Connie
Sam, as a child, was affectionate and kind and deeply curious, with the sort of eyes that saw only the good of the world.
Connie doesn’t know how to protect a daughter like this. She doesn’t even know where Sam gets it from. Not Connie’s husband, certainly, who knew her for all of six months. And certainly not from her. She had been a poor family’s fourth child, both a girl and the unluckiest number, had been given up by her mother and father before she could even remember their faces.
So, when she was a teenager and saw a Western billboard advertising a movie about young people in love, starring people with names like Dean Whittaker and Connie Luke, she concluded that the key to success in life was choosing an English name. To belong to a different world. By the time she met her husband, a much older man, she was introducing herself as Connie Sun. And by the time she was pregnant and he had already stopped coming home, she’d decided that she was going to America. It was the year 1991, and rumors ran rampant about a flood of high-paying jobs in new chemical factories springing up all over the place overseas. A product called sand was taking over luxury markets in America; it was the designer drug of choice for the rich and famous; the supply couldn’t keep up with the demand; money was growing on trees there.
Connie asked around among her friend circles about what, exactly, sand was, but in those days it was so new that no one could say for sure. A miracle elixir. A scam. A phenomenon. A couple of anecdotes about how it could make you more beautiful. More charming. More intelligent. More innovative. It was behind the economic boom sweeping through America, it was fueling a new era of the free market, it was the engine for the age of easy money, it was speeding up the world, it was going to usher in a revolution in finance and science and technology.
There were also some scattered discussions about the alarming spike in mass shootings where the gunmen had sand in their pockets. A lone rumor about strange clusters of suicides. All was hearsay. Mostly, people were excited. Sand had appeared so recently that no one was cracking down on it yet, and they preferred hiring workers from overseas because they could pay less and skip filing official paperwork that might expose them to inspections. It was hard work, but Connie was young and strong, with ambition gnawing at her stomach like a deep hunger. If you could get a position in one of the factories, you could earn ten times the salary here, enough money to set you up forever. You could make it.
So, when Sam was nine months old, off Connie went, buying passage for cheap on board an old cargo ship sailing out of Shanghai, determined to find a better life.
The instant they landed, Connie started hunting aggressively for the rumored factory jobs that had lured her and thousands of others into the country. But no one advertised them in regular places. Eventually, she figured out that you had to hear about it through word of mouth. In her broken English, she asked around, have you heard of this or that factory, do you know if they have any new positions, how do you apply.
While she searched, she found temporary work for four dollars an hour cleaning bathrooms at the local theater. She would come home most nights worn down to the bone, exhausted by the unfamiliarity of everything. Trick-or-treaters at her door freaked her out; she studied her neighbors in order to piece together how to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas. And months later, when police were acquitted for brutalizing a man and the city exploded in fury, she bore witness to the burning streets, trying to learn the wounds of her new homeland.
Her job forced her to leave Sam alone in the apartment for hours at a time, and for a while, she had recurring nightmares of coming home from her shifts to find Sam missing or hurt or worse. She did her best to make it safe; she locked Sam in the bedroom and moved all the furniture out except for a mattress and some cushions, put up a heavy gate, put Sam’s few toys out on the floor. One of those toys was a set of foam alphabet letters. In a few weeks, Connie realized that Sam could recognize all of them. By eighteen months, Sam was reading out words on street signs and newspapers. Their neighbor had greeted them once in front of the complex’s mailboxes, had made an offhanded complaint about pain in his knees. Ayear later, when they bumped into the same neighbor, Sam had asked him, “How are your knees?”
Mixed in with her amazement at Sam’s strong memory was guilt, for Connie wondered constantly which of these memories would be the first permanent one. Children’s earliest recollections tended to solidify at around three or four years of age. Would Sam remember the bright foam letters, the neighbor with the bad knees? Or would she recall a heavy gate and a bare room, with no one around?
At last, Connie heard from another theater worker about a factory north of the city hiring people with a keen eye and steady hands and who were willing to work long hours.
She wasn’t told much. It was owned by a parent company called the Lumines Group, and it promised this: sifting and purifying compounds at a large complex, for pay lower than Connie had heard in the rumors but higher than any job she could have gotten back home, plus free lunches every day. It was located in a refurbished factory downtown, and the company would reimburse the bus fare to get there. So when she finished the interview, she waited nervously for a phone call, hoping.
Two days later, she got the job.
Connie didn’t know whether or not the chemicals she processed really were being used for sand. Still, as the months went on, she picked up bits of gossip from the other workers around her. Their factory complex was owned by someone named Alexander Reed, and he operated Lumines with the grip of a king. Every few weeks she would see young, finely dressed people sporting gold fox pins on their suits pass through the main hall, escorted by half a dozen bodyguards. Sometimes, a couple of police officers would come through and one of the factory’s managers would take them out to lunch. And once a year, a government inspector would make the rounds at the factory, the chemicals would change for the day, and Connie would find herself processing petroleum and waxes instead of sulfur and mercury.
By now, the FDA had started an investigation into sand’s effects. So the workers were forbidden to speak openly about their jobs. They were to say that they worked at a chemical processing plant, and then to change the subject. They also were forbidden to speak to anyone wearing a winged lion pin on their collars. Connie didn’t ask questions about this, although shedid find it odd, because she’d only ever seen the winged lion insignia on the fence around a pair of new twin skyscrapers under construction downtown, expected to be the tallest towers in the city. The buildings didn’t seem related in any way to the factory where she worked, and she didn’t know anything about why there might be competition or animosity between them, but her English wasn’t strong, anyway, so she had little trouble keeping her mouth shut.
Each floor had a manager, one of the workers anointed by their supervisor to inspect the sifted chemicals and ensure the quality of the product. On Connie’s floor, they had no manager, and over the span of six months, this became the topic of everyone’s conversation as they jostled to be the chosen one and thus add five hundred dollars a month to their paycheck along with a week of vacation days.
While the others gossiped, Connie kept her head down and worked. She checked the batches of sulfur and liquid mercury and silver that were delivered daily to their stations. She weighed samples from each batch of sulfur pellets against its ideal weight. She heated samples of silver in beakers with water and nitric acid. She ran the mercury through three rounds of distillation and recorded numbers. It became a personal game of hers to see how close to 100 percent she could get each batch’s purity. Always, she made sure to turn in her work with her name on it. At the end of the week, her batches were consistently the highest grade on her floor.
One day, their factory supervisor, Maclan, made a round on their floor. Most stopped to chat with him, making a point to remember details about his life—How is your daughter? How is your dog?—and pretending to care about his answers. Connie could always hear his laughter across the floor. He laughed easily.
When he reached her, though, she just gave him a smile and stepped aside to let him inspect her work. She didn’t say anything when he made an approving murmur about the silver’s readings, nor when he commented on the high grade of the mercury.
“You get these numbers often?” he said to her.
“Yes, sir,” she said, without humility nor arrogance. Her gaze caught on the gleaming fox pin affixed to his lapel.
He smiled at her, and she smiled back.
“I notice you stay late sometimes,” he said as she looked up from a finalbatch of silver she was inspecting. “You always check each batch, even if one turns out good.”
“It’s not really finished until they are all checked, sir.”
He nodded in approval at her answer. “How long have you worked here?”
“A year, sir.”
“You’ve been putting in consistent numbers all year. I’m surprised you just started.” He leans close to her against her station’s counter. “You enjoy the work?”
“I like to do good work, sir, whatever the work is,” Connie said.
He smiled again, kindly this time. “Well said. Do you have family? You work very late sometimes.”
