enough, but they had been friends before Jieling moved in.
“Hey,” called Taohua. Then, seeing what Jieling had. “Oh, first paycheck.”
Jieling nodded. It was like getting a jail sentence.
“Let’s see. Oh, not so bad. I owe three times that,” Taohua said. She passed the statement on to the other girls. All the girls owed huge amounts. More than a year.
“Don’t you care?” Jieling said.
“You mean like little Miss Lei Feng?” Taohua asked. Everyone laughed and Jieling laughed, too, although her face heated up. Miss Lei Feng was what they called Baiyue. Little Miss Goody-goody. Lei Feng, the famous do- gooder soldier who darned his friend’s socks on the Long March. He was nobody when he was alive, but when he died, his diary listed all the anonymous good deeds he had done, and then he became a Hero. Lei Feng posters hung in elementary schools. He wanted to be “a revolutionary screw that never rusts.” It was the kind of thing everybody’s grandparents had believed in.
“Does Baiyue have a boyfriend?” Taohua asked, suddenly serious.
“No, no!” Jieling said. It was against the rules to have a boyfriend, and Baiyue was always getting in trouble for breaking rules. Things like not having her trays stacked by 5:00 p.m., although nobody else got in trouble for that.
“If she had a boyfriend,” Taohua said, “I could see why she would want to quit. You can’t get married if you’re in debt. It would be too hard.”
“Aren’t you worried about your debt?” Jieling asked.
Taohua laughed. “I don’t have a boyfriend. And besides, I just got a promotion, so soon I’ll pay off my debt.”
“You’ll have to stop buying clothes,” one of the other girls said. The company store did have a nice catalog you could order clothes from, but they were expensive. There was debt limit, based on your salary. If you were promoted, your debt limit would go up.
“Or I’ll go to special projects,” Taohua said. Everyone knew what special projects was, even though it was supposed to be a big company secret. They were computers made of bacteria. They looked a lot like the boxes in the dormitory rooms. “I’ve been studying computers,” Taohua explained. “Bacterial computers are special. They do many things. They can detect chemicals. They are
“What does that mean?” Jieling asked.
“It is hard to explain,” Taohua said evasively.
Taohua opened her battery and poured in scraps. It was interesting that Taohua claimed not to care about her debt but kept feeding her battery. Jieling had a battery now, too. It was a reject—the back had broken so that the metal things that sent the electricity back out were exposed, and if you touched it wrong, it could give you a shock. No problem, since Jieling had plugged it into the wall and didn’t plan to touch it again.
“Besides,” Taohua said, “I like it here a lot better than at home.”
Better than home. In some ways, yes, in some ways, no. What would it be like to just give up and belong to the company? Nice things, nice food. Never rich. But never poor, either. Medical care. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing. Maybe Baiyue was a little … obsessive.
“I don’t care about my debt,” Taohua said serenely. “With one more promotion, I’ll move to cadres housing.”
Jieling reported the conversation to Baiyue. They were getting incubated cells ready to move to the tissue room. In the tissue room they’d be transferred to the protein and collagen grid that would guide their growth—line up the cells to approximate an electricity-generating system. The tissue room had a weird, yeasty smell.
“She’s fooling herself,” Baiyue said. “Line girls never get to be cadres. She might get onto special projects, but that’s even worse than regular line work, because you’re never allowed to leave the compound.” Baiyue picked up a dish, stuck a little volt reader into the gel, and rapped the dish smartly against the lab table.
The needle on the volt gauge swung to indicate the cells had discharged electricity. That was the way they tested to see if the cells were generating electricity. A shock made them discharge, and the easiest way was to knock them against the table.
Baiyue could sound very bitter about New Life. Jieling didn’t like the debt; it scared her a little. But, really, Baiyue saw only one side of everything. “I thought you got a pay raise to go to special projects,” Jieling said.
Baiyue rolled her eyes. “And more reasons to go in debt, I’ll bet.”
“How much is your debt?” Jieling asked.
“Still seven hundred,” Baiyue said. “Because they told me I had to have new uniforms.” She sighed.
“I am so sick of congee,” Jieling said. “They’re never going to let us get out of debt.”
Baiyue’s way was doomed. She was trying to play by the company’s rules and still win. That wasn’t Jieling’s way. “We have to make money somewhere else,” Jieling said.
“Right,” Baiyue said. “We work six days a week.” And Baiyue often stayed after shift to try to make sure she didn’t lose wages on failed cultures. “Out of spec,” she’d say and put it aside. She had taught Jieling to keep the out-of-specs for a day. Sometimes they improved and could be shipped on. It wasn’t the way the supervisor, Ms. Wang, explained the job to Jieling, but it cut down on the number of rejects, and that, in turn, cut down on paycheck deductions.
“That leaves us Sundays,” Jieling said.
“I can’t leave compound this Sunday.”
“And if you do, what are they going to do, fire you?” Jieling said.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to earn money outside the compound,” Baiyue said.
“You are too much of a good girl,” Jieling said. “Remember,
“Is that Mao?” Baiyue asked, frowning.
“No,” Jieling said, “Deng Xiaoping, the one after Mao.”
“Well, he’s dead, too,” Baiyue said. She rapped a dish against the counter, and the needle on the volt meter jumped.
Jieling had been working just over four weeks when they were all called to the cafeteria for a meeting. Mr. Cao from human resources was there. He was wearing a dark suit and standing at the white screen. Other cadres sat in chairs along the back of the stage, looking very stern.
“We are here to discuss a very serious matter,” he said. “Many of you know this girl.”
There was a laptop hooked up and a very nervous-looking boy running it. Jieling looked carefully at the laptop, but it didn’t appear to be a special projects computer. In fact, it was made in Korea. He did something, and an ID picture of a girl flashed on the screen.
Jieling didn’t know her. But around her she heard noises of shock, someone sucking air through their teeth. Someone else breathed softly, ‘Ai-yah.’
“This girl ran away, leaving her debt with New Life. She ate our food, wore our clothes, slept in our beds. And then, like a thief, she ran away.” The Human Resources man nodded his head. The boy at the computer changed the image on the big projector screen.
Now it was a picture of the same girl with her head bowed and two policemen holding her arms.
“She was picked up in Guangdong,” the human resources man said. She is in jail there.”
The cafeteria was very quiet.
The human resources man said, “Her life is ruined, which is what should happen to all thieves.”
Then he dismissed them. That afternoon, the picture of the girl with the two policemen appeared on the bulletin boards of every floor of the dormitory.
On Sunday, Baiyue announced, “I’m not going.”
She was not supposed to leave the compound, but one of her roommates had female problems—bad cramps—and planned to spend the day in bed drinking tea and reading magazines. Baiyue was going to use her ID to leave.
“You have to,” Jieling said. “You want to grow old here? Die a serf to New Life?”
“It’s crazy. We can’t make money dancing in the plague-trash market.”
