Today I went to the Safety Compliance workshop.

Safety Compliance produces the black and yellow molds, and inspects the finished ones. It is hot. The moment you walk in, there is the sharp smell of plastic. Stay long enough and you begin to itch all over, as if tiny mosquitoes have flown into your veins and, crazed with hunger, will bite wherever they can. This was where I met Supervisor Xu on my first day. The black paste he was fiddling with then was the raw material for the little capacitor molds. Pour it into the mouth of a machine, and the machine grunts and pants and spits out a few little lumps.

I sat at the same table as Sister Wang and Sister Lei. We were responsible for inspecting rows of tiny capacitors on wooden boards. If a core was exposed, pull it out. If there was glue on one, scrape it off with a small blade. Look, scrape, arrange. The same motions over and over. More than thirty thousand a day.

Sister Wang said there was dust on the boards. You could not see it, but it was poisonous. It bit.

Sister Wang was born in 1984, Sister Lei in 1987. They were both from Shaoyang, Hunan, and both said they were old.

Old. They already had children, one boy and one girl each. Sister Wang's husband ran a small business back home. Sister Lei's husband made molds here in Safety Compliance.

I looked back at Sister Lei's husband and said, "You two can flirt with your eyes across the workshop."

"Ha!" Sister Lei laughed. She said they were an old married couple. There was no romance left to speak of.

I used to imagine that if I did badly at school, I would open a little steamed-bun shop with my wife. I would make the filling; she would wrap the skins. By then, I suppose, there would be no romance left to speak of either. When no customers were around, we would talk about the neighbors, or quarrel over the future. In the end we would both fall silent and sit there: I making the filling, she wrapping the skins.

"The children are both back home," Sister Wang said. "My daughter is seven, my son four. They've become left-behind children."

"Do you miss them?"

"Yes. I call once a week. It's cheaper if you buy a calling card."

I wanted to ask why she did not call more often. Wouldn't the children miss their mother? But by the time the question reached my lips, it felt unnecessary.

"Is two children the fashion where you're from?" I said. "Most families where I live have one."

"Don't you get a reward for having only one child?"

I shook my head. The reward was not being fined.

"In the countryside where we're from, if the first child is a girl, you're allowed to have a second," Sister Wang said. "Without a son, there'll be no one to tend your grave, and no one to look after you when you're old. Once a daughter marries, she's water poured out of the house. She has to serve her husband's parents."

"What about you?" I asked. "Was having two a matter of tradition?"

"Yes. My family has a daughter and a son too. I have a younger brother."

"Is he back home?"

"My brother is in a sacred place."

I guessed she meant heaven, so I said nothing and kept working for a while. In the end, though, I asked the ill-timed question anyway.

"Where?"

"Prison," Sister Wang said.

Her brother went in when he was twenty. He was twenty-eight now.

"Did he kill someone?"

"No, he didn't kill anyone. He was an accomplice. One of the others killed a man. They were stealing a car. The man inside called the police, so they killed him."

"I was twenty-three when my brother went in. It was my second year away from home for work, and I was pregnant."

"An accident?"

"No. It wasn't an accident. He'd been learning bad things since he was a child. It was the family. My family wasn't a happy one.

"My father was a very bad man, bad to the bone. He beat my mother, badly. He liked to drink, and he kept mistresses.

"My father performed Peking opera in town. He played huadan, the young female roles. He was handsome, and dressed as a woman he could make every gesture and expression come alive. People praised him, and he began to think he was somebody. Of course, plenty of people also came to 'watch the show' after he stepped offstage: they would use him and throw him away, egging him on to fight with my mother. The moment he came home, he beat her.

"Violence was the only way my father ever knew to solve a problem. When I was in first grade, I asked him about a school problem I couldn't do. He had no patience. One slap sent my tooth into the table. My brother and I grew up with no self-respect. My father hit everyone. He even hit my grandmother once. He was beating my mother, and Grandma came over to stop him. He brought an iron hammer down on her head. Blood ran out and left a huge swelling. Of course, 'he didn't mean to do it'—the hammer was supposed to land on my mother's head.

"My mother never divorced him. It was all for the sake of us two children. If she divorced him, she could marry again, but the two of us would have had to stay with our father. A father and a stepmother—wouldn't they have beaten us to death?"

"Had to?" I said. "What law says that?"

"A man with two children can manage. But a woman with two children—how is she supposed to marry again?

"Besides, my mother loved my father very much.

"They're still separated now, though. My father was born in 1963, my mother in 1964. He went to high school and she went to middle school, which counted as a lot of education where we were from. So you see, education is no use. Everything depends on a person's character, on their temperament. Most of the people who only finished primary school have become bosses—multimillionaires, billionaires. University students like you still end up working for somebody else. Isn't that right?"

And so, day by day, her brother went bad too. By middle school, he was lost completely.

"He went to internet cafés and played games all night, night after night. Eventually he ran out of money, and he had no gear in the game. What could he do? He had to go out and steal.

"Looking back now, the stealing wasn't even the worst of it. He watched Hong Kong gangster movies then—the Young and Dangerous films—and became obsessed. Every time he came home, I heard him muttering, 'I'm going to join the triads.' Gangs were all the rage where we lived. Even primary-school children would steal chickens from the village after school. Things only calmed down a little after the year 2000. It was supposed to be a civilized society by then.

"After that, I often saw my brother heading out to fight with a knife slung over his shoulder. Different groups of thugs served different bosses. There were turf disputes, and they were always battling.

"My father didn't care. He thought paying the school fees was already a tremendous sacrifice. My mother often tried to talk sense into my brother. In the end, not only did her advice do nothing—he started beating her too. Once, beside a pond, he pushed her head under the water and said, 'That's what you get for trying to control me. Go die!'

"He was still the one who gave me away at my wedding. When he went to prison, I was in Guangdong, about to have my first child. It was 2007. My mother called and said something had happened to my brother. He'd been sentenced to ten years.

"I visited him once in 2008. He was dressed in red and wore shackles around his ankles. There was a pane of glass between us, and we spoke over telephones. When he saw me, his face was blank. He didn't even call me Sister. I kept asking whether he was eating well, whether he was all right. He got impatient and said, 'When are you going to get me out of here?'

"My parents visited him a few times too. It was always the same thing: hurry up and pay the money to buy me out.

"Have you changed?" my mother asked from the other side of the glass.

"He looked away and said nothing.

"He also said he was already twenty-eight and still had no wife, while everybody else's children were nearly grown. He told them to hurry up and find him one."

"Your children probably haven't even met their uncle, have they?"

"They have. Their grandparents took my daughter to see him. She held her grandmother's hand and asked, 'Grandma, why is Uncle inside the glass?'

"Her grandmother said, 'Because Uncle did something wrong, and he has to be punished.'"

"These men think far too much of themselves," I said to Sister Wang.

"It's the preference for sons," she said, as if naming the most ordinary thing in the world.

She said plenty of men in Hunan kept mistresses. If a woman was pretty, she went off to become somebody's second wife. Her second uncle drove a coach and earned good money, but whenever he had any, he spent it on women or gambling. It was all the money's fault, she said.

"Hunan isn't so bad," Sister Lei said. "It's much worse here in Guangdong. A woman having seven or eight children is perfectly normal. She keeps going until she has a son. Without a son, her mother-in-law looks down on her. She has to become the lowliest person in the entire family."

They told me about a woman at the factory whose husband was also a manual laborer. The family was terribly poor, but over ten years she still had seven children. The first six were all girls. Only on the seventh try did she get the boy she wanted. They could not afford to raise so many. One egg that another family's only child might eat alone had to be divided seven ways in their house. In winter, the children wore clothes other families had thrown away. In summer, they went barefoot because there was no money for shoes.

But the woman said she had no regrets. If she lived her life again, she would still have seven. She had to prove to her mother-in-law that she could give birth to a boy.

Sister Wang also told me about Supervisor Xu.

"His family was the same. Eleven children. The first nine were girls."

"How old is he?" I asked. Supervisor Xu was capable and composed, much better with people than I was, though he still looked young.

"Him? Born in 1994."

"1994? That's the same year as me! But he seems far too accomplished to be this young."

"He works hard. He's ambitious. We all call him the 'little grown-up.' Children from poor families learn to run the household early. Sometimes he'll sit down and help us polish the capacitors. When we talk, he says his father is already gone and he has to support his mother. His mother and his sisters."

"That couldn't have been easy," I said. "He's remarkable. He may only work in a factory, but I've rarely met anyone so impressive."

"He has his faults too. But we won't get into those," Sister Wang said.

"Men are all dazzling when they're at work. In daily life, they're something else altogether." As Sister Wang said it, perhaps she was thinking of her father: his high, warbling voice onstage, his feet moving in dainty little steps.

"I heard he came when the factory first opened. Does that mean he left home at fifteen?"

"Yes. As soon as he finished middle school."

Only then did I understand why Supervisor Xu took such care of Xiao Li. Though he had an entire floor to run around, he always stopped beside Xiao Li and taught him each step with his own hands. When Xiao Li tried to look cool and wandered off, Supervisor Xu turned around and called, "Come back. Don't run away. I'm teaching you, not doing it for you." When Xiao Li returned, he patted him on the head and said, "You should know how to do it tomorrow, all right?" Perhaps six years earlier he too had stood there, every bit as lost as Xiao Li. The workers had been busy all around him while he stood alone in the middle of the workshop, looking up at the white glare of the lights and listening to the machines thunder.

At lunch, Xiao Li sat down beside me again.

As we ate, he began talking to me of his own accord.

"Where are you today?"

"Safety Compliance," I told him.

"Oh." He went on eating. When he finished, he walked out to the balcony and lit a cigarette.

"You little punk," I said. "When did you learn to smoke?"

"Monday."

"Oh, stop it. Tell me the truth."

"Middle school." He took two sidesteps away from me, meaning I should mind my own business.

"After this, I'm never working for someone else again. I want something of my own," Sister Wang said that afternoon.

She wanted to open a little grocery store and set up some bumper cars outside her house. She would make a little money and spend more time with her family.

She also wanted to send her children to the expensive private school in the county. Tuition began at eight thousand yuan a semester even in primary school. According to her fifth uncle, the school could take a failing child and make them pass in a single term. Every year it sent students to Tsinghua and Peking University, while others went abroad to places like Cambridge University in New York.

"American education is still better, really," she said. "By fourth grade, they can tell what kind of person you are. Then they focus entirely on whatever you're good at. If you're good at mathematics, you study nothing but mathematics from then on. If you're not good at books, you study art instead."

"Oh, really?" I said. "Where did you hear that?"

It made me feel as though those of us at a liberal arts college were defective goods sifted out in fourth grade, like little capacitors with their exposed cores pulled away.

"The news. It's all over the internet."

"I have to write that down." I took out my notebook.

"What are you writing?" Sister Lei asked.

"What I just told him about American education," Sister Wang said. "If my daughter had been born in America, I'd have had her study ballet."

In fact, I held the notebook beneath the table and wrote: Daughter. Uncle. Asks Grandma: Why is Uncle inside the glass?

Everyone here has a story, but they seal the past inside themselves and do not speak. People come here for one thing only: money, Sister Wang said.

The boss said production depended on the strength of everyone together, that every person mattered.

"But who doesn't know the truth?" she said. "Anyone who walks in here can do our jobs. We are insignificant."

She had once worked as a secretary and looked down on people who labored in factories. Now she was older, and companies did not want an old woman for a secretary. She had drifted from factory to factory before she understood how young and arrogant she had been. There was no shame in any kind of work now, she said, so long as you did not steal, or rob, or deceive; so long as you were a good person and did not pass the evil of one generation down to the next. To her, there was dignity in labor.

Then she said that when she was at vocational school, she should not have studied computers. She should have studied beauty care. Rich women these days were always willing to spend money on that.