We have no time to be bored.

I am not sure how Ms. Whang is going on. There are hundreds of small shopping bag factories in Yiwu. People living in the same village gather together to fold shopping bags, and the whole neighborhood has a printing house, perforating office, and other stores selling materials required for a shopping bag. However, they actually carry low unit cost products, so the quality is also low. 

Ms. Whang has folded shopping bags for ten years. When she moved into Jiangxi at first, she did another work. After then, she entered into our factory and learned how to fold shopping bags. She has built her career at the factory for a long time, so she was highly recognized as the best in this field in Yiwu. I met her six or seven years ago. One of our employees brought her in our factory. 

Yiwu always reminded me of her at first. She received a higher monthly income than others. She was really good at folding a shopping bag. She could fold more than 3,000 pieces. She was the best in our factory. Now, I don’t know where she is after we moved into this small village. I heard that her mother in law was too sick, so she and her family probably left Yiwu, or she actually worked in other factory. 

I am just curious about how she is. I felt unfamiliar with everything in Yiwu after we moved from Shanghai. Now, I feel also unfamiliar with this small area because I should leave Yiwu which we stayed for more than five years. I didn’t have many Chinese friends in Shanghai because our company usually did business with Korean companies. 

So, I made lots of Chinese friends in Yiwu. They worked in the same business to fold a shopping bag, printing house, and various subcontractors. However, in Shandong, I don’t have any friends, except for our employees and a Korean-Chinese boss who runs a chicken restaurant in front of my home. He uses the Korean name for his restaurant, but he and his wife came from here in Shandong. 

He really likes me because I am the first Korean customer who visited his restaurant first. In the restaurant, he serves the Korean style chicken, but it doesn’t taste like in South Korea. Anyway, it has the similar smell and shape to the Korean chicken. 

There is one Korean restaurant around here. It’s really cheap, but it is not delicious. It’s been a really long time since I visited there. There’s no change in our schedule in Shandong. I leave home at 7’o clock in the morning and return back to home around 6~7 p.m. Most of our employees don’t smoke and drink. 

If they don’t work overtime at night, they are just back to home, take a shower, have a dinner, and go to bed like I do. My daily life in this village is always same. Sunday is nothing special. I just go to write a post or do other things at a factory late. 

We usually see each other every day, so we don’t have something to say. But, that doesn’t mean that we are really bored in Shandong because we have no time to rest. We are always anxious about a small or serious matter happened to us every day. A few days ago, one of our employees hurt his hands while cutting a foil film, so he immediately went to see a doctor and went home. We also had another problem about a container delivery yesterday. 

So, we are always ready to any accidents that we will have. 

                            

There was a lot of snow in Shandong probably because of El Nino phenomenon in China. We should unload our materials coming from Yiwu and Shanghai, but we actually do nothing for five days because the expressway was paralyzed. 

It is not easy for a Korean person to operate a business in China. I just feel that meeting our employees and factory producers is a big fortune in my life. This company can’t be going well without them. I just suggest the purpose and direction. Other things are their own duties. We have done this so far, and we will do like that. We have no time to be bored.