Pt. 1 From Hospital to Factory
After leaving the hospital, I thought I would finally be able to escape those confused days and enjoy the “freedom” that belonged to me. Reality soon told me, however, that changing one’s thinking does not happen automatically simply by changing environments or doing physical labor for a short time. After I left the hospital, my old habits—relying on speculative business, pursuing a comfortable life, and fantasizing about romantic relationships—did not disappear. Instead, they followed me everywhere like a shadow. Whenever I encountered new problems and setbacks at work, or whenever I had free time, I would sink into fantasies of the past. Amid countless bouts of self-doubt, I gradually realized that this was not simply a moral problem, nor a matter of being “incapable of changing,” but that I had not truly freed myself from the petty-bourgeois way of life. Genuine ideological transformation is a long-term tug-of-war; it requires constantly struggling against one’s old way of life through real labor.
The reason I left the hospital in the first place was not only that I was tired of its day-after-day existence with no end in sight. After realizing that my past experiences with speculation and my family had created my decayed way of life and moral standards, I also deliberately tried to sever myself from those things and become an “independent” person. Therefore, the first thing I did was resign from my hospital job and go to a big city.
At that time, I merely paid lip service to the claim that “the proletariat is the greatest.” In reality, I still wanted to follow capitalism’s spontaneous path and continue living an easy, comfortable life. Although I did need to find a job, I looked only for easy jobs, hoping to use labels such as “bachelor’s degree,” “male nurse,” and “ICU experience” to find something “respectable.” In the end, although I did not fully achieve this goal, I did find a job as a medical-records specialist at a cosmetic hospital. It was an administrative position with no night shifts and no physical labor, but the pay was low. Compared with the intense labor of the ICU, this job was far too easy and comfortable. Most of each day was spent organizing files and entering data; when I had nothing to do, I would chat with the department director or go to the wards to deliver and collect case files. In addition, I remained closely connected to my old life. Most importantly, I still maintained economic ties with my family involving small-scale production. This was also a major reason I could remain satisfied with such a relaxed but poorly paid job in a big city—my class position had not changed. At first, I immersed myself in this comfort, enjoying the dual satisfaction of freedom and income. Yet the shadow of my old way of life soon emerged: I constantly missed my ex-girlfriend and fantasized about reviving our former intimate relationship. Looking back at my state of mind then, it is obvious that although my body had left the hospital and my family, my thinking and way of life had not truly broken away from the petty-bourgeois state in which I had previously lived parasitically. On top of that, the cosmetic hospital where I worked was about to undergo an evaluation, and the workload suddenly increased. Because I hated labor so much—even though this job involved almost no physical labor—I chose to resign.
After that, I found a job as a sterilization nurse at a dental clinic. Compared with the administrative work of a medical-records specialist, it involved some physical labor, but it still did not truly bring me close to the working people. First, the hiring requirements—an associate degree and a nursing certificate—already excluded most people. Second, the clinic was located in a prosperous shopping mall, and the people who visited it every day were either affluent petty bourgeois like my former self or mental workers. Third, the working conditions were two days off a week, eight hours a day, and thirty yuan per hour. Moreover, because I still had not recognized the need to transform my entire way of life, I had not broken off my ties with my family concerning small-scale production. It could be said that my economic position as an affluent petty bourgeois had not changed in the slightest; it had even improved. Gradually, I once again began seeking personal enjoyment and thinking about “falling in love”—this time not only with my ex-girlfriend but also with a female coworker at the clinic. I realized that I was once again heading down the old road, so I resolved once more to leave my job at the dental clinic.
Later, I decided to truly engage in physical labor, hoping to pull myself out of my easy and comfortable environment. From childhood onward, the people around me had been small producers, members of the bourgeoisie, students, and intellectuals. Even when there were genuine physical laborers around me, at most I would merely exchange a few words with them. I lived entirely within my own “little circle.” It was only after entering an auto-parts factory that I gradually began to discover the differences and barriers between myself and those genuine workers. I was still engaged in small-scale speculative business, and my life did not depend entirely on my factory wages. When the workers met and chatted during idle periods, they talked about how many parts they had made that day, while I hid behind the machine tool, avoiding the workshop supervisor as I conducted my small-scale business and communicated with customers. Looking back now, I was still treating labor as a kind of “moral cultivation” rather than truly placing myself within the real life of the workers. During my first week at the factory, I barely spoke with the shift leader. As my speculative business began to improve somewhat, I increasingly fantasized about returning to my former life. I could not muster the energy to work, and this was accompanied by my “nostalgia” for my former romantic relationship. At that time, I gradually began to realize that the main sources of the persistent shadows of my past life were speculative business and romantic relationships. The romantic relationship had in fact already disappeared; what remained was the speculative business. To change further, I resolved to sever myself from it. The problem was that I attributed all my past problems to “speculative business” and failed to recognize the problem of my way of life as a whole. Severing myself from speculative business was certainly a good thing, a step forward, but if I did not fundamentally change my state of life, it could not solve the problem at its root. The soil for the restoration of old ideas still existed.
After that, I became unemployed for a period of time because I moved. This parasitic state—detached from labor and reality—caused my thinking to deteriorate further. For a while, I nearly gave up on transforming myself. I fantasized about returning to my former comfortable life, even imagining opening a bowling alley and getting back together with my ex-girlfriend, once again setting out on the path of personal enrichment and personal enjoyment.
What pulled me back to reality was taking a job at a furniture factory. The factory had only two days off each month and required eight hours of work every day. The workshop was unbearably hot: the originally airtight building, combined with the heat generated by the machines, could push the temperature above forty degrees Celsius. Between every two workstations, there was only one industrial air-conditioning fan to provide a trace of cool air. I still had to drink two liters of water every day to replenish the fluid lost through sweat. My job was to use a machine tool to cut a large wooden board—approximately 1.5 × 2.5 square meters and three centimeters thick—into components of different sizes and shapes, then stack the components neatly on a conveyor belt so they could be sent to the next edge-banding area. (Because the edges of the cut boards were extremely sharp, the slightest careless contact would leave a shallow cut in the skin, while clothes could be snagged and torn open. After only a few days, more than a dozen cuts of varying depth had appeared on my exposed forearms. At the end of each workday, when I blew my shirt, trousers, and shoes with an air gun, large quantities of sawdust would fly out.) Although the cutting itself was done by machine, I first had to use a forklift to place a neatly stacked pile of boards precisely on the cutting table. This step alone took me two days to learn because I had never operated a forklift before. Once the forklift raised the boards, they blocked my view, making it impossible to see the distance and position between the forklift arms and the cutting table with the naked eye; I had to rely entirely on instinct. Either I could not get the boards onto the table, or I would ram the cutting table and knock it askew, causing my coworkers considerable trouble. Having been detached from labor for a long time, wanting to achieve personal wealth, and holding myself in high esteem, my position had already shifted toward that of the bourgeoisie. At first, I was resentful when my coworker expressed dissatisfaction with my mistakes. I even attacked him as a “country bumpkin” and a “hard laborer,” without examining my own problems at all. When my coworker told me to work faster, I distorted this as him being a “foreman” urging me on. But later, when he came over and said, “You’ve stuck it out for two days, so you don’t look like someone who’s just here to fool around. But how are you going to make money working so slowly in this heat?”, I finally understood that he had not been urging me to work faster for his own sake, but was concerned about my livelihood. This small incident to some extent shattered my bourgeois theory of human nature and made me recognize the narrowness and ugliness of my own thinking.
Later, I gradually became competent at the job. I was able to operate the machines independently and handle some unexpected problems that arose while they were running. During this period, however, my impulse to evade labor and struggle continued to recur. Every time I moved a board or shed a drop of sweat, I would think, “I could have avoided this,” “I still have a way out,” or “I could still enjoy myself.” Then one day, on a label attached to a board—bearing the customer’s name, address, and the board’s intended use—I saw the words “XXXX residential complex, Director X.” (Previously, the customer information had always been the name of a furniture city; direct personal orders like this were uncommon.) The boards were also absurdly large. Some were entire large sheets with only the edges cut off, intended to be used directly as walls. As a result, I had to expend enormous effort to lift them off the conveyor belt, sometimes needing help from the workers beside me. Presumably, Director X’s renovation requirements were so high that he was not satisfied with decorating his mansion using ordinary paint or wallpaper. At the time, I cursed under my breath while thinking: Although I have a “way out,” if I really became part of the bourgeoisie and embarked on the road of personal enrichment and personal enjoyment, how many people would then be forced to endure this kind of hired labor for their entire lives? This direct experience of reality made me reconsider once again the question of what kind of person I should live as in this world and what path I should take in the future. I thought: A person cannot be too selfish. I still have to persevere. Although I would continue to reminisce about romance and fantasize about a comfortable life while doing physical labor, some changes also took place in my life, especially in my relationship with my coworkers.
At first, because I did not consider myself a worker, I had little communication with my coworkers, even though I received their help at work. The turning point in my relationship with them came during overtime that the boss demanded. Because the volume of orders had suddenly increased, only my coworker and I had machines in the factory with a somewhat higher degree of automation. The boss therefore wanted us to work overtime so that he could fulfill his shipments. But instead of making the demand directly, he “tactfully” asked us to work for two extra hours under the pretext of “testing productivity,” and required us not to stop the machines during that time. It was obviously a lie. If he merely wanted to “test productivity,” why would we need to work two extra hours? Wouldn’t it be more accurate and scientific simply to calculate an average based on the output of any number of previous days? Moreover, he required us not to stop the machines. Clearly, he wanted to see how much we could produce at most and use that as the standard for future overtime, setting a daily production target. If we failed to meet that standard, he would inevitably use it to hold us accountable. At first, I told my coworker not to work overtime, but he said we should just do it for one day and see. I hesitated at first and did not want to struggle, but then I thought that, since I had at least been exposed to a little Marxism, I could not practice “tailism.” So as soon as my shift ended, I immediately shut down the machine and began cleaning. My coworker asked me, “Aren’t you afraid that Baldy”—meaning the boss—“will come after you?” I explained my thinking to him and continued, “If we do it once, there will be a second time. His orders have increased, and he can’t immediately hire skilled workers, so he definitely won’t mess with us.” After hearing me out, he said, “That makes sense,” and asked me to help him clean up so we could get off work early.
From then on, he also called me over to eat lunch with him and talked about the conditions at the factory. From a legal perspective, I pointed out the factory’s exploitative practices, and I used the small amount of Marxist theory I had studied and remembered to explain to him why finding employment was becoming increasingly difficult. The working class naturally has faith in Marxism because it is the class that suffers oppression, and he agreed with much of what I said. Through this incident, I also came to understand concretely what it means to “first be a student of the masses, and only afterward become their teacher.” I was still nowhere near being able to “lead the masses,” but if I myself was not one of the masses, not a worker, then no one else would listen to a word I said. Later, this coworker even invited me to his home to visit and chat. But because I needed to move for various reasons, I ultimately missed the opportunity to make a worker friend. Moreover, during another period of unemployment afterward, I once again began living a life detached from labor and society. This brief experience did not fundamentally change my thinking, and in that comfortable, pleasure-seeking life I once again began fantasizing about returning to those corrupt days of the past.
(To be continued…)