go. Working more than ten hours a day in there, her skin was bound to break out in open sores. Unable to stand the conditions, she quit after three months and stayed home to raise their child.

The 100,000-yuan betrothal payment her family asked for at the wedding, on top of the mortgage, was more than He Jun's 6,000 yuan a month after tax could carry alone. In February 2016, without telling him, his wife put the cash gifts from the wedding and the family's savings into the peer-to-peer lending platform Jiedaibao, lending the money to three strangers. All three later said they were students and could not repay, and the couple had no idea how to get the money back.

To fill this new hole in their finances, his wife took up WeChat reselling, with cosmetics. Every few months she traveled to Hangzhou for a reselling convention to hear talks from the people above her, mostly about how to recruit downline sellers and lift sales; at home she had her phone in her hand constantly, watching video lectures and "study materials" sent round WeChat groups. He Jun doesn't remember the exact name of the cosmetics brand she represented, but the pyramid she described stuck with him. At the top was the "chief island master," and below that four tiers running from island master down to islander: 38 yuan for a first-level agent, 68 for second, 98 for third, 158 for fourth — much like the anti-myopia pen, a pyramid scheme in all but name.

The two of them once had a fight on Lingyan Mountain near home. His wife raised divorce; He Jun thought about it and said no. His reasons were the same ones he'd had from the start — once you're married and have a child, you should live a good, steady life.

3

At 5:30 on the afternoon of February 3, 45 minutes before the annual gathering was due to start, the second-floor ballroom of the Shangri-La was already packed.

Since setting up its R&D and production center in Suzhou in 1997, He Jun's German company has held its global annual gathering here. The turnout says something about how much weight it puts on the Suzhou operation: R&D departments from Germany and the United States, and sales divisions in South Korea and Japan, send representatives every year. This year more than 600 people attended, close to a third of the company's entire global workforce.

To fit everyone in, the company booked two halls. People waiting to go on moved back and forth outside in costume; the reception area had been roped off into a cocktail zone of about 30 square meters, where foreign executives clinked glasses, seeming to occupy a different world from the people outside the rope.

There were 15 numbers on the program, and rehearsals had begun at 9:30 that morning. He Jun's came first: in the first half he played guitar while two coworkers played harmonica and sang lead; in the second, guitar and harmonica went off and several women from the company came on to dance, holding paper umbrellas and wearing long water sleeves. The three men had bought matching outfits on Taobao for it — black Chinese-style formal jackets, with a row of frog buttons down the chest and gold trim at the collar and cuffs.

He Jun had made a point of getting a buzz cut, and fastened his jacket all the way up to the collar.

Between rehearsals he sent over a few videos from the floor — a lion dance, a mass chorus of I Love You, China — and said, "As one of the earlier foreign companies to come in, 21 years putting down roots in Suzhou hasn't been easy!" He also mentioned the company's 20th anniversary the year before, when a long history wall outside the ballroom laid out its growth in the Chinese market; he was a little sorry it wasn't up this time.

The gathering opened with the global president invited on stage to speak. He said in English: "2017 was a good year for our group. Conditions improved in our main markets — Germany, Europe and Asia. Despite the negative effect of exchange rates, our global sales still grew by double digits, reaching 260 million euros. I hope we can keep up this momentum next year too." Then he switched to Chinese and finished with "Happy New Year."

He Jun picked up his guitar and a music stand, walked on from the right side of the stage, and sat down with his two coworkers in one corner of it. So the lyrics and images would show on the big screen, the ballroom lights went out, and the three performers' faces were hard to make out. When the line "We always part in the twelfth lunar month, and meet again after New Year" came up on the screen, a good number of people in the room stood and started taking photos and video on their phones.

It was over within a few minutes, and He Jun wasn't happy with it. "I was so nervous my heart felt like it was coming out of my chest, my legs shook the whole time, and I played several wrong notes." The coworker singing lead complained too: the dancers coming on had knocked his microphone loose, so his voice wasn't picked up for the second half. But against their own verdict, when the votes were counted at the end, their number had 33 — second place in the whole show.

Twelve days after the gathering came Lunar New Year's Eve. That year he took four days of annual leave, and on February 10 took his wife and daughter home to Linyi, in Shandong, for the holiday. Ten days later, He Jun would go back to the Suzhou he can't do without, and carry on with his life.

May his New Year's wishes come true.

(*He Jun and Zhang Tao are pseudonyms.)

Cover and in-story images: photographs by He Jun, some provided by Starlight Home, and by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash.