Cindy Kwok shifted uncomfortably in the plastic chair designated for customers. She did not know where to put her feet; her high heels pinched, so she was happy to sit down, but the front of the steel desk left little room for her legs.
She handed over the phone. A logo appeared in the center of the screen, flipped upside-down and then righted itself, before changing from gold to orange, to an angular, flame pattern, and finally settling on a red, stylized box, with the letters TCJ in white.
The repairman looked at her quizzically. “That’s what it’s supposed to do when it’s booting up,” Cindy confirmed. “No issue, there. The problem comes later.”
He nodded his head, but was putting his attention all on the phone. “How much did you pay for this?” he asked. His voice was roughened by years of unfiltered tobacco and broken things.
He sat across from her, the surface of his ancient metal desk covered with a layer of rough-cut linoleum, at a cramped booth on the second floor of Wanchai Computer Centre. A chaotically capitalized sign above the desk read, in English, “Repair – all brands – phones tablets laptops – fair Price”. The equivalent was handwritten below in uneven Chinese, with a marker that had given up the ghost just as it came to the final character. He looked like nobody in particular, just an average, middle-aged man with thinning black hair, sallow, pock-marked skin, and dark eyes, in a button-down shirt with short sleeves.
Cindy’s thighs were sticking unpleasantly to the plastic chair, despite the blasting of the industrial air conditioners, and she tugged down her short skirt. “Funny story. I actually got it for nothing! It was already one of the cheaper phones on sale at Broadway, and at the last minute, the sales guy asked if I had any credit card points. I did, and when he checked the balance, it turned out that it could cover the entire ….”
The repairman had cocked his head slightly to the side, like a bird does when it is focusing intently on an insect. Again, he was paying attention only to the phone and not to her.
He might have muttered, “Hong Kong girls!” under his breath, or perhaps not.
This repair shop was special, her friend Marco had told her. Cindy had decided to give it a try, since Marco was the only person she really knew in Hong Kong. She’d lost touch with her childhood friends when she moved to Canada ten years previously, and had trouble meeting people when she moved back. Even her neighbors never spoke to her, instead choosing to judge her silently through their steel-gated doors; it was the norm, she supposed, in a big, impersonal city. Marco kept promising to show her where all the cool parties were, but no matter how long she stared at her phone, he never followed up.
She plowed on, determined to make the repairman take her seriously. “For an iPhone or a Samsung, I know you’re supposed to go to their designated Hong Kong service centers, but I thought maybe for a brand like this one you might be able to fix it.”
He finally turned his gaze directly at her. “It doesn’t matter what brand. Android, iOS. You can bring it to me. But sometimes, they have big problems that are impossible to fix. Deep problems. Problems with how they are made.” His eyes were darker, more haunted, than she had thought at first. As the phone finished its startup sequence, he handed it back to her to unlock. She presented her face to its camera, and the normal icons appeared.
“There,” she showed him. “It’s got my soul.”
The repairman’s grim expression did not change, and Cindy was once again aware of the enormous gulf that separated them. He doesn’t get the joke at all, she realized, and pointed at the screen.
“See that little X that’s showing up instead of the email icon?,” she continued, shaken but still insistent. “If I tap on it, the app works normally. But when I close it again, the other apps start displaying an X as well, and you can’t see which one is which. Except for this one, see, here? The little flame icon – actually, I don’t even know what that app does, but the system won’t let me uninstall it.”
The repairman nodded, slowly, his face darkening. “I suppose you already know where these TCJ phones are manufactured?”
She gave him a confused look. “What? I mean, China, I guess, like everything else, right?”
He leaned back in his creaking chair. “About 100 kilometers outside of Dongguan, in a town called Huocheng, there’s a big campus. Bigger than anything Foxconn has.”
She remembered the news about Foxconn, where hundreds of thousands of workers manufactured iPhones and other mainstream electronics day and night, at a breakneck pace. The company had installed nets outside the factory dorms, to catch would-be jumpers. But something in his tone made her say, “This other place – it’s worse?” She went over the name in her mind: literally, it meant “Fire City”.
He nodded again. “It’s not too bad to be an employee at one of the bigger brands, nowadays. But Huocheng isn’t where you find those factories. Desperate workers show up from the countryside, without a hukou to prove their residence, looking for any kind of job at all. They leave everything behind. Sometimes their families never hear from them again.” Cindy noticed for the first time that the repairman’s accent was not strictly the urban, Hong Kong Cantonese that she’d grown up with; underneath, she could hear a faint echo of the lonely, hilly Guangdong countryside.
She shuddered. Still, that was in the past; her problem now was getting the phone to work.
“Do you think you can fix it?”
An obscure expression of disappointment suddenly cloaked the repairman’s face. “Might be difficult.” He leaned forward in the battered, stained chair, and swiveled to an ancient desktop where he typed something, quickly and unseen. “Depends if you’re willing to pay.”
“How much are we talking about?” she asked, suddenly wary.
“I don’t think you’re that kind of person.”
“You don’t think I’m what kind of person?” she retorted indignantly. “If the quality is good, I’m willing to pay a fair price.”
It was all bravado; she knew wouldn’t have come to this shop if she’d had the means to pay a fair price, if she had been able to find a job since moving back to Hong Kong three months ago. She would have bought a different phone to start with.
He looked into her eyes again. “I’m not talking about money. But if you say so.”
He took her phone again, placed a scarred finger on the “fire” icon, and held it down for four seconds while tapping the email app – now a plain X – three times, and simultaneously pressing the phone’s camera button. He turned up the volume. The app blinked, and a young woman’s voice, speaking a rustic variety of Mandarin, hollow and afraid, came forth.
“I accidentally dropped a box of components this morning, and Mr. Zheng says he’s going to take it out of my paycheck. But it’s worth more than 1,000 yuan, and my salary is only 300 yuan per month. There’s no way I can pay; I just need to escape. But the dormitory doors are locked.”
The voice faded away. The repairman tapped again, and another voice began to speak, in an urgent, desperate whisper. “Yìzé didn’t like it at all when I told him. He said he would be embarrassed to bring me home as his wife, and that I should just get rid of it. But the clinic fee is 220 yuan. I wouldn’t be able to send any money home for half a year. He just left me here on the road and drove away.”
Cindy put her hand over the repairman’s, before he could continue. “What is this? Are you trying to prove something?”
“You said you’d be willing to pay a fair price.”
Unwillingly, she withdrew her hand, as he again performed the complicated sequence. “I haven’t seen my mother in so long that I am starting to forget her face,” a younger, sadder voice lamented. “I could have at least brought her some comfort. Why didn’t she ever learn how to write? I should have stolen a finished product and sent it to her, so I could at least send her voice messages, or a photo.”
Incredulous, Cindy asked, “Did those women working in the factory record these messages as they assembled the phones? Did they want the customers to hear?”
“How could they? You heard yourself, the first one was locked in her dormitory. The second one was stranded on the road.”
“Then …”
He put the phone down. “When a voice is desperate enough, it will find a way to be heard. Even when it is too late.”
Cindy paused.
“Was it too late for them?” she asked, at last.
The repairman nodded. “I don’t know how it happens. Sometimes the voices come out from an app that doesn’t appear to have any other function, like this one. Sometimes I find them in the middle of a playlist, online. Other times, if I take the sound card out of the phone, it will start to play through the speaker without warning.
“For a while, I tried to find out who they were. I went to Huocheng, once, with an old school friend. I thought we might be able to track one of them down. But there were too many people with the same stories; too much suspicion; too many young women who had simply disappeared. How could I find the one who had been abandoned by the recruitment agency, when there were 1,000 others who had experienced the same thing? How could I find the one who had lost her ID card, who had been shortchanged on her wages, who had been left in the middle of nowhere with the other passengers when the bus wasn’t full enough to make a profit, who had paid for a doctor’s visit only to find out that he was a quack, when it happens every day, in the hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands? So many had simply disappeared. Perhaps they could no longer reach their families, or were afraid to.”
Cindy’s mother, halfway across the world in Toronto, hadn’t called once since Cindy moved back to Hong Kong, always waiting for Cindy to initiate contact; she said she didn’t know how to use all this new technology. “Their voices …”
“Must be heard.” He tapped again, and a new voice, older, slower, despairing, came from the phone.
“I don’t know where my daughter is. The poster doesn’t help, since we don’t have a photo of her. She may be using another name. She would be 17 by now.”
The repairman performed the tapping sequence a final time, but there were no more voices. He turned the phone off, rebooted it, and said, “It’s clean, now.” He handed it back, but Cindy dropped it instantly onto the linoleum desk, as if it were on fire.
“No. I can’t.”
“Go ahead. The price is now paid.”
Reluctantly, she took it, lifting it by the corner, and dropped it into her little, jeweled purse. She kept the purse open, and drew out her wallet, but the repairman waved it away. “The price is paid.”
Wordlessly, she stood and made her way through the crowded, warren-like hallway toward the escalator. She glanced back for a moment, trying to catch a glimpse through the crowds, but the shop was already closing up. The repairman had brought down its metal shutter, twisted the shackle at the floor, and disappeared behind another booth.
As she descended, she found herself several times about to open her bag and take out the phone, reflexively, as she usually would do while walking alone, to see what her friends in Canada were posting as they woke up. But every time, something stopped her. Only later that evening, when she finally returned to her apartment, did she unlock the device to check her messages. The face-recognition login failed even after three attempts; Cindy decided she must be wearing a very strange expression. She retrieved the original device PIN, which she had, fortunately, written on a scrap of paper she had kept inside her wallet, and opened the phone.
Strangely, although the internet connection was established, there were no notifications. She tapped the Instagram app, only to be welcomed with the login screen. She entered her credentials.
“No users found.”
She opened WhatsApp, and was asked to register her number as a first-time user.
She tried Gmail and Discord, and finally even Facebook and even LinkedIn. She had been logged out of all of them, and none recognized her username or email. The HSBC app no longer recognized her fingerprint.
Damn. He’s completely wiped the phone, she realized. But the shop is already closed.
Somehow, with a sinking certainty, she knew that even if she were to return the next day, the repairman’s booth would still be shuttered and locked.
She cursed, and turned to her laptop. There, too, with a growing sense of dread, she found that her emails, her social media history, and all of her login details were gone. I need to call Marco, she thought. He’s the one who introduced me to that place.
But his number was not in her contacts. Nobody was in her contacts.
I’ve paid a fair price, after all, she thought.
Ashamed and furious, Cindy began to cry; suddenly, desperately, she wanted her mother. She checked the time. It was late in Toronto, but surely any mother would be willing to pick up the phone when her daughter called.
But Cindy could not remember the telephone number.
INSTANT NOODLES 