A Few Stories from Life on the Factory Floor

[Rural life in the 1980s and 1990s, migrant workers, city life, flirtation, love, growing up, everyday life, the little things, not a power fantasy, realistic]

Do you remember working in Shenzhen twenty years ago?

Everyone wore the most innocent smiles. Nobody on the streets was glued to a phone. Even though people earned only a few hundred yuan a month, they were remarkably happy and content. Now, even with several thousand yuan a month, or even a business of your own, you can never go back to those innocent days...

Back then, friends rarely schemed against one another. Everyone went happily to work. Men and women could be just friends, and online romances brought many couples together. Girls were simple, innocent, and sweet. They were so adorably naive that a bottle of water, a meal, a heartfelt confession, or a promise was all it took to start dating...

Did you ever date someone you met at work, or meet an online friend in person? Do you remember your first love? Do you remember fried rice noodles for one yuan and fifty fen, or a boxed meal for two yuan? Do you remember the young men and women in their teens and twenties gliding gracefully around the roller rink to the music?

Do you remember singing in the open-air plaza for one yuan a song?

Do you remember staying with your partner in a twenty-yuan hotel? Did you end up together?

Twenty years have passed like a dream. Those born in the 1980s and 1990s who went off to work witnessed the fastest industrial boom in history. But looking back, so many factories have closed or moved away. That era has become a memory, never to return.

The places we once knew are unrecognizable now. The factories have moved away, and those young people have lost their youth!

Back then, we were all only seventeen or eighteen...