My cousin Alex and I like to play a kind of translation game, challenging each other to come up with concise ways to express Chinese idioms in English.
Sometimes, we agree there are no good substitutes.
Language is so intricately bound with culture that it almost seems wrong to try to translate some phrases or words.
While in China, I mostly took notes in English and counted on the digital equipment Jessica and I brought to record Chinese better than I could on the fly. But some expressions I scribbled in Pinyin, because I couldn’t adequately convey the nuances of the original Chinese with a direct translation.
One that stood out was “mei you ban fa,” which could roughly correspond to “there’s no way” or “that’s the only option,” depending on the context.
It was a phrase that each of the factory employees we met with used at least once to describe aspects of factory work and life.
A 24-year-old worker who had left the Supercap factories in Zhongshan used it to describe the nepotism managers showed toward workers from their hometowns.
Parents used it to shrug off their sadness at not being able to see their children for months or years at a time.
Trying to describe the look of incredible sorrow that came over the face of one woman who had not seen her 10-year-old daughter in months, I could only think of the same expression “mei you ban fa.”
There is no way for me to put the way she froze, or the silence that fell across the table, into words.
Moving toward opportunities
When there are no opportunities to earn money at home, people leave.
This is something I should be more than aware of; my own identity is shaped by my parents’ emigration from Taiwan to California.
They, in turn, are shaped by their parents’ own move from China to Taiwan.
Still, hearing about the fractured families of China driven apart by economic necessity was different, because it seemed like much less of an option and more like a mandate for those workers.
At the Shenzen Coastal City Mall, Jessica and I chatted with two store clerks for more than an hour. We had been staking out the UCLA boutique across the way, waiting for customers to interview.
Xie Hua, 22, immediately struck up a conversation when we wandered in. She had left her rural hometown, where “there’s nothing to do,” in search of work.
She and Zhao Juan, who left home at age 17 two years ago for similar reasons, agreed that they probably are paid as much as factory workers.
The clerks actually make a little less per month, but they also work slightly fewer hours, and as they said, they have more freedom. But they, too, miss their families, and Hua said she feels isolated in Shenzhen.
Most of the women she knows in their 20s are looking for husbands, she said, because they will not be able to find work after a certain age.
Ivy, the coordinator from Worker Empowerment, said that in today’s China, it’s not unusual for four siblings from one family to seek jobs in four different cities.
Countless children are raised by relatives, usually grandparents, and supported by money sent from parents the children see only rarely.
About a week into the trip, I sent my mother an e-mail thanking her for the life my parents have provided for my brother and me. I like to consider myself class-conscious, one of those recent college graduates with the appropriate amount of guilt over the privileges she has had.
Still, it was hard for me to digest the idea that for these workers, a 40-hour train ride home on hard seats in a stuffy compartment is considered, at a price of about $20, a luxury.
In my e-mail, I used another expression that kept running through my head: “xing fu,” something like “blessed,” “happy” and “fortunate” all rolled into two syllables.
Being raised in the United States has meant possessing freedoms and opportunities that the young people we met never had. Most started working right after high school, if they even had the chance to stay in school that long.
My grandfather paid most of my student fees for college because he has always believed that education is the most important pursuit anyone could undertake.
The parents we met had the same opinion; they work in factories to provide financial support for the next generation, so their children will have more choices than they did.
Confronting capitalist realities
As we spoke to more and more people, it finally sank in for us that this, right now, is China’s ongoing industrial revolution. Young people are moving in droves to the cities in search of economic opportunities.
And as grueling as factory work is, for many young Chinese, those jobs offer more money than they could expect to make anywhere else.
There is simply no capital available in agricultural areas. Income from crops is dependent on weather conditions and can only be collected when fields offer up produce.
In factories, the demand for products is constant, though it has slowed since the financial crisis.
Factory employees may not love their work or the conditions they toil under, but they are, as Tony Fung said, realistic about their situations.
Tony, the Worker Rights Consortium’s field director in China, used an extended metaphor about a party to describe the role of outside organizations in monitoring labor conditions.
If the party is still being planned, he said, it doesn’t matter whether Peter, Paul and Mary show up and make the guests happy ““ there’s nowhere for them to go yet.
I wasn’t sure if he meant the ’60s folk group or just chose three convenient names, but I asked him to clarify the metaphor first.
Tony’s point was that universities and labor organizations looking to enforce codes of conduct have no infrastructure to rely on, yet.
He said the “We can do it!” attitude he associates with an American mindset does not apply, or work well, in China.
The Chinese are more cautious in deliberating before they act, he said.
Many workers are not ready to mobilize or risk their salaries by drawing attention to themselves as troublemakers.
The workers we met were hesitant to offer information, even after we assured them of their anonymity. They had problems with factory life, but they rely on those jobs to support themselves and their families.
“It’s too demanding to ask the young people to get out of the capitalist reality of the world,” Tony told us.
At the same time, I had to wonder how long party guests should wait for the party to be planned.
To beat the metaphor completely to death, if Peter, Paul and Mary are ready to party, shouldn’t they lend a hand and help set up the tables, instead of waiting outside, strumming their acoustic guitars?
And since Associated Students UCLA is making money from the party, we most definitely have a vested interest in setting and meeting standards of fair labor treatment.
As members of the demand side of the supply chain, our participation in the capitalist reality means being aware of where funding is coming from, monitoring ““ and taking responsibility for ““ the manufacturing behind the label “UCLA.”
Because of conflicting interests and ideologies, the move to make collegiate apparel sweatshop-free is complex and contentious.
But as Cynthia Holmes, director of trademarks and licensing for ASUCLA said, there must be short-term action even as colleges and labor organizations seek long-term solutions.
“Even if it’s not comprehensive, it’s something,” she said. “You know, since these are people’s lives, it’s kind of like, “˜Let’s do it now – something is better than nothing.'”
The dividing line of education
On a 17-hour train ride in mid-October, Jessica and I ended up in a marathon conversation with the other passengers who were jammed into the uncomfortable seats and standing in the aisles around us.
We covered a smorgasbord of topics: Michael Phelps ““ a sea monster who should be left alone to dominate his underwater realm, it was decided; the upcoming elections ““ ironically, McCain was called “that one,” and everyone knew the name “Obama”; the financial crisis; the relative merits of rice and bread; whether Jessica and I knew how to speak Chinese or use chopsticks, whether we counted as actual Chinese people.
We also talked about the distinction between young Chinese people who had and had not gone to a university.
Two men in their mid-20s debated the issue: Yao Kunlong, who was traveling to Shenzhen on a business trip, argued that it was impossible to truly succeed in modern China without education, certain connections and “wen hua,” which roughly translates to “culture.”
The other man, whom I had dubbed “Slick Rick” as soon as he boarded the train in a hipster black shirt, with an oversized cell phone bulging out of his right front pocket, disagreed.
“Wo jiu si liu mang,” ““ “I just am a rascal,” he shot back. “I never even finished sixth grade.”
I was surprised to hear someone willingly accept the label “liu mang,” a phrase older relatives throw at us when they don’t like our behavior. As far as I can tell, it implies a lack of social graces, along with the dictionary translation of “hoodlum” or “rogue.”
The self-proclaimed liu mang said his lack of education never stopped him; some people just have the ability to make money. Kunlong held on to his argument that those days of China are over, and with so many people competing to be on top, education is the dividing factor.
Education seemed to be the theme echoing through the trip.
When visiting the factory compound for Airmate, an electronics company, I kept thinking of how similar the grounds were to a college campus, with all of the workers staying in dorms, eating bad food in oversized cafeterias, constantly waiting in lines, and anticipating the social events of the weekend.
If it weren’t for the eight hours of work on an assembly line five days a week, I could almost think the comparison fit.
The two young Taiwanese managers-in-training giving us a tour of the production process indicated that bringing in factory workers was simple ““ not that their employees were expendable, but with assembly lines, a new worker could learn his or her task in less than a week.
The lack of specificity in their jobs means factory workers are aware of how easily they can be replaced but also of how easily they can find a new situation if they are unhappy.
At the end of it all, I wonder where the dividing line is set between being realistic and being cynical about the conditions of laborers and the possibility of enforcing strong codes of conduct.
Somewhere between “mei you ban fa” and a blind “We can do it!” attitude, there has to be a way to ensure fair living wages and safe working conditions, to make sure all of the party guests are sharing in both the preparations and the festivities.
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