My Years at the Textile Mill

I’m Zhang Dagen, a graduate of the mechanical engineering department at a certain textile university. After graduating in the 1990s, I started work at a state-owned textile mill, beginning my career as a repairman in a workshop where temperatures soared above forty degrees Celsius. Amid the clash of yellowed work clothes and crisp white shirts, I had to tame more than a hundred roaring old-fashioned looms and learn to grow up among the sweat-soaked polyester shirts of the female loom operators. From the initiation rite of having my white shirt stained with machine oil by a veteran mechanic to personally dismantling the old machines that had accompanied my youth, twenty years passed in a whirl of cotton threads. When the wave of automation drowned out the roar of traditional looms, the attendance sheets stained with oil and blood, the gardenias hidden in toolboxes, and the songs floating through the locker room during night shifts would ultimately weave the story of a generation of textile workers.