Yesterday, having completed every process on the first floor, I went upstairs to the second.

The workers downstairs had told me that compared with the people on the second floor, our hardship was nothing. They made me feel as though I were about to descend into Dante's second circle, where I would see Dido swept back and forth by the gale.

The moment I reached the second floor, the smell of burned plastic hit me. At first, I had to pinch my nose to enter. In the inner-coating room, a worker opened the silicone furnace and a cloud of white vapor rushed toward the ceiling, as though someone had just steamed a basket of gasoline buns. At the de-racking station, an old man carried baskets of piping-hot, vermicelli-like pieces on his shoulders. They landed on the floor with a tremendous bang. In appearance inspection, three rows of women kept their heads down, rustling and racing without pause, as though sitting an examination paper that never ended.

"Anyone who works on the second floor can endure anything," Sister Cai said. "Heat in summer, cold in winter. Nothing frightens us."

As she spoke, Sister Cai was using a soldering iron to burn the burrs from the molds. This was the easiest job on the second floor, she said. The factory was looking after her. Humane management. Her health had always been poor. She had uterine fibroids when she gave birth and underwent surgery when her child was two. Last year the pain returned to her abdomen. She had it examined: the old illness. Another major operation.

Her life had not been easy, she said.

Sister Cai left home to work when her son was six. It was 2001.

"I brought my son with me and paid for him to attend school in Dongguan. I earned 350 yuan a month then. His tuition was 1,800 yuan a semester. Every time the fees were due, they took half a year's wages.

"By the time my son was in fifth grade, the family back home was building a new house. I truly couldn't afford his tuition anymore. I quit and went home with him so he could study there. I stayed for four years. Home is Mianzhu, Sichuan. We have Jiannanchun liquor and Dongfang Turbine there. Both were badly affected by the earthquake.

"My son is a year younger than you. He's studying in Chengdu now. He didn't score high enough for a regular second-tier university, so he went to a third-tier one. Tuition is thirteen thousand yuan a year. He studies advertising and marketing. I asked why he had to study that. He said, 'Everyone else is going to university, so I have to go too.'"

Her son could have done better, Sister Cai said, but she had ruined it.

"I still remember that his high-school entrance exam was June 15 that year. On May 28, I picked him up from school on my motorcycle. When we stopped for petrol, my son said, 'Mom, you're too tired. Let me drive.'

"I really was tired. I must have been out of my mind to agree. We set off. At a turn, he didn't know to use the indicator. A minivan crashed into us. My son fell to one side with a few scrapes. I lay across the middle of the road and couldn't move at all. The driver leaned out, took one look, and drove away. My son stayed beside me while I slipped into unconsciousness. I was out from three in the afternoon until after ten that night. It must have affected his exam.

"I had the accident, and he did badly. He'd always been an above-average student, but he only received a B1.

"When the result came, he said nothing. With a little extra money, he could have attended Lanxuan Middle School, the second-best school in the county. But he didn't tell us until enrollment day. The whole family rushed there frantic with worry. By then, even the students with C1 and C2 grades had already paid their fees. Our entire family sat outside the school gate and watched wave after wave of parents come out. The regret of it."

"I've always felt that I held my son back," Sister Cai said.

"Life is hard for people like us, right at the bottom, isn't it?" Xiaorong said.

Xiaorong worked in the printing section. She had arrived only two weeks earlier and had not yet received her uniform, so she wore a red short-sleeved shirt. Still new to the work, she printed much more slowly than Xiao Yang beside her. Xiao Yang, like me, was from Guangxi and my age.

Xiaorong said that what frightened her now was her child—"a left-behind child"—growing to fifteen or sixteen and leaving for factory work just as she had. The cycle turning again, generation after generation.

Every time she returned home to Hunan now, her child said nothing. She had no idea what was on his mind. Sometimes she thought: I should stop working away. I should go home and stay beside him. Then she thought again: only by working hard now could she help change his fate.

She turned to Xiao Yang.

"I wish the country would change some of its systems and pay more attention to workers like us, so we could stay with our children."

Xiao Yang smiled without speaking. His hands moved quickly.

Xiaorong said her family had been poor since she was a child.

She had two younger sisters and a younger brother. One sister worked in accounting, the other in purchasing. Xiaorong gave the chance to study to her brother, but he did not work hard. Later he trained in CNC machining but never graduated. Now all he could do was deliver parcels.

"I told him, 'I sacrificed myself so you could make something of yourself, and you still didn't value it.'"

When she was in high school, she said, her teachers had made a special trip to her house. They begged her parents to give her a chance and let her continue her studies. Her parents agonized. In the end, they hardened their hearts and made her leave school.

Actually, Xiaorong said, the people she despised most were factory workers. They had no prospects. She herself was one of them.

Xiao Yang, who had kept his head down and worked throughout, was offended.

"You make it sound as if we had a choice. No skills, no education—where can we go except a factory? Stay home and farm? At a factory, at least there might be some small chance. Is there any hope in farming?"

"When we were children, we herded cattle and farmed," A-Quan said. "Now everyone has left for work. No one farms anymore."

A-Quan worked in Quality Control. He came from Guiping, Guangxi, and was born the same year I was. There was little to do today, so he wandered over and talked to me.

"Doesn't the government provide subsidies?"

"They used to give one or two hundred yuan per mu. I don't think they even do that now. The farmers rent their land out for factories. There's no money in growing things, and you live at the mercy of the sky. Sometimes there's a drought, sometimes a rainstorm."

A couple of years earlier, A-Quan said, CCTV had made a special report on the flooding where he lived. That flood, however, had been entirely man-made. Heavy rain fell again and again over several days. Five or six kilometers upstream, the reservoir's duty officer—A-Quan could not remember whether he was drunk or asleep—left it unattended all night. The next day the water had risen far above the warning line. There was no choice. If the dam broke, everything downstream would be destroyed, so they opened all seven sluice gates at once. The flood came rolling and roaring down. No one was prepared. The entire county town went underwater, four or five meters deep in many places. When the water receded, people returned home and found everything ruined.

Their village had a fishpond then. The flood smashed it open, and everyone went into the streets to catch fish.

"When my son went home for school in 2007, my husband and I had saved a hundred thousand yuan and built a new house," Sister Cai said.

"Then, in 2008, the earthquake came.

"At noon that day, bright sunshine suddenly turned to cloud. I took a nap every afternoon, but when I saw the sun disappear, I went out to work in the fields instead.

"After a while, the ground began to shake. The leaves on the trees began to tremble. I looked back and saw every house around me shaking, like reflections on water broken by a hand. I ran toward our house. I thought, It's over. All those years of work, gone for nothing.

"Before I reached the door, the earthquake threw me down in the field. It was a rapeseed field, the soil so hard you could barely push a plow through it, but great slabs of earth leapt out all at once.

"Luckily, our house was well built. It was new, and it stayed standing. All the neighbors' houses that were a little older collapsed.

"Later, Suqian in Jiangsu was paired with our county for reconstruction. They built many roads.

"No one died in our township," Sister Cai said, "because when the sky clouded over, everyone went out to work in the fields. But many people died in the county.

"Remember the Dongfang Turbine factory I told you about? Ninety percent of the students in its affiliated school were buried under the rubble.

"The county magistrate was away when the earthquake struck. He didn't report the disaster to his superiors at all. When the volunteers arrived, they said, 'My God, it's this bad?'

"In the end, the magistrate knelt in the street, surrounded by survivors, and apologized."

A-Quan said the flood smashed open the fishpond and they went into the streets to catch fish.

When he was a child, there had not been so many pesticides and chemicals. Fish were everywhere. There were fish in the fields. Sometimes, when you opened the door at night, one would be jumping underneath, as if it had come calling.

"Of course," he said. "Lots of fish meant lots of snakes.

"Our village was at the foot of a mountain. Cobras were everywhere. They came out to hunt at night, so none of us children were allowed outdoors after dark.

"One night my second uncle went into his bedroom and heard a hissing sound. It frightened him half to death. He fetched the village's snake catcher. The man shone his torch under the bed and—wow—two cobras.

"I almost got bitten once too. It was winter, and the sun had come out. Cobras like to come out and sleep in the sun. One was coiled on the ground. If you didn't look carefully, you'd think it was a heap of cow dung. I nearly stepped on it. Only when I turned around did I see it was a snake. I broke into a cold sweat.

"Cobras are one thing. King cobras are truly fierce. What's a king cobra? A snake that lifts its head and has the character for 'king' written on it. And it's several lengths longer than an ordinary cobra. But the most dangerous one is actually the many-banded krait. It usually won't bother you. But if you provoke it and it bites, its venom works faster and hits harder than a cobra's.

"One of my primary-school classmates disturbed a krait one night and was bitten. He went home. A child, he was too afraid to say anything. The next day his parents entered his room and found him lying rigid on the bed. He was gone."

The village snake catcher was a tall, powerful man, and quick.

Whenever a snake got into someone's house, they called him. He charged in and caught it by the head in one grab. Once its head was in his hand, the snake had no swagger left.

He had been bitten many times himself, but each time he merely applied herbs at home. He never even went to hospital. He kept the herbal formula secret. If someone else was bitten and came to him for it, they had to pay; otherwise they could go to hospital themselves. The saying goes: bitten once by a snake, you fear a rope for ten years. He never feared them.

We children all called him Uncle, and he was gentle with us. When we were little, he showed us snakes and all the children crowded around him. He would pretend to stumble and let go. We screamed. In fact, he only brought out harmless snakes. He would never have hurt us.

Back in 1999, a factory worker earned only three hundred yuan a month. A cobra, though, sold for one or two hundred yuan per jin. Uncle kept the snakes he caught in cages at home, each weighing about a jin, and sold them every so often. But once he caught a king cobra weighing more than seven jin. Someone offered two or three thousand yuan. He shook his head. Not for sale. In the end, he kept it and steeped it in liquor.

Come to think of it, he has been gone many years now. He was only in his early sixties when he died. His son is famously terrified of snakes. The village has had no snake catcher since, though there are fewer snakes too.

The man has been gone all these years, but the liquor remains. A great jar of it, too much ever to finish. Even now, you can see the giant snake in its drunken pose. Uncle fed it two drops of liquor and it became drunk. Then he submerged it in the jar, and there it has stayed to this day, head slightly raised, mouth open.

To this day.

Today the man is gone. His flesh has rotted into the earth, and year after year new crops and wild grasses grow from it. The snake remains intact.

"Los Angeles. I heard it's a major port city. Is it the capital of the United States?

"So Hollywood is there. You must have seen lots of movie stars, right?

"How long does it take to get from China to America? Thirteen hours? The ticket must cost more than a thousand yuan!"

Xiaorong had heard from someone that I had studied in America. She fired one question after another. Even Xiao Yang, who always kept his head down at work, looked up to ask.

"Does Los Angeles have countryside?"

"Yes. Our school was in the countryside."

"Abroad," Xiao Yang marveled. "People from the countryside like us wouldn't even dare imagine it."

He nodded and had already gone back to work when another question occurred to him.

"Are the local people in Los Angeles white or Black?"

"Both."

"How can one place have two kinds of people?"

"Don't we have different ethnic groups here too?"

Xiao Yang nodded.

"I've heard Black people naturally have a certain smell?"

"Nonsense."

"If I could go to America—if I could get there—I'd be willing to scrub toilets," Xiaorong said. "The minimum wage is nine dollars? Then you could earn at least five hundred yuan a day. That's fifteen thousand a month. Spend carefully and you could save ten thousand every month! Even being smuggled in would be worth it. Survive the disaster and good fortune is bound to follow."

Then she shook her head.

"Here it's eight yuan seven an hour. It's not fair."

Xiao Yang laughed at her.

"Fair? Why even talk about fair? The world was never fair."

He went back to work. His hands were fast, often faster than the flow of pieces coming out. When there was nothing to print, he stood beside the machine in a daze. He had told me before that he had no particular goal. Thinking about such things was too distant, too heavy.

But this time, after Xiaorong left, Xiao Yang quietly turned back to me.

"Then—could you tell me how to learn English? It doesn't have to be fast. Just a way that works."

The de-racking station was said to be one of the hardest posts on the second floor. The curing oven stood beside it. Every five minutes, it spat out a fresh rack of molds newly coated in silicone. There was no air-conditioning. Two electric fans blew without pause, but the heat was still unbearable. De-racking meant lifting down the racks and gathering the molds into new baskets. Simple, exhausting. An old man with thinning hair was responsible for it. Workers gave the area a wide berth when they passed. The smell was heavy, and thanks to the fans, waves of hot air came rushing at you too.

Sister Cai said the old man did not speak and could not speak Mandarin. Xiao Yang put it more simply: a man who did the heavy labor.

On my first day, I passed him and asked, "Master, what's your name?"

It took me asking twice before he understood.

"Surname Li," he said.

"Li?"

"The Li made of 'wood' and 'son.'"

Having learned his name, I fled the heat.

Today there was nothing for me to do, and I suddenly thought I would help him. It was unbearably hot there, just as before. Master Li allowed me to do only a little and kept sending me outside to rest. He could manage alone, he said.

Master Li was fifty-one and came from Nanyang, Henan. His son and daughter-in-law, his daughter and son-in-law, all worked on the third floor. His wife and grandson were back home. His children rented their own rooms outside. Master Li lived alone in the dormitory, Room 405.

"Do you miss them?"

Master Li smiled.

"Not especially."

He had been here four years. Before that, back home, he had been a village cadre.

The South-to-North Water Diversion Project was in full swing then. Beijing lacked water, so it had to be brought from the south. Their village lay across the route on the map. It had to move.

The government ordered the relocation. The villagers refused. Some thought the compensation too low. Others simply did not want to leave the old houses where their families had lived for generations.

As a village cadre, Master Li said, he could not disobey the government. If he obeyed, he offended the villagers. Either way, he labored and won no gratitude. Eventually, the local government sent someone in. The man agreed to every condition the villagers proposed, and at last they consented to move into the resettlement apartments. But once they had gone, the man could no longer be found. Naturally, every promise vanished with him. The villagers had nowhere else to make trouble, so they went to the cadres' homes and cursed them with every ugly word they knew. Master Li and his wife sat at the table with their heads lowered, not even daring to lift their teacups. When they walked down the road, every neighbor looked at them with hatred.

From then on, Master Li felt that "being a village cadre meant nothing anymore." He resigned and came to Dongguan with his son and the rest of the family. Far from home, he settled in this factory.

"Now I do heavy labor and earn four thousand a month," he said with a smile. "As a village cadre, I made one hundred."

"Then haven't you become one of the rich people in your village?"

He nodded. He smiled, until the smile would no longer come. He sighed, turned around, and went back to lifting racks. The curing oven opened its mouth. The rising steel plate, speckled with red paint, looked like a guillotine.

Suicide was cowardice, Sister Cai said.

"In 2009, I went to Foxconn. I spent three years there. We weren't official employees because we were over the age limit. A contractor went inside and outsourced the work to us.

"It was so busy in there. People truly came and went at a run. There were so many of us, and nobody knew anyone. A friend you met today would be gone tomorrow. A lot of people jumped from the buildings then. I saw it myself three or four times. But after a year or two, no one jumped anymore. People inside said it was because Foxconn put in the contract that there'd be no compensation if you jumped.

"I've been through many hardships too. Sometimes I think, our family has already had such a rough road. Why do the worst things still keep finding us?

"It was 2006, in Chashan, Dongguan. One evening my husband said he was going out for a haircut. On the way, he took out his money to buy our son an ice cream, and someone noticed it. He passed a lychee grove. Two minivans pulled up, and a group of men got out with iron bars and knives. They dragged him into a van, beat him almost to death, took all six hundred yuan he had, then threw him onto a construction site far away.

"When I saw him in hospital, I fainted. Two knife wounds in his head. Both thigh and lower leg broken. His whole body looked as though the life had already gone out of it. My son was there too. He hadn't gone home to study yet. He held me and cried and would not stop. Luckily, his father survived. We counted as fortunate. Robbery was everywhere in Dongguan that year. Many people died on abandoned construction sites.

"My husband spent a month in hospital and another three months lying at home. I told him, 'We have to recover together.'"

"A human life is not easy," Sister Cai said.

"The spring silkworm spins until it dies; the candle weeps until its wick is ash. On the day you die, if you can look back and know you did right by yourself, that is enough."

She burned the burrs from row after row of molds. Her voice and expression remained even, as though she were telling the story of someone else's family.

For the past two days, I had been afraid of falling into the trap of narration.

I demanded that my narration be conscious. To sink into other people's stories and lose command of the telling was to fall into the trap. Writing would become another form of unconscious life, a life without choice. Word joined to word, sentence to sentence: like Hume's logical flaw, the connection was accidental, a snare laid by the framework of cognition. I did not want that. I wanted command. I wanted to create my own metaphorical world, my own narrative of history.

But after hearing so many stories, I felt I had been stubborn to the point of blindness.

What other people gave voice to was precisely the new narrative of history I had always been searching for. It began in a factory in Dongguan and reached outward into the wilds of Guangxi, a prison in Hunan, the Wenchuan earthquake, the Guiping flood, the South-to-North Water Diversion Project. There were even unexpected figures out of a tale of wandering heroes. Who could have imagined that the uncle who spent his life battling snakes would, in the end, lose to his favorite defeated enemy?

Their points of view, their inspired adjectives—"the shaking houses were like reflections broken on water"—reconstructed the history that grand narratives, narrowed by an elite perspective yet convinced of their own authority, had monopolized. Every prejudice dissolved inside the stories. A classmate praised me for going down to mingle with the people at the bottom. Chengcheng told me workers lacked the power to change their own fate. Xiao Yang told me that old man was simply someone who did the heavy labor. Now I hoped I had supplied an answer that neither they nor I had wanted.

Here they called me "the census taker," because I always wanted to trace everything to its roots: What is your name? Where are you from? How many brothers and sisters do you have?

In truth, I was the one who should thank them for their honesty. In ordinary life, honesty like that was rare. But while plastic burned and machines breathed fire, somehow it became easy.