Yu Hua - Boy in the Twilight - Stories of the Hidden China

Actually, when we just started, it was Lü Qianjin who was the janitor and me who was the fitter. Lü Qianjin refused to be janitor and went off to see the manager, a chisel in his hand. He stuck the chisel in the manager’s desk and said he would not be janitor, he insisted on being reassigned. So that’s how Lü Qianjin and I came to exchange positions, with him becoming a fitter and me becoming janitor. After he became a fitter, he handed me the chisel and told me to stick it in the manager’s desk just as he had. I asked him why.

“If you stick it in his desk,” he said, “you won’t have to be janitor anymore.”

“What’s wrong with being janitor?” I asked.

“Damn it, you’re such a blockhead,” he said. “Being janitor is the most demeaning job of all — don’t you realize that yet?”

“Yes, I realize that. I know none of you are willing to be janitor.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and started pushing me. “If you’re clear on that, that’s fine then,” he said. “Off you go.”

He pushed me out of the shop. I took a few steps forward, and then I turned around and went back in. Lü Qianjin blocked my path. “What are you doing back here?” he asked.

“If I stick the chisel in the manager’s desk, but he still wants me to be janitor,” I said, “what do I do then?”

“That’s not what’s going to happen!” said Lü Qianjin. “All you need to do is stick the chisel in the desk and the manager will be scared. If he’s scared, he will let you go back to being a fitter again.”

I shook my head. “The manager won’t get scared so easily.”

“What do you mean?” said Lü Qianjin. He started pushing me again. “I scared him, didn’t I?”

“You scared him,” I said, “but I wouldn’t scare him.”

Lü Qianjin looked at me intently for a moment and then withdrew his hands. “You’re right,” he said. “You wouldn’t scare the manager. You wouldn’t fucking scare anybody. You were fucking born to sweep the floor.”

Lü Qianjin is right. I was born to sweep floors. I like sweeping floors. I like sweeping the shop floor until it’s squeaky clean. I like walking back and forth in the shop with the broom in my hand, and even when I sit down to take a break I like to hold the broom. The guys in the shop say, “Yang Gao, the way you hug that broom of yours, it’s like you’re feeling a woman up.”

I know they are having a joke at my expense, but I pay them no mind, because they are always making fun. I have no idea why they love to laugh at me so much. If I’m sweeping the floor, they watch me and roar with laughter; if I’m walking along, they point at me and laugh fit to burst. When I clock in before them, they think this a great joke, and when I finish work later than them, they think that a great joke too. Actually, I start and finish just at the proper time, at the time fixed by the factory, but they make fun of me all the same, because they always start late and knock off early. “Yang Gao,” Lü Qianjin once said, “everybody else starts late and finishes early, so why do you start on time and finish on time?”

“That’s because I’m biddable,” I told him.

He looked at me and shook his head. “No, it’s because you’re timid.”

I feel it isn’t that I am timid, it’s because I like this job of mine. Lü Qianjin doesn’t like his job, doesn’t like this skilled fitter’s job that he got with the chisel, so he comes to work late every day. Not only does he turn up late, but he often drags an old mat over to a corner of the workshop and takes a nap there. Sometimes Song Hai and Fang Dawei come over to socialize, slipping away from their posts during work hours, and when they see Lü Qianjin snoring away on that old mat of his, they shout at him to wake up. “Damn, you really know how to make yourself comfortable, don’t you? Here you are, sleeping on the job. You might as well fetch your bed from home and move it right in.”

At moments like these, Lü Qianjin rubs his eyes and chuckles. “You guys not working today?” he’ll say.

“We’re working all right,” Fang Dawei and company say, “but we slipped out for a breather.”

“Well, aren’t you doing the same thing as me?” Lü Qianjin says. “You guys are pretty damn comfortable yourselves.”

Then Fang Dawei and the others call me over. “Yang Gao, every time we come over here we see you sweeping the floor. Why don’t you take a leaf out of Lü Qianjin’s book and take a nap on that old mat?”

I shake my head. “I never take a nap.”

“Why not?” they ask.

“I like my work,” I reply, broom in hand.

Hearing this, they roared with laughter. They find this very strange. “Can you believe it?” they say. “There’s still someone in the world who likes sweeping floors.”

It’s not strange to me, because I really do like sweeping the workshop till it’s spick-and-span. I wipe all the machinery in the shop until it is squeaky clean too. Because of me, our workshop has become the cleanest in the whole plant. The people in the other shops wish they could have me working for them, but the people in our workshop won’t let me go. Everybody knows that — in the plant, and outside too. Even my old classmates Lin Lili and Sun Hongmei know, because once they said, “Yang Gao, you’re the best worker in your factory, but every time they award raises or assign housing, you’re always left out … Look at that Lü Qianjin — he’s always napping on the job, but he gets a raise, he gets an apartment. He does no work, but he has his finger in every pie.”

“I’m not in his league,” I said to them. “Lü Qianjin has ways of getting things done. But not me. I have no way of getting anything done.”

“What are Lü Qianjin’s ways of getting things done? What else is there to it but threatening the factory manager with a knife?”

They got that wrong. Lü Qianjin never used a knife to threaten the manager. He did use a chisel when he first got his job assignment, but later he didn’t even use that. When he heard some workers were going to get raises, he went off empty-handed, went off to the manager’s office every morning as though that was his workplace, not our workshop. He would go into the manager’s office, sit down in one of the manager’s chairs, drinking the manager’s tea and smoking the manager’s cigarettes, talking to the manager for hours on end. That carried on until one day the manager said to him, “Lü Qianjin, the list of those getting raises has now been approved, and your name is on it.”

Lü Qianjin then returned to our workshop to work. Ever since, the old mat in the corner of the shop has never gone unoccupied — you can see a body stretched out there at all hours of the day.

Lü Qianjin’s wages keep on rising, while mine never change. Lü Qianjin has tried to educate me. “Yang Gao,” he said, “just think — when we first came to the plant, we had exactly the same pay. Years have passed, and I keep on napping every day and you keep on slaving away, and yet I’m paid more than you are. Do you know why that is?”

“Why?” I said.

“It’s because misery is the lot of the timid, and fortune favors the bold.”

I didn’t agree. I shook my head. “I didn’t go and see the manager, not because I’m timid, but because I feel I make enough money. So it doesn’t bother me that I make less than you.”

Lü Qianjin had a good long chuckle after hearing that. “You’re incredible,” he said.

Lü Qianjin is a good friend. He’s always got my interests at heart. After the factory built a new block of housing, he came to give me more advice. “Yang Gao, have you seen? That new apartment building is finally completed. It took a full three years to build it, damn it. We need to go and see the manager and demand that he assigns us new housing. What you have to realize is that after this housing is allocated there won’t be any new construction for another ten years, so we have to get our hands on an apartment now, no matter what it takes.”