....While Winston, Lee, and I waited our turn to see the white-helmeted supervisor, the foreman handed each of us a green helmet, the color given to the lowliest workers. We held them in our hands, hesitant to put them on. In Taiwan, only men whose wives had run off with other men wore green hats; it was a symbol of humiliation
I looked around the factory and saw that all the workers who had waited outside in the freezing mornings wore the helmets. Momo had even managed to wear his at a rakish angle. I reluctantly placed it on my head as if it were a live animal. Winston and Lee quickly followed, just as Mike, the burly supervisor, arrived to give us our individual tasks.
Mike thrust a large broom into Winston’s hands and told him to sweep the factory floor from one end to the other. Winston’s blank look was almost comical—back home, he was an educated member of the upper class, and sweeping, like housework, was considered women’s territory. In the months that I had been here, I had been struck by how much Americans valued work, whether it was menial, manual, or office. In Taiwan, an unemployed intellectual earned more respect than an uneducated but rich farm owner. Here, if you did honest work, you were paid in money and in admiration for your willingness to take individual responsibility for yourself and your family.
Mike, thinking Winston simply did not understand his instructions, seized the broom and vigorously demonstrated what to do. Winston took the broom from him and began to push it in unenthusiastic strokes across the floor.
To save time, Mike himself showed Lee and I what we would be doing. From a row at one end of the factory floor, he grabbed a tall metal shelf, built on rolling casters and filled with dozens of deep trays. He pushed it to a conveyor belt, which had not yet been switched on. He showed us how to remove a tray and where we were to hold it under the belt. He explained that the peaches, at this point peeled and halved, would fall into the tray. When full, we were to replace the tray with an empty one, being quick enough to make the exchange so that the flow of peaches was uninterrupted. Once the shelf was full, we were to push the peaches to dump into another area about 40 feet away where they would continue processing. Sixteen workers were assigned to the task, including Lee and I. The two of us retrieved our shelves and stood waiting with the other workers for the belt to come on.
At first, it was not terribly difficult. Since we were all bunched together, it was easy to slide into place and fill our trays. The peaches came down the line slowly, falling with an odd plopping sound. But soon the fruit came more quickly, the trays began to feel heavy as we heaved them from belt to shelf, and Lee and I lacked the advantage of height when reaching for the upper shelves, which were well above our heads. Moreover, certain shelves moved better than others; some had casters with cracked ball bearings that made sliding them across the floor difficult. We would later learn that these broken casters often led to workers coming to blows over disputes of usership.
Lee, stymied by a lame shelf, lagged too far behind the person in front of him and was overwhelmed by the flow of peaches. Too late, he lost his pace and peaches fell from the belt onto the factory floor. Lee tried to catch them in his hands and made a worse mess of things until the conveyor suddenly stopped moving. Someone had smacked the emergency stop button.
Mike rushed over and yelled to Winston to come clean up the mess. To Lee, he jerked his thumb in the direction of the employment office and told him to collect his pay and go home.
I wanted to tell Lee not to worry, but he had lost enough face as it was, so I let him trudge out of the factory, his cheeks aflame and hands sticky with juice.
I was suddenly startled by a deafening sound. At one end of the building, empty cans began to fall into a large bin two stories below. The clatter clanged over the sound of the machinery. In my hard green helmet, I felt as if I were in the middle of a war. No one else seemed troubled by it, so when Winston finished mopping up, I continued with my work, just like everyone else, the casters on my shelf gliding across the floor as if they were on ice....
