Back when I was working in the company at Pudong, I got ton know some of the workers there quite well. As with everything here, it was very heirachical and segmented. To get a good job (engineer!), you need most likly a masters degree or better PhD, and a very good recommendation from your teacher. Alternativly, if you have a bachelor's degree and your teacher knows someone who works in the company, that's probably ok - in fact you'll probably even earn a little more than the masters candidate, or if you have studied abroad they'll snap you up (and give you a big salary bonus!). Basic salery here is about 3000 RMB a month, and there are reasonable promotion opportunities after a few years I'm led to believe.
If you started work after school, you become a worker, and that's more or less as far as you will go (one worker who had lots of experience and defected to the company from another one became the forewoman in her room, and got abot 20 more than the average worker. After 9 years.). You wear different clothes to the engineers to highlight the difference, work at the same station for months on end (although it wasn't quite the sweatshop hours I was expecting, usually about 8-5 with free lunch provided at the onsite canteen) and generally do whatever you're told. You earn about 1000 RMB a month, probably share a room with another worker for about 200 RMB of that each, spend another 200 or so on food and transport, and end up with about 600 RMB each month. Not the greatest of jobs.
However they all work with a smile and are generally really friendly, although none speak English (but they know the premiership results better than me) and often don't even speak regular mandarin chinese all that well (so I'm told), prefering their local dialect.
Since the student engineers there have some time on their hands, and there is a set of benches near one particular work bench, we got to know the workers there very well. One was a very pretty girl from Anhui province (reknowned for being undeveloped) who was very chatty and generally amusing. She took it upon herself to teach me Chinese in her spare time during the day, then stole my mobile number from another engineer andbegan a texting campaign, letting it be known that she wanted to be invited out to dinner.
Great, I thought, a chance to get to know someone a little different from the rest of the Shanghai croud (Shanghai, everyone says, is very different to the rest of China; much more modern, fast paced and materialistic). So I invited her to a restaurant for dinner one time... or that's what I thought.
I was a bit surprised when she said no, after all the efforts she'd gone to, but recently I found out why. I'd asked her to a fan dian. Now fan is rice, which is used very often here to mean food generally, and dian is a building or shop. However, apparently when you put the two together it means... hotel! I bit my lip but couldn't help chuckling inside when I found that out a couple of days ago, another Chinese mystery explained!
For all you Romeo's out there, a much better way to ask a girl to dinner is, as I now know, "Wo (time and date) qing ni qu chi fan", literally 'I invite you to eat rice' - the same fan but not a dian in sight!
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