Displacing migrant livelihoods in the making of South China's jiagongchang

As marginal hubs of women's affective and industrial labour across the supply chains, jiagongchang household workshops incorporate migrant labourers into chains of low-wage labour, while dispossessing them of decent working conditions, stable living wages, and legal claims to state welfare before expelling them when their ageing and exhausted bodies leave them unfit for low-wage industrial labour. Jiagongchang only partially incorporate the affective sites of rural/urban subjectivities, household/factory relations, and productive/reproductive labour, such that they do not fully belong to any of these realms. As a result, female migrant labourers must negotiate the conflicting demands of these converging spaces. Moving in and out of care work and industrial labour, female migrant workers take up temporary sewing piecework in the workshops. The short-term and flexible conditions of their work enable them to balance their income-generating labour in the factories with their care work obligations.

Migrants’ narratives of maternal longing, or qian gua, as I demonstrate, reveal the ambivalent conditions of mobility and emplacement, where female migrant workers labour to fulfil certain life projects as mothers, wives, and daughters, even though their precarious livelihoods keep them from satisfactorily achieving these roles. Their expressions of maternal longing show how jiagongchang household workshops emerge from the overlapping spatial and subjective displacements of family life and livelihood within which female migrant labourers find themselves. Migrant labourers try to collectively make sense of unexpected moments when family relationships become strained due to the pressures of migration, poverty, and wage labour. Their collective status as members of the floating migrant population, who drift between rural and urban classifications, facilitates a common thread through which stories of personal hardship, structural inequality, and poverty are collectively shared. Their fragmented memories of home in the countryside also serve as a platform for migrant workers to express their gendered longings and nostalgia.

As scholars and observers of contemporary China have noted, the nation's undocumented migrant population constitutes one of the world's largest groups of internally displaced people. Through their analysis of the country's domestic and overseas migrants, some anthropologists of China have argued that displacement should not be understood solely in terms of physical mobility. Rather, emplacement or feeling ‘stuck in place’ permeates alongside Chinese migrants’ experiences of physical mobility, which are conditioned by the cultural practices of exclusion and political forms of Othering, leaving displaced people feeling subjectively incarcerated. The paradoxical dimensions of migration and displacement thus compel people to feel grounded and ‘out of place’.

In her study of overseas Fujianese migrants, for instance, Julie Chu shows how some villagers’ travels to and from their native place have intensified the desire for emigration among those who lack the means and opportunities for transnational mobility.Footnote ⁷ Chu argues that migrant identities and forms of social belonging among displaced populations in places of destination must be understood alongside feelings of emplacement among those who stay in places of dispersion. Such consideration sheds light on a broader geography of desire and belonging that remains unbound by transnational borders and assumptions of ‘the local’. Meanwhile, in her study of rural citizens who reside in Guangzhou's urban villages, Helen Siu argues that emplacement is part and parcel of people's conditions of displacement.Footnote ⁸ She argues that displacement should not be solely equated with physical mobility but with cultural forms of exclusion as well as with affective dimensions of immobility.

While anthropological studies on migration and displacement have insightfully examined the paradoxical conditions of emplacement and mobility within which migrants find themselves, I aim to further deepen their analyses by arguing that precarious labour within Guangzhou's household workshops relies precisely on female migrant workers’ negotiations with their feelings of displacement and being ‘stuck in place’ as both industrial wage workers and domestic caretakers. Women workers’ expressions of qian gua, or longing, convey their paradoxical conditions of immobility and displacement. Their sense of feeling immobile compels them to pursue their longer life trajectories as mothers, wives, and caretakers in the industrial workshops. Although they experience a certain sense of mobility in their life course as migrant workers, they feel that they have not quite fulfilled their desires and aspirations in their family lives. Thus, migrant women's struggles challenge the dichotomy that separates productive and reproductive labour, since they carry the double burden of piece-rate work in the factories and care work for their families.

Using case studies from a jiagongchang in Guangzhou's garment district, where I have conducted ethnographic research on the low-cost fast fashion industry since 2010, I narrate the stories of factory women who labour as temporary wage workers in an informal household workshop.Footnote ⁹ Through their stories, I demonstrate the ways in which migrant labourers’ expressions of maternal longing produce jiagongchang household workshops as marginal hubs of women's low-wage and informal labour across Guangzhou's supply chains for low-priced garments. Their conditions of maternal longing and migratory displacement are brought about by having to continually bridge the spaces of rural/urban, household/factory, and reproductive/productive labour. Their efforts in trying to balance these tensions cause them to feel unfulfilled in their desires and obligations as industrial workers and domestic caretakers.

In what follows, I begin by historically situating jiagongchang household workshops that have emerged in the spatial interstices of the rural and the urban within Guangzhou's urban villages. I then trace how maternal longing serves as a force of informal production across the supply chains for low-cost fast fashion, particularly within worker-to-worker relationships as well as employee-boss dynamics. Female migrant labourers’ expressions of maternal longing demonstrate how their activities within jiagongchang blur the dichotomies that once defined rural/urban, household/factory, reproductive/productive labour, and boss/employee relations. Temporary sites and precarious forms of low-wage production in the jiagongchang serve as fragmented and provisional resources of sociality and labour as migrant workers and urban villages gradually become incorporated within the urban fabric. Migrant women's unrequited yearnings as factory workers and caretakers demonstrate how marginal hubs across the supply chains for low-cost garments in Guangzhou are created through the disjunctures of emplacement and mobility, which are intensified as they attempt to bridge the contradictions entailed in care work and industrial labour.

Blurring the rural and urban: the historical emergence of jiagongchang in Guangzhou's urban villages

In the past three decades of market reform, China's intensified participation in the global supply chains for low-cost commodities has been facilitated by the convergence of the nation's retreat from a planned economy and the proliferation of outsourcing of labour and manufacturing capabilities by multinational corporations to places across the Pacific Rim. These socio-economic developments have resulted in the structural processes of fragmenting rural households and kin relations in the countryside. Indeed, the expansion of private enterprise in China, as well as expansion of flexible production, would not have been possible without the mass mobilization of low-wage labour among female workers who have migrated from lower-tier cities and the countryside to urban cores and other production hubs.

The hukou household registration system, a Maoist policy of population control, designates the majority of these migrants as undocumented city dwellers who are excluded from asserting legal claims to state-sponsored welfare, including education, housing, and health care. As rural citizens under the hukou, undocumented migrant labourers become incorporated within the urban landscape for as long as they are able to provide low-wage labour. Dispossessed from their land as well as excluded from legal claims to state welfare, millions of migrants sell their labour power in the factories with little certainty about their future prospects. Pressures to remit money to their natal families, along with rising costs of living in the cities, leave female workers particularly dependent on low-wage employment. Migrant women struggle to provide financially and care for their families, while juggling housework with low-paying jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors.

Guangzhou's informal sector attempts to harness the labour power of these female migrants by organizing the assembly lines of low-cost production within small-scale household workshops. Hidden within the city landscape, clusters of dense and low-lying factories, warehouses, and apartment buildings line the southeastern corner of the city. Here, thousands of migrant labourers from China's lower-tier cities and the countryside work out of the garages, living rooms, and abandoned ancestral halls that serve the global commodity chains for low-cost fashion garments and accessories. Within this concrete labyrinth of narrow buildings and twisted alleyways, over 200 household factories, or jiagongchang, yield nearly 5 per cent of the country's annual garment production.Footnote ¹⁰ Factory bosses who served as China's first generation of migrant wage workers during the 1980s and 1990s in the neighbouring cities of Dongguan and Shenzhen, own and operate these assembly factories. These former wage workers use their modest savings and skills to experiment with the risks of self-employment and entrepreneurship. Using outmoded and second-hand machines, assembly factories organize craft-like modes of labour and mass manufacture to support the ‘just in time’ manufacturing capacities of larger, more centralized garment factories. Emphasis on low-volume piecework and hand labour enables jiagongchang to facilitate the quick turnover of styles characteristic of the world's low-cost fast fashion sector.

In a broader sense, the jiagongchang serve as an illustrative feature of Guangzhou's urban villages, or chengzhongcun, quite literally known as ‘villages in the city’. Situated within the urban villages that comprise Guangzhou's garment district, the jiagongchang historically emerged from the spatial interstices of rural/urban; home/factory, and state/collective land. Currently, urban villages in the surrounding Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, like those that comprise Guangzhou's garment district, serve as affordable housing, large-scale factory communities, and gateways for recently arrived migrants from the countryside who are searching for affordable housing in major metropolises, such as Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou.Footnote ¹¹ Administratively, urban villages are no longer agricultural villages, yet according to the hukou household registration system, their residents and the surrounding infrastructures are not considered fully urban either.Footnote ¹² As former agricultural villages that once stood in the shadows of the city, urban villages are the result of the unbridled urbanization that has taken place over the past three decades. City expansion has physically enclosed these distinct neighbourhoods and threatens to incorporate these spaces into the concrete jungle. They differ from city neighbourhoods that are constructed on state-owned land, since long-standing members of the agricultural collectives retain the administrative use-rights over their land.Footnote ¹³

The mushrooming of jiagongchang in Guangzhou's urban villages primarily relied on the widespread practice of low-wage and unregulated labour. Since the introduction of the household responsibility system in 1979, during which agricultural land was decollectivized and redistributed to individual households, the rapid industrialization of the surrounding urban villages converged with an influx of undocumented migrants from the countryside. Few, if any, factory owners, wholesalers, and temporary wage workers in the area abided by enforceable contracts. During the 1990s, village members built apartments and rented out residential and commercial spaces to undocumented migrants largely outside the purview of the municipal government. These former villagers quickly rose to the ranks of wealthy landlords, while retaining their administrative status as rural peasants. The inflow of foreign capital, primarily from garment wholesalers and factory owners in Hong Kong and Taiwan, further promoted the proliferation of these small-scale household factories in the area. Although these urban villages were administratively transferred from the local Xinjiao Commune to the urban management of Guangzhou city in 1986, most economic affairs there remained under the direction of the local village collectives specific to their residential neighbourhoods.

Historically, jiagongchang assembly factories exemplified what Michael Piore and Charles Sabel describe as the ‘second industrial divide’, a historical epoch marked by the growth of small, enterprising firms along the Pacific Rim.Footnote ¹⁴ The so-called return of small-scale household workshops in places across the global South featured forms of flexible mass manufacture that replaced Fordist types of mass assembly factories organized along vertically integrated lines. This industrial transformation stemmed from sociopolitical crises that affected the global economy, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s. It ushered in innovative alternatives to mass production by connecting small and fragmented firms to fulfil the quick delivery of low-cost commodities to multinational corporations. These small firms utilized kin relations and craft-based production, which were mobilized to facilitate the transnational outsourcing of labour and manufacturing capacities by multinational corporations.Footnote ¹⁵

Since the publication of their book in the early 1980s, women's productive and reproductive labour have intensified, creating the affective and material anchors that link migration networks with supply chains for the world's low-cost commodities. Specifically, the relocation of mothers, sisters, and daughters from their households to the cities serve as pathways through which their migratory movements to the cities connect with their kinship networks in the countryside. Indeed, over the past three decades, the PRD region, as well as other regions in China and throughout the global South, have witnessed the intensified extraction of migrant women's unpaid labour, which directly sustains practices of transnational outsourcing by multinational corporations. As the United Nations reported in 2007, women's work in the global South drives and supports numerous informal sectors of the world economy through their subcontracted work as well as the unpaid labour they undertake for the family in the household.Footnote ¹⁶ Their double burden of reproducing the global labour force while materially and emotionally caring for their families highlights the multiplicity of ways in which women contribute to the formation and development of global supply chains.Footnote ¹⁷ In short, global supply chains are, in many ways, both gendered and intergenerational.

As a case in point, migrant women's bodies reproduce the affective dimensions of the family, a key force of low-cost production within the household workshops. As Elizabeth Dunn observes in her study, Polish factory women reinforce their roles as mothers on the shop floor through various feeding practices.Footnote ¹⁸ Likewise, in Guangzhou, migrant women's roles as primary caretakers are also performed in the household factories where women often help each other by performing domestic tasks for one another, including cooking, washing, and childcare. On particularly gruelling work days, female factory owners provide dinner for their hired workers, which usually consists of stir-fried vegetables and meat over white rice. When young mothers bring their toddlers to the factory in lieu of finding day care, female workers keep an eye on each other's children by safeguarding them from minor dangers around the factory space or distracting them from the monotony of the working day.

Although workers tend to socialize along lines of native place and linguistic ties, women bridge their regional differences by sharing stories of motherhood and family life. Within the confined quarters of the jiagongchang, where some migrant labourers live and work, assembly lines are organized such that female workers can fulfil their tasks on the sewing machines while sharing details about their personal lives. Their conversations commonly lead to close friendships being formed, which includes shopping and dining with one another outside the factory work space.Footnote ¹⁹ Female factory owners often join the women at the sewing stations, thereby closing the affective gap between employer and wage worker. Their relationships exemplify how expressions of care within the industrial setting of a factory often fall within the domain of the feminine. In the course of my research, I have come across female factory workers who divulge problems that they encounter in their personal lives and offer assistance to one another. They express mutual concern and appreciation for one another, thereby building convivial ties. In short, they engage in the work of gendered care for one another within the context of flexible production. The everyday operation of the jiagongchang, therefore, relies on the care work performed by these migrant women.

Blurring the household/factory: qian gua as a force of informal production across Guangzhou's supply chains for low-cost garments

Through their gendered ties, female workers in the jiagongchang forge a sense of what Svetlana Boym calls ‘diasporic intimacy’, a transient and precarious affection for each other.Footnote ²⁰ Such intimacy describes a condition in which two or more immigrants come together through a shared sense of precariousness or alienation in a foreign land, however short-lived this encounter may be. Feelings of homelessness and exile among immigrants produce a double consciousness—what Boym describes as ‘a double exposure of times and places, a constant bifurcation’.Footnote ²¹ ‘Exile,’ she continues, ‘means to leap outside. Exile is both about suffering in banishment and springing into a new life; it reveals an incommensurability of what is lost and what is found.’Footnote ²²

Women's feelings of qian gua and their care work in the jiagongchang reflect, in many ways, Boym's description of diasporic intimacy as a temporary and precarious convergence of migrants’ shared conditions of displacement and alienation. Maternal concern and longing for someone far away serve as forces of low-wage production, thereby signalling women workers’ experiences of displacement and dislocation. Their affection for a loved one in a distant place, which remains unfulfilled and unrequited, becomes a mobilizing force of low-wage labour along an uneven and disjointed chain of marginalized labour and hub of extraction. Women seek meaning from their labour as mothers and as wage workers in the household workshops, although their double burden in the jiagongchang further blurs their overlapping roles. For instance, many migrant labourers whom I encountered articulate their concerns about the rising costs of education for their children, their elderly relatives’ failing health, and the emotional tensions that their absence has caused in their family relationships.

Female factory workers also bridge regional differences by venting about their familial problems in their home villages, alluding to the difficulties in maintaining stable family relationships across vast geographic and emotional distances. The ethnographic vignettes that I sketch below demonstrate how some of the migrant mothers in the factory attempt to find solutions to their children's involvement in drug abuse, industrial accidents, debt, and domestic violence. These problems emerge when the mothers are absent from home or when children are brought into the factories to assist in low-wage production. The demands of industrial work strain the migrant labourers’ family relationships, particularly because the family relies on them for socio-economic survival. The bridging of productive and reproductive labour among female migrant workers thus become a significant force of industrial production in the jiagongchang.

As a case in point, during one of my early visits to the Wongs’ factory, I met a loquacious mother of a lovely 10-year-old daughter. Mrs Ma, who appeared to be in her late thirties to early forties, hailed from one of the villages around Taishan located about three to four hours west of Guangzhou. She had been living and working in the garment district for the past 20 years. One day, after exchanging our usual greetings, Mrs Wong and I trailed off into silence as Mrs Ma's robust voice began to dominate the shop floor. Speaking in Putonghua, Mrs Ma complained about drug abuse in her hometown.

Apparently, the use of cocaine (bai fun, literally ‘white powder’) was rather common there. It was not unusual, she said, to find people, ranging from young to old, addicted to cocaine. It was grown in the fields surrounding her hometown, attesting to the prevalence of the drug there. Various local gangs operated around her town, coaxing people into purchasing and using the drug. These gang members hung around various marketplaces and even visited people's homes in the hope of luring potential users to become regular customers. Two years earlier, the police had caught a major ringleader of a drug-dealing gang in the village.

As Mrs Ma openly shared her stories with us, we realized that one of the gang's customers was her own son. When Mrs Wong (the factory owner) asked Mrs Ma how she had discovered that her son was using cocaine, Mrs Ma explained that he loafed around the village and followed the same boring routine day in and day out. Every day, he woke in the mornings, visited his usual dim sum restaurant, watched TV, took naps, and occasionally read in bed. Further probing by Mrs Wong revealed that Mrs Ma's son had been introduced to cocaine by his close friend. She went on to describe his laziness and the aimlessness of his life, causing me to wonder why he did not look for a job.

Mrs Ma continued to explain that one day she got into a physical fight with her son, while she was holding a baby in her arms. As his hand swept across her shoulder, some white powder settled on her body. Apparently, her son stopped using drugs shortly after her discovery, an intervention which she perceived as a saving grace for her entire family. She stated, ‘Thank goodness that I discovered this [her son's drug use] because once you start it's easy to become addicted. Otherwise, it would become a huge nightmare for our family.’ Mrs Wong echoed her sentiment: ‘My brother-in-law explained that he only tried it a couple times’, thus suggesting that drug use was merely a passing experiment for him.

Once Mrs Ma discovered the use of drugs in her family, no one dared to bring it back into the home. Even the gang members did not have the courage to come by the house for fear of incurring her wrath.

Her narrative seemed to suggest that she not only served as the family's caretaker and breadwinner, but also that her work as a seamstress in the city meant that she was a responsible member of her family while other family members seemed more wayward. As I got to know Mrs Ma and her daughter, whom she regularly brought to the factory, I slowly began to realize why the mother often refused to return to her home village. It seemed that Mrs Ma wanted to shelter her young daughter from the violence and drug problems that plagued her family members and fellow villagers.

On separate occasions, I noticed that Mrs Ma's daughter sometimes assisted her mother at the sewing machine, demonstrating the child's familiarity with garment work. It then became clear to me that Mrs Ma kept her daughter by her side as she made her rounds of the factories in the garment district. During Mrs Ma's occasional time off, the mother and daughter would ride on the newly built subway (by the municipal government in preparation for the 2010 Asian Games). Together, they also visited the airport, just so that they could watch planes fly in and out.

Despite Mrs Ma's physical presence in Guangzhou, she remained emotionally attached to her son and family members in the countryside. The temporary unburdening of her maternal concerns on the shop floor served as a fleeting release from the strain in balancing care work in her household with wage labour in the factory. The geographical distance that she maintained as a temporary worker in the garment district allowed her to manage, to some degree, the emotional turmoil that she experienced as a mother and as a migrant labourer. At the same time, however, her absence from home seemed to have exacerbated her son's waywardness and his involvement in drugs, thus signalling the difficulties Mrs Ma had in balancing industrial work in the city with her obligations as a mother towards her son in the countryside.

Blurring productive and reproductive labour: negotiating the double burdens of care work and industrial labour

While Mrs Ma had to cope with the unintended consequences of her absence from home in the countryside, other migrant women had to deal with problems that emerged when they were obliged to raise a family within a factory setting. During another visit to the jiagongchang, I discovered that Mrs Wong, the factory owner, was absent from the shop floor. The workers’ stony faces and the deafening silence penetrating the dusty air signalled that something was unexpectedly wrong. I proceeded to climb the steep ladder staircase to the second floor where I found Mrs Wong lying horizontally across the couch, resting on one side of her body with her arm stretched across her eyes to block out the light.

After I reached the top of the long staircase, I immediately greeted Mr Wong, who was standing beside the worktable. He returned my greeting in a tired and spiritless tone. Sensing the lack of enthusiasm in his voice, I gently asked whether they had worked another late-night shift. To my surprise, he replied they had not, but did not provide any other explanation. He then tenderly nudged Mrs Wong's shoulder to wake her. As she slowly lifted her heavy eyelids, she acknowledged my presence in a muffled and sombre tone of voice, a sharp contrast from her usual eagerness and zeal. Her eyes looked puffy and swollen from crying the previous night.

With a slight air of shame and embarrassment, Mrs Wong explained that her 16-year-old son, Bun Bun, had spent the night at a nearby hospital awaiting knee surgery. Apparently, Bun Bun had gravely injured his right knee as he hoisted a heavy bolt of fabric along the steep metal staircase to the second floor a few months earlier. For at least three full months, Bun Bun had kept silent about his knee, even though he could only drag his right foot around as he limped around the shop floor. Everyone in the factory had noticed his injury, but no one realized that his condition would worsen to the extent that he needed surgery.

With tear-filled eyes, she expressed her disappointment in her son. Implicitly, however, her anger was directed primarily towards herself as a mother. ‘You know how is,’ she said, as the story poured out. ‘He is always so silent and hardly said anything to us even when he was in pain. If only he had told us about his condition earlier.’ Mrs Wong was referring to Bun Bun's reticent and seemingly apathetic attitude towards everyone in the factory. In fact, the majority of his time in the factory was spent with his eyes cast downwards towards his mobile phone, through which he communicated with his friends back home or read anime novellas online, disengaged from everyone around him. I had noted the overt lack of communication between Bun Bun and his parents, but I never thought that their problem would result in such an outcome.

After she composed herself, Mrs Wong and I returned to the worktable downstairs where we sat to chat further. As a means of relieving her emotional distress, she unburdened herself by explaining the difficulties of motherhood as a migrant worker. Her tear-filled release revealed the deep sense of regret that she felt for having left her sons behind as a young migrant worker. She explained:

Mrs Wong continued to explain that Bun Bun had refused to attend school, so lacking any other viable alternatives, he joined the couple to work in the factory. Having seeing the young man in the factory over the course of the past few months, it suddenly struck me how unhappy he was there. The hours of overworking day in and day out must have depressed him. Mrs Wong added, ‘He was probably not used to working the hours that we do here. He was not used to this (factory) environment . . . His grandfather was right,’ Mrs Wong added, ‘this (factory) is no place for a child to grow up.’

The visceral sense of guilt and disappointment that Mrs Wong felt as a mother seemed real and unmasked. She expressed her remorse for being separated from her son while she and her husband lived far away in another province to work for most of the years of Bun Bun's childhood. ‘How can a mother not worry over her son?’ she asked with a defeated sigh. She continued, ‘All those months that he was in pain, he kept it from us. If only he had just told us of his condition.’ She added, ‘His grandfather called him earlier today and told him to go to the hospital.’ Her statement indicated that Bun Bun would only trust and listen to his grandfather who had raised him since he was a young child. Meanwhile, the parental role of Mr and Mrs Wong had taken a back seat in Bun Bun's life primarily because of their absence from it. For Mrs Wong, seeing Bun Bun's self-inflicted agony exacerbated her sense of failure and guilt as a migrant working mother. Her guilt was compounded by the fact that Bun Bun disliked working in his parents’ factory, even though the Wongs badly needed his help in running the family business. Unable to find alternative pathways to economic stability and socio-economic mobility for her son, Mrs Wong openly expressed her guilt in convincing him to join them in the factory.

Qian gua in building affective ties across the supply chain: wholesalers and manufacturers

While in some cases, the pressures of low-wage industrial work have clearly fractured family relations within the household, the day-to-day business of keeping up with the rapid turnover of fast fashion sometimes compels wholesaler bosses and their manufacturer employees to build affective ties with one another in order to fulfil last-minute requests and to meet unforgiving production deadlines. Wholesalers must trust that the manufacturers they hire will ensure the quality of the products and not sell their garment designs to a competitor. At the same time, factory owners rely on the goodwill of their clients to provide them with a steady stream of orders without demanding an unreasonable amount of labour time. They, too, must appeal to their affective ties with their clients in the hopes of maintaining their small-scale factory operations without being unduly exploited. In these circumstances, maternal longing serves as an affective bridge that brings wholesalers and manufacturers together in their business collaborations. The boundaries between care work and industrial labour, as well as between boss and employee, thus become blurred and ambiguous.

In the Wongs’ jiagongchang, for example, Mrs Wong and Carmen, her 28-year-old Guangzhou-based wholesaler client, had developed a fictive mother-daughter friendship that blurred the strict divisions between boss and employee. As a fledging wholesaler in Guangzhou's garment sector, Carmen had forgone her studies at a university in Australia to take over her mother's garment wholesale business shortly after her death. In the wake of her mother's unexpected passing, Carmen dedicated her career to the expansion of the family business, in her mother's name. As Carmen struggled to jumpstart her wholesale operation, Mr and Mrs Wong were attempting to establish their factory in the urban village. When Carmen met the Wongs, she and Mrs Wong bonded over the loss of Carmen's mother. Her feelings of sadness struck a chord with Mrs Wong's long-standing desire to have a daughter, particularly in light of her strained relations with her son. Over time, they provided crucial assistance to one another in the launching of their respective businesses. Meanwhile, Carmen and Mrs Wong shared intimate details about their families, calling each other several times a day to chat about the difficulties of marriage, motherhood, and entrepreneurship.

Occasionally, boss/employee relationships, like Mrs Wong's rapport with Carmen, develop into fictive, kin-based ties such that the dynamics of power between the independent subcontractors become unclear and ambivalent. In other words, the question of whether care work can, and should, be considered commodifiable as waged labour is left open to ongoing negotiation by women who must confront this dilemma. As a case in point, one evening, as Mrs Wong completed the task of packaging folded garments into flat cellophane bags, she had remained silent, mostly likely as a result of lingering feelings of exhaustion, anger, and resentment towards her husband after another bitter argument between the couple earlier that day. Moments later, she received a phone call from Carmen. Soon after, she discovered that one of Carmen's clients from Australia had seen a picture of one of the dresses that was not quite ready for shipment and was in the process of being assembled. Apparently, this client requested a shipment for the next day, pushing the Wongs’ deadline up by two days. After explaining to Carmen that she and the workers had worked overtime the previous night to meet a prior deadline, Mrs Wong reluctantly agreed to spend another sleepless night to complete the order.

Amid the overlapping conversations among the workers on the shop floor, I heard Mrs Wong informing Mr Wong that they would have to stay up that night to work late again. When Mrs Wong reluctantly returned to her place beside me on the factory floor, I asked her whether there was any possible way for Mrs Wong to convince Carmen to push the deadline back by one day, especially since they had worked so hard to meet the last deadline only a day before.

Mrs Wong explained to me that since summer was approaching, little girls in Thailand would soon be out of school. Therefore, their parents would want their daughters to wear new dresses to play in or to go shopping. Her explanation seemed out of context from the reality of the factory environment in which we were situated. However, Mrs Wong's explanation to me served as a rationale for her willingness to work overtime for her client, Carmen. She then patiently explained to me, playing the role of an older figure training an apprentice, ‘Sometimes you must understand the position of the other person by putting yourself in their shoes. Our client (Carmen) is getting pressure from her client, so we must do our best to serve her.’ She continued to explain, ‘When we needed to pay the three-month lease a few weeks back, she asked us if we had enough money. I told her that we didn't, so she lent us the RMB 10,000 (approximately US $1,500) we needed to keep our business.’

Mrs Wong described her friendship with her client with such compassion and respect that I initially failed to see the uneven power dynamics that coloured their boss-client relationship. The Wongs’ decision to fulfil Carmen's last-minute request at the expense of their need to rest arose from their desire to maintain their relationship with Carmen as both a client and family friend. The bonds of exploitation, obligation, and sacrifice between Carmen and the Wongs were tightly enmeshed, blurring the boundaries that separate boss/employee, care work/productive labour, and commodified/non-commodified work. Their collaboration as independent contractors in the highly volatile and unpredictable world of fashion and garment manufacturing emerged not only from a common interest in profit-making, but also from their affective parent-daughter bond.

In turn, Carmen's decision to provide financial assistance to the Wongs stemmed from her reliance on the couple as both her friends and business partners. Later in the week, Carmen and I shared our appreciation for the Wongs over dinner one evening. I explained to her the enormous sacrifices that the Wongs had made by living and working in the factory day in and day out. Impressed by the displays of modesty and pride that the Wongs had shown through their hard work, Carmen and her business partner responded, ‘You know, we have met numerous factory owners around here, and it's quite easy to find hard working people. But the Wongs are exceptional because we can rely on them. Once we place an order, we know that they would do the best they can to complete it. They do what they say they'll do. That's why we trust them.’ In this example, trust between an employee and an employee was developed through the idioms of kinship and maternal longing, thus blurring the cultural boundaries that separate friend, fictive kin, and exploiter. The extraction of labour power and surplus value in the context of subcontracted labour, as I have shown, is performed within these ambiguous margins.