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tiger-striped, peonies (old lady phones) metallics (old man phones), anime characters, moon phones, expensive lantern phones. “Where is your printer?” she asked.
    “At home,” he said. “I print them up at home, bring them here. No electricity here.” Up north in Baoding she’d always bought them in a store where they let you pick your pattern online and then printed them there. More to pick from.
    On the other hand, he had a whole box full of ones that hadn’t sold that he would let go for cheap. In the stack she found a purple one with kittens that wasn’t too bad. Very Japanese, which was also very fresh this year. And only one hundred yuan for phone and three hundred minutes.
    He took the flat plastic sheet from her and dropped it in a pot of boiling water big enough to make dumplings. The hinges embedded in the sheet were made of plastic with molecular memory and when they got hot, they bent, and the plastic folded into a rough cell phone shape. He fished the phone out of the water with tongs, let it sit for a moment, and then pushed all the seams together so they snapped. “Wait about an hour for it to dry before you use it,” he said and handed her the warm phone.
    “An hour ,” she said. “I need it now. I need a job.”
    He shrugged. “Probably okay in half an hour,” he said.
    She bought a newspaper and scallion pancake from a street food vendor, sat on a curb, and ate while her phone dried. The paper had some job listings, but it also had a lot of listings from recruiters. ONE MONTH BONUS PAY! BEST JOBS! and NUMBER ONE JOBS! START BONUS! People scowled at her for sitting on the curb. She looked like a farmer, but what else was she supposed to do? She checked listings on her new cell phone. Online there were a lot more listings than in the paper. It was a good sign. She picked one at random and called.
    The woman at the recruiting office was a flat-faced southerner with buckteeth. Watermelon-picking teeth. But she had a manicure and a very nice red suit. The office was not so nice. It was small, and the furniture was old. Jieling was groggy from a night spent at a hotel on the edge of the city. It had been cheap but very loud.
    The woman was very sharp in the way she talked and had a strong accent that made it hard to understand her. Maybe Fujian, but Jieling wasn’t sure. The recruiter had Jieling fill out an application.
    “Why did you leave home?” the recruiter asked.
    “To get a good job,” Jieling said.
    “What about your family? Are they alive?”
    “My mother is alive. She is remarried,” Jieling said. “I wrote it down.”
    The recruiter pursed her lips. “I can get you an interview on Friday,” she said.
    “Friday!” Jieling said. It was Tuesday. She had only three hundred yuan left out of the money she had brought. “But I need a job!”
    The recruiter looked sideways at her. “You have made a big gamble to come to Shenzhen.”
    “I can go to another recruiter,” Jieling said.
    The recruiter tapped her lacquered nails. “They will tell you the same thing,” she said.
    Jieling reached down to pick up her bag.
    “Wait,” the recruiter said. “I do know of a job. But they only want girls of very good character.”
    Jieling put her bag down and looked at the floor. Her character was fine. She was not a loose girl, whatever this woman with her big front teeth thought.
    “Your Mandarin is very good. You say you graduated with high marks from high school,” the recruiter said.
    “I liked school,” Jieling said, which was only partly not true. Everybody here had terrible Mandarin. They all had thick southern accents. Lots of people spoke Cantonese in the street.
    “Okay. I will send you to ShinChi for an interview. I cannot get you an interview before tomorrow. But you come here at 8:00 a.m. and I will take you over there.”
    ShinChi. New Life. It sounded very promising. “Thank you,” Jieling said. “Thank you very much.”
    But outside in the heat, she counted her