Part Two – Jingle Bells and Bike Alarms

So there I was, carefully examining the newest and most daunting dish served from the company’s cafeteria. Today, the challenge was to not just eat, but attempt to enjoy chicken feet. All my coworkers considered it a delicacy as they smiled and piled more of their apportioned feet onto my plate. Tomorrow’s challenge might be pig stomach, fungus, strange tofu or even snails! While I was completely afraid initially to even taste these dishes, I slowly began to enjoy them as time went on, becoming more acclimated to Southern Chinese cuisine.

Learning to eat and enjoy new and exotic foods was really symbolic of my learning to more fully enjoy the internship, despite its challenges and strange events. To return to the food analogy, the first few weeks were merely eating rice, some basic vegetables and soup. The next few weeks however, were rising to the task and eating snails, chicken feet, unknown tofu or pig stomach. Little did I know that these disgusting-sounding dishes are healthy to the body (or at least according to the Chinese they are)!

My brain would be entirely spent after a full day of reading, speaking and even thinking Chinese. After a few weeks I longed to talk with someone in English for more than 5 minutes and savored each minute during a call with my family, or when a friend in the factory practiced their English with me.

Although I took on a sort of celebrity status for being the only young and strapping American chap, I often felt strangely isolated in this factory of so many (other than the fact that my skin was white, and I was deemed incredibly tall, I really didn’t think I was that much different).

Most mornings, the first thing I would wake up to was the terribly annoying and free alarm clock system. Each morning at approximately 6:30 a.m., the electrical bikes and motorcycles would screech in sequential unison directly outside of my apartment (if you’ve been to China, then you know what I mean).

After those initial weeks of early mornings, brain exhaustion and sporadic loneliness, I wondered if my time over the rest of the summer in the Corporate Responsibility department would really have any positive impact on the factory. Would I have been better off just staying in the States? Would I be remembered as more than just the silly foreigner who stuck around for a summer?

Then randomly, I was informed that I would be spending a day on the actual production lines making shoes. I couldn’t believe my manager had gotten the permission to send a barely-trained, unskilled outsider to actually help out. It was my dream come true, but I was so nervous that I would mess up a pair of shoes and get fired from a job that I really didn’t even have.

When the time finally came to go to Basketball Line 12 (the factory had over 16 basketball lines and 12 soccer lines) I nervously walked to my work area for the afternoon with the line manager and a friend from the CR department. I suddenly began to feel the heat of a thousand pair of Chinese eyes staring at the one and only American.

Initially everyone around me was afraid that I was a staff member with the U.S. shoe company and kept away from me, namely out of fear that I was conducting an inspection. When I sat down I was so relieved to discover that I wasn’t doing anything difficult. The manager slowly and methodically explained that I would simply be placing a small sticker on the inner reinforcement of the sole of the shoe. Yes, it was a miniscule task, but anything else and I probably would have destroyed every pair of shoes that went through my hands.

Once my workmates saw that I was working diligently (and not taking notes of their behavior), they slowly warmed up to me and quickly began to ask how someone like me ended up on the factory’s production floor. Surprised to hear me speak somewhat conversational Chinese they first barraged me with questions about American culture, my American family and American food. They warmed up to me over those next few hours and for that afternoon, I got to experience factory life from their perspective, complete with the sights, sounds and smells.

By the end of work that day, I could say that I had put my labor into anywhere between 100 and 200 pairs of shoes. I had also listened to “Jingle Bells” at least fifty times, because the song played whenever a machine broke or a worker had a question related to their individual job performance. Never again will I look at a pair of athletic shoes, or hear “Jingle Bells” quite the same.

In reflection, my experiences over the summer were a lot like that one miniscule task on the production lines. I wasn’t doing anything really important, but was able to help out even in the small way of making others laugh and smile along the way. Most workers said they were honored to be making the acquaintance of their first foreign friend. While my job task was nothing special in the scheme of shoe production, I still cannot believe that I was able to be there and make so many special Chinese acquaintances. And anytime I walked by Basketball Line 12, I exchanged smiles and waves with my new friends…
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Tune in Next Friday for the Final Part – Kings of KFC and My Own Pair of Shoes (finally)