After the fight, Min's boss became nicer to her. He urged her several times to
consider staying; there was even talk of a promotion to factory-floor clerk,
though it would not bring an increase in pay. Min resisted. "Your factory is not
worth wasting my whole youth here," she told her boss. She signed up for a
computer class at a nearby commercial school. When there wasn't an overtime
shift, she skipped dinner and took a few hours of lessons in how to type on a
keyboard or fill out forms by computer. Most of the factory girls believed they
were so poorly educated that taking a class wouldn't help, but Min was
different. "Learning is better than not learning," she reasoned.
She phoned home and said she was thinking of quitting her job. Her parents, who
farmed a small plot of land and had three younger children still in school,
advised against it. "You always want to jump from this place to that place," her
father said. Girls should not be so flighty. Stay in one place and save some
money, he told her.
Min suspected this was not the best advice. "Don't worry about me," she told her
father. "I can take care of myself."
She had two true friends in the factory now, Liang Rong and Huang Jiao'e, who
were both a year older than Min. They washed Min's clothes for her on the nights
she went to class. Laundry was a constant chore because the workers had only a
few changes of clothes. In the humid dark nights after the workday ended, long
lines of girls filed back and forth from the dormitory bathrooms carrying
buckets of water.
Once you had friends, life in the factory could be fun. On rare evenings off,
the three girls would skip dinner and go roller-skating, then return to watch a
late movie at the factory. As autumn turned into winter, the cold in the
unheated dorms kept the girls awake at night. Min dragged her friends into the
yard to play badminton until they were warm enough to fall asleep.
The 2004 lunar new year fell in late January. Workers got only four days off,
not enough time to go home and come out again. Min holed up in her dorm and
phoned home four times in two days. After the holiday she went to her boss
again, and this time he let her leave. Liang Rong and Huang Jiao'e cried when
Min told them her news. In a city of strangers, they were the only ones who knew
about her departure. They begged her to stay; they believed that conditions at
other factories were no better, and that to leave or to stay would be the same
in the end. Min did not think so.
She promised she would return for a visit after she got paid at her new job. Min
left that same day with a few clothes in a backpack and the two months' wages
that the factory owed her. She did not take her towels and bedding with her;
those things had cost money, but she couldn't bear the sight of them anymore.
In ten months on the assembly line, Min had sent home three thousand yuan--about
$360--and made two true friends.
She should have been scared. But all she knew was that she was free.
In the village where Lu Qingmin was born, almost everyone shared her family
name. Ninety households lived there, planting rice, rape, and cotton on small
plots of land. Min's family farmed half an acre and ate most of what they grew.
Her future appeared set when she was still a child, and it centered on a tenet
of rural life: A family must have a son. Min's parents had four girls before
finally giving birth to a boy; in those early years of the government policy
limiting families to one child, enforcement was lax in much of the countryside.
But five children would bring heavy financial burdens as the economy opened up
in the 1980s and the cost of living rose. As the second-oldest child, Min would
bear many of those burdens.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
The story of an American family, middle class in middle America, ordinary in every way but one. But that exception is the beating heart of this extraordinary novel.
First time novelist Vaddey Ratner captured my heart and senses in this novel based on her childhood in Cambodia. Her story transcends any news story...
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From the first page, I was drawn in by the lyrical writing of the author and mesmerized as the narrator, eight year old Raami, remembered the years...
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Trite but true, all good things must come to an end. I so wanted to keep reading the wonderful prose, the settings that let one think they are part...
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Kenn Nesbitt is new Children's Poet Laureate(Jun 12 2013) Kenn Nesbitt has been named the new Children's Poet Laureate: Consultant in Children's Poetry to the Poetry Foundation, which noted that the two-year position...
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