Lei the sweatshop worker

Hannah

//okay i just wanted to say this story was super old, i was super dumb when i wrote this, though nothing much has changed, i wrote it for a school project and my friend wanted me to post it. however i'm not going to take it down because it has had lots of reads and stuff :P! okay it sucks i know but thank you for reading it if you have.//


This is the diary of Lei she works in a Chinese sweatshop that apple run. She helps make phones.
27th February 1999

Dear diary,
Today was my 18th birthday I still can’t believe it been four years since I started here. I hate it! But I have nowhere else to go or be. The conditions here have got worse, the place stinks of crushed dreams and desires, no one is happy here. I want to escape. Go somewhere, somewhere I fit in. In four years I have made no friends. I don’t need friends, I had friends when I was a different person, when I wasn’t told what to do.

No one remembered I was 18 today, no letter from my family. All I want is a letter saying “hey Lei, we miss you and really appreciate that you have been working your but off for the last four years to pay our rent and now your little brother can now go to school and insure that you hard labour hasn’t gone to waist. From your loving, devoted family” and I bet you my brother has gone to the cheapest school my parents can find and the rest of my money goes to alcohol for my parents. I and my siblings didn’t deserve parents like that. We were always well behaved and kind to people but we could never bring friends home else they would see my drunk parents screaming at us for no reason.

I want to be myself, but here I am someone else, I can’t express myself I can be different to any other worker. I want to leave this sweatshop and China, go to America or Europe, I want to live because working here all my life isn’t living its dying. All the time I can feel that death is on my shoulder. It scares me. All my life I have been mistreated. Death seems to be calling me…calling me to the grave. I don’t have the strength to kill myself but if I did I would. I guess I still have a reason to live and even if that reason is staying here so young girls and boys can have an iphone I will do it. I believe that everyone has a purpose and sometimes without that person doing that thing they were meant for the whole world will collapse into darkness.

When I was younger I used to dream of romance, adventure, the normal things you were supposed to do, now, if I do sleep, I see black. Just black. I feel like I am floating on my back through nothingness. I want someone to save me, to love me, to make an adventure with me. I can never have that. When I wake up from nothing I see the plane white walls of my room. Damp oozing out of them. I have never felt so alone. I go for breakfast, YUK! It reminds me how worthless I am. I have lost all my ambitions. I hope my siblings don’t lose them. I want them to break free something I couldn’t do, I want my sister, Han, to fall in love and my four brothers, Cheng, Chun, Da and Chin, to make adventures for four perfect woman, though those boys deserve the most beautiful, kind, sweet girls in the whole universe and I don’t think that even they will be good enough for my brothers. I also hope that Hai sees me in heaven, I remember when we were thirteen and we were the most inseparable couple, he was all I needed but he died and left me to bleed inside. I loved him and will forever more.
I have to leave now bye.

Lei
That night Lei got up the courage to take her own life. She now rests in heaven with her beloved Hai were they lie side by side.