Also I’m gonna make a thread of every lift the bucket meme I could find:
“I won’t learn anything during the three month probationary period,” referring to the first three months of training at a factory job. Implication is you get hired, slack off for three months, then quit.
“Sooner or later, the workers on the assembly line at an evil factory will all become bucket lifters,” implying that eventually everyone will quit their jobs rather than continue working.
A proletarian poem:
“The soul chasing and life stealing assembly line,
The dark and ghostly shop floor,
The difference between life and death lies between two shifts
Run off with your bucket tomorrow.”
“I GIVE UP, I’m dying on the assembly line!”
a list of complaints:
“Rocket speed assembly lines, have to wear space suits [ie protective gear for semiconductors], shitty management, pig slop for food, whole days standing upright — I’m taking my bucket and running back to Sanhe [labor market]!”
A glossary of migrant worker slang
“Another fucking evil factory! Run away!”
黑厂, an evil or dark factory, a job that is consistently not worth the trouble
A huge list of all the things wrong with the factory: 14 hour workday, bad food, bed bugs, no air conditioning, confiscate your cell phone, etc…
Factory boss says to dying Sanhe temp worker: “Dashen, what’s wrong with you! We only have 10k units left to finish!”
Looking for work after the new year? Here are the top five WORST factories in guangdong! “Everyday they have more people picking up the bucket and running away.”
This is Chongqing, my favorite city in China. It’s a truly special place. Less than a kilometer from this area is a packed migrant neighborhood where people peddle their wares in a massive textile market or look for odd jobs. Most are legally second class citizens in the city.
One of the amazing things about CQ is the verticality, its like HK on steroids. The migrant textile market was itself a sort of labyrinthine maze built into a series of commercial and residential blocks built into the hillside, a rhizome between buildings and mountain
I’d be walking down a road and then suddenly realize I’m on the edge of a huge cliff, it’s that sudden and abrupt, with infrastructure built into the mountain and housing built into the infrastructure or vice versa