T. Bunn - The Great Divide

The day and the world were as gray as the sky. Grim and hot and terrifying. There was no escaping how scared she was. Fear gripped her with the strength of an eternal desert. The fact that she was here, that she might actually succeed at what she had planned and schemed over for so long, meant nothing. Not now.

Gloria turned to the next person scuttling toward the gates, and spoke in a voice that she did not recognize as her own. “There, ask this one. Wait, please don’t run away!” Gloria wheeled on the cowering interpreter. “Why aren’t you asking him?”

The interpreter was a wizened man she had hired in Hong Kong. She had gone through an agency and paid twice what the same services would have cost on the street. But she had wanted a paper trail. If she was being watched, as she hoped, Gloria wanted to make sure they knew she was coming.

The interpreter stared at her with angry defiance. “They not talk with you.”

“You need to be quicker, catch them before they enter the compound.” She gripped the padded shoulder of his cheap jacket and spun him around. “There, hurry, here comes another busload!”

“Don’t touch suit!”

She released her hold. “All we need is one person who works in Factory 101! Just one!”

He muttered an angry expletive, jerked his lapels straight, and stalked toward the disembarking throng.

Gloria risked a single glance at the gates. Guards clustered by the gatehouse and eyed her sullenly, talking among themselves. But none made any move toward her. She turned back, anxious that her plans might fail. Terrified that they might succeed.

She watched the interpreter work the crowd. She knew what he was saying because he had told her. Factory 101, anyone work at Factory 101, we seek someone who has been there or seen inside. Anyone who has spoken to the workers inside Factory 101. Anyone.

In the parking lot’s dusty sunlight, the disembarking laborers seemed burdened by the shift they had not yet begun. Some had journeyed from the far reaches of Guangdong Province, traveling as many as ten hours on these rusting, overcrowded buses. They came for a week of dormitory life and ten-hour workdays. Then back for one day in squalid farming villages and families who were desperate for any wages at all, before returning for another round.

Even so, most still chattered noisily as they started toward the Guangzhou Industrial Compound’s main gates. Yet as soon as they heard what her interpreter was asking, all animation vanished. Time and time again Gloria watched it happen. Upon hearing the interpreter, the workers showed a single flash of terror, then nothing. The curtain descended. They hurried by, never glancing her way. It was all the confirmation she required.

The interpreter returned to Gloria’s side. “They no speak to you.”

“Just one. All I need is-”

“Why you no hear?” His English continued to disintegrate the longer they remained. “All have much fear. I too. Come. We go.”

“We’ll try one more busload.”

He motioned angrily at the compound gates. The gesture revealed gray patches of sweat beneath his arms. “The guards ask questions too!”

Gloria glanced around. It was true. The guards snagged passing workers and pointed back to where she stood with the interpreter. The workers refused to look Gloria’s way even then. But the guards were bolder. One soldier stomped into the gatehouse, picked up a phone, and watched her through the open window.

“We go. Now.”

Gloria blinked through the sweat streaming into her eyes. Why did it not rain? The day draped about her like a dirty, steaming rag. Beyond the tall brick wall, dozens and dozens of smokestacks spewed multicolored clouds, the one directly behind the main gates belching brilliant yellow. The air burned her throat as she said, “We’ll try one more time.”

Fear turned to rage. “You crazy! These soldiers, they hurt you!”

She swiped at her face. “One more busload. Then we leave.”

The interpreter kicked at a stone and stomped away, muttering angrily in Cantonese. Gloria remained standing in the middle of a parking lot several hundred yards wide. The unpaved lot was dotted with signs in Chinese, all for buses to various outlying villages-there were hundreds of rusting signs. Red dust floated over the uneven, potholed surface. Her clothes were stained, her face and hands sweat-sticky and layered with grit. Gloria could feel the soldiers’ hostile gaze. She had never felt so exposed. All her careful plans, all her months of scheming, all her urgency and zeal-she could not recall a single thing beyond the rising cloud of dismay.

They had arrived too late. Gloria had planned to set off from Hong Kong before dawn. She had contracted for a car and driver through the hotel, and an interpreter through the agency. She had told the driver, but not the interpreter, where they were going. The interpreter had arrived two hours late, sullen and sleepy in his sharkskin suit, his dull fatigue turning fast to irritation and then to angry fear when he finally learned where they were headed. But he did not refuse, not after she had offered to triple his day rate if he came.

The compound lay twenty-two kilometers east of the Guangzhou city limits, fourteen kilometers north of the river, eight kilometers down a road that went nowhere else. A constant stream of trucks pulled up to a second set of gates farther down the wall, adding their noise and fumes to the already overburdened air. She glanced back at the guards and the factories behind the wall. The compound was as large as a small city. Construction cranes sprouted like diseased trees within a nightmarish garden. She had researched the compound for almost eight months and still did not know how many people worked inside. Some reports said ninety thousand, others closer to a hundred and twenty. She did not even know which was the factory she sought. All she knew for certain was that it was there. A name that conjured shadows and whispery fear even among expatriate Chinese nine thousand miles away, back in Washington, D.C. Back where she desperately wished she was now.

Even so, when the next pair of rolling buses belched black smoke and entered the lot, she almost screamed to the interpreter, “Here they come!”

The man waved one hand and shouted back, only one word of which was in English. “Crazy!”

“Ask them!” She had no choice but to plead. “Just this group, then we go!”

That turned the man around. “Go Hong Kong now?”

“Just this one group more!”

The buses were ancient and scarred and dusted a uniform brownish gray. They rolled and dipped toward the gates and halted almost directly in front of Gloria. She shouted to the interpreter, “Please!”

The man walked over and stood before the bus doors, his shoulders slumped in resignation. Only this time the disembarking passengers neither chattered nor looked his way as he started his speech. Instead, their eyes were locked upon the gates. Their expressions were so taut and so fearful that Gloria had no choice but to turn around.

The first two soldiers gripped her arms and pulled her away from the buses. Two more posted themselves between her and the vehicles. The interpreter had instantly vanished. The arriving workers dispersed almost as swiftly.

Gloria shouted, “I’m an American citizen!”

Another man stepped in close, as diminutive as the others but younger and dressed in civilian clothes. “So, American citizen, who sent you. United Nations? Red Cross?”

“Nobody.” Behind the man stood another civilian, bigger and older. The second man had the shape of a bull on two legs-huge arms, no neck, flattened face, eyes as hard as the young man’s voice.