A-chin's drawer, the second from the left in the changing room of the packaging department of the Zhongli plant, Taoyuan district, holds twenty-two green bags arranged in a row by expiry date, the nearest ones at the front; and on Monday mornings at ten past seven, for thirty-two years, A-chin has opened that drawer before her locker, taken the first bag in the row, put it in the pocket of her apron and gone up onto the line, a thing written in no job description and asked of her by no one, but which the department stopped noticing around nineteen ninety-eight, the year line two stopped for eleven days and then started again without the technicians from Bade being able to say why it had stopped.

The bag has to be green. Yellow and red are not used, because green is the colour of the correct-operation indicator light and the other two are the colours of the fault; the green one is coconut flavoured, it has two characters printed on it that mean obedient, and it must not be expired, which is the part of the rule that seems strangest to people outside and is in fact the only obvious part, because a thing that has expired cannot ask anything of anyone.

Where the green bags are to be found, according to what A-chin has seen with her own eyes over the years: on top of the generator at the Taoyuan hospital, where her sister worked as an orderly; next to the cash machine of the bank opposite the station; on the trolley of the ultrasound scanner, in a ward where the consultant had them taken away and the night shift put them back; inside the server rooms, set on top of the cabinets, where nobody goes in with anything to eat and they are there all the same. In two thousand and sixteen, after the Kaohsiung earthquake, a semiconductor plant repaired a damaged line and then had bags printed with its own name on them and handed them out to its employees; the story ran in the papers for two days and nobody filed it under oddities.

At twenty-five past seven the shift supervisor arrives with the list.

He says nothing about the list. He sets it down on the trolley next to A-chin, turns the sheet with his thumb so that she sees it the right way round, and at the top of the right way round it says four. Then he says not to waste the new ones.

The list is the order in which the machines come apart. Number four is first because it is the smallest and because it is the one that goes into the lorry without taking the sides off; seven and nine come after, to Hsinchu, thirty-nine kilometres, which is fifty minutes when it is not raining; the others will be decided later. A-chin learned about the sale of the land on the twenty-sixth of July from a newspaper someone had left in the canteen open at the page, five point six seven two billion in large figures (the number was in the headline), and the company notice about the move came on the first of September, thirty-seven days later.

A-chin goes to machine four.

She takes off the old bag, which is from the Monday before and has not expired, and under the bag the casing has a rectangle of paint the colour the machine was when it arrived: a pale industrial green, twelve centimetres by twenty, clean at the edges, because for thirty years the light did not get into that rectangle and all around it it always did.

She looks at the rectangle.

Then she opens the new bag, checks the date on the back, and lays it exactly on top, on the spot where the casing has the fold that holds it in place even with the vibration.

The shift supervisor is watching her. He takes out his pen and marks something next to the four, and goes off towards seven with the list under his arm; what he marked A-chin will never know, and neither will we, because the sheet went back to the office that same evening.

What A-chin knows is that she has covered a rectangle of paint.

She goes back to the drawer at eleven, when the line stops for the changeover. She counts what is left because she has to know whether to order more: twenty-one bags, the first expires on the fourteenth of October, the last on the sixth of March next year. The Zhongli plant closes, according to the notice of the first of September, by the end of January.

The dates at the back of the drawer are further off than the date when there will be nothing left to protect.

A-chin closes the drawer slowly, so that the bags do not get mixed up and stay in the row as they are. Then she goes to the canteen, where a colleague who resigned on Thursday has come in to say goodbye and is telling them that nobody can get to Hsinchu every day; and she is right, because the trains are there but the timetables are not, and because waiting for your severance sitting on a chair that is being carried away in the meantime is a thing that can be said and that nobody can deny.

A-chin says yes, the trains are what they are.

At ten past one the line starts again for two hours, which are the last two hours of production scheduled for number four. The machine starts first time, the way it always has.

On top of the casing there is the green one, resting in the fold, with the two characters turned towards the operator.

Under the green one there is the rectangle, which now cannot be seen.