Nuanjuan, Nuanjuan—a name like a tongue twister. Yesterday I worked beside her inserting capacitors on the assembly line. Four people stood in a row, eight hands moving without pause. The belt carried ninety slots past us every minute, and we had to put a capacitor into every one. Fumble a single piece and the belt had already taken the empty slot away. Today I was sorting molds with her again. If black resin had stuck to the legs, we picked the piece out and scraped it clean with a blade.

"Everyone thinks it's a tongue twister," Nuanjuan said. "Say it often enough and it becomes easy."

Nuanjuan was born in 1987 and came from Hechi, Guangxi. She left home at sixteen, before finishing middle school. Most people did the same back then, she said. She thought leaving to work was cool. Fun.

Now she knew that without an education, she could only do work like this for the rest of her life.

"Did you ever think about going back to school?" I asked.

"We're all old now. So much time has passed. There's no point talking about regret."

At sixteen, she went to a place called He'an in Shenzhen, near what is now Shenzhen North Station. The place was crowded with high-rises now, but back then it had been open grassland. It was 2003, and the factory was another electronics plant. Factories gave no days off then. A "rest" meant not having to work overtime on Saturday evening. When that hour finally came, a group of the women would walk into town together. It took an hour to reach the shopping street, but they browsed and talked along the way, and they were happy.

"Being happy is one thing," I said, "but not working overtime on Saturday night counted as a day off?"

"Factories didn't follow the labor law in those days. We were only sixteen. Some of us weren't even that. The factory was already breaking the law—and doing us a favor—by taking us in. So none of us dared say anything."

Sister Wang said that sometimes she too felt powerless.

There was not much in her queue today, so in the morning she helped me inspect capacitors for bent legs. If a leg was bent, we put the capacitor in a box and straightened it with pliers. If it had an air bubble, there was nothing to do but throw it away.

Sometimes, Sister Wang said, she could not hold her head up in front of her family. Her eldest uncle's two sons, both born in 1980, were the first people from the village to enter college, even if it was only a vocational college. The village celebrated as though the top scholar in the imperial examination had come home: gongs and drums, a feast with tables stretching down the street. From then on, every time the brothers returned, they put themselves on display. To relatives like her who had only finished vocational school, even sparing a glance seemed an act of generosity. Whenever the family gathered, her uncle found a way to bring up his two college-educated sons, then boast a little about his daughter, now a head nurse earning eight thousand yuan a month. Her father swallowed all the humiliation in front of them. Back home, he wanted to beat and curse people again. Sister Wang would stand up to him and say it plainly: Who are you blaming? Did you ever put any care into raising us?

For people like her, Sister Wang said, the injury was only something they carried inside. The truly powerless were the disabled people in the village. They were supposed to receive the state's minimum-living allowance. In the end, it was divided among the village officials' fifth uncles and sixth aunts. An old blind man went to an official's door to demand an explanation. The official argued with him: You have sons and daughters. You have hands and feet. What gives you the right to an allowance?

Liu Cheng had left home at eighteen. He came from Zunyi, Guizhou, and was a few months younger than I was, but far more capable. He ran three printing machines at once, operating them and inspecting the results. The characters were only a few millimeters high. Looking at a single row with the naked eye was enough to make me dizzy. The first time I saw him two days ago, I asked, "What are you doing here?" Without even looking at me, he said softly, "Printing." I thought he was unfriendly. In fact, he had been impossibly busy from the very beginning, like Kamaji in Spirited Away: even six arms would not have been enough. There was a large order today. Supervisor Xu called me over to help, and watching just one machine was more than I could bear.

Running that printing machine all afternoon and evening was the dullest thing I had ever done. Duller than sitting in front of the movie channel for an entire day at twelve, waiting for the few scenes where people kissed. Perhaps only reading Hemingway could just about rival it. For six solid hours, I had to stare without blinking at the endless little molds waiting to be lettered by laser. I squinted at them and pulled out any whose printing sat crooked. Worse, the track was always malfunctioning. Every minute, the tiny capacitors started a fight. Until I began slacking off during overtime, I could barely get a word out. I remembered Kierkegaard saying that feeding and clothing humanity was not difficult; people invented and created because they were bored, because they needed to find some meaning in life. Seen from here, human beings were boredom itself. Boredom made them create, and the price of creation was the modern factory, which produced a new boredom in turn—my boredom. Only this boredom was passive, incurable. It clogged the mind and broke every thought apart. Schopenhauer's abyss of desire, where satisfying one desire merely drops you into the trap of the next: this was what he meant.

"How do you usually fight this kind of boredom?" I asked Liu Cheng.

"How do I put it? It's not so bad. Blink and the day is over. Most of the time I want to hit the machine, but sometimes I actually hope it breaks. Then I can repair it. Then I have something to do. Sometimes I sit on the stool and watch it print row after row, and there's nothing I can do at all. That's the hardest."

"Doesn't staring at it all day ruin your eyes?"

"My eyes were bad to begin with," Liu Cheng said. The implication was that the factory was not to blame. Once "bad to begin with" became the premise, "made worse" somehow lost its force.

"Why did you come to a factory?"

"How do I put it? If I didn't come to a factory, where else could I go?" Liu Cheng sounded as though there had never been a choice. Before leaving home, he had completed half a semester of high school. "I was only playing around." He could not learn the material anyway, he said. He could not understand it when he listened. Better to quit than keep wasting his parents' blood and sweat. When he said his family were farmers, he seemed a little embarrassed. They grew corn. In Guizhou, you lived at the mercy of the weather. Money was hard to earn, and the work was much harder than this. His parents had not said much about him leaving school. Afterward, he opened a bakery with his three closest friends. Business turned bad a year later, and all four went away to factory jobs.

"Running a bakery must have been happy," I said innocently.

"Happy? It was harder than this. In summer the room was over forty degrees, and you still couldn't stop."

"But doing this makes me miserable," I said. "I watch basket after basket fill up, and there is still no end."

"Right. The managers always want you to go faster, then faster again. They think anyone can run a machine. If you won't do it, someone else will."

Liu Cheng had been at this factory for a year. A year earlier, at another factory, he had met his girlfriend. She too was born in 1994. They rented a place together outside the factory and had lived there ever since. Liu Cheng had an older sister, born in 1990, who lived in Hangzhou and had married at twenty-one.

"You're twenty-one now," I said. "Your girlfriend is twenty-one too. Are you going to get married?"

He had no plans yet. It felt too early. He would think about it later.

There was nothing that made Liu Cheng particularly happy, he said, and nothing he particularly hated either. Every day when he got home, he watched television for a while. Variety shows.

"Running Man China. Have you heard of it?"

Sometimes, he said, he played games too.

"What games?"

"How do I put it? The ones everyone plays. League of Legends and things like that. They play, so I play a little too."

Liu Cheng said he was lost. He always had been.

A-Lei had just sold an account yesterday. Fantasy Westward Journey. Thirty-one hundred yuan. He had paid three thousand for it, he said—almost an entire month's wages. He had played for six months. Then he came to the new factory and started working nights. There was no time anymore.

He also let me in on the secret. When you sold an account, you had to strip off the gear first, or you lost money. He converted the gear into more than eleven million units of in-game currency, then sold that for over a hundred yuan in cash.

"Eleven million only got you a hundred and something yuan?"

He answered with complete seriousness. "You think eleven million is a lot? I'm telling you, late in the game, that much can't do anything." He repeated himself. "Nothing at all."

"Now that you've sold the account, spend some time finding a girlfriend. You're so handsome."

Embarrassed, he turned his head away and smiled.

"No time."

"Have you dated anyone before?"

"Dating? I don't think I ever have, actually."

For every two hours we worked in the factory, we rested for ten minutes.

Supposedly the break had begun as a little time for the smokers to relax and, somehow, become tradition. When the hour came, someone in the workshop would shout, "Break!" Everyone stopped what they were doing.

During the break, the workers gathered around a row of small stools beneath the dormitory building. Smokers and nonsmokers, people who played games and people who did not: everyone went. The strange thing was that it was no cooler there, no one spoke, and the smoke was thick. It was not even as comfortable as the workshop. But as soon as one person went, the rest followed. When the time came, they filed back inside.

"Are you happy?"

Nuanjuan said she was.

Her husband was good to her, she said. Their son was a year and a half old, and the family had recently built a new house. No one could have everything, but if you knew what was enough, you were happy.

"You must have been away for twelve years by now. That's a lot of sweetness and bitterness."

"Only seven years, actually. I stopped for a long time in the middle to look after a child."

"I thought your son was only a year and a half old?"

Nuanjuan suddenly caught on the words. She began to say she had been caring for someone else's child, then stopped halfway.

"I used to have a daughter."

Her first child had been a girl. She died when she was two years and one month old.

"Was she ill?"

"No. She fell into a river."

At the time, Nuanjuan and her husband were both away working. The day their daughter fell into the river was the day they had planned to go home.

"A son and a daughter—how good that would be. An only son will be lonely. When something happens out in the world, there'll be no brother or sister to share it with. I'll have another one someday. But by then I'll already be old."

"Are you happy?"

Sister Wang said she was.

Her childhood had been unhappy. Even then she thought that when she found a husband, she had to find one who treated her well and listened to her. Laughing, she said she was a forceful woman.

The husband she found was exactly like that. He listened to everything she said. He did not hit her or curse her. And he was handsome too. She said this as if she had turned a profit, as though good looks were the natural premise for infidelity and arrogance.

Her parents-in-law treated her well too. She did not have to do housework. Her mother-in-law cooked and cleaned. Her husband spoiled her and told her to stop going away for work, to stay home and be a housewife. But she did not want to become a burden. She was still young. While she was able to work, she would do a little more.

She told me that in all their years of marriage, she and her husband had never quarreled. Every time she went home, there were two people and two computers. Each played an online game. There was no time to fight.

It was only when she mentioned online games that I remembered Sister Wang belonged to my generation. She was only ten years older than I was. The stories she told, the assurance of her hands at work, the weathered face—all of it often made me feel that she had also lived through Liberation, land reform, the Cultural Revolution; that if I kept asking, she would tell me whole histories I did not know.

"Are you happy?"

I asked Liu Cheng as the shift was about to end.

"How do I put it?" he said. "I guess—I'm doing all right."

Behind me, I heard a happy Huang Yang call out:

"And just like that, the day is gone."