My days in the factory did not leave me wanting more. They were a period of perfect clarity—so clear that, long after they had passed, trying to dig further into them yielded as little as chewing on a cherry stone. The flesh of the stories had already been sucked clean; the pit of labor had no flavor. Work without creativity made me feel neither glorious nor empty. I knew I was making capacitors, one small checkpoint in an enormous undertaking. My labor had meaning. My person did not matter.

From layer after layer wound together on the third floor to the moment the piece entered a testing machine on the first, I was the small capacitor's passive, unimpassioned creator. I watched it packed into a box, carried away by truck, delivered to another factory. There it would be soldered onto a circuit board. The board would become a laptop, to be auctioned, owned, forgotten. It reminded me of a line of calligraphy I had read not long before on the wall of a railway-station bookshop: One mother reads, and ten generations become sages. The little capacitor's evident fate ceased to concern me the moment it passed beyond my assembly line, just as I might brush past the nameless mother of future sages in a crowd. Perhaps on some sunny day, I would remember its blurred shape.

I began planning my escape while I was still on the line. A sunny day, a day with a light order, preferably before the Mid-Autumn Festival. Work got in the way of thought. My hands stayed busy; before long, the struggling mind was empty. The machine was like a mischievous child: noisy, always demanding attention, never growing up. Amid the clamor, only impossible fantasies of freedom could enter the mind, urging me to run. In fact, everyone on the assembly line had the same fantasy. Once I have enough capital, I will leave the factory and open a little shop. Open when I please, close when I please. If I am destined to spend this life inside a factory, I will work so my child can be free.

I quit before the Mid-Autumn Festival. It was a sunny day, the same relentless sun over Dongguan near the Tropic of Cancer. The accountant scrolled through an Excel spreadsheet. The numbers inside its tidy boxes reported my performance to her.

"Your total pay is 857 yuan," she said. "You missed overtime on two evenings, so we've deducted fifty-two."

She took me downstairs and told me to sit for a while. She would bring everyone's wages down together.

Waiting beside me was an old man in the sort of kung-fu shirt Jackie Chan wore in a shampoo commercial. His name was Chen Yong, he said. Fifty-three, from Yueyang—the Yueyang of Yueyang Tower. He had spent twenty days working in the canteen, cutting vegetables and tossing woks every day. It was too tiring. He could not take it anymore. He did not actually need a job, he said. His son and daughter were both established now, one a civil servant, the other a teacher. He had come twenty days earlier because his wife, who worked here, had fallen ill and he wanted to keep her company. When he went home, Chen Yong said, she would continue in the canteen. She was only forty-two. Still young. She could take it.

Mo Yan arrived too. I had met her on my first day. She said she would quit after teaching Xiao Li, and neither of us had expected to leave on the same day. She wore a pale-green blouse and a flowered skirt. At first, I did not recognize her. In the factory, we all wore the same blue uniform. I had come to believe that was how they naturally looked.

"Oh, you're here too," Mo Yan said.

Her husband would arrive soon in a little minivan and take her to Shenzhen.

I smiled at her and imagined their time on the road. A cheap glass bodhisattva hanging from the rearview mirror. The air-conditioning broken, so they cranked down the windows and let the subtropical wind strike their faces, carrying exhaust and the mingled smells of shopping malls, dust, and leaves. Her husband whistled. Mo Yan complained of the month's exhaustion, all the while impatient to see the little room that belonged to the two of them. The passing landscape had nothing to do with them. Until tomorrow arrived, they were happy and free.

"I wanted to open a milk-tea shop last year," Brother Hu told me.

He had planned to borrow a little here, a little there, and scrape together enough to begin. Then he visited the areas around all kinds of schools. Either a competitor was already there or the location was far too remote. In the end, he decided he had been unrealistic and returned to the factory.

I knew what he meant. The whole thing had been written across his QQ Space the year before.

"Why did you want a milk-tea shop?"

"Because of her."

She had told him, "You can't spend your entire life in a factory. You can't amount to nothing forever."

"I've loved her for more than ten years, since vocational school," Brother Hu said. "By then, we weren't even in the same place anymore. We went to the same primary school. She was always a tomboy—lively, with some of that Hunan fierceness, never polite to anyone. Everyone liked her. But she didn't like me. She liked another boy from my village. I always called him Brother, though I'd hated him since we were little.

"Later she went to a teachers' college and studied piano. She should have graduated by now. I don't know. We haven't spoken in half a year. Before that, we were always drifting close, then far apart. This time, I think it's truly over.

"I knew she didn't like me. The boy she liked had no feelings for her, and I was always the one standing beside her. I met plenty of girls who liked me. At one factory, a seventeen-year-old even said she wanted to marry me. I turned them all down for her. Sometimes I thought that if all I could ever do was stand beside her like that, it would be enough. We opened a couples' page together. We became husband and wife in QQ Dance. But no matter how many times I told her how I felt, she only said, 'You're my best friend.'

"I knew we could never happen. Her father worked at the education bureau; her mother owned a shop. Our families were too different. Her parents would never agree. But I always felt there was a special understanding between us. Do you know what I mean? Two souls that belong together."

"Soulmates."

"When I was in school, there were two things I always wanted. One was a wallet. I kept loose money in my pockets and was always losing it. The other was a red ribbon around my wrist. I saw the ribbons other boys' girlfriends had given them and thought they looked so cool. But if a boy bought one for himself, it seemed girlish, so I kept the thought hidden. Then guess what happened? On my birthday that year, a parcel from her arrived. I tore it open. Inside was a wallet, and inside the wallet was a red ribbon.

"It wasn't as though our personalities matched perfectly. I'm easygoing, careless. As long as life is happy, I'm fine. She takes everything seriously. If she came home and realized the supermarket had given her ten cents too much in change, she would walk a kilometer through the night to return it. I understood that too. She studied piano. Once I sat beside her while she practiced. She played one phrase wrong again and again. How could she be anything but exacting? But it made conflict easy. I worked at the factory and was exhausted every day. Sometimes, while we were chatting after work, I fell asleep. She became furious. When I woke and sent her another message, she would wait half an hour, then answer 'Mm' or 'Oh,' as though she did not care at all. Later we simply stopped talking for three months. We both deleted the other's contact details. A final goodbye.

"Then, three months later, one day I suddenly missed her. I turned the thought of her over and over, but there was no way to reach her. At that moment, my phone rang. It was her.

"She said, 'I miss you.'

"I said, 'How do you still know my number?'

"She said, 'How could I forget it?'

"Tell me, do people really have telepathy? Why was she thinking of me at the very moment I thought of her? We became close again, then parted, became close, parted again. Whenever we had been apart for a long time, a day would suddenly come when I missed her so badly I couldn't sleep, and somehow she would find a way to reach me too.

"Soulmates. Soulmate.

"How do you spell that word you just said?"

"S-o-u-l-m-a-t-e."

"Yes. That's it. She said I was her soulmate.

"She took things seriously. She said I couldn't stay in a factory all my life, amounting to nothing. That was last year. The truth is, who wants to stay in a factory? Everyone wants to get out. But once you're out, what can you do?

"Still, that sentence struck me. I wanted to take one chance—for her and for myself. The next afternoon, I quit the factory and took the train back to Hunan alone. You know what happened. I failed. No one would lend me money, and the opportunity wasn't good. I came back to the factory and have lived this same life ever since.

"Then this year, one night when she was about to graduate, she suddenly called. She was drunk in a KTV. She stepped out of the noisy room and told me that a boy had confessed his feelings to her the day before.

"I asked, 'Did you say yes?'

"She was vague. She didn't know. She didn't know whether she liked him, or whether she was ready for a relationship.

"I said, 'Then tell me. What am I to you?'

"She said nothing on the other end. After a pause, she told me, 'From now on, take good care of your health over there. Look after yourself when you're alone.'

"That was the last thing she ever said to me."

A person had to keep their feet on the ground and move one step at a time, Brother Hu said. Life at the factory was actually all right. He was someone with a powerful need to belong, and the factory was his home.

"Don't you feel you belong more at home?"

He shook his head. Sometimes when he returned, he sat on an empty stool while relatives he knew or barely knew came by and exchanged a greeting or two. It felt strange. Awkward. Stay anywhere long enough—when he returned to the factory after the New Year holiday, for example—and he would think: Ah, I am back somewhere familiar.

"But," he said, "sometimes a holiday comes and I suddenly miss home. I miss certain people, all kinds of things. One year I was working in Guangzhou and stayed at the factory for the New Year. On New Year's Eve, I ate instant noodles alone in the dorm. A moment before, I'd been playing a game on my phone, perfectly fine. Then halfway through the noodles, I started crying."

Meeting people is a marvelous thing. It fills memory like an iridescent bubble swelling in a bathtub. Before this, I remembered only the half-naked man in my uncle's factory. He wiped sweat with a black towel beside the furnace. I never knew his name, and I had forgotten his face. Now I could think of many people, each with a different expression in memory.

But every bubble bursts. Then life returns to the ordinary. As a selfish narrator, I wanted to put the bubble in my bag before that happened. I left the factory early in the morning, the day before Mid-Autumn. My roommates were all asleep. I carried my wheeled suitcase downstairs without saying goodbye and without turning for one last look. I climbed into a car, squeezed into the metro, and went to the busy streets of Shenzhen, where people moved in groups of three and five, enjoying the holiday.

I was ashamed. Escape did not ease the shame. I listened to them, even enticed them to tell me many stories, while knowing I was powerless to change anything. Beyond murmuring agreement and urging them on, I could not help—or perhaps helping had never been my purpose. After I left, every life had to continue. The failures and compromises would keep returning, over and over.

The day before I left, I went to Mission Hills Golf Club. It was the largest golf course in Asia and only three hundred meters from our factory on foot. Later, Xiao Yang told me that after lunch he often wandered around its perimeter, but had never known it was a golf course. Mission Hills occupied twenty square kilometers of green hills and clear water. At the entrance stood watchful guards and stone lions; if you did not arrive in a car, you had no right to enter. The grounds were a paradise apart, complete with everything: clubhouses, an international school, a property-management building shaped like a pyramid. They told you that some people deserved a private corner of their own in crowded Guangdong.

Driving through it, I sometimes forgot that three hundred meters away lay an industrial zone a little smaller than the golf course, a place of hammering metal, the smell of plastic, a crowd of busy and silent people, and machines that never rested, day or night.

In front of the hotel, I saw a Ferrari. A potbellied man sat behind the wheel on the right, probably a Hong Kong boss. He noticed me staring and knitted his brow. If there had been a broom nearby, he might have summoned a doorman to sweep me out. This, of course, was my stereotype at work again. Without sitting down face-to-face and talking, how could I know the sweat he had shed in a Fujian snack shop in Causeway Bay in the 1980s? How could I know that three bankruptcies had failed to stop his rise? How could I know the earnest, tireless love he bore for golf and Little Flower in Futian's village of second wives?

But he had no shortage of spotlights. The world would remember the version of himself he told. Contrary to Nietzsche, the strong will emerge in history sooner or later, accompanied by glittering rabble. Yet for many people, weakness was never a choice. They live in the shadow of the stage, and their stories deserve to be passed down too.

Before Mid-Autumn, I ordered a box of mooncakes online. Only when it arrived did I discover that it had been made at the food-processing plant next door. Four days earlier, it had come fresh from the oven, roamed the world in a Taobao delivery truck, and finally returned to the other side of the same wall.

I went from dormitory to dormitory handing out mooncakes: Supervisor Xu, Sister Cai, Sister Wang, Nuanjuan, and finally Master Li. Master Li was asleep in a lounge chair when I brought his. He was too embarrassed to accept it. I forced it into his hand. Wearing only his underwear, he chased me down the entire floor.

"No need, no need! You eat it. You eat it!"

"It's almost Mid-Autumn. It's only a mooncake, just a little gesture."

He beamed, delighted beyond measure, and hurried to thank me. Master Li held the most exhausting post. His companions were iron racks brandishing their claws and two electric fans caked in tar. Dust seeped into his skin and devoured what little hair he had left. Perhaps at Mid-Autumn he would miss home: his wife and grandson, the village now submerged beneath the South-to-North Water Diversion Project.

And of course there were Brother Hu and A-Lei. Brother Hu ate one first. He liked it, so he tucked away another for his night shift. When he returned in the morning, he still had not been willing to open it. A-Lei kept his mooncake by the head of his bed. It remained untouched on the day I left.

"Eat it. There are plenty more."

He smiled.

"I will, I will."

I remembered the first time I entered the dormitory. It was dusk. The air-conditioner blew, though the air was not cold. Brother Hu and A-Lei were half naked. The window was a sheet of shattered glass, its holes stuffed with old newspaper. Beyond it lay factory buildings and fields. A farmwoman was walking home through the fields, bent at the waist, wearing a conical hat and red sleeve protectors.

We greeted one another and exchanged QQ accounts. A-Lei's display name was "A Life Buried." Brother Hu said that "burial" and "untimely death" were primary-school children's favorite characters. I blushed. Brother Hu's name was a heap of radicals I could not pronounce. Chengcheng's was "My Idol Hitler."

When A-Lei added a note to my contact, he asked my name.

"Zhonglun. Zhong as in China. Lun as in ethics."

"Which lun?"

"The one in ethics."

Beside him, Brother Hu muttered, "Don't worry. He doesn't know it."

"Screw you," A-Lei said.

A moment later, he shuffled over awkwardly.

"I really have forgotten which lun it is."

A-Lei, A-Lei, forever innocent and lovable.

Brother Hu was off duty on the day I quit. We went to a roadside place for roast-goose rice. Twenty days earlier, he said, when he and A-Lei arrived by bus to apply for the job, they had passed the same restaurant. A-Lei's mouth had nearly begun to water. From then on, whenever they wanted to eat out, A-Lei said, "Let's have roast-goose rice." He never stopped thinking about it.

The last time I saw A-Lei was on the evening of the day I quit. I wanted to treat everyone to one final late-night meal, but he had to work the night shift. Before leaving, he played music aloud from his phone in the dorm, like a young man on a long-distance coach. The last song was My Deskmate. He sang as he walked out and away:

"Back then skies stayed blue, and days passed too slowly."

On the evening of the day I quit, I took everyone out for a late-night meal to say goodbye.

I invited my new roommate Xuanchao, Brother Hu, Chengcheng, Gengren—Supervisor Xu, though we were the same age and he would not let me call him Supervisor—and Xiao Yang. At the intersection, I saw fifteen-year-old Xiao Li, my first friend at the factory. He was on his way to an internet café with his roommate. I stopped him.

"Come eat with us. I'm leaving tomorrow."

"Ah." He looked around. His roommate called to him from up ahead. Xiao Li looked at me, shook his head, and turned away.

We went for Chaoshan shrimp congee. Two pots of congee, ten bottles of beer.

At the table, I said, "Let's go around. Does everyone have some ideal, some dream for what comes next?"

They laughed, and I laughed with them. The question had come from nowhere and sat awkwardly beside the women we had been talking about a moment earlier. Then Xuanchao, his face red with drink, spoke first.

"My dream is to save money little by little, until one day I have a truck of my own."

Xuanchao was the new roommate in our dorm, newer even than I was. New arrivals were such a constant theme in the factory that people eventually became used to unfamiliar faces. The vacancy each newcomer filled—the person who had left—was soon forgotten. Xuanchao was twenty-seven. A-Quan from Quality Control had introduced him. They were both from Guiping, though not the same village, so Xuanchao had never seen the snakes. For several years, he had driven trucks in Zhongshan. Wages there were too low, and he wanted to try his luck in Dongguan.

Xuanchao had told me before that his brother-in-law was in the underworld. He had set out to make his way at thirteen and now worked in a boss's casino. Six hours a day, six hundred yuan from the boss. If someone owed money at the casino, they locked him in a hut below the mountain and beat him with a flat bamboo pole. The first blow split the skin. If he lost consciousness, they threw chili water over him to wake him.

But Xuanchao said he would never enter that line of work. He wanted only a truck of his own. At the table, he told us that his father had given a lifetime's savings—all three hundred thousand yuan—to his older brother, hoping he would slowly build a trucking business of his own. His brother turned around and sold the truck, then gambled and chased women until all the money was gone.

His face swollen and red with drink, Xuanchao said, "Now I can only rely on myself. But one day, I'll have my own truck."

Brother Hu said he still wanted to move one step at a time. Save the money first. Do not think too far ahead at the beginning.

He had wanted a milk-tea shop, Brother Hu said, but later understood it was unrealistic. A person could not think too far into the distance, or he would forget who he was.

"Don't worry," I said. "You're the best talker here, the person everyone likes most. An opportunity will come."

Brother Hu seemed moved.

"You and Chengcheng are the best roommates I've met in all my years working away. In my old factory, everyone in the dorm kept their heads down over their phones. Sometimes a whole year passed without us saying a word to each other. One man liked talking to himself from the top bunk. I've been so happy these past few days, but you're leaving so soon."

Brother Hu's sentimentality made me remember many of our days together: sitting in a grilled-fish restaurant while he complained about his ill-tempered younger brother, who let people bully him outside the home, then came back and took his anger out on the old people.

I too hoped that one day I would see Brother Hu in a milk-tea shop on a street in Chenzhou. I would be waiting behind a line of primary-school children, crumpled ten-yuan notes clenched in their hands, all itching for their turn. At the front, Brother Hu would be overwhelmed in his apron, warning every small hand reaching for a cup not to burn itself. Then he would look up and see me.

Chengcheng said his goal was to make lots of money and find a woman.

"Then what?"

"Make more money and find more women."

Everyone laughed except Chengcheng. He was not telling the truth.

On my first night, his QQ name made me laugh aloud.

"Why is Hitler your idol instead of Chairman Mao?"

"Too many people already worship Chairman Mao. Hitler is still relatively niche."

"Do you have a special fondness for genocide?"

He thought for a moment.

"No. I don't agree with that. I admire the spirit that took him from nothing to the summit through his own struggle."

Chengcheng told me privately that a person could not be like a worker, staring only at the small profit in front of him. He had to think about doing great things. At his previous factory, Chengcheng had organized a union and tried to start a workers' newspaper. He asked the workers in every dormitory to sign their names. Someone reported him the next day, and he was fired.

"Starting from nothing is all very well," I said, "but what do you want power for?"

He fell into thought again.

"That first step is hard enough. After that...do good things, I suppose?"

My questions quickly made the air awkward, so he began telling me about the women in his past.

Gengren said he too wanted to take things one step at a time. First, strengthen the abilities he could rely on. Then think about a way out.

Gengren—I was still used to calling him Supervisor Xu—was one of the very few genuinely outstanding people I had met. He was warm and mild, unruffled in any confusion, as though nothing could ever go truly wrong. If he had been able to continue studying, he said, he certainly would have. His family could not afford it. Now he read books about management on his days off. He had left middle school at fifteen and gone to work in a Shenzhen factory: a dark mass of people, no holidays, no rest. He was twenty-one now, the same age as I was, but the world he had seen was much larger than mine.

One day, I found a status he had posted the year before:

"From today on, I will cut off every feeling and turn myself to ice. Everyone in the real world is false. I won't trust anyone again. But I can say it and can't do it."

I imagined that he too had been hurt, humiliated, and that his gentleness now, his calm amid disorder, was Faust's gift. Beneath the many consoling replies, only a user named "love me" wrote:

"Missing your dad?"

Gengren answered:

"Mm. Two more days, and it will be three years."

"I don't know," Xiao Yang said. "Nothing."

Xiao Yang was a practical man. He concentrated on his work. He had a girlfriend, and they rented a room together. Online, he liked posting inspirational images that said May you grow old together and Contentment is a blessing. Judging only by his updates, you might think he was an office worker in a high-rise who claimed to enjoy running, or a happy forty-two-year-old mother in Shanghai's Jing'an district.

Everyone was looking at him. The silence became awkward.

"I adapt to whatever comes," he said. "When an opportunity appears, I'll take it."

He did not need to say any of that. There was no shame in having no goal. I remembered a bestselling woman writer I had met in Shenzhen. Thirty-one, flamboyant, she had already arranged every part of her life in perfect order: a foreign husband, a cultural company, a crowd of fans who worshiped her as a genius. At a book signing, she said, "From now on, I only want to wait patiently for my company to go public." As though she already held the future in her palm, as though life contained nothing now but sowing and sitting back to reap.

I did not think anyone could see so clearly. Take away the eyes of desire, and we were all blind people feeling an elephant.

Xiao Yang turned to me.

"What about you? What do you want?"

"Me? I want to write a good book and travel around. I still can't work out who I am, or what I should do."

They nodded.

Later, our spirits spent, we returned and said goodbye. The machines in the factory had not stopped roaring. The moon was full.

Where next? There were still so many interesting places on this earth. So many. A person could not drift forever, but settling into a safe and happy life before one's voice went hoarse seemed a pity too. I hoped I would meet them again one day, when all of us were weathered and old. Then we would tell the stories we once knew, or never knew, and every face would open into a smile.