English Book Cover
My Name Is Li Ling mEi
A Story That Escaped The Machine
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In Zhengzhou, China, a single factory compound houses 300,000 workers who help make the world’s smartphones.
It has its own police force. Supermarkets. A post office. Hospitals. Concrete towers wrapped in suicide nets.
Some workers don’t leave for months.
Li Ling Mei secretly documents her life inside a factory city where nothing belongs to you—not your time, not your body, not even your future.
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Day 一
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I got there at 5.04AM.
At the gates of the factory, there were already so many people I thought they must be lining up for food — but they were all there for jobs, like me.
Some stood silently with folded arms. Others sat on their bags. A few were asleep on flattened cardboard.
I stood behind a boy with short hair and soft shoulders.
Neither of us said a word.
When the gates opened, the crowd moved like steam through a crack.
It was a silent crush.
We were processed in single file, like cattle.
After the gate, everything changed.
There were guards in dark uniforms, silent but watchful — like statues with earpieces.We were told where to stand over loudspeakers, when to move, where to look — but no one spoke to us directly.
They didn’t yell. They didn’t have to.The line moved by instinct.
By the time I reached the front, I had already stopped being a girl with a name.I was a height (1.71m), a weight (59kg), blood type (O+) and pressure (115/67) and soon just an ID number.
Digits inside just five boxes.
At each checkpoint, there was a beep.
The wrong beep meant rejection — you’d be sent back out through the same gates you came in empty handed. It was a machine game show, we were human marbles dropping into slots and holes of someone else’s design.
A small white card emerged from a printing machine as I passed through the final scan. Behind the window, the guard looked down and read it aloud:
“Li Ling Mei. Q3306444.
這是你的工作ID號。”“This is your work ID.”
That would be one of the last times I heard a superior use my name.
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At 9.41am each following day, her daily journal
will be delivered until her story concludes.