by Karoline Kan
In Caiyuan, many parents did not put much into their children’s education. They had neither money nor high expectations. Farming was the priority. To most of them, sending their kids to school was merely a way to keep them busy and out of trouble. Many of the children didn’t even finish the first nine years of education the government provided for free. Only a few would make it to high school. If a child went to college, it was such big news that the whole village celebrated. One year when a boy was accepted to Tsinghua University, one of the best schools in China, he received a 10,000-yuan cash award from the local government. A band of trumpets and drums played in front of his home, and a big flower necklace made of lucky red-colored cloth was placed around his neck.
My mother was worried that raising us in such a rural environment would be detrimental to our future. Yunxiang’s behavior was also ratcheting up her anxiety. At eleven years old, he played hooky and sat in video gaming bars. In the dim huts, renovated storerooms along the national road leading to the neighboring province, a few sets of screens connected to Nintendo 64 accessories had been installed against the wall. Kids, still wearing their schoolbags, sat on chairs, unmoving, staring at screens on which animated characters fought and moved under their direction. Most villagers did not mind; Nintendo 64 was a sign of modernity and progress. “The Japanese are evil, but they are so damn good at technology,” they’d say. A friend of Yunxiang, whose father was the best carpenter in the county and was thus richer than most, bought the consoles to play at home.
Yunxiang and I were regularly invited to gaming parties, where the host would show off their wares: Contra, Battle City, and Super Mario. But Mom hated the games. She said our time could be better spent. She would ground us every time she caught us coming out of the gaming bars. I spent a few evenings inside every month, but Yunxiang was grounded every week. One of our cousins, Chunheng, dropped out of school at fifteen to be a gamer, and Yunxiang had looked up to him like an older brother.
When my mother asked Uncle Lishui why he was okay with his son not going to school, he laughed.
“Someone has to farm. Otherwise, how would we survive? Don’t worry, he’ll be fine, he won’t starve.”
Uncle Lishui made a good living buying glass wholesale and selling it from the back of a three-wheel cart at a marked-up price in nearby villages.
“But don’t you want more for him? Look at our brother Shoukui; he’s a lawyer, in Lutai. Don’t you want something like that for Chunheng?”
“Shumin, you think too much—that’s why you’re so unhappy!” Uncle teased. “Our children have their own lives, and their own fate.” He patted her on the back. “If you really care so much, why don’t you move to Lutai?”
Uncle Lishui’s flippant response gave her an idea. Why not move to Lutai? Mom knew there was no hope for her to be promoted as a registered teacher, since she’d had a second child and that broke the law. She was tired of being a substitute teacher. If we moved there, where no one knew us, the past would be the past. We’d make a new home and a fresh start. Uncle Shoukui was already there, and his two sons were good students. What’s more, the schools were better there: They taught more than just Chinese and mathematics. They also had music and art classes, and sports. Mom decided that, more than ever, we needed to be living in a town, instead of in a small village. She didn’t know how we would manage without a job or a plan, but she knew it was the sort of life she wanted for us.
The town of Lutai and our village were only six miles apart, but towns had government jobs, and the children attended modern schools. If we moved, it would cost us: We’d have to pay rent and other bills like water, which was free in our village, and electricity. Although primary school, grades one through nine, were free, to have after-school activities like art and music classes required an additional fee.
More money was what Mom needed, but didn’t have. It was already difficult to make ends meet. But she decided the move would be worth it. She knew of people who had moved from other provinces and managed to settle down well in town. Why couldn’t she?
The greatest obstacle was the hukou, which strictly controlled and facilitated the rules of internal migration. The hukou system began in ancient China, when the emperors wanted to prevent free migration. When Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist Party founded China’s first republic in 1912 after the Qing dynasty was overthrown, they promised to end such restrictions. The Republic of China’s first constitution in 1912 acknowledged freedom of movement as a human right. The Chinese Communist Party upheld that right for the first few years, and then they began to change their minds.
A decade after the People’s Republic was founded, Sino-Soviet relations soured. The Soviets threatened China’s border and the fractured relationship worsened the already frosty international environment for China. A new plan was put into place, requiring rural residents to remain with the land to ensure food production; thus, the hukou system was reinstated in an effort to balance a number of people working in factories against those working in the fields. Citizens had to register their age, gender, marital status, and, most importantly, their hometown. After 1958, moving from village to city was not allowed unless the government approved.
Migration became less tightly controlled after Reform and Opening Up in 1978. But the right to migrate freely never returned to China’s constitution.
Where you could work and where you could get married, as well as whether you received a good education, health care, or a pension, were all determined by hukou, and urban workers had it better than farmers.
This unfair, discriminatory system exists today, enshrined by law.
Hukou meant that, because I was born in a village, I was deemed inferior to anyone born in a city, no matter how much harder I worked or how much more deserving I might be. It was disheartening as a child because all the adults in my life also instilled in me that hukou mattered. As an immigrant, you become an alien in a new land; to feel like an alien in your own country is another matter.
For the rural villagers, entering a town would have felt as magical as stepping into Oz, or into Daguanyuan, the mansion in one of the most famous Chinese novels, the Dream of the Red Chamber. In towns, the streets were all paved, so on rainy days mud would not ruin your trousers; the residents rode bikes to their factory jobs every morning and did not have to walk for miles; workers wore tidy blue uniforms with turned-up white collars; the floors of their homes were covered in clean gray tiles, not dirty bricks.
My mother would never forget the first time she visited her relatives in town. Before they let her in, they handed her a pair of slippers at the door. She was momentarily at a loss for words; then she realized no one in town wore their dust-covered shoes inside. This was my mother’s first impression of Lutai. She felt inferior, like a fish out of water.
My parents knew they could not simply leave the village and take up the good life in town so easily. It would be nearly impossible for her or my father to get urban hukous. The only way a status change could happen is if someone went to college and secured a government job, as my oldest uncle, Shoukui, had done.
So my mother could not rely on government support, and there were no job openings, not even for manual labor. It was 1996, and there were only three state-owned factories—a cotton mill, a steel mill, and a frozen seafood-processing plant—which were all doing terribly and rumored to be on the brink of shutting down. It was no secret that the cotton mill had been losing money for years, and that workers at the seafood-processing factory had work only three days a week because of decreasing demand from their main Japanese client, who switched their business to another privately owned factory in Dalian that worked faster than Lutai’s state-owned one. The old model of state-owned companies was facing a crisis nationwide—once drivers of the economy, they were now being reformed, privatized, or shut down.
Private enterprise became more and more important after Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up, but core, state-owned enterprises still had no real compe
tition.
Government-employed factory workers enjoyed stable, low-pressure jobs; productivity remained low and management rigid. When Premier Zhu Rongji came to power in the 1990s, he targeted the then-bloated state-owned enterprises that employed so many, yet produced so little. Millions lost their jobs in the ten years following. In small towns like Lutai, the state-owned enterprises were dying, but the private ones didn’t arrive to replace them—they preferred to be in cities first. There were too few jobs in town even for those with urban hukous. And Lutai residents topped the long waiting lists for work.
Mom thought first about using their little savings to start a business in the New Market. She’d rent a shop to sell fruit, seafood, and flowers. But what did she know about running a business? She had neither the experience nor the mind-set to survive the competition.
Weeks passed, and Mom began to give up hope. “We might be stuck in Caiyuan Village forever,” she’d tell me sadly. I was sad too. I didn’t want to be in a place where people whispered about me, but I also didn’t want to leave Chunting and my grandparents. Then Uncle Shoukui visited with good news: his wife had recently opened a kindergarten, but the loud, out-of-control town kids were too much for her to handle. Why didn’t my mother take it over?
Mom did not know if she could handle it, either, but her years of teaching made her well qualified, and Baba could help her. He had a high school diploma, a rarity that would add credibility to their venture. My dad was not sold on the idea, but he supported her, as he always did. Contrary to the custom, by now he had become used to being a helper in our family rather than the decision-maker. I suspect other families had a similar dynamic, though none would dare admit it.
The state-funded kindergartens in town were too few and their teachers were known to be too lazy—or so parents complained: too much time painting pretty pictures, not enough time practicing characters.
In urban China, where the competition begins on day one, parents did not want their children playing with their friends; they wanted them learning. And they did not want to pay the one hundred yuan per month that state-run schools charged for something they considered little better than babysitting. Private kindergartens had fewer textbooks and supplies, but they made up for the lack of resources by being just about affordable, and by focusing on core subjects such as math and writing.
We were among the first families from all the dozens of villages in Ninghe County to leave and move to a town. Chinese people have a deep attachment to the land. Traditionally, people believed they should remain on the land where they were born until the day they died. As a farmer, you were born on the land, grew up on the same land, and one day, if you were a man, you were buried in that land. Your ancestors were there, and your descendants would follow. Only promises of great fortune or calamity could entice people to leave—a catastrophic event like a famine or flood, or the opportunity to sit on an official throne.
But I was nervous about moving again. It had been less than two years since we moved from Chaoyang to Caiyuan. I was seven, and didn’t care about a good education or paved roads. All I cared about were my friends. Are people in Lutai nice? Will I meet new friends? Will they want to chase fireflies with me? Will there be enough stars in the town’s sky? I had many questions and concerns, but Mom said moving was the right thing to do. I had no choice but to trust her.
Chapter Four
We, the Migrants in Town
Lutai, 1996
Lutai is also known as Reed Island. Towns and villages with tai and gu in their names—both words for “island”—were everywhere in Tianjin, where five rivers funneled into the sea through the mouth of the Hai River. It created scores of tiny landmasses between crisscrossing waterways. Reeds shrouded Lutai’s streams, rivers, and ponds. As tall as a grown man, the reeds were felled in the autumn and dried in the sun to make baolian, thick mats used to insulate roofs. The reeds in Lutai had a reputation for being more waterproof than average, and were also used to weave mats to pad chairs and beds, as well as baskets for storing food. They brought wealth to the town, enticing many to live there.
When not weaving, Lutai’s residents would fish. Old people said they could catch enough fish, crabs, and shellfish for a day’s meal within a few short hours using nothing but homemade nets. Lutai’s two-inch silvery whitebait was famous for being tender and tasty. Big-city restaurants would buy it by the crate. When they had sold all they could, the fish were dried and saved for winter. But that was before I was born. Since the late 1980s, the water gradually became polluted, and fishermen had a much harder time making ends meet.
As the Chinese saying goes: “A sparrow may be tiny, but its body is complete.” Though Lutai was a small town, its population outgrew the number the government once planned for it when the new China was founded and the town rebuilt. A centrally orchestrated economy was introduced in the mid-1950s, modeled after the Soviet Union. The government calculated how much the country would consume each year, and formulated a plan to produce the amount to meet the estimate. The government also allocated set-wage jobs to workers based on their skills. Consumer goods—from rice and pork to soap and bicycles—were rationed. Lutai’s planners, like their colleagues in other towns around the country, expected their citizens to stay put, as dictated. Facilities and infrastructure were installed for about fifty thousand people, and no more. There was one police station, one cinema, one park, one state-owned market, and two hospitals—one each for traditional Chinese and Western medicine. Today, more than 130,000 people live in Lutai. I grew up after Reform and Opening Up, so my generation has always taken for granted the abundance of resources, products, and big shopping malls. I could not imagine having to bathe using a slivered ration of soap. My parents and grandparents weren’t so lucky.
However, even with the old days long gone, in the nineties, the stains of that bullish economy remained.
When we arrived in Lutai, a business-driven urbanization had begun and was booming. People were taking their fate into their own hands. Street peddlers sold steamed buns, soy milk, and eggs pickled in tea from illegal street stands. The two-story Workers’ Club was now filled with sellers peddling cheap clothes and pirated books. Locals complained about all the migrants with weird accents running businesses and selling suspicious foreign products: cigarettes from Taiwan, beers from Vietnam, and fur hats from Russia, all of which were probably imported illegally. In life, change occurs every day, but the shift is sometimes so incremental it’s imperceptible. The locals complained about the migrants who rushed into the town and sold illegally imported or fake products, migrants who made their streets dirty and messy; but no matter how much they complained, they still bought the cheap pots, knives, shampoos, and shoes from migrants.
At seven, I was wide-eyed when we arrived in Lutai. It was so modern. Every Tuesday afternoon, Baihua Cinema would announce a new film by papering a Hollywood poster on its gray cement wall. The courthouse, police bureau, and tax bureau each had their own buildings in the center of town. Two yuan would get you a whole day in Fangzhou Park, where there were paddleboats and pink lotus alongside the riverbank. The newly built Fuli Hotel featured Lutai’s first swimming pool and seafood buffet. The Luyang shopping mall was the tallest, with six floors and a clock on top. I liked to look up at it each time I passed. The shopping mall had everything a village child could imagine. I wanted to wear the little white dress with red polka dots that I saw in a shop window and to taste the chocolate bars wrapped in paper printed with Russian matryoshka.
We moved into a traditional single-story house in the hutongs, the narrow alleys commonly found in the old section of northern Chinese cities. It was a rental apartment in a community called Dongdaying, or the East Barrack, once reserved for the military during the Qing dynasty. I was disappointed as soon as I saw it. It was not like the fancy new homes we had seen advertised on the sides of buses as we drove through town. The homes in Dongdaying were run down, and had been built in the 1970s. The streets, though pave
d, were full of holes. The alleys were too narrow for two cars to pass, so one car would have to wait at the corner for the other. Wires running from the telephone poles were tangled like spiderwebs along the edges of homes. Our walls were so paper thin that at dinner I could hear the clash of spatula on pans and smell the frying vegetables from next door. How was this the “bright future” Mom had promised? We slept in a small room together, whereas Yunxiang and I had our own bedrooms back home. I didn’t understand how Mom could prefer this over the village. I didn’t understand what made the town better, except the tall buildings and lavish shops we couldn’t afford.
The shabby hutong neighborhood was not comfortable, nor was it safe.
One day a rainstorm brought down the power lines on our street. No one had inspected the lines in years, and the frayed cable ends fell into a puddle, electrocuting a man. When his wife tried to save him, she died too. When the policemen came to take the bodies, I sat inside and could still hear the family’s wailing over the blaring sirens. From then on, I always walked on the far right side of our street, away from the power lines.
Our home had four rooms and a small yard. The walls were lime-washed, and if I touched them, my fingers would end up covered in white powder. The iron windows were rusted. The floor was cement, and the kitchen was furnished with only a shelf and a large blue tin filled with liquefied natural gas used for cooking. Every few months when it was emptied, Baba would pay thirty-five yuan to refill it at a gas station.
My parents hadn’t brought any furniture with them, so we had very little in our home. For many years, I never brought classmates home, and turned down invitations to visit theirs. I couldn’t bear to have to reciprocate, and reveal how we lived.
The summer was hot and humid in Lutai, and afternoon showers regularly flooded the poorly drained streets. This made the hutongs a breeding ground for mosquitoes. When I forgot to apply repellent, my arms and legs would be covered with bites within minutes. Baba had to climb a ladder onto the roof every day to check for leaks. If he didn’t get there in time, the rain could drip through to the walls. Mom used the empty laundry basin to collect the water dripping from the ceiling. I’d sit counting the drops per minute to try to cheer myself up.