Maureen McHugh - After the Apocalypse

One of the girls was from way up north; she had a strong Northern way of talking.

“How long are you going to work here?” the northern girl asked. She looked as if she might even have some Russian in her.

“How long?” Jieling said.

“I’m getting married,” the northern girl confided. “As soon as I make enough money, I’m going home. If I haven’t made enough money in a year,” the northern girl explained, “I’m going home anyway.”

Jieling hadn’t really thought she would work here long. She didn’t know exactly what she would do, but she figured that a big city like Shenzhen was a good place to find out. This girl’s plans seemed very… country. No wonder Southern Chinese thought Northerners had to wipe the pig shit off their feet before they got on the train.

“Are you Russian?” Jieling asked.

“No,” said the girl. “I’m Manchu.”

“Ah,” Jieling said. Manchu like Manchurian. Ethnic Minority. Jieling had gone to school with a boy who was classified as Manchu, which meant that he was allowed to have two children when he got married. But he had looked Han Chinese like everyone else. This girl had the hook nose and the dark skin of a Manchu. Manchu used to rule China until the Communist Revolution (there was something in-between with Sun Yat-Sen, but Jieling’s history teachers had bored her to tears). Imperial and countrified.

Then a man came in from human resources.

“There are many kinds of stealing,” he began. “There is stealing of money or food. And there is stealing of ideas. Here at New Life, our ideas are like gold, and we guard against having them stolen. But you will learn many secrets, about what we are doing, about how we do things. This is necessary as you do your work. If you tell our secrets, that is theft. And we will find out.” He paused here and looked at them in what was clearly intended to be a very frightening way.

Jieling looked down at the ground because it was like watching someone overact. It was embarrassing. Her new shoes were very white and clean.

Then he outlined the prison terms for industrial espionage. Ten, twenty years in prison. “China must take its place as an innovator on the world stage and so must respect the laws of intellectual property,” he intoned. It was part of the modernization of China, where technology was a new future—Jieling put on her “I am a good girl” face. It was like politics class. Four modernizations. Six goals. Sometimes when she was a little girl, and she was riding behind her father on his bike to school, he would pass a billboard with a saying about traffic safety and begin to recite quotes from Mao. The force at the core of the revolution is the people! He would tuck his chin in when he did this and use a very serious voice, like a movie or like opera. Western experience for Chinese uses. Some of them she had learned from him. All reactionaries are paper tigers! she would chant with him, trying to make her voice deep. Be resolute, fear no sacrifice, and surmount every difficulty to win victory ! And then she would start giggling and he would glance over his shoulder and grin at her. He had been a Red Guard when he was young, but other than this, he never talked about it.

After the lecture, they were taken to be paired with workers who would train them. At least she didn’t have to go with the Manchu girl, who was led off to shipping.

She was paired with a very small girl in one of the culture rooms. “I am Baiyue,” the girl said. Baiyue was so tiny, only up to Jieling’s shoulder, that her green scrubs swamped her. She had pigtails. The room where they worked was filled with rows and rows of what looked like wide drawers. Down the center of the room was a long table with petri dishes and trays and lab equipment. Jieling didn’t know what some of it was, and that was a little nerve-wracking. All up and down the room, pairs of girls in green worked at either the drawers or the table.

“We’re going to start cultures,” Baiyue said. “Take a tray and fill it with those.” She pointed to a stack of petri dishes. The bottom of each dish was filled with gelatin. Jieling took a tray and did what Baiyue did. Baiyue was serious but not at all sharp or superior. She explained that what they were doing was seeding the petri dishes with cells.

“Cells?” Jieling asked.

“Nerve cells from the electric ray. It’s a fish.”

They took swabs, and Baiyue showed her how to put the cells on in a zigzag motion so that most of the gel was covered. They did six trays full of petri dishes. They didn’t smell fishy. Then they used pipettes to put in feeding solution. It was all pleasantly scientific without being very difficult.

At one point everybody left for lunch, but Baiyue said they couldn’t go until they got the cultures finished or the batch would be ruined. Women shuffled by them, and Jieling’s stomach growled. But when the lab was empty, Baiyue smiled and said, “Where are you from?”

Baiyue was from Fujian. “If you ruin a batch,” she explained, “you have to pay out of your paycheck. I’m almost out of debt, and when I get clear—”she glanced around and dropped her voice a little “—I can quit.”

“Why are you in debt?” Jieling asked. Maybe this was harder than she thought; maybe Baiyue had screwed up in the past.

“Everyone is in debt,” Baiyue said. “It’s just the way they run things. Let’s get the trays in the warmers.”

The drawers along the walls opened out, and inside, the temperature was kept blood warm. They loaded the trays into the drawers, one back and one front, going down the row until they had the morning’s trays all in.

“Okay,” Baiyue said, “that’s good. We’ll check trays this afternoon. I’ve got a set for transfer to the tissue room, but we’ll have time after we eat.”

Jieling had never eaten in the employee cafeteria, only in the guest house restaurant, and only the first night, because it was expensive. Since then she had been living on ramen noodles, and she was starved for a good meal. She smelled garlic and pork. First thing on the food line was a pan of steamed pork buns, fluffy white. But Baiyue headed off to a place at the back where there was a huge pot of congee—rice porridge—kept hot. “It’s the cheapest thing in the cafeteria,” Baiyue explained, “and you can eat all you want.” She dished up a big bowl of it—a lot of congee for a girl her size—and added some salt vegetables and boiled peanuts. “It’s pretty good, although usually by lunch it’s been sitting a little while. It gets a little gluey.”

Jieling hesitated. Baiyue had said she was in debt. Maybe she had to eat this stuff. But Jieling wasn’t going to have old rice porridge for lunch. “I’m going to get some rice and vegetables,” she said.

Baiyue nodded. “Sometimes I get that. It isn’t too bad. But stay away from anything with shrimp in it. Soooo expensive.”

Jieling got rice and vegetables and a big pork bun. There were two fish dishes and a pork dish with monkeybrain mushrooms, but she decided she could maybe have the pork for dinner. There was no cost written on anything. She gave her danwei card to the woman at the end of the line, who swiped it and handed it back.

“How much?” Jieling asked.

The woman shrugged. “It comes out of your food allowance.”

Jieling started to argue, but across the cafeteria, Baiyue was waving her arm in the sea of green scrubs to get Jieling’s attention. Baiyue called from a table. “Jieling! Over here!

Baiyue’s eyes got very big when Jieling sat down. “A pork bun.”

“Are they really expensive?” Jieling asked.

Baiyue nodded. “Like gold. And so good.”

Jieling looked around at other tables. Other people were eating the pork and steamed buns and everything else.