Blue Gold Page 6

  “That is so judgmental,” she said.

  “I still like you,” Ryan offered, feebly.

  “Don’t do me any favors!”

  “What are you getting so upset about?” he asked, annoyed now, like she was being some kind of drama queen.

  “I don’t know. Because you’re a two-faced hypocrite?”

  Ryan’s face got pinched and angry, but Fiona didn’t care. Suddenly she was wondering what she ever saw in him.

  “So…what? Are we, like, breaking up?” he said.

  Fiona wasn’t sure if he was asking or threatening. Either way, she found herself jumping at the suggestion.

  “Maybe we should,” she replied, and before he could respond, she slammed her locker shut and started away. She took two steps, then spun back to where he stood glued to the floor, gape-faced.

  “Give me your phone,” she demanded.

  “Why?”

  “Just do it!”

  He dug in his pocket and fished out his cell. Fiona grabbed it out of his hand and in three seconds flat had found the selfie—which, naturally, he had saved. With the tap of her finger, she deleted it.

  “There,” she said, handing it back to him. “Just in case you get any ideas about spreading it around.”

  As she headed down the front steps of the school, breathing in the fresh spring air, Fiona felt a surge of freedom. She also felt relief—she’d totally dodged a bullet with the boob shot. It had seemed like such a nothing thing on Saturday night, but the anxiety she had felt since then wasn’t worth it. She’d learned her lesson—from now on, she was going to be more careful.

  FIONA HAD TOLD HER MOM about the lost phone on Sunday, but on Monday night after softball practice, she had to face telling her dad. The phone had been a Christmas present from him. Her dad was a super-conservative business guy, the vice president of communications for a mining company. Balding, glasses, polo shirt tucked neatly into chinos—there was no way she was going to avoid a lecture.

  “Fiona, you were supposed to look after that cell phone,” he said.

  They were sitting in his car outside her mom’s place, the engine running because he had to get home to his other family in West Vancouver, across the bridge. Fiona’s parents had been divorced since Fiona was three, time enough for her dad to produce another whole family with Wife #2, also known as Joanne. Brandon was eleven and Katie was seven. At first Fiona had been jealous of the competition from kids who were only half-related to her, especially when Katie, his second daughter, arrived, but the upside of her dad being super straight was that he was also super conscientious. He made the trip across the bridge twice a week to coach softball and he always included Fiona in family vacations to Whistler and Hawaii, which her mom could never have afforded.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, duly regretful.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m just going to go out and replace it.”

  She didn’t expect that. On the other hand, her cell phone was her life.

  “I was thinking I’d get a job this summer,” she replied, “and pay for it myself.”

  “Good idea,” he nodded. She could tell that he was proud of her. “If you get a job,” he said, “I would be willing to get you a new phone, for your birthday.”

  My birthday’s in September, and it’s only June! calculated Fiona. That was a long time to go without a phone.

  “By that time,” he said with a wink, “the next generation of these babies is supposed to be out.” He slipped his smartphone out of his pocket—top of the line, the phone that people camped out overnight in front of electronics stores to buy. “I know a guy who can jump the queue.”

  “That would be awesome!” Beyond awesome! Fiona hugged him. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Better not mention it to your mom,” he added.

  He didn’t need to say more. Fiona’s mom had a tendency to flip out when she came home with expensive presents from her dad. Her mom was a writer for a consumer magazine. Fiona knew her rant by heart—“For every electronic gadget we buy, somebody, somewhere is being exploited!” But Fiona thought that her mom’s mini-

  meltdowns were really about the fact she didn’t make much money, and she felt bad that she couldn’t compete with Fiona’s dad.

  “Don’t worry,” Fiona agreed.

  She climbed out of the car and waved while he drove away in the late-evening light, feeling that all was right with the world once more. She could hear kids playing at a nearby park, their voices ringing out last shouts of freedom before their parents packed them off home. Soon the summer holidays would be here, two whole months of freedom. As she turned her key in the gate, Fiona wondered what kind of job she would be able to find, considering she wasn’t quite fifteen.

  “Ryan called,” her mom told her when she walked into the apartment. She was at the kitchen table, working at her laptop. Fiona’s expression must have betrayed her, because her mom peered over her glasses at her. “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “We broke up,” Fiona told her.

  “Oh, Fee, I’m sorry,” she replied.

  “I’m not,” said Fiona.

  Fiona could see her mom willing herself not to ask what happened, knowing that Fiona hated to be interro­gated. She leaned back in her chair and ran her hand through the mass of brown-gray curls that covered her head. “Are you going to call him back?” she asked.

  “I’m pretty tired. I’ll see him tomorrow at school. Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, hon.”

  As she headed to her room, Fiona was curious about why Ryan had called. But whatever the reason, he was the last person she wanted to talk to. She was amazed by how quickly she was over him. I guess that’s how you know what you feel, she realized. Now that she understood she’d never really had feelings for him, something else was dawning on her. She’d sent a nude photo of herself to a guy it turned out she didn’t even like that much. Thinking about it made her burn with embarrassment. No, she really didn’t want to talk to Ryan—ever. If she was lucky, she’d get through the last couple of weeks of school avoiding him. After that, she would put the whole business behind her, like it never happened at all.

  LAIPING AND FEN inhaled a breakfast of rice and vegetables in the cafeteria, then hurried along the sidewalk to the Training Center. As they walked, they chatted about how they would spend their first paychecks, even though they wouldn’t be paid until they’d finished their training and been on the job for two weeks.

  “I want to buy my own phone,” said Laiping as they rounded the walkway to the broad boulevard where the busses ran. The air was stinky with exhaust, and a gray, humid haze hung over the campus.

  “I’m saving my money to take a computer course,” countered Fen.

  “Why bother?”

  “A computer course will allow me to move up to an office job,” she replied. “Do you think I want to be stuck on the assembly line forever, going numb, like my mother?”

  To Laiping, Fen was getting ahead of herself. “I just want to become good at this job,” she said.

  “Laiping,” lectured Fen, “in order to be successful, you have to have a plan to improve yourself.”

  Laiping was discovering that Fen had a talent for making her feel ignorant, even though Fen was a year younger. “I do have a plan,” she said. “I plan to make lots of money.”

  “That’s what everybody says when they come out from their villages. But do you know how many wind up going back after a couple of years, worn out and just as poor as when they arrived?”

  “How many?” Laiping asked, challenging her a little.

  “Lots,” replied Fen vaguely. “That isn’t going to happen to me.”

  It sounded to Laiping as though Fen was making things up again. But as they walked through the shadow of a white-tiled factory building, she did start to think. What plan do I have, other than to work and send money home? Even her plan to buy a mobile phone would have to wait, she realized, until she had wired money to her parents—and until she
had paid back Older Cousin Min. Someone in Min’s dorm had told on Min about Laiping sleeping there. Min was fined one hundred yuan—almost a day’s pay! When they saw each other at breakfast, Min shouted at Laiping that she would have to pay her back, plus the ten yuan for the fake birth certificate—only to then be fined another twenty-five yuan by the cafeteria guard for causing a disturbance!

  “That’s another twenty-five yuan you owe me!” Min had snapped at Laiping, keeping her voice low.

  Fen, who was sitting with them, had butted in with, “It isn’t Laiping’s fault you have a temper like a sow in heat!”—which made Min even more cross.

  Now Min wasn’t speaking to Laiping. Laiping felt sick when she thought about it, first because her cousin was angry with her, but mostly because she had planned to put her first one hundred yuan toward buying a mobile phone so that she could call her parents whenever she wanted. Her money was disappearing before she even earned it!

  FOR THREE MORE DAYS, Laiping and Fen reported to the Training Center to practice soldering capacitors to circuit boards. Circuit board-capacitor-solder; circuit board-

  capacitor-solder—once Laiping had mastered this rhythm, the work became as monotonous as planting rice. But at least, she reflected, her feet were dry, not being sucked into the mud of a farm field.

  By the end of the fourth day, Mr. Huang pronounced Laiping and Fen ready to move onto the factory floor. The next morning, they found their way to Building 4, which turned out to be even bigger than the white-tiled factories they passed every day on their way to the Training Center, a squat but massive concrete structure of six storeys that took up two campus blocks. They showed their ID tags to a security guard at the entrance. Inside, they were given smocks to wear over their street clothes, caps to put over their hair, and booties to cover their shoes, the last of which they were required to put on before entering the factory floor in order to prevent dust and dirt from outside from getting into the electronics. Laiping felt a thrill as she pulled on her smock and cap—just like the girl in the poster! Except that Laiping’s smock and cap were blue, not white.

  Laiping and Fen climbed a wide staircase alongside hundreds of other workers up to the fourth floor, where they had been assigned. They went through a broad doorway and found a vast factory, bigger than two cafeterias put together, divided by long rows of work stations, and lit by glaring fluorescent tubing that hung down from the high ceiling. The floors were spotless concrete, and there was a slight chemical smell—perhaps from whatever was used to clean the floors. Laiping looked up and saw sealed windows placed up high along the walls. They provided a little daylight, but no fresh air.

  In the open aisles between the rows of work stations, workers in blue smocks and caps identical to Laiping’s and Fen’s were lined up in formation, eyes forward—like soldiers at attention. There must have been over a hundred people in each line, and four lines in each aisle—more than a thousand workers altogether on this floor alone.

  “What should we do? Should we join them?” Laiping whispered to Fen.

  Fen shrugged her shoulders, yes. The girls hurried to the end of the nearest line of workers, almost to the back wall. Someone they couldn’t see blew a whistle. Over a loudspeaker, a cheerful but firm female voice told them, “Good morning!”

  “Good morning!” the thousands of workers repeated, as one.

  “How is everyone this morning?”

  “Fine! Fine! Fine!” replied the workers in unison.

  “On the count of three, we will march on the spot, right foot first. One…two…three!”

  The workers began marching on the spot in near-

  perfect unison. Laiping and Fen joined them.

  “Lift those knees!” warned the pleasant voice from the loudspeaker. “Remember what our leader Mr. Chen says, ‘Fit body, fit mind—fit for work!’” Laiping looked up to a giant portrait of Steve Chen, the company’s founder, on the wall, smiling down on the factory floor, like a father smiling down on his children. Laiping’s glance strayed to a giant poster near the portrait of Mr. Chen: “Work hard today, or work hard to find another job tomorrow.” She lifted her knees higher, anxious to show her willingness to work hard. The lady told them to run on the spot, then to march again. After ten minutes or so, she told them to stop marching and to punch their time cards in a machine. New workers, like Laiping and Fen, were to find a supervisor to be assigned work stations.

  The supervisors were not hard to find—they were the ones walking up and down the aisles, telling the workers to hurry up and get to work. Fen nudged Laiping toward one of them, a pudgy man in his forties. His eyes were set too close together for his broad face and he had a big mole near his nose that Laiping tried not to stare at.

  “Excuse me,” she said politely, “but we don’t know where we’re supposed to go.”

  “Country mice, eh?” replied the man. “Let me see your hands.”

  The girls held out their hands.

  “Yours are nice and small,” the supervisor told Fen. Then he shifted his attention to Laiping’s hands. “Your fingers are like sausages! Big and clumsy!” he pronounced. “What are they thinking sending you here? This is very delicate work.”

  Blushing, Laiping pulled her hands back. But Fen spoke up.

  “My sister does the finest embroidery,” she told the foreman. Once again, Laiping marveled at Fen’s quickness with a lie. “Back home, everyone admires how delicate her work is.”

  The supervisor looked from tiny Fen to Laiping, who was taller than he was, and got a crooked smile. “If you’re sisters, I’m a millionaire,” he said with a laugh, but not unkindly. “I get it. You want to stay together. Come with me.”

  The supervisor, whose name was Mr. Wu, led them down the production line where worker after worker was seated in an identical pose, head bent over tiny squares on a mat in front of them, to a spot where there were two open stations. Laiping was happy to see that there were stools at each work station, so they wouldn’t have to stand while they worked. Mr. Wu told her and Fen to pull on plastic gloves and face masks to cover their mouths and noses, like the other workers were wearing.

  “Show me how you work,” he said, waiting expectantly.

  Laiping took her seat, her hands shaking with nerves. Gingerly, she used tweezers to lift a circuit board from a bin onto the mat. The tiny capacitor was hard to pinch. She hoped that Mr. Wu didn’t notice her hands trembling. From the way he was focusing most of his attention on her, she assumed that Fen was faring better than she was.

  “Now the soldering iron,” he prompted, noting Laiping’s hesitation.

  Laiping picked up a soldering iron, its fine tip giving off a wisp of heat. She took a deep breath, willing her hand to be steady. Bending close to the circuit board, she managed to touch the soldering iron to just the right point. Next she took a string of solder and melted the tiniest amount on the tip of the iron, applying it to the exact spot where the capacitor joined the circuit board, just as she had done a hundred times in training. She looked over at Mr. Wu for his reaction. He nodded his head slightly, eyeing Laiping as though he suspected she was cheating somehow. Otherwise, how could her fat fingers have managed such a delicate task?

  “For today,” he pronounced, “take your time and make sure to do your job perfectly. But by tomorrow we expect you to work as quickly as everyone else.”

  Laiping glanced down the line and saw how the other workers performed the procedure in seconds, without ever looking up. Circuit board-capacitor-solder; circuit board-

  capacitor-solder.

  “Your shift is ten hours,” said Mr. Wu, “with a half-hour break for lunch. Any questions?”

  “No, sir,” said Laiping.

  “No, sir,” said Fen. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Then get busy.” He gave Laiping an appraising look and added, “Sloppiness will be punished.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, and bowed her head.

  After Mr. Wu walked on, Laiping reached her tweezers
into the first bin and laid a circuit board on the mat. She took a tiny capacitor and dropped it onto the proper spot on the board. She picked up the soldering iron and touched it to the capacitor and the circuit board to heat them. She melted the solder with the iron just as she had practiced and applied just the right amount to create the joint. Perfection! Pleased with herself, Laiping glanced down the line of blue-capped heads bowed to their task in quiet efficiency—in the shared certainty of three meals a day and a warm bed at night—and pondered what on earth could make workers so unhappy with their lot that they would throw themselves off the roof of a dormitory rather than face another day.

  OLIVIER DIDN’T COME BACK the next day as Kayembe promised, or the day after that. When finally he returned late in the afternoon of the third day, he was angry that Sylvie had been to see his boss.

  “How does it make me look, to have my sister checking up on me?”

  His offended pride filled the small hut up to bursting. He seemed to have grown suddenly taller, and broader through the shoulders. From his body odor, he obviously hadn’t washed in the few days he’d been away.

  “It makes you look like you have a family where you belong,” snapped Sylvie, refusing to be bullied.

  “Stop arguing with him, Sylvie, and give him some food,” commanded Mama.

  But Sylvie noticed that, as relieved as Mama was that Olivier had returned, she had not gotten up from the sleeping mat to greet him. She was keeping her distance, almost as though she was afraid of him. Sylvie knew what she was thinking, because she was thinking it, too. He’s beginning to look like a soldier.

  Pascal and Lucie came in, lugging the plastic jerry can full of water between them.

  “Olivier!” shouted Pascal with excitement. “Where have you been? Is it true you learned how to drive a truck?”

  Sylvie turned a sharp look on Olivier. “You’re driving for Kayembe? Where to?”

  “None of your business!” He took a tin of meat from the sack he was carrying over his shoulder and tossed it to her. “Mr. Kayembe sent this for you,” he said, and headed outside.