Notes on the Life of Glass Workers
In 1958, the whole country sounded the horn of the Great Leap Forward. We were to surpass Britain and catch America, and build socialism with greater, faster, better, and more economical results. Kunming, remote on the frontier, had poor transportation and had always lagged industrially. To answer the central government’s call, every trade and industry expanded and built factories at top speed. Factory buildings sprang up everywhere like bamboo shoots after rain, but there was no glass for the windows. The walls stood with great open holes, like beasts with their mouths wide open.
Provincial and municipal leaders decided to build a sheet-glass factory to meet market demand. Yunnan Optical Instrument Factory supplied the main personnel: a deputy factory director, a melting-shop chief, and several technicians and workers. A preparatory office for Kunming Sheet Glass Factory was established on Huguo Road. In the spirit of pushing ahead rapidly, design, site selection, construction, and training were all carried out at the same time, with the hope that production could begin three years later.
Training in the North
The site chosen for the sheet-glass plant was beneath Xiaotuanshan, five li beyond Kunming West Station, beside the Burma Road. After I was transferred from Yunnan Optical Instrument Factory, the preparatory office told me that two apprentices were already helping the drilling crew at the factory site. I was to go first to Xiaotuanshan and help out, and a couple of days later we would leave together for Qinhuangdao.
The next morning I arrived at Xiaotuanshan. In the middle of green rice paddies stood a triangular tent. Beside it, a drilling rig roared away collecting information about the underground formation. Another canvas cot was set up inside the tent, and I lived there for two days.
Then the preparatory office telephoned and told me to go with the two apprentices to the training team in Qinhuangdao. At that time Kunming was not yet connected by rail. We had to take a long-distance bus south through Luliang, Kaiyuan, and Baise to Nanning, change to a train for Hengyang, and then travel north to Beijing.
One apprentice was surnamed Deng, an unemployed young man from the city. The other, surnamed Lü, had just graduated from high school and had answered the motherland’s call to take part in socialist construction, giving up his chance to sit for the university entrance examination. The preparatory office had told us not to stop and sightsee along the way. But these two borderland youths were leaving the province for the first time. How much they wanted to see the great capital, Beijing! Since we were passing through it anyway, how could they miss such a rare chance? When we changed trains at Beijing Station, I arranged permission for a two-day stop, fulfilling their dream of seeing the capital.
When we reached Qinhuangdao and asked around, we learned that the training team was staying at an inn called Yuelai Zhan not far from the railway. It was probably the sort of inn meant for caravan drivers and cartmen to sleep in at night. There were no tables, chairs, or benches in the rooms—only bare communal sleeping platforms. The entire place had been taken over by the Kunming Glass training team.
Trainees were housed according to their trades. There were three rooms for men, one separate room for women, and another room for several technicians. Yaohua Glass Factory operated three shifts around the clock. The trainees were assigned to workshops to learn alongside the regular crews and also worked three shifts. Meals were bought with meal tickets at the factory canteen.
Trainees received apprentice treatment: an allowance of fifteen yuan a month. A night shift from midnight to eight in the morning brought an extra twenty fen; an evening shift from four in the afternoon to midnight brought ten fen as a health allowance. That small amount was barely enough to maintain the minimum diet. At each meal one could afford only a ten-fen plate of stir-fried cabbage or pickled vegetables. A plate with meat cost thirty or forty fen, which apprentices could not afford.
Northerners liked wheat foods, while Southerners preferred rice. For the first few months in Qinhuangdao things were still tolerable. But in the second half of the year rice became scarcer, then flour products also became scarcer. The rough corn buns and coarse sorghum rice made the apprentices from Yunnan complain bitterly. By October, when sweet potatoes were harvested, the municipal grain bureau supplied only fresh sweet potatoes—not even coarse grains. Sweet potatoes at every meal, sweet potatoes every day, until acid rose in the trainees’ stomachs. The leaders had no solution. We were told that newly harvested sweet potatoes were hard to store, and the Qinhuangdao Grain Bureau called on everyone to overcome difficulties and eat more of them.
At the time, those of us in the cities did not yet know that the country was entering a period of severe hardship and that people in the countryside were going hungry. Over those three years, at least factory workers were not yet starving to death.
Into the Workshop, Learning from the Old Masters
Qinhuangdao Yaohua Glass Factory was an old plant founded in 1934, specializing in sheet glass. After Liberation, a branch factory was built in Shanghai and named Shanghai Yaohua Glass Factory. The old Qinhuangdao plant had two main production shops, the First Melting Shop and the Second Melting Shop.
The Kunming training team had more than thirty trainees. According to production needs, melting workers, batch feeders, and temperature measurers were assigned to the melting section; edge-repair workers, drawing workers, and furnace watchers went to the drawing section; glass gatherers, selectors, and cutters went to the finishing section. There were also kiln repairmen, tank-brick workers, and other trades. All of the Kunming trainees studied on shift in the Second Melting Shop.
The trainees came from several sources. Some were second- and third-grade workers transferred from Kunming Thermos Factory and Kunming Light Bulb Factory, including Party members and demobilized soldiers. Some were high-school graduates who voluntarily gave up the university entrance examination only a month away in order to answer the motherland’s call to construction. Some were unemployed young people from Kunming. Others were educated youths recruited from rural areas in Baoshan and Dali prefectures and counties, including Yi, Wa, and other minority youths.
Under emotional mobilization, they carried beautiful ideals in their hearts. They wanted to learn a skill and build their beloved home province. The moment they heard the word glass, they imagined bright, transparent sheets being made by their own hands. How fascinating! How great!
At first everyone studied with tremendous enthusiasm. They followed the masters everywhere, watched carefully, listened patiently, did whatever they were told, and rushed to take the dirty and tiring jobs. No one dared arrive late or leave early. Everyone hoped to master the trade quickly, return to Kunming and show what they could do, shed the apprentice identity, and become a second- or third-grade worker. In the early period, the veteran workers at Yaohua were very pleased with this group from Yunnan.
There were very few women in the old Yaohua glass shops. Sheet-glass production was high-temperature silicate work. The tools were iron rods and shovels four or five meters long. The raw materials were sand and chemicals, the production process created heavy dust, and each refractory brick weighed dozens of kilograms. It was not work thought suitable for women. Yet one-quarter of the Kunming Glass training team were female apprentices. Perhaps the people recruiting workers had been outsiders who understood only that labor was needed and did not think about physical differences between men and women.
The arrival of female apprentices in the glass shops was something unprecedented. They worked like the men, running back and forth in intense heat, drenched in sweat, climbing up and down welded steel platforms. Even old Yaohua workers who had spent decades in the factory felt sorry for them—and admired them.
To tell the truth, the physical demands on glass workers were tremendous. In eight hours they sweated no less than miners. Their working environment could be hotter than that of steelworkers. Steelworkers could use fans at the furnace, but glass workers beside the drawing machine could not. Sometimes even the windows had to be shut tightly so that when the next sheet formed, cooling would not happen too quickly and cause cracking. Calling the glass shop a steamer was hardly an exaggeration.
An Apprentice Earning a Fifth-Grade Worker’s Wage
Apart from two technicians who earned more, several third-grade workers in the Kunming training team received only a little over forty yuan a month. I, however, was a demobilized serviceman and drew sixty-two yuan. Everyone envied that wage, and many of the younger apprentices liked to be around me.
I was easygoing by nature. During the period of material shortage, restaurants in Qinhuangdao had stopped allowing customers to order individual dishes. Everything had become fixed set meals: one dish spooned over rice, with only a tiny bit of minced meat, and the staple might be a few grains of white rice with a corn bun, or millet with a corn bun. On days off, when I went into town with several apprentices, I would sometimes buy one or two of the four-yuan set meals so that we could improve our diet. They might contain donkey meat or horse meat, which counted as high-class food at the time. I did it simply as an older brother caring for younger brothers and sisters, hoping they would settle down, endure the three-year apprenticeship, and complete their training successfully.
I was assigned to Master Yang’s crew in the Second Melting Shop. Master Yang was a fifth-grade edge-repair worker. The others were fourth- and third-grade workers, some with more than ten years of experience. Perhaps they felt a little sour toward an apprentice who earned more than they did. At first they barely paid attention to me. But I always respected them. As time passed and we came to understand each other better, the awkwardness disappeared. I asked questions humbly, and they became willing to explain whatever I wanted to know.
The biggest accident in sheet-glass production was what workers called “dropping the furnace.” During the drawing of sheet glass, changing conditions could cause the sheet to break and production to stop. Then everything had to be started over: dismantling the furnace, digging out contaminated molten glass, replacing defective tank bricks if necessary, firing the furnace again, and restarting the draw. Each shutdown could cost three or four days of production.
To prevent accidents, every drawing worker had to remain cautious and alert, like a soldier on a battlefield gripping his rifle, never overlooking the slightest change. The work required a quick mind and quick movements. The moment the furnace watcher shouted his warning—“Xuan—teng!”—the drawing worker had to rush onto the steel platform above the furnace, even with glass fragments raining down overhead, and eliminate the problem as quickly as possible.
At first I too was unaccustomed to this hot, filthy, exhausting labor. I even disliked it. I had returned to China years before, yet here I was still doing work so dirty, so bitter, and so tiring. What future did it lead to? Some of the classmates who had returned to China with me had already graduated from university, some had been promoted to official positions, some had… and I alone seemed to be starting from the beginning again.
Old workers used to say that before Liberation glass workers were among the most looked-down-upon trades: “If you have a daughter, don’t marry her to a glassmaker.” Glass workers sweated from morning to night. The work was hard and dirty, the wages low, and young women did not like them. Qinhuangdao harbor was right beside Yaohua. Even shoveling coal there seemed easier than glass work.
But then I remembered why I had returned to China, and the expectations the overseas Chinese community had placed on us. “Do whatever the Party asks.” “Go wherever there is need; make your home wherever hardship is greatest.” So I could only keep at it.
As time went on, however, the climate, the rough food, and the hard labor wore on the trainees. Training groups from Xinjiang, Lanzhou, Luoyang, Yichang, Nanning, Guangzhou, Qinghai, Shanghai, and other places were scattered among Yaohua’s workshops. Because there were so many trainees and the housing was dispersed, management became difficult. Later, the factory provided funds to build two long wooden barracks on sandy ground near Yaohua’s workers’ village by the sea. The trainees were concentrated there.
The barracks were built of wood, with upper and lower communal sleeping platforms covered with wheat straw. Each building had a coal stove in winter. But the toilets stood several dozen feet behind the buildings. In warm weather that was manageable; on winter nights it was misery. You had to climb out of a warm bed, throw on a padded coat, hurry into the bone-cutting cold, and come back shivering with your neck tucked down. That feeling was truly hard to bear.
Before long, homesickness and irritation spread. Some wanted to resign; some wanted to return to Kunming but did not even have the travel money. The Party and Youth League branches of the training team held several meetings to discuss how to strengthen political and ideological work and keep the trainees settled.
The team leader was Yuan Xiangzhong, a small thin man wearing gold-rimmed glasses. On the surface he looked scholarly, like an intellectual. In fact, he had originally been a neon-tube worker. In the early years after Liberation, when workers’ morale sometimes wavered and labor discipline was loose, Old Yuan would tell stories in the workshop—Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, one tale after another. He was so persuasive that workers did not want to leave their posts. When higher officials came to inspect, they thought the workers were unusually enthusiastic. Because Yuan could tell stories, talk endlessly, and hold people together, he was soon promoted to cadre and later to a section-chief position.
After he came to the Kunming Glass team as leader, he repeatedly cut expenses in order to save the factory money. Workers were supposed to receive two sets of work clothes each year, but he issued only one, so the trainees’ sweat stains dried into salt stains and their clothes smelled sour. Gloves and masks were issued only once a month, although in reality they wore out in a few days. He did not care. Higher leaders thought he managed well, while the trainees complained privately.
To suppress their growing dissatisfaction, he began conducting “class struggle” among the thirty-odd trainees. An apprentice surnamed Zhong, from a rich-peasant family, was labeled a “bad element” for supposedly “longing for the life of the exploiting class” and “harboring hatred toward the new society,” and was forcibly sent to a labor-education unit.
Another young worker surnamed Li was a demobilized soldier who had once been a squad leader. Because he had served in the army, he was rather casual and liked to joke. Once, while buying daily necessities in a Qinhuangdao shop, he joked with a rather pretty salesgirl. Whether it was a misunderstanding between a Yunnan accent and northern speech, or something else, the salesgirl became angry and reported him. He too was labeled a “bad element” and sent for labor education.
I disagreed with such unreasonable criticism and struggle. But in the larger atmosphere where “class struggle works as soon as you grasp it,” I was helpless and could only let things take their course.
Yunnan Girls Bewitch the Northern Lads
Apart from a few female technicians in the laboratory, Yaohua’s production shops had almost no women. When the Kunming Glass trainees arrived, suddenly there were young women in work caps, black braids showing beneath them, white towels around their necks. The young northern masters stared.
Yunnan—what a distant, mysterious place! They had seen colorful minority girls in films and picture magazines. Now these lively, petite southern girls with gentle voices were right before them. They were not necessarily beauties from heaven, but their soft calls of “Master, Master” scratched at the young men’s hearts.
The trainees told the masters about Yunnan’s climate and products, the Spring City where all four seasons were mild, enchanting Butterfly Spring, the five-hundred-li Dianchi Lake, and blue Erhai. The northern lads listened as if spellbound. The unmarried ones wanted to find a Yunnan girl for a wife. Even some married men dreamed of going to the new factory, showing what they could do, and perhaps becoming foremen or section heads.
Look—the round-faced temperature worker coming from the corner of the furnace, with a charming dimple. She walked to the furnace, raised the thermometer toward the opened furnace mouth, and calmly measured the temperature.
“How is it? Much difference?” the sturdy young Master Liu asked.
“Fourteen hundred degrees. Very steady.” A smile appeared in her dimple.
Her name was Ding Xiufang, the daughter of an old Red Army soldier. Her father had been a poor young man from an old mountainous area of eastern Sichuan. When the Red Army passed through his home region, he left with it. After Liberation he was demobilized and married a Yi woman. Ding Xiufang had finished high school but during the Great Leap Forward was mobilized to give up the university entrance examination and join the sheet-glass training team.
A Yunnan girl arriving on the northern plain was like a red plum blossoming in a winter field. On International Women’s Day in 1959, Qinhuangdao even specially invited the female apprentices from Kunming Glass to attend the city’s women’s celebration.
In the spring of 1961, the three-year apprenticeship came to an end. When the trainees heard they were finally returning to Yunnan, the whole team erupted in happiness. When a junk dealer came to the dormitory, apprentices traded their padded winter clothes for cash.
“How much?”
“Five yuan?”
“Eight!”
“Take it!”
“Don’t need it anymore. We won’t need padded clothes in Yunnan!”
The junk dealer got a wonderful bargain and walked away grinning, carrying a shoulder pole loaded with his trophies across the golden sea sand.
When the Kunming Glass training team returned to Kunming, one young master surnamed Bao came with them. At Yaohua he had been a third-grade furnace watcher. Once in Kunming, he found a Yunnan girl and married her.
And so a northern lad put down roots in Yunnan.