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【阅读理解】Reading: The Last Shift at the Harbin Cold-Storage Plant
The thermometer on the wall read minus eighteen, and Wang Meiqi, 34, was fastening a plastic tag to a crate of frozen mackerel when the compressor began to scream.
She had worked at the Harbin cold-storage plant for eleven years, and she knew the sound the way a farmer knows hail.
Her supervisor, Old Zhou, fifty-eight, glanced at the gauge, shrugged, and said the same words he had said every winter since 2019: 'Not tonight. Not our problem.'
Then the lights flickered and the belt halted.
That was the night of 12 January 2024, at 2:40 a.m., when the plant lost 4,200 tonnes of poultry and pork overnight.
The cause was not barbaric sabotage or a contrived accident; it was a brittle copper pipe, forty years old, that had quietly corroded under a layer of insulation.
The loss came to 21 million yuan.
Meiqi stood in the doorway and watched the frost turn to water — an awful, slow betrayal.
She felt a temptation to cry, then a hesitation, then nothing.
The insurance report later disclosed that maintenance had been postponed three times, which rendered the whole failure predictable, hence the fury that followed.
Before the collapse, the plant had been a small cosmos of its own.
On the ground floor you could browse racks of imported dairy; upstairs, in a compartment nobody visited, a bachelor named Liu Peng encoded shipping labels for the night shift.
He had studied geology for two years before the money ran out, and he liked to exaggerate his past: he claimed he had once measured limestone on the equator.
Meiqi did not believe him.
Nevertheless, she brought him soup.
They were both migrants, both allergic to being pitied, and both reliant on a payroll that had already begun to shrink — from 610 workers in 2021 to 388 by that January.
What followed was not a single disaster but a dispersal of small ones.
The owner, a snobbish heir named Sun Kewei, flew in from Shenzhen, extolled the virtue of lean management, and announced a twofold plan: automate the freezer line and prosecute the maintenance contractor.
His declaration pleased the shareholders.
It alienated everyone else.
The staff were asked to sign new contracts that implicitly stripped their pension input, and when they hesitated, the company used a legal formula to justify the cuts.
Meiqi's cousin, a veterinary assistant with a chronic liver condition, succumbed to the pressure first and moved south.
'The city does not love you back,' she told Meiqi on the phone.
'Starve quietly, or leave loudly.'
By spring, the plant was a decrepit shell.
Only 90 workers remained on the official roster; the rest had been sacked or had slipped away undetected.
The compressors were replaced, but the confidence was not.
Liu Peng began to suffer from insomnia and would interrupt conversations mid-sentence, as if his thoughts were on a separate, glacial timetable.
In April, a government inspection found the company guilty of mishandling hazardous waste, and the fine was comparatively mild: 180,000 yuan.
Old Zhou retired that same month.
At his farewell he made a short, clumsy tribute, then cried into his sleeve, which unnerved everyone more than the layoffs had.
'I wanted to preserve something,' he said.
'I do not know what.'
The final shift was on 30 June, a humid night with a lunar glare over the Songhua River.
Meiqi walked the aisles and swivelled each plastic knob on the packaging machine, one by one, out of habit or grief.
She had hoped the company would motivate itself to rebuild, that some sign of renewal would spring from the bankruptcy filing, but the paperwork only complicated the future.
Her own plan was simple.
She would take the 1,400 yuan severance, return to a village near Mudanjiang, and help her mother sell vegetables from a wagon.
There was no shame in it.
There was, however, an uncertainty she could not name.
At 5:10 a.m., the last pallet slid out, and the freezer lights vanished.
Liu Peng handed her a plastic bag of frozen dumplings, a small, ugly package that felt absurdly heavy.
'For the journey,' he said.
She almost corrected him — she was not on a journey, she was going home — but the sliding door closed before she could speak.
Outside, the sun was already up, the pavement was soaked, and somewhere a cricket had begun its mechanical, undetected song.
She stood there with the bag in her hand, waiting for the ice inside it to melt, or for someone to tell her whether the plant would ever open again.
Questions
1. What was the immediate cause of the loss at the Harbin cold-storage plant?
A. A brittle copper pipe that had corroded under insulation. B. A sudden power failure during a winter storm. C. A deliberate act of sabotage by a former employee. D. A malfunction in the automated freezer line.
2. How many workers remained on the official roster by spring?
A. 610 B. 90 C. 388 D. 1400
3. What does the word 'succumbed' most nearly mean in the sentence 'Meiqi's cousin... succumbed to the pressure first and moved south'?
A. Yielded B. Resisted C. Complained D. Escaped
4. What can be inferred about Old Zhou's feelings at his farewell?
A. He was proud of the company's new management plan. B. He was relieved to leave the plant after so many years. C. He was angry at the company for not promoting him. D. He felt a deep sense of loss and confusion about the future.
5. Which title best captures the main idea of the passage?
A. The Success of Lean Management in Chinese Enterprises B. How Government Inspections Saved a Failing Factory C. The Rise of Automation in Harbin's Food Industry D. A Cold-Storage Plant's Decline and One Worker's Uncertain Future