Today was my first day at the factory. The factory is in Dongguan. It manufactures capacitors.

The girl from Human Resources took me to Manager Ding on the second floor. Manager Ding looked up from a dense mass of work orders, signed one, and went to find Supervisor Xu downstairs. Supervisor Xu was fiddling with black paste. He took me to the sorting team and said, Stay here. Watch for a day.

Chuff, chuff.

The machine sounded.

The sorting team selects finished capacitors. The machine is a woodpecker: takes the good, throws out the bad.

Chuff, chuff.

Workers walk back and forth. When they speak, no voices can be heard.

A child.

The child wears a black T-shirt and white jeans. A pointed mouth, the look of a southerner. He is very busy, moving boxes around, sometimes forgetting what he meant to do. He does not speak unless asked.

How old are you?

Eighteen.

Don't fool me.

Fifteen.

He says his name is Li Wei. But warns me not to call him Li Wei. Call him Li Biao. He is using his older brother's identity card.

Though, he says, my brother isn't eighteen either.

He comes from Guigang, Guangxi, he says, but both parents work in Dongguan. His extended family has seventeen siblings: eleven brothers, six sisters. He is the second youngest. He left before finishing junior high. His brother gave him the identity card, allowing him to find this first job.

He started only on the fifth. Before this, he was in the printing department. That job was slightly easier, he says. You could sit all the time. The day before yesterday, they transferred him to sorting because the woman here is resigning. Once she finishes teaching him, she will leave.

You look well behaved, I say.

He smiles shyly. Then shakes his head. He often fought in junior high, he says. He was small and could not win, so he called others to fight with him.

He works while he speaks. Inserts the capacitor's metal legs into the testing machine. Fail. Inserts it again. Still fail. He places it on the scrap pile.

Chuff, chuff.

The sound behind us resembles a wind-up dinosaur with an empty stomach.

DF manual retest: After manual testing at 1KHZ is complete, confirm and adjust high frequency according to the flow card, then perform a second DF test.

IR manual retest: First adjust according to flow card—reading this made my head enormous yesterday, Xiao Li says.

Capacitors.

Sorting machine. On and Off; Pass and Fail.

12345678

Xiao Li fills out the paper: 31 good items, 3 scrap.

Online, it says the company produces one billion film capacitors a year.

The manual says finished products come in Type J and Type K.

What does that mean? I ask Xiao Li.

Xiao Li says nothing. He walks to the machine and turns the sign around for me—Type J on the left, Type K on the right. He opens his mouth in a grin.

So what does it mean?

I don't know either, he says.

—

I think of Professor Erikson. When teaching Marx, he said he had once worked in a Minnesota factory. He was one member of an assembly line and did not even know what he was producing. Every day, he was so tired that he fell straight asleep. No time to read. No time to think. Perhaps this was alienation?

The production does not belong to you, the product does not belong to you, the soul does not belong to you, you do not belong to yourself.

Is it boring? I ask Xiao Li.

Not boring, Xiao Li says.

A woman from the packaging department behind us walks past. Her hair is dyed yellow. From time to time, he turns to look.

He tests a small capacitor. Pass once, fail once, pass on the next test, fail on another. Xiao Li does not know what to do but is too embarrassed to ask anyone. He wanders around, picks up a work order and looks, puts it down again, seeming continuously busy.

Supervisor Xu understands his little thought and comes to teach him hand over hand.

Don't use only one hand, Supervisor Xu also says. Two hands are much faster.

Is there any need to be so careful? I ask Xiao Li. It's only one. Does the company require that not one capacitor be sorted incorrectly?

No, he says, still concentrating absolutely. But that's what I require of myself.

—

What do you plan to do in the future? I ask Xiao Li.

Nothing.

Any occupation you would like?

No.

Who do you live with at home?

My mum. If I go out, she comes out. If I go back, she looks after me.

Has your father always been in Dongguan?

Nod.

How old are they?

Thirty-something? Forty? I don't know.

“I don't know” is Xiao Li's most frequent answer, a form of self-defense. Perhaps before he left, Mother warned him there were many bad people in the world. Whatever happened, say you did not know.

—

I remember visiting Uncle's factory as a child. Workers threw steel into a furnace, and the steel became water.

“So hot!” I said.

The workers were half naked. Blackened towels wiped away sweat.

Seeing a black towel, I suddenly wanted a Coke. Aunt took me outside to buy one. The moment I stepped through the factory gate, the world outside became abruptly fresh—quiet, backward, with a rusted electric tricycle and weeds growing at random. Fresh.

Only many years later, when I read Dante's Purgatorio, did the sensation return. The factory is purgatory for good people. Plato may be smelting iron. And Aunt was my Beatrice.

At fifteen, I had just begun my first year of high school. When Xiao Li clocked in, I was already catching up on sleep during morning reading. I had not yet dated. The way I looked at girls resembled Xiao Li looking at the woman from packaging. It was enough not to humiliate myself in the weekly exam. Better if I stumbled into some damned luck. The world was strange. The future was mine.

“I didn't like school,” Xiao Li says.

Being in school was like prison.

And here isn't?

At least no one controls you, he says. At school, the teacher came to inspect our dormitory. We made noise, she scolded us, we didn't listen, we made her cry. At this point, Xiao Li smiles sweetly.

His village junior high had thirteen hundred students, he says. The vast majority left to work before graduating. The whole village is outside. He wanted to go somewhere farther away, but Mother would not allow it. She wanted to keep Xiao Li within an imaginable distance.

—

Mo Yan will resign in two days. Once she teaches Xiao Li everything, she will leave.

Why?

She says she came only because her older brother and sister-in-law did. It is too boring here. She is not happy. And the pay is low.

Chuff, chuff. The machine sounds. She eliminates the disobedient capacitors, then puts the honest ones into plastic bags.

Low?

This is piecework, Mo Yan says. We receive eight yuan fifty for every ten thousand we test. Ten thousand capacitors piled up would be taller than a person. On a bad day, we test forty thousand. On a better day, only sixty thousand.

So only forty yuan a day?

Add fifty for the retesting and it is ninety. Think about it. Even if you work all thirty days in a month, it is only twenty-seven hundred.

How old are you this year? I ask Mo Yan.

How old do I look?

Thirty? Naturally, I know to guess downward.

Mm. She nods.

Where are you from?

Hubei.

I have a friend from around Xiantao in Hubei.

Hah. That's only a five- or six-hour drive from us.

Married?

Could I be thirty and unmarried? My child is already seven. The child is in our hometown. My husband is in Shenzhen.

So your next stop is?

Shenzhen.

How old were you when you began factory work?

Twenty. Though I've been here only one month.

Our Xiao Li over there is fifteen.

Didn't even finish junior high, did he? Stinking boy, should have studied properly. I can see he can't even read the forms. Yesterday I told him, you're going to be in danger like this!

Mo Yan walks to Xiao Li.

Why are you so young? Why come out to work at this age instead of studying?

Xiao Li reddens. But says as though nothing matters: Young? Is eighteen young?

—

Eight in the morning to eight at night. Chuff, chuff.

From ten onward, I begin looking at the clock. Counting down. Ten minutes' rest every two hours, with a little time to eat at noon and in the evening.

I remember what I promised Professor Erikson: to live dangerously, to discover life, the vitality of memory. But can I discover them here? Can I compensate for the time I once threw away and wasted? Can I begin living sincerely again? Will inward exploration be extinguished by the external environment? Am I reflecting upon life at the edge of a cliff, or have I already fallen into the abyss?

I begin to understand Xiao Li. For a fifteen-year-old child, and for me, the world is much the same. Many questions have no answer. “I don't know” is an easy breath.

The first time Xiao Li speaks to me without prompting, he asks: If the boss hasn't told you to work, would you work?

I have watched from the side for half a day. To me, boredom kills more readily than hardship.

Yes, I say.

I wouldn't, he says. Because we're paid by the hour. We just leave when the time comes. If it were piecework, then I would.

In fact, my answer was irresponsible. Later, Supervisor Xu asked me to pick out defective products. We had not finished when the shift ended. I began to feel nostalgic for boredom.

These defects were the responsibility of the printing department upstairs. Among tens of thousands of capacitors, roughly two hundred had poorly printed trademarks.

An older worker beside us complained that the printing people were not human. Their work was already easy enough. As long as someone sat there, it was absolutely impossible to print one incorrectly. The older worker's uniform was covered with oil stains. He had probably just been transferred from construction. He also had a safety helmet with a piece missing. He took it off and used it to hold the defects.

If only the printing is wrong, I ask, what does it matter?

The customer requires it, the older worker says. No choice.

Xiao Chen is sorting defects with me. Xiao Chen is eighteen and also from Guangxi.

I came out at fifteen too, he says.

Naturally, he did not finish junior high either. From the countryside. What more was there to think about?

What do you plan for the future? I ask.

Squinting as he examines the defective item in his hand, he says, Keep working for now. In three years, I've already changed factories six times. As he speaks, a packet of Double Happiness cigarettes shows from his pocket.

Near the end of the shift, we still have two tubs of capacitors left. Absolute concentration. No one speaks.

Chuff, chuff, hiss—the machines all stop.

Why are you so slow? Manager Ding scolds behind us.

Hurry up! Can't you go any faster? Supervisor Xu is unhappy too.

Our coworkers gather around to watch the excitement. Xiao Li squeezes in as well. He is small; one dart takes him straight to us. The shift is almost over. He has even taken out his phone. I turn my head and see the wallpaper on his screen:

“Perhaps I am only a passerby in your life. But you will never meet another person like me.”

Yes, Xiao Li.