This isn’t very well written, I feel.
13 cents may get you a handful of penny candy at the corner store, but this is a rare occurrence these days. To find a novelty like that, it’d be best to start your search back in the nineties. To a sweatshop worker in China, this is the hourly wage on which one must support a family – or at least try to.
Among the country’s billion residents, it’s more than common to find in any given number of people a man, woman, or child even who succumbs to the harsh conditions of Chinese sweatshops: stuffy, crowded rooms full of non-descript machines giving away lung cancer like lollipops, vermin scampering about, and shop owners who refuse workers the freedom to go home at the end of the day, unprotected by union laws – or any laws for that matter. Don’t bother trying to stand up for your rights, either. You’ll only be fired and blacklisted, leaving you to find some other less-than-acceptable form of employment.
It wouldn’t be strange to see one of those US-owned machines explode, either, seeing as most of the people using them, some as young as 12, aren’t really trained to use them properly. This fact is demonstrated in a news story from March 2001 that tells of 42 people [mostly in 3rd and 4th grade] having been killed when their school-turned-fireworks-factory blew up. But pulling the same lever hundreds of times a day shouldn’t be too hard, right?
The exploitation existing in China is overwhelming, but with the majority of records and information being withheld from outside news sources, it’s unknown the exact number of children affected by the growing child-worker industry in the country. All one can find on Google is outcries from human rights groups on the issue, and the far-from-accurate estimates that 61% of the 250 million children (of 5-14 years) working in developing countries can be found in Asia – real specific.
It seems the orphanages taking in displaced, disabled children don’t do much better of a job taking care of them, either. “Dying rooms,” a term for where the mentally deficient and ill are taken, given (sometimes lethal) doses of medication and sedatives, and starved, can’t be a very happy place to live out one’s remaining hours or days. From killer sweatshops to killer orphanages, it’s hard to pick the lesser of two evils, if the choice even presents itself. No wonder World Vision programs and the like take over the airwaves day in and day out. It seems people really are suffering.
—
“Can he speak any English?” I asked. At this age, if I was going to bring him home with me, there needed to be at least some way to communicate with him.
“Sure he can.” The interpreter told me, “but only a few phrases. Let me see…”
The interpreter began again to speak the inconceivably complicated language, looking for something useful the boy could say in English. I began to drift off again, looking around the room at the other children who were staring at my wife and I in awe, as if we had extra legs protruding from some place on our bodies that I myself could not see.
They varied in age, from what I could guess, anywhere from 4 to about 12. I imagined their lives had been thus far displaced, depressing. I wondered what was so special about the 10-year-old who stood in front of me – why he seemed so different from the rest. He looked to be older than most, and slightly happier than the rest, if even by an infinitesimally small fraction, as if he hadn’t been living there quite so long.
So many thoughts hit me in the span of about 4 seconds as the foreign sounds that made no sense to me drifted through one ear and exited through the other. Here I was, about to adopt a young Chinese boy as my own, and I could hardly understand the logic of their mother tongue. I was a tad panicked. Would we be good parents to him? Would the language barrier somehow lower its walls over time? I had no idea! Only by the suggestion of our doctor did we think of coming to China.
“It all starts with one,” he said, “one by one. And they need as many ones as they can get! Even with that one-child law, they’ve still got an overwhelming population crisis! What do you folks think?”
What did I think? I was hesitant. My father wasn’t hesitant. He told me what he thought. He didn’t want any more of those “short stops” over here. Then I hung up the phone. Anna thought it was a great idea. That’s what decided it, too: Anna.
“I’ve got something,” the interpreter said. Interrupted by the present, I had forgotten what was going on. “Here is something he can say.”
As the young one opened his mouth, I didn’t know what to expect. A simple, American “How are yah doin’?” would work for me.
“My…name is…Peter Chang.” He smiled. My eyes met his and I could tell this would work. A friendly boy to say the least.
“Good. Anything else?” I questioned. Being happy, but all the while concerned about how we would get anywhere when I’d have to ask him his name all day long.
“Of course, but I don’t know if you really want to hear it…” The interpreter hesitated, eyeing me. I nodded.
Another split-second eternity passed, and as I wondered whether I should take the word of this sharp-dressed translator or let the formerly garbled bowl of oriental soup that was their language be poured over my head, it hit me, hard. Wet noodles and everything.
What came out of that boy’s mouth this time startled me. To know that a child so young could be put through work so tiring was almost as bad as having an ice cube shot down my shirt.
He uttered the words as if they were a burden.
“Made…in China.”