Three Poems

With your right hand, you slip strips of
metal under a hammer backed by
4,000 pounds of pressure; with your
left, you sweep molded parts into a
pile. You do this once a second for a	China makes 80 percent of the toys
10-hour shift, minus a half-hour lunch.	sold in America.
You must concentrate. You must not
lose a beat, or it's all over.
Wang Chenghua, migrant worker
with crushed fingers
	Neon banners on Yiwu World Trade
	Center: CONSTRUCT THE WORLD'S
	BIGGEST MARKET / BUILD AN
	INTERNATIONAL SHOPPING
You tell them to pay attention, and they	HEAVEN
don't listen. They have no culture or
education. They are told many times to
be safe, and they just don't get it.
Shi Yanxin, owner of Hua
Xin Electronics	Yiwu, the most sizzling city in Zhejiang
	Province, makes trinkets that fill stores
	the world over. A half million migrant
At fourteen, my son left to work in the	workers live in and around this city of
city. Fifteen years passed. He still borrows	640,000 residents.
money to look for jobs. To make
money, you have to leave. Nobody has
made much, but we can't go home.
Nothing left in the village. Everything
broken, broken.
Cai Songquan, farmer from	Yongkang, the hardware capital of
Caijia Village	China, has 7,000 privately owned factories
	making hinges, hubcaps, pots,
	power drills, thermoses, plugs, and
	headphones and filling the shelves of
	Wal-Mart with products that get better
	and cheaper each year. Yongkang
	means "eternal health" in Chinese. It is
	also the dismemberment capital: there
The riskiest jobs, as in war, go to new	are 2,500 accidents each year and thousands
recruits fresh from the farm. Young	more that are unreported.
migrants are hired at the train station
to run metal stampers, molders, and
high-pressure hammers driven by flywheels.
Few workers last a month.	We have always met the government's
	standard for safety. Otherwise, they
	would not let us operate.
	Kang Ziying, lawyer for Lucky Gem & Jewelry
Of course, life has improved. We
couldn't have imagined any of this ten
years ago. This small town with mud
houses now has an airport, a world
trade center, skyscrapers, hundreds of
factories, hotels, and two Middle Eastern
restaurants with belly dancers. We
hardly had any schooling, but our
daughter studies marketing at college.
Jin Xiaoqin, owner of Yiwu Toys
	From their rice paddies, the villagers
	watch trucks whiz by on the new cross-national
They've been pushing down the rates.	superhighway, carrying goods
We used to get 3.5 fen per toy, but now	made by their teenage sons and daughters
they are just paying 2.5 fen—less than	far away—goods they will never
one-tenth of an American penny.	see.
When the orders are high, we work 14
hours a day, 7 days a week, and might
clear $120 in a month. More typical is
$90 a month, and in a slow month, $50.
It's not enough to get by on.
Cai Gaoxiang, migrant worker
at Yiwu Toys	You have no right to speak. You have
	no right to organize.
Each eyelash is assembled from 464	Hu Xu, owner of Xu Xing Metals
inch-long strands of human hair,
placed in a crisscross pattern on a thin
strip of tranparent glue. It takes an
hour to complete a pair. We work 14-
hour shifts, but can't make enough for
a bonus.	Kin Ki and other big producers have
Wei Qi, 16, migrant worker	come under greater pressure to adhere
from Anshan	to global labor codes. They open their
	doors to foreign inspectors to assuage
	concerns that products used to entertain
	children in rich countries are not
Life was poorer under Mao—you were	made under oppressive conditions in
lucky if you had a pair of pants—but it	poor ones.was more equal.
Cai Songquan, farmer from
Caijia Village	The goal conflicts with price pressures
	in commodity industries like toys.
	China alone has 8,000 toy makers
	competing fiercely for contracts by
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