In the spring of 1983, Lin Xiulan, a female worker in Jiangnan Cotton Mill, ushered in a watershed moment in her life at the age of twenty-four. As the eldest daughter in the family, she wears faded blue work clothes and weaves her best years into pieces of high-quality fabric. Until that early morning when the locust flowers were raining in the air, my mother knocked on the door of the factory director's office with three kilograms of food stamps in hand, and arranged for her to marry the widower section chief of the machinery factory.
When the new technician Chen Mo broke into the workshop with a northern accent, Xiulan was squatting in the dressing room repairing the cuffs that were torn by gears. The young man had a pen in the pocket of his white shirt and held a vernier caliper with his slender fingers, but when he taught her to calibrate the machine, his palms were full of calluses. He always hid behind the boiler room and ate steamed buns during lunch break, but he folded the food stamps into paper airplanes and gently dropped them into her apron pocket filled with cotton wool.
When the spring breeze of reform blew through the mottled brick walls, Xiulan read the words "Shenzhen Special Economic Zone" on the old newspaper in the boiler room. Chen Mo's transfer order and the wedding date were approaching at the same time, and the blood stains his mother coughed into the handkerchief stained the second button of the wedding dress red. The night when a heavy rain destroyed the old warehouse, she rushed into the rain with the night school notice in hand, only to see her soaked fiancé repairing the transformer. Chen Mo's bicycle was always parked under the sycamore tree in the factory area, with a dried locust flower hanging on the bell.
This spring, there were three unsent letters locked in the iron cabinet of the female workers' dressing room. The calluses on the fingertips of the female textile workers finally failed to wrap around the spindle of fate. When the recruitment notices of private garment factories were posted all over the bulletin board, when the girl's acceptance letter was sent to the communication room, Xiulan finally heard the crisp sound of silk cracking in her heart when she calibrated the machine for the last time.
