HAIFENG, China — The boulders were as big as farm animals, and for $20 a month Feng Xingzhong's job was to slice them with an electric saw, cutting the hulks into fillets small enough to throw into a bowl.
Other workers in the jewelry factory would trim the pieces of jade, turquoise, onyx and other gemstones into little hearts and beads, polish them, drill holes and string them onto earrings, bracelets and necklaces to be shipped off to American shoppers.
Feng thought little about that, or anything else during his earsplitting 12-hour shift. By day's end, he looked like a coal miner emerging from the shaft, covered from head to toe in red, green or yellow dust, depending on the stone he had been cutting.
From age 18 to 26, Feng toiled without so much as a mask, trying to turn himself from an impoverished peasant into a prosperous city worker. He married a fellow employee, had two sons.
"We had a beautiful dream," Feng said. "To make some money, go home and start a small business."
Today, Feng hopes mostly to live long enough to collect some money from the factory where he developed silicosis, an incurable ailment known as dust lung that kills more than 24,000 Chinese workers each year in professions such as mining, quarrying, construction and shipbuilding.
Most slowly suffocate without protest. But not Feng. He sought workers' compensation. He sued his employer in two courts. He picketed near the company headquarters. He went to arbitration with the help of a Hong Kong labor group and even won a judgment.
But he hasn't received so much as a penny.
"I could die in a year or two," said Feng, now 31, who speaks in a soft, wispy voice and coughs frequently. "I am still so young. I have a wife, two children and an elderly mother. No amount of money can bring back my life. All I want is some justice."
*
The factory where Feng worked was one of more than 2,000 small and medium-sized similar operations near the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. The area processes about 50,000 tons of semiprecious stone jewelry a year, 70% of the world's total, according to the state-run People's Daily newspaper.
When Feng started in the early 1990s, his factory, called Gaoya, had about 50 employees. The crowded workshop had no ventilation system.
"We asked for masks, but they said no. There was no why," Feng said. "They knew we were peasants thrilled to have a factory job."
