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Leo The hibiscus king in his mouth is about to burn out, the white ashes are long, he turns a blind eye, catching his desk, aiming, and hitting the ball, with a crisp "horn" sound, and black 8 falls into the bag.
"Code ball!" The beast waiting beside him floated over with a smile, Leo exhaled a mouthful of smoke, and his little eyes narrowed into a slit.
Almost every night without overtime, Leo brought me to the billiards hall of Meilianmei Supermarket to kill time. He is an old bird in Foxconn . He has been working in the PCB (printed circuit board) industry for many years. He has abandoned his wife and children and came from Shenzhen to support him. He has enjoyed his two years of single life. The owner of this billiard hall is from North Korea. He is short and strong, fluent in Chinese, and has a very good atmosphere of a wealthy man in the world. When there are fewer people, I often talk to us about the customs and customs of North Korea and the hardships of leaving my hometown.
The two girls in charge of posing the ball are both students from nearby universities. In addition to Southern girl Azun, there is also a Henan girl Xiaoxiao. Ah Bun is petite, with very white skin, and is wearing a big wave. She smiles a little charmingly, not even like a student. Leo comes to play basketball, half to play basketball, and half to see Azun; Xiaoxiao is a typical northern girl. I ask you how tall you are, she said it is 1.75 meters taller than you. She speaks very interestingly, always with something but so mature. Looking back, she was only 18 or 9 years old at that time.
You can’t feel the passage of time when you go to work, get off work, eat, and play basketball. This is the daily life of Foxconn employees in Yizhuang, Beijing. Every time after get off work, young people wearing indigo and beige work clothes rush out of the work building and the workshop like a tide. When recalling this scene many years later, I always remind me of a certain clip from "Blizzard is Coming" by Duan Yihong . But this is not the case.
There was little rain and snow that year.
Yizhuang in 2007 is remote and quiet. This is the eve of the rapid development of the Beijing real estate market. The most expensive house is Jindi Green Town , 7,000 yuan per square meter. After all, at that time, Wangjing was only 9,000 yuan, and some new houses in East Fourth Ring Road began to sell for 15,000 yuan. The comments from " Beijing News " at that time said that this was a "year of heartbeat prices rising"!

Yizhuang·City Record (Picture Source: Internet)
does not have much entertainment facilities, there is no house that costs more than 60,000 yuan, one Decathlon , one Walmart , several affordable shopping malls, this is Yizhuang 15 years ago, with sparse cars and horses on weekdays, which is very consistent with Foxconn's self-sufficiency and cold state. The windows of the 8-person dormitory face south, and the neat factory building is silent in the sunset.
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"Do you have an English name?" Frank asked me, "We all need it here, so let's take one."
"No!"
"Ok, I checked it, you just call it Jerome."
Actually, I have it, I have been called Frank since junior high school. But I can't tell him, my direct leader, a fat Taiwanese man who looks aggressive. He is from another province, his ancestral home is Hebei, and was born in Taiwan. His father was once a general of the National Army. He likes to drive, like Fei Yuqing , he also has a good voice and won the championship in their All-Soldier Singer Competition. The runner-up that year was Yang Zongwei .
After getting along for a long time, you can find that he is simple and funny. He occasionally teaches some workplace rules to me and Leo, and later we became good brothers. He vividly told us how Terry Gou showed up in the hand of Foxconn at the end of the first fang of a Foxconn one year, almost falling; he also exaggeratedly described how much performance pressure the senior executives of Foxconn were. "This year, I was still sitting next to Terry and drinking, and I might be yelled at the second year:
You go to the toilet to sit!"

Terry Gou and Lin Chi-ling held hands at Foxconn's tail teeth (Picture source: Internet)
With Frank, Foxconn's life is not very difficult.During the 8 months, I spent half of my time at Yantai . There are two huge parks there that produce circuit boards and assemble the whole machine for DELL and Apple . Lao Yang, who is in the same dormitory of my university, works as an engineer in another factory area. He studied information technology. After learning about my news, he opened his mouth: How could you, a journalist, come to Foxconn?
Are you here to do an undercover agent?
I was very ashamed and I had never written a diary during that period. Perhaps in my concept, this trip is an insignificant stop. Most of my classmates and friends went to newspapers and TV stations, and they lived step by step with them, just like the vague and regular drum beats in the distance, which I was out of place.
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I have never seen any snow that is stronger than Yantai. It is deeper than the knee. Maybe because it is close to the sea, the wind is surprisingly strong, and I can't even lie down against the wind and snow. More than a dozen Christmas trees several stories high at the entrance of the factory often disappear after a storm. Hong, the Taiwanese factory owner who has a profound heritage of Chinese studies, will lead a group of colleagues to worship the world at this time.
According to the rank, he is an assistant manager and is already a not-low position. Under them are the deputy manager, specialist and section chief - a typical Japanese enterprise grading system. Unlike cities such as Beijing and Shenzhen that built factories earlier, Taikan and Lukan are clearly separated in this barren land called Bajiao Eighth Road. In this factory with tens of thousands of people, mainland cadres are the highest to be the head of the section; the labels of Taiwanese employees are vertical, while those of non-Taiwanese are horizontal, just like the official title and rank can be seen in the army at a glance, and you only need to take a look at the label here; Taiwanese officials can walk casually in the factory, but mainland employees have prescribed walking routes.
"Fuck!" After I went to Beijing to tell Leo these jokes, he was a little angry, "You Shandong is just not civilized!" In Shenzhen, Lu Gan could be the best assistant manager at that time, after all, he was the first city in China to see the world.
Yantai has been in the production line for 4 months, and I spent 3 months on the production line. From one workshop to another, upstairs and downstairs, many places are covered with chairman's quotations, such as:
We want to be the tiny-unbeat Xiaoqiang.

Heading without seeing him (Picture source: Internet)
From the cutting to the end circuit board finished product shipped out of the factory, there are about 30 processes. Frank had a curious expectation for me at that time, and let me observe and learn from each workshop. In the past three months, I have become familiar with the periodic table of , and I know that potassium permanganate is purple, and I know that the multiple standards of clean room are: of course, I also remember that the little Chen girl in the electroplating room uses Sassoon to wash her hair every day, and Dido lives in Zhifu District , and Shi Youli of the project control department is Real Madrid . What impressed me the most was Adong. He looks like an Indian , has a high nose, deep eyes, dark skin, and a lot of hair. He speaks English more than Yantai dialect. He has been internship in Beijing for half a year and often talks to me about things in Beijing: Have you been to Yonghegong ? Is there a stop called Shuangjing ? " Shuangjing Station is here!" He learned to broadcast the subway,
"It's so exciting!"
Get up at 17 o'clock and turn off the lights at 11 o'clock. You can think of it as a prison with less stringent management. For a while, I rented a house in a village that was 5 minutes' walk from the factory. These 5 minutes were almost the most wonderful 5 minutes in my life at that time. On sunny days, you can see distant mountains like dark sunset like blood, the air is refreshing, the wilderness road is as wide as American western films, and you can clearly see countless stars at night.
All the things related to words in my mind are replaced by various machine parts and old-fashioned disciplines, buried in the snow; let me know that there is such a life in the world, which is very different from what was before, and beyond the scope of my dreams. This kind of ejaculation was briefly paused when Shi Youli talked about his love past in Yantai dialect, or when Dido recalled his time in Jinan.
Dido is in human resources and is usually responsible for photography promotion in the factory. In order to improve the level of talent, Foxconn once recruited 4 girls from Dalian Foreign Languages College. Dido said, there must be a type you like. I saw it soon. At that time, their work clothes had not been released yet. They walked in the factory with a fresh graduate atmosphere, making the gray factory shine. Some stories happened, but now the music books are broken, I don’t know where they are going, and everyone is scattered around the world.
It was a clear evening when I really left Yantai. Youli and Dido sent me, it was miserable. I was going to Jinan. Shandong TV was summoned in front of me, and finally I was able to return to the familiar world. We have never seen each other again since then.
Yantai's first subway line will start construction in 2022, and the plan says it is expected to be opened to traffic in 2017; Leo returns to Shenzhen and has become an assistant manager; Frank has long left Foxconn and continues to be free in an electronics factory in Suzhou. We have also seen this year. He brought Kinmen sorghum wine of more than 60 degrees to my father, and he and my father, an old party member who has been a soldier, said in a humble handshake:
support the reunification of the motherland.
Yizhuang has been to Yizhuang many times, and sees the rise of new buildings like bamboo shoots. The house I rented back then was 960,000 yuan, but now it is sold for 7 million yuan; Longhua Foxconn in Bao'an, Shenzhen is still a small world with more than 300,000 people, but there is no big difference between inside and outside the pass; although Guo Taiming is no longer a pure businessman, its factory area has expanded to 30 cities compared to more than ten years ago. In 2022, young people in Zhengzhou started a runaway, but fortunately it has not snowed there yet.
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