factory girl

the clothing manufacturing factory i worked at in china let nothing go to waste. i'd fallen out of favor with the floor manager and he'd pulled me off piece work and put me on my feet for my 17 hour shifts gluing scrapes of fabric from the floors around the cutting tables into patchwork yardage that would eventually wind up as cheap (nearly one time wear...) garments to be sold in bulk in africa. for weeks now i'd been waking up with headaches that stayed with me the whole day. i had no doubt it was from breathing in the volatile compounds off-gassing from the adhesives i was using to glue the pieces together. it was well known that the gluing room was a kind of death sentence- but  i wasn't having nosebleeds yet, so i comforted myself by thinking that maybe i wouldn't get leukemia like the others.

i sent most of my meager pay back to my family on the farm and after i paid my employer for my job station, i had just enough left over for a week's worth of cheap ramen and a loose black tea that was mostly stems. i thought about my mother and father almost all the time. i worried that my sisters would leave the country and come to the filthy city to work in the factory like me.