PACIFIC RIM TRADE : Profiles : Millions of Engines Rev Up the Asian Economy : To start a family. To start a business. To travel. Such goals help make individual workers productive. : QIN TINZHEN, 18, <i> Chinese toy maker </i>

Forget about Santa’s elves and all the other Northern Hemisphere mythology in toy making. The toy makers are not found in the North Pole but in China’s steamy Guangdong province across the border from Hong Kong.

This is where more than 60% of the world’s toys are manufactured before being shipped out through Hong Kong to overseas stores. More than 300,000 people are employed in the $9-billion toy-making business there.

On a recent day at the Qualidux Toy Factory in Guangdong’s Heng Gang district, about an hour’s drive from the Hong Kong border, workers were busy making Mighty Morphin Power Rangers . . . and puzzles, miniature Jersey cows and plastic gifts for both McDonald’s and Burger King.

A typical toy maker, explain e d Y. S. Wong, who employs 6,000 of them at the Qualidux Toy Factory he manages, is a woman, 18 to 23 years old, from one of China’s impoverished interior provinces such as Sichuan, Hunan or Jiangxi.

The toy manufacturers pay fees to provincial authorities to recruit the young women, usually the second or third children in farming families, and load them onto buses for the southern coast.

To start, they are paid about 280 yuan a month, around $40. In addition, they receive free housing (eight women to a room), food and uniforms. Most of the women are able to send about half of their salaries home to their families.

Almost to a person, their goal is to save enough money making toys in five years to return home and get married with a decent nest egg to start a family.

Qin Tinzhen, 18, operates the No. 44 injection-molding machine at the Qualidux factory. Her machine makes red plastic toy truck cabs for an American company. She said she came to Guangdong from her home in distant Sichuan province, where her father is a rice farmer, when she was 16. Her first job was in an optical company.

“I heard from neighbors in Sichuan that there were good jobs here,” she said as she held up one of her red truck cabs.

Told that her product might someday make it all the way to the United States, she beamed with pleasure, a pink ribbon bobbing in her hair.

“I thought I was making toys for Hong Kong,” she said.