The Anyang Fire Struck a Nerve in This Child of Peasants
On November 21, 2022, a garment factory making cotton-padded clothing caught fire in Anyang, Henan. As of now, the fire has killed 38 workers. This news story has upset me deeply.Henan and Hubei are neighboring provinces; the rural areas of the two have similar economic conditions, similar customs and folkways, and even similar dialects. My hometown, Huanggang in Hubei, also has many small garment factories like this. My own sister, my wife’s sister, and my brother-in-law’s wife all work in garment factories in our county town; even my mother-in-law sometimes takes odd jobs at a garment factory. So when a garment factory catches fire, I feel for it deeply.These Henan countrymen who lost their lives in the fire are so very like our own relatives. The fire-safety conditions in the garment factories of our county town are no better, and garment factories hold far too many flammable materials; once a fire breaks out, the consequences are truly terrifying.Wages in rural garment factories are not high. In 2019 my sister worked as a sewer in a garment factory, paid piece-rate; when business was good, she could earn over 5,000 yuan a month. Due to the impact of the pandemic, this year her monthly income is only a little over a thousand yuan, and the factory does not pay social insurance for them.Of course we can say the bosses of such factories are far from proper. But this is simply the level of our country’s economic development: for the vast surplus rural labor of the central and western regions, if they want both to care for their children at home and to earn some income, employment in such factories is the only option; one might even say that having a job like this is already decent. The latest wave of the pandemic has left many of them without even this kind of work. My wife’s sister’s factory is about to close, and the workers can only wait to be laid off.High risk, low income—and to those of us with a little medical knowledge, such a work environment may even be carcinogenic. But vast numbers of rural migrant workers do not have much choice; they have to take such work, or even feeding their families becomes a problem. These workers at the very bottom of society have almost no capacity to absorb risk; once the pandemic arrives and society locks down for a long time for epidemic control, life becomes very hard for them. If on top of that an elderly parent or a child falls ill at home, the pressure becomes enormous; some people genuinely cannot go on. Our generation had many siblings, so we could support one another and share the burden of supporting our parents; how will the only children of the next generation bear all this?Now I deeply understand the faith that sustained my parents as they raised us, and I am grateful beyond words for the toil and hardship they endured to put us through college. They worked hard, lived frugally, and supported their children’s schooling—I should note here that my parents did not favor sons over daughters in education. My sister was simply limited by her aptitude; she repeated too many grades in primary school and struggled so much with learning that, unlike my older brother and me, she did not go on to higher education but instead learned sewing. My parents’ wish was that we would no longer be peasants. Although I feel nostalgic for rural life, as a child of peasants who grew up in the countryside doing every kind of farmwork, I am fully clear-eyed: I know how hard rural life is. The other side of the pastoral idyll is the hardship of facing the yellow earth with one’s back to the sky.If my parents had not struggled to change their children’s fate, I might now be laboring in such a high-risk workplace to earn a living, rather than studying medicine and writing in my own study. This fate of dying in a fire is so close to us children of peasants—so close that when we see such news, we cannot help but feel a pang of dread.My sister and my sisters-in-law now work in garment factories back home; after work, what they care about most is their children’s education. They are repeating the story of how my parents raised us—braving risk, enduring hardship, and with unshakable faith making enormous sacrifices for their children’s future. From them we can see what drives human evolution: the hardships of life and the deep love for one’s descendants make them know that unless they struggle to change the next generation’s fate, generation after generation will have to suffer just as they do.As for the workers who died in this fire, I need not interview them to know that their life stories are much the same as those of my parents and my sister and sisters-in-law. Their plight grieves me deeply. Their children must, like me as a boy, have been urged by their parents to study hard so as to change their own and their family’s fate; when such a catastrophic accident suddenly strikes the family, the sky falls in on them. Nothing about safety is trivial. I hope this fire will lead countless such small workshop-style factories across our country to strengthen their fire-safety infrastructure, protect our brothers and sisters, our elders and our townsfolk, and prevent similar tragedies from recurring.If these people’s fate is to change, it can only come through the healthy development of society. Development is the hard truth; disruption is a crime. Unfortunately, there are always people who speak easily from a comfortable position, who—for their own private gain—are blind to the suffering of those at the bottom and stand in the way of society’s healthy development. How hateful that is.