I am very cold and the rain is getting worse and I do not think that anybody is going to come.
My father used to tell my sister and I when we were collecting shells on Baihu beach, that the rain was caused by dragons fighting in the sky and that our buckets were full of bits of skin that had been torn from their bodies.
He will be waiting for the money and it will not arrive. And he will not know what to do.
There’s a light in the distance, I don’t know what it is, it’s difficult to make out because of the rain, but I think it’s the light from a house. Whoever lives there won’t be able to see us. They’ll be looking out over the bay and they won’t know what’s happening. I wonder if they have lived there long. A young couple with a child, opening their curtains in the morning and staring at the sea.
We had to leave the sea behind to find work when the factory closed. To a city with a river full of dead fish. I was making speaker cabinets for stereos. Electric saws screaming, choking on dust while women were hunched over worktables with bandaged hands pressing transistors into circuit boards. In four years we didn’t get a rise. The only union we could join was the government run one and we were told not to cause any trouble. If you did you were beaten black and blue. Sometimes a man from the west would come and we would wonder if that would mean that things would improve, but each time he would say that costs had to be cut. That there was more competition.
My sister made toys. Like every other woman in Guangdong. Breathing in the fumes of glue and paint and plastic and living in a dormitory with nineteen others, none of them able to afford the Chinese Medical Insurance. And sometimes they were told that there was no more work, because the toys they made were not popular. They were the wrong colour, or the wrong shape, or they weren’t funny or happy enough. I don’t know. But she would eat no meat. And sometimes it was alright. They were lucky. It was a good toy for European children to play with and my sister was told that she would be working through the night for the next two months.
She was doing Barbie dolls when it happened. Dolls of women with video cameras and mobile phones and all the other things that a young woman has to have in the west. There were no exits. No money for improvements to the factory. Costs had to be kept down. It’s an economic miracle. Dozens of seventeen and eighteen year old women burnt beyond all recognition amidst piles of melting Barbie dolls with their melting video cameras and their melting mobile phones.
And now I’m up to my waist in water. And the rain is very cold, and I do not know which way I should move. But I cannot move. I am stuck in the sand and it is pitch black and every now and again I hear a shout from somebody I cannot see.
And that light is still on. I can see it. A young couple climbing into bed. Turning on the television.
It’s the broken shells you look for. The shells of the cockles that the gulls have taken. And underneath the broken shells, that is where the cockles lie. The ones we have collected go to Spain, even though they have cockle beds of their own, patrolled by armed guards, making sure that no harm can come to them.
And the trouble is this. I have paid to get here. Because my family need the money, now that my sister is dead and the factories that provide goods for the west pay so little. And if I cannot keep paying then my parents will owe the debt. And then maybe my father will have to come. The door of the lorry slamming, the quiet fear of suffocation, like the men whose bodies were pulled out from amongst tonnes of rotting tomatoes.
The first thing I saw was a giant plastic ice cream cone, probably made in Guangdon. And although the sky was grey it hurt our eyes. But there was the sea.
And we were taken to a house, like my sisters dormitory, and given some money and told to go to the supermarket with shelves and shelves of food. And toys. Plastic toys, all made in China. And people were picking them up and looking at them and putting them back and picking something else up. And I wondered how important it was to them to get the right one. And I wanted them to hear the quiet screams of young girls and look closer at these toys and see that trapped inside them were the souls of young Chinese women waiting to be set free, like Genies in bottles.
But I was the one being looked at. People wondering why I am here. Causing problems. Making things difficult. I am illegal. I do not have any papers. I am on the black market.
She would come if she were here. She would always come. When I paddled out too far and called out for her she would come to be with me. And my father would stand there laughing. But I do not think that anybody is coming now.
And the couple in the house, they do not know. They look out their window but they cannot see. Nobody can see. And even if they did there would be nothing that they could do. They are better off going to comfort the cries of their daughter. Reading her another story. Handing her another toy.
And the water is getting deeper and the rain is getting worse. The dragons are battling. Those who protect the pearls. And those who live in a palace at the bottom of the sea. And those with the heads of tigers that seize human beings. ‘No blood is left when they stop sucking’, my father would tell us, and we would shudder.
And nobody is going to come.
Written and performed by Andy Barrett - February 11th 2004
Copywright © 2004 Andy Barrett