So there I was, in a Chinese fire station, being greeted by the twenty young firemen. Through our company’s Volunteer Association, I had gotten to know a widower who worked in the factory and spend time with her children. Her oldest son, who is soon to be in 10th grade had been invited by the fire station to make a visit and they had extended the welcome to me. I felt strangely out of place with Communist pledges and codes on the walls around me, but was warmly welcomed by the bright young men who made lunch for us, showed us the fire trucks and even breakdanced for us!

Had you told me that I would be in that fire station, with that group of Chinese people, I would have thought you were crazy. Sometimes during the trip, I thought even I was crazy for choosing to put myself so far out of my comfort zone, in such a new culture and type of work. But it wasn’t the work, or the culture that gave me the most memories. It was the people.

Even now as I reflect on the dozens of incredible adventures during my internship in that shoe factory, I just smile thinking about the endless recollections from my short time as an intern…

• How kind Joyce, Miley, Candy and Bella were to welcome me into life in the factory, from the first day to the last afternoon in the CR office.
• How patient my instructors were to calmly repeat directions and not scold me while I stubbornly learned how to use a sewing machine. 
• How thoughtful the Chinese families I met were to always extend a hot cup of tea or delicious meal with me, going out of their way to serve me as their guest. 
• How funny Xiao Yong, Justin and James were as we ate Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time in Qing Yuan, cheerfully proposing toasts with our Pepsis and asking me why a strange old man was the face of KFC. 
• How fun it was to spend sweaty Sunday afternoon’s with the three kids, running around the basketball court and back alleys of their broken neighborhood. 
• How I almost cried in laughter seeing my coworkers try and dance to OK Go’s “A Million Ways to Be Cruel” song. 
• How much I would sweat after playing basketball with friends in the factory for a few solid hours in the blistering heat and humidity. 
• How diligent my workmates were to teach me Chinese when I didn’t want to learn it, and try to speak English when I longed to hear it. 
• How dear my factory friends were to say hello to me when walking through their areas.

But more than fun experiences with nice people in the factory, these friends taught me so much about life’s journey. They taught me to always cherish the countless blessings I’ve been given in this life. They reminded me that I could never complain about my education, my work or other things about my life. And above all, they showed me by example how to welcome, serve and love a stranger as if I were one of their very own.

I am eternally grateful for my time with the CR department, the members of the factory and everyone in Qing Yuan, China for guiding me and teaching me on my journey. Even though I didn’t get any wages for my time in the factory this summer, I received a complimentary pair of shoes to wear home. With the signatures of friends from the factory in the inside tag, I carry these adventures within me and on my feet wherever I go.

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)

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