I walked into the Qing Yuan, China factory on May 17th for my first day of work (see picture on the left). It was 7:50 a.m. and the nearly 16,000 other workers were flooding in the gates to get to their production lines before 8 a.m. I felt lost and out of place among the crowds and nervous to enter the first factory in my life. Suddenly I began thinking that a commitment to stay here for more than two months was a very, very big mistake.

Before coming to Penn State in the fall of 2007, I spent six years in Tianjin, China and graduated from high school there. I chose to study Labor and Employment Relations at Penn State to understand the movement of labor in the global economy, with the hopes of improving the lives, conditions and wages of workers in corporations around the world. I was somewhat involved in USAS (United Students Against Sweatshops) on campus and nurtured a passionate dislike of multinational companies that often made headlines for sweatshops, disproportionate worker wages and other unfair labor practices (Nike being a prime example). Yet here I was, six months after having the vague thought of an internship, in a large multinational shoe company’s prime Chinese factory serving (unpaid) as the factory and the supplier’s first American intern.

After entering the gates of the factory, I was immediately led to an office area in the main building and informally introduced to my coworkers in the company’s Corporate Responsibility department. I would be with this department for nearly ten weeks for my summer internship. Most of that first day was learning (all in Mandarin Chinese) about the functions of the department itself among the company’s 52 separate departments and 26+ production lines, but the heaviest thing on my mind was when I would finally see the factory floors.

When my one coworker finally took me to tour a soccer shoe line, I was about to burst with anxiety. What was I to do if I saw children working in the lines? How would I document the terrible acts to show the Western world? But before I could answer these questions, we were enveloped by the sound of heavy machinery, hundreds of sewing machines, and thousands of workers on their job. My eyes shot to the intricate path of hundreds of soccer cleats making their trek from one side of the room to the other. My coworker introduced everything to me, but between the noise, my limited Chinese ability and sheer amazement of the scale of production I didn’t register much that she was saying. Each group of workers we walked by stared at me with a look of fear that I was an audit from the United States (my standard issued “Visitor” tag for the first few days didn’t really help). After about 15 minutes we left the soccer line and headed back to the office as I tried to regather myself after seeing such intensive labor and so many workers. There was nothing shockingly horrible that I had just witnessed and I began to realize how terribly inaccurate my original perceptions of a large Chinese shoe factory were. I started to comprehend just how complex, often monotonous and finely mechanized the production process of a single pair of shoes really is.

The next week, my manager had me go through first week training with new hires. After two days of quite boring classes on company management, work environment and safety, job tasks and company history, etc., we were finally let loose to the training center for the remainder of the week where we began practicing our actual jobs. They started me on the cutting machine – the first process of shoe-making in which workers use cookie-like cutouts to cut the basic material with a machine that exerts force of over three tons (I couldn’t believe they trusted me to do this within a week of being in the factory)!

Next was the sewing machine, where we practiced five different stitching patterns before we could test to be in the actual production lines. My instructors and fellow workers got quite a laugh at the site of this six-foot-three American (or “老外” (lao wai)) squeezed into a chair and his inability to effectively work the machine. Those training days were actually quite fun, between the poorly received instructions and sweaty repetition as I got a taste of some of the boredom and monotony of a single task for entire weeks or months on end. However, I was blessed to only be practicing for the sake of learning as part of my internship and not practicing to be put to work for the next days, weeks, or even years of my life.

I found myself during those first two weeks pinching myself and wondering if I was actually the only foreigner in such a large shoe factory in a somewhat obscure southern Chinese city. I enjoyed my new friends in the factory and office, but wasn’t sure if my Chinese would ever be good enough to talk and converse with the people here to actually have a positive and lasting impact on the culture. But after those first two weeks, I felt welcome and excited for the next eight weeks to learn and live in such a unique place – as long as I didn’t have to work on the production lines!

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Tune in next Friday for Part Two – Jingle Bells and Bike Alarms