‘She’s a good-for-nothing chummer. If she survives a week on the slime line without cutting off her thumb or slicing her wrist, she’s hired.’
The cannery smells of fish and death and cleaning chemicals and the stink of old refrigerators. There are long metal tables covered in blood. The workers’ gloves and bibs are smeared with red and they all stand in a shallow pool of bloody water and guts. The boss explains each job on the line. Hea…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘We all would like to think that with one line, one brush, we could make a reader fall madly in love, and there are writers that elicit such a response with the appropriately gorgeous.’
‘I tried to work out how many elements I would have plugged if I retired at sixty, and soon I was fatigued before a simple subtraction.’
Fiction by A. Jiang.
‘Finally! I thought. Now I get to work in a big factory. I was fifteen and a half years old. I was a child laborer.’
Xiao Hai on coming of age in the factories of Shenzhen, translated by Tony Hao.
‘in the Huangma Mountains, everything rots readily’
A poem by Zheng Xiaoqiong, translated by Eleanor Goodman.
‘People say it’s healthy for couples to fight, it means there’s still passion. I’ve always assumed that was bullshit, but now I’m not sure.’
Fiction by Brad Phillips.
