Blue Gold Page 12

  Lightning quick, Miss Lau picked up a ruler from the desk and—thwap!—struck Laiping on the side of her head with it.

  “Let me assure you, it is yours,” she stated. She pulled several more circuit boards out of the container, each one flawed in its own way. “And this one, and this one, and these. Let me assure you of something else: if you wish to continue working here, such carelessness will not be tolerated!”

  Laiping wanted to tell Miss Lau that a dozen flawed circuit boards out of the thousands she had made was not so bad. She wanted to tell her that mistakes must be expected if the supervisors insisted on working the employees to the point of exhaustion. But she stayed silent as she suffered a tongue-lashing about her laziness and ingratitude.

  “Mr. Chen is taking a chance on ignorant girls like you by bringing you from your miserable villages and letting you work here,” said Miss Lau, the overhead lights glaring off her glasses so that Laiping couldn’t see her eyes. “He’s giving you the opportunity for a better life. It is your duty to repay him by working your hardest and your best, every minute of every day.”

  “Yes, Miss Lau,” replied Laiping, bowing her head.

  “As punishment, you will not work in the factory tonight and you will not be paid.”

  “Yes, Miss Lau.”

  Miss Lau reached for a small bound book that was resting on top of a file organizer. She handed the book to Laiping.

  “Instead, you will spend tonight’s shift copying out The Sayings of Steve Chen.” Laiping saw that this was the title of the small book. “Perhaps through his wisdom you will understand the dedication it takes to be successful and prosperous.”

  “Yes, Miss Lau,” repeated Laiping humbly, but inside, she burned with the sense that she was being treated unfairly. She had worked so hard to please Steve Chen—she didn’t deserve to be punished! She thought of what Kai had said about him getting rich by treating the workers like slaves. If she was supposed to think of Steve Chen as a father, he was a mean one. She remembered the video Kai showed her on his smartphone, of the Americans protesting Steve Chen outside a store, and took comfort from the fact that she wasn’t the only one who knew the truth about him.

  These thoughts raged inside Laiping’s head as she followed Miss Lau down the corridor, the loudspeaker lady’s heels click-clicking against linoleum, to a small room with one table and one chair and no windows. On the table there was a pad of cheap paper and a pencil. Laiping looked up and saw a surveillance camera pointed at the table from a corner of the ceiling.

  “I’m leaving for the day,” explained Miss Lau. “Another supervisor will come and check on you later.”

  “What if I need the washroom?” asked Laiping.

  “You’ll have to hold it. Cheer up, Laiping,” she told her, suddenly smiling her broad, tight smile. “You still have your job. This will help you to remember to be more careful in the future.”

  “Thank you, Miss Lau.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, the smile unfaltering, and exited.

  Laiping opened The Sayings of Steve Chen and began copying characters and phrases:

  Efficiency leads first to Productivity, then to Prosperity.

  The ability to solve problems is the best way of judging a manager.

  The ability to obey instructions is the best way of judging a worker.

  Laiping found the sayings of Steve Chen boring, but she had liked combining tiny strokes on the page to make characters from the time she first learned to write at school. She took her time and made sure that her penmanship was neat and pleasing, just to prove that she was a careful worker. She kept at it steadily for several hours, enjoying the solitude—even though she was aware the entire time that she was being spied on by the security camera. Finally, a different manager came into the room, a man in a gray suit and striped tie. He took the pages that Laiping had copied and studied them. At last he nodded, she hoped in approval.

  “What have you learned?” he asked Laiping.

  Laiping was caught. She had been focusing so hard on drawing the characters that she hadn’t paid much attention to the sayings themselves. But one of the posters she stared at every night during marching exercises bubbled up from her memory to save her.

  “That if I don’t work hard today, I can work hard finding another job tomorrow,” she said.

  “Very good. I’ve been watching you,” he told her, nodding toward the camera. “I can see that you know how to work hard. After the meal break, you may go back to your job and receive half a day’s pay.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Laiping, glowing at his praise. But at the same time, she kicked herself for being so eager to please, like a running dog. She was beginning to notice a pattern in the factory—one day they praised, the next they found fault. She wondered if the bosses were intentionally trying to keep the workers off balance.

  LAIPING ATE MORE HEARTILY at the midnight meal than she had all week, even though it was the same dish of rice, vegetables, and pork. Her coworker Bohai spotted her and joined her. Laiping wondered if he ever bothered to shower, because his hair was greasier than ever, and he smelled of old sweat. He hunched over his bowl shoveling food with his chopsticks, talking with his mouth full.

  “So what happened?” he wanted to know, a little too eagerly. “Where did they take you?”

  Nosy! thought Laiping. “It’s none of your business,” she said.

  “Did they make you write a confession?” asked Bohai.

  “A what?”

  “That’s how they punish people in metal processing. You have to write a letter to Steve Chen, telling him you’re a lazy good-for-nothing and begging him to give you a second chance—then they’ll let you keep your job.”

  “How do you know?” she asked. “Were you punished?”

  “Not me!” he huffed. “I was one of the best workers. That’s why they chose me to work on the new product.”

  Arrogant, too, thought Laiping. She knew the type from her village—a young prince, an only son spoiled by parents and grandparents, raised to believe he deserves to have everything handed to him. She filled her mouth with rice and greens, hoping he would take the hint and stop talking. It worked—Bohai gave up on conversation and focused on wolfing down his own food. But between the sight of his flaky scalp as he bent over his bowl, and the thought of returning to the monotony of the line, Laiping had suddenly lost her appetite. She could already feel the ache in her shoulders and neck. Part of her missed the peaceful solitude of the little room, and writing out the sayings of Steve Chen.

  “Are you going to finish that?” asked Bohai, eyeing the remaining food in her bowl.

  “Help yourself,” she replied.

  Without registering her sarcasm, Bohai took Laiping’s bowl and greedily ate her leftovers. She wondered whether he was lying, if the reason he knew about having to write confessions to Steve Chen is because he had been punished. And if so, she wondered what he had been punished for.

  ON WEDNESDAY EVENING following marching exercises, Miss Lau, the loudspeaker lady, made a special announcement.

  “Despite generously giving you overtime, production is falling behind. The reputation of the company is at stake if we fail to meet the product launch date! Therefore, as of now we are increasing the production quota per shift.” The workers received this news in silence, no one so much as daring to steal an anxious glance at her neighbor. “You will have to work harder if you want to continue to work here,” warned the voice of Miss Lau. “Are you willing to work harder?”

  “Yes!” called out the workers, as one.

  “I hope so!” she scolded them. “Let us all strive to make Mr. Chen proud of us!”

  Laiping took her place beside Bohai and pulled on mask and gloves. She told herself there was nothing to be worried about—by now, she was an expert at soldering capacitors. She would just work a little faster, that was all, and pay greater attention to what she was doing.

  For the first half of the shift, her concent
ration was perfect, her rhythm effortless as she fixed capacitors onto circuit boards. When Mr. Wu reached Laiping on his ceaseless stroll up and down the aisle, he nodded his approval. By the time the meal-break whistle sounded, Laiping’s container of finished circuit boards held several hundred. She felt proud of herself, but Bohai was in a bad mood.

  “This isn’t fair,” complained the young prince. “They can’t expect us to work this fast for twelve hours straight.”

  “You can always go back to the metal processing shop,” replied Laiping without sympathy, pulling off her latex gloves.

  She headed toward the exit with the other workers, hoping to avoid Bohai’s company, but something made her look back—a half-formed suspicion that was starting to take shape—and she saw Bohai drop something into her “completed” bin. By the time she strode back to him, he was walking away from the work bench.

  “What did you do?” she demanded.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Did you switch circuit boards with me?”

  “No!” he replied with a sneer, backing away.

  Laiping stepped toward him, refusing to let him get away. “You did, didn’t you?”

  “Listen,” he said, leaning close so that only Laiping could hear, “my uncle is a Party boss, so you better not start making crazy accusations against me, or you’ll be sorry.”

  He hurried away without giving her time to reply. Laiping looked into her bin and found several botched circuit boards that Bohai had ruined with too much solder. Workers with carts were coming down the aisles, collecting the containers of completed boards.

  “What are you waiting for?” yelled Mr. Wu when he saw Laiping still at her work station. “You better not be late coming back from the break!”

  Laiping was on the verge of telling him what had been happening—that Bohai had been letting her take the blame for his poor workmanship. But she remembered the blow of the ruler she’d received from Miss Lau when she questioned whether the bad boards could have been hers. This was the fifth rule she had learned since starting work in the factory: Never talk back to a supervisor. Besides, if Bohai’s uncle really was a Communist Party boss, he could make trouble not just for Laiping, but for her family, too. The Party ran everything, from the government in Beijing to the village councils.

  “I’m going, Mr. Wu,” she said—and quickly dropped the defective boards back into Bohai’s container.

  On Thursday evening, Laiping arrived early for her shift to ask Mr. Wu for permission to move to a different place on the line. She didn’t tell him the reason.

  “What does it matter where you sit?” he barked. “If I make a change for you, then everyone will want to change!”

  Laiping thanked him anyway, and took her place beside Bohai. From then on, she and Bohai didn’t speak. And Laiping watched Bohai like a hawk.

  FISTON SANG while the jeep bumped over the dirt road on the way back into Nyarugusu, a lullaby about rowing on the river that Sylvie remembered Mama singing to her when she was small, back when Mama was happy. Olele, olele, the current is very strong! Fiston’s voice was surprisingly sweet, coming from such a rough man. Riding in the front seat with the cooking knife in her lap while Pascal sulked in the back, Sylvie would have found his song comforting if she hadn’t been so filled with worries.

  “I know you won’t tell me what Olivier is doing for Mr. Kayembe,” Sylvie said to Fiston after they had passed back through the camp gates, “but can you at least say if what he’s doing is dangerous?”

  Fiston shifted in the driver’s seat, taking a moment to consider his answer. “Olivier is with experienced fighters,” he replied at last, “but in the Kivus, everything is dangerous. The Chinese want to buy coltan, and the Canadians want to sell it to them. Mr. Kayembe is in the middle between them trying to do business, but so are the Mai-Mai and the Rwandans, and other rebels.”

  “The Canadians?” repeated Sylvie, startled. “What do they have to do with it?”

  “They own a lot of the big mining companies,” he replied. “Sometimes the foreigners have need of a militia to do their dirty work for them.”

  “What kind of dirty work?”

  Fiston kept his eyes on the road and honked several times at refugees who were ambling along. “Get out of the way! Do you want to get hit?”

  “You mean like when the Mai-Mai killed my father,” Sylvie said, watching for his reaction.

  Fiston shot her a warning glance. “You’re a smart girl, Mademoiselle Sylvie,” he said. “You know it isn’t wise to ask too many questions.” Abruptly, he changed his tone and became carefree and joking once again. “Where shall your chariot take you? You live in Zone 3, no?”

  Sylvie thought for a moment. “Would you take us to the Zone 3 clinic?”

  “At your service, mademoiselle.”

  Sylvie rode the rest of the way wondering if it could be true what Fiston said, that Canadians were somehow involved with the misery that had befallen her family, and thousands of other Congolese. She remembered Marie telling her something about her friend Alain’s website keeping tabs on mining companies in the Congo, but she hadn’t told her that those companies were Canadian.

  When they reached the clinic, Fiston gave Pascal a grave look. “You listen to your sister and go home with her, or you will have Fiston to deal with.”

  “Yes,” whispered Pascal, in awe of Fiston, but Sylvie could see he was still pouting over being pulled away from his new friends.

  “Thank you,” Sylvie told Fiston.

  He dipped his head and drove off, the jeep kicking up dust in its wake. Sylvie turned to Pascal.

  “Go home. Give this back to Mama,” she told him, handing him the cooking knife. “Tell her I will be there soon.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Never mind that. Go right home, or I will tell Fiston!”

  Reluctantly, Pascal headed away, scuffing his bare feet through the red earth. Sylvie watched him long enough to be certain that he was obeying, then she went into the clinic to find Doctor Marie. She wanted to hear from her if it was true that Canada was involved in the fighting back home.

  “She is with a patient. You will have to wait,” said Neema, at the admitting table. She took in Sylvie’s impatience. “What is so important?”

  “I need to talk to her, that’s all,” Sylvie replied. She had no intention of sharing more.

  “Is it true what they’re saying, that Kayembe wants you?” Neema asked. When Sylvie didn’t reply, she added, “You know he recently took a wife in North Kivu, don’t you?” She hadn’t known this, but it didn’t surprise her. A man like Kayembe wouldn’t care that taking many wives was considered backward by modern people. “Sure he’s rich, but you’d better watch out,” advised Neema. “You will be his second wife, under the thumb of his first one.”

  It was on the tip of Sylvie’s tongue to tell her she would rather die than marry Kayembe, but Olivier’s words rang in her ears. He’d kill all of us. Mama, the children. All of us.

  Sylvie took a seat on one of the rough wooden benches in the small waiting area, beside a man moaning with a toothache. She waited for half an hour, watching patients come and go. A rash, a sprained ankle. One young man on crutches, his pant leg pinned under the stump of his right leg, complained to Neema he was having trouble breathing. Doctor Van de Velde came out to the waiting area to check on him, making Sylvie nervous. She hadn’t forgotten how angry the head doctor had been when the young American, Martin, had let her come inside the foreign workers’ compound. But Doctor Van de Velde ignored Sylvie, listening intently through his stethoscope to the man’s lungs, round gold-rimmed glasses perched on top of his large nose like a tiny bicycle.

  “I can find nothing wrong,” the Belgian told the man in his strangely accented French. “How have you been sleeping?”

  “Not well,” replied the man.

  “Nightmares?” The man nodded. “Are you Congolese? From the DRC?” The man nodded again. “You cam
e from the Kivus recently?”

  “Yes. Someone killed a Mai-Mai soldier in our village,” the man explained. “So they came and butchered thirty people, maybe more.” His kept his voice flat while he told his story, as though his emotions were all used up. “They pulled us from our homes,” he said, “women and children, too.”

  He winced, as though he was seeing them in his mind. Sylvie could see them, too. She could hear their screams.

  “They cut us with machetes,” he went on, “even the babies.”

  Sylvie’s heart pounded painfully as she saw the soldier’s machete raised over her face. There was no escaping memories. They stayed close, like unhappy spirits, demanding attention.

  “You saw this?” asked Doctor Van de Velde. His face was blank, without feeling, his skin ashen against his white lab coat—not rosy, like some Europeans.

  How can he be so heartless? thought Sylvie. How can he be a doctor and not care?

  The man nodded and bowed his head, admitting in shame, “I pretended I was dead, and hid under the bodies.”

  Now Sylvie understood why he couldn’t breathe—

  because he survived when his friends and family died. She felt guilty, too, sometimes, because she lived and Papa died.

  “Your shortness of breath is most likely related to post-traumatic stress,” Doctor Van de Velde told him.

  “Is there medicine for it?” the man wanted to know.

  “There is, but we don’t have any right now. There are counselors who can help, other refugees who’ve been through the same things you have.” The man looked disappointed. Doctor Van de Velde at first looked angry, but when he spoke, Sylvie could see he was trying to be helpful. “When you feel a panic attack coming on,” he suggested, “try some simple exercises to regulate your breathing.”

  He demonstrated, drawing in a deep breath and releasing it slowly. Sylvie tried, breathing in and then out. But the man wasn’t interested. Taking hold of the crutches, he struggled up from his wooden bench.

  “What use is breathing?” he said. He wouldn’t look Doctor Van de Velde in the eye.