My name is Zhang Mei Jin, and I am a 22-year-old silk worker living in Guangdong Province, China.
The year is 1880 and China trades many goods worldwide, especially silk.
Part of the Pearl River Delta is located here, which makes this area one of China's most important sources of silk.
The river is rich with sand and mud, and this material fertilizes the mulberry trees.
We use mulberry leaves to feed the silkworms that produce the silk.
Most of the women in my village work in the silk industry, including my grandmother and mother,
and our expertise has given us more power and independence.
After all, without the women silk workers, how can our village survive?
Chinese silk has been regarded as the best in the world for many centuries and is in high demand.
Perhaps you know of the Silk Road?
The Silk Road allowed our ancestors to trade many different types of goods with foreign merchants, but silk was always China's main commodity.
So China guarded the secret of its silk carefully.
Taking a silkworm out of China was forbidden, but many foreigners still tried to obtain our precious Chinese silkworms.
Long ago the ones who tried to smuggle silkworms out of the country were executed,
so it was many centuries before anyone learned the secret of Chinese silk.
A silkworm is a caterpillar, and when this caterpillar becomes an adult moth, the female lays three hundred to five hundred eggs.
These eggs are so tiny that 35,000 of them weigh only 28 grams.
As soon as the eggs hatch, the young silkworms are placed on wooden trays, and these trays are stacked on top of each other inside a dry farmhouse.
Fresh, shredded mulberry leaves are sprinkled on top of the young worms, and they eat and eat.
When I was seven years old, my job was to help pick leaves from the mulberry trees and fill many baskets with them.
My mother and the other women feed the silkworms every two hours, day and night, and all you hear are worms crunching on the leaves.
The farm is quite noisy!
The work is very hard because each worm has to be put on a new,
clean tray every day and needs to be protected from bright light, loud noises, and strong smells.
The worms don't like to be disturbed or they don't grow well, and when I was a young girl, my mother never let me even speak inside the farmhouse.
This was difficult because I had so many questions to ask!
After about a month of eating, resting, and shedding their skin four times, the silkworms are ready to spin their cocoons.
This is when the workers put them on spinning racks, and the silkworm builds its cocoon by making a long fiber and surrounding itself with it.
In about three days, the silkworms look like white balls.
Then, eight to ten days later, the cocoons are ready to be unwound, a process called reeling.
Right now I am still being trained by one of my aunts to unwind the cocoons.
My job is to reel the silk threads onto a large spinning wheel, but we have a machine that helps us to do this.
Our reeling machine is built directly over a large pot of very hot water, and I put the cocoons in the pot to kill the worms inside.
A long wooden plank, placed across the pot, has two poles that have two small rollers attached, and a bamboo tube hangs from each roller.
As I stir the cocoons in the hot water, the ends of the silk fibers float free.
I grab the ends of the threads, gently pull and twist them together, and feed these fibers through the bamboo tube.
Then the fibers wind around the rollers and onto a large reeling wheel.
When the fiber of the cocoon is completely unwound, only the dead insect is left.
Silk reeling is very tricky, and it takes years of experience to learn how to do it just right.
One silkworm can make a strand of silk about one thousand meters long—the longer the strand, the better the silk.
If a strand is too short, the quality of the silk suffers.
Remember, the best-quality silk thread is one that is reeled continuously in one long strand,
which means I cannot break the fragile thread as I am handling it.
I have heard that automatic machines powered by steam are being used now
because they can reel many cocoons at a time and unwind the silk more quickly.
Businessmen are building large factories near cities and employing hundreds of women to work in them.
But these factories are very noisy and some silk workers have gotten injured using the machines.
Many of our friends and neighbors have left our village to find work in the factories.
We miss them, but my family is content to stay here and stick to the older traditions because we take pride in quality more than quantity.
In my village silk making is so much more than just making a profit; we view our work as a spiritual exercise.
Whether it is collecting the cocoons, unwinding the threads, or even spinning the silk, each movement is done precisely and slowly.
This is why the Chinese martial art tai chi chuan includes exercises from silk-reeling techniques.
Practicing tai chi silk-reeling exercises helps a person to move slowly, smoothly, evenly, and continuously,
and prepares the body to make gentle yet accurate movements.
We are totally dedicated to our art, so it is not surprising that the silk from Guangdong is considered to be superior.
Making silk is a unique tradition of my village, my people, and my country.
I am proud it is part of my heritage and hope that one day I can learn all the skills needed to become a proficient silk worker.
Sadly the way silk is being made is changing,
but I hope that silk making will always be considered a noble art and that one day my children will learn it too.