Baiyue’s eyes got very big when Jieling sat down. “A pork bun.”
“Are they really expensive?” Jieling asked.
Baiyue nodded. “Like gold. And so good.”
Jieling looked around at other tables. Other people were eating the pork and steamed buns and everything else.
“Why are you in debt?” Jieling asked.
Baiyue shrugged. “Everyone is in debt,” she said. “Just most people have given up. Everything costs here. Your food, your dormitory, your uniforms. They always make sure that you never earn anything.”
“They can’t do that!” Jieling said.
Baiyue said, “My granddad says it’s like the old days, when you weren’t allowed to quit your job. He says I should shut up and be happy. That they take good care of me. Iron rice bowl.”
“But, but, but,” Jieling dredged the word up from some long forgotten class, “that’s feudal!”
Baiyue nodded. “Well, that’s my granddad. He used to make my brother and me kowtow to him and my grandmother at Spring Festival.” She frowned and wrinkled her nose. Country customs. Nobody in the city made their children kowtow at New Year’s. “But you’re lucky,” Baiyue said to Jieling. “You’ll have your uniform debt and dormitory fees, but you haven’t started on food debt or anything.”
Jieling felt sick. “I stayed in the guest house for four days,” she said. “They said they would charge it against my wages.”
“Oh,” Baiyue covered her mouth with her hand. After a moment, she said, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.” Jieling felt more frightened by that than anything else.
Instead of going back to the lab they went upstairs and across a connecting bridge to the dormitories. Naps? Did they get naps?
“Do you know what room you’re in?” Baiyue asked.
Jieling didn’t. Baiyue took her to ask the floor auntie, who looked up Jieling’s name and gave her a key and some sheets and a blanket. Back down the hall and around the corner. The room was spare but really nice. Two bunk beds and two chests of drawers, a concrete floor. It had a window. All of the beds were taken except one of the top ones. By the window under the desk were three black boxes hooked to the wall. They were a little bigger than a shoebox. Baiyue flipped open the front of each one. They had names written on them. “Here’s a space where we can put your battery.” She pointed to an electrical extension.
“What are they?” Jieling said.
“They’re the battery boxes. It’s what we make. I’ll get you one that failed inspection. A lot of them work fine,” Baiyue said. “Inside there are electric ray cells to make electricity, and symbiotic bacteria. The bacteria breaks down garbage to feed the ray cells. Garbage turned into electricity. Anti–global warming. No greenhouse gas. You have to feed it scraps from the cafeteria a couple of times a week or it will die, but it does best if you feed it a little bit every day.”
“It’s alive?!” Jieling said.
Baiyue shrugged. “Yeah. Sort of. Supposedly if it does really well, you get credits for the electricity it generates. They charge us for our electricity use, so this helps hold down debt.”
The three boxes just sat there looking less alive than a boom box.
“Can you see the cells?” Jieling asked.
Baiyue shook her head. “No, the feed mechanism doesn’t let you. They’re just like the ones we grow, though, only they’ve been worked on in the tissue room. They added bacteria.”
“Can it make you sick?”
“No, the bacteria can’t live in people.” Baiyue said. “Can’t live anywhere except in the box.”
“And it makes electricity.”
Baiyue nodded.
“And people can buy it?”
She nodded again. “We’ve just started selling them. They say they’re going to sell them in China, but really, they’re too expensive. Americans like them, you know, because of the no-global-warming. Of course, Americans buy anything.”
The boxes were on the wall between the beds, under the window, pretty near where the pillows were on the bottom bunks. She hadn’t minded the cells in the lab, but this whole thing was too creepy.
Jieling’s first paycheck was startling. She owed 1,974 R.M.B. Almost four month’s salary if she never ate or bought anything and if she didn’t have a dorm room. She went back to her room and climbed into her bunk and looked at the figures. Money deducted for uniforms and shoes, food, her time in the guesthouse.
Her roommates came chattering in a group. Jieling’s roommates all worked in packaging. They were nice enough, but they had been friends before Jieling moved in.
“Hey,” called Taohua. Then, seeing what Jieling had. “Oh, first paycheck.”
Jieling nodded. It was like getting a jail sentence.
“Let’s see. Oh, not so bad. I owe three times that,” Taohua said. She passed the statement on to the other girls. All the girls owed huge amounts. More than a year.
“Don’t you care?” Jieling said.
“You mean like little Miss Lei Feng?” Taohua asked. Everyone laughed and Jieling laughed, too, although her face heated up. Miss Lei Feng was what they called Baiyue. Little Miss Goody-goody. Lei Feng, the famous do-gooder soldier who darned his friend’s socks on the Long March. He was nobody when he was alive, but when he died, his diary listed all the anonymous good deeds he had done, and then he became a Hero. Lei Feng posters hung in elementary schools. He wanted to be “a revolutionary screw that never rusts.” It was the kind of thing everybody’s grandparents had believed in.
“Does Baiyue have a boyfriend?” Taohua asked, suddenly serious.
“No, no!” Jieling said. It was against the rules to have a boyfriend, and Baiyue was always getting in trouble for breaking rules. Things like not having her trays stacked by 5:00 p.m., although nobody else got in trouble for that.
“If she had a boyfriend,” Taohua said, “I could see why she would want to quit. You can’t get married if you’re in debt. It would be too hard.”
“Aren’t you worried about your debt?” Jieling asked.
Taohua laughed. “I don’t have a boyfriend. And besides, I just got a promotion, so soon I’ll pay off my debt.”
“You’ll have to stop buying clothes,” one of the other girls said. The company store did have a nice catalog you could order clothes from, but they were expensive. There was debt limit, based on your salary. If you were promoted, your debt limit would go up.
“Or I’ll go to special projects,” Taohua said. Everyone knew what special projects was, even though it was supposed to be a big company secret. They were computers made of bacteria. They looked a lot like the boxes in the dormitory rooms. “I’ve been studying computers,” Taohua explained. “Bacterial computers are special. They do many things. They can detect chemicals. They are massively parallel.”
“What does that mean?” Jieling asked.
“It is hard to explain,” Taohua said evasively.
Taohua opened her battery and poured in scraps. It was interesting that Taohua claimed not to care about her debt but kept feeding her battery. Jieling had a battery now, too. It was a reject—the back had broken so that the metal things that sent the electricity back out were exposed, and if you touched it wrong, it could give you a shock. No problem, since Jieling had plugged it into the wall and didn’t plan to touch it again.
“Besides,” Taohua said, “I like it here a lot better than at home.”
Better than home. In some ways, yes, in some ways, no. What would it be like to just give up and belong to the company? Nice things, nice food. Never rich. But never poor, either. Medical care. Maybe it wasn’t the worst thing. Maybe Baiyue was a little … obsessive.