by Karoline Kan
Outside, our flooded yard would take days to dry. Tree roots blocked the drainpipe. My father and our next-door neighbor, Old Chen, once dug up the whole road in an attempt to clear the drains, but by the next week, the floods were back. The inside of our home sometimes became so damp that it smelled unrelentingly of mold, which made me feel sick to my stomach. When the sun came out, I’d run quickly to hang my laundered shirts on a string tied between two trees. Those days were always a relief, and the sunshine reminded me of my village.
When we moved in, Old Chen and his wife, Aunt Cui, came over to welcome us. The couple, both in their early fifties, were the unofficial chiefs of the neighborhood. Old Chen had a pale, round face, and wore a hat no matter the season. He was a real city man who had come to Lutai from the Tianjin city center in the sixties as part of Mao’s campaign to educate urban youth by sending them to rural areas to “experience hardship” and contribute to reconstructing the countryside. They were referred to as the “sent-down youth.” He met and married Cui in Lutai. After Mao’s death, they chose to stay, unlike the tens of millions of other sent-down youths who returned to their cities.
Aunt Cui, a plump woman with short, well-coiffed hair, was the closest Lutai had to aristocracy. The daughter of Communist Party cadres, she was revered not because she had contributed much or achieved anything, but because she came from a wealthy family. She and her siblings worked in government offices. The Cuis could afford a more expensive apartment in town, but they, along with their extended family, preferred to dominate and rule in the old neighborhood, where they had lived for decades.
They planned to send their second daughter to college in America. “It’s expensive there,” Cui said. “A meal in the US costs more than a whole week’s meals here.” I knew nothing about America except that the people were big and had different eye colors, as I had seen in films.
Maybe because of their size they have to eat a lot, and that’s why a meal is so expensive, I thought.
While Lao Chen and Aunt Cui lived next door, her brother and parents lived in the row opposite our house. Across the street in another hutong lived Wang Jianli and his family.
Wang Jianli was a wiry man in his late thirties. He and his family lived in a four-room house with a small yard, inherited from his parents, who in turn had been given the home by their employers, a state-owned factory. Wang Jianli had a small confectionary shop, but his wife took care of it most of the time. He spent his time chatting and playing chess.
Next door to Wang Jianli lived the Li family from Hunan Province, over nine hundred miles away. The Lis were small and had tanned skin. They rented three rooms out of an otherwise abandoned factory nearby, which they had set up as a bakery. Their son, Li Chun, was the same age as I was, and had big eyes and yellowish hair, which tickled me.
Even at a young age, I quickly worked out the neighborhood hierarchy. The Cui family was always in the right. No matter man or woman, young or old, all the adults respectfully addressed the matriarch as Sister Cui or Aunt Cui. They had built an extension to their house—a kitchen and bathroom next to their main rooms—on public property without permission, but no one complained or asked that it be removed. The Li family was treated quite differently. When they built a shelter outside in their yard, the authorities quickly called it illegal and within weeks came to tear it down.
When the Cuis’ younger daughter, Lan, was studying for her college-entrance exam, Wang Jianli and his friends would stop their rants about international affairs under the poplar tree to beam at her with joy whenever she passed, and wish her luck on the test. Yet they never worried about disturbing us during my and Yunxiang’s naptime. I wanted Mom or Baba to shout at them to be quiet, but Baba said, as newcomers, it was important to build a good relationship with our neighbors.
“Even when they’re not nice?” I protested from our room. But Mom said it was the price we had to pay as migrants.
Neither we nor the Lis were locals, and the Wangs, who regarded themselves as real Lutai folks, treated us differently. They treated the Lis worse, because they had come from farther away.
Wang and his gang were sometime merciless, mocking the Li family’s Hunan accents—which caused them to mispronounce “shi” as “si” and “n” as “l”—and referred to them as “the southern barbarians” behind their backs. The Lis’ way of speaking was novel to me too: I had never heard a southern accent. But I saw no reason to make fun of it. Like us, they were trying hard to get by, and always spoke Mandarin. They’d struggle to find the correct words at times. Their Mandarin was not perfect, but neither was my other neighbors’.
I liked playing with Li Chun much better than the local Lutai kids because he had better stories, which were different from mine.
He told me about how his father, a man who didn’t talk much, had left his mother, his siblings, and him behind in Hunan for two years so he could work construction in Tianjin. The money he earned in a month at the construction site was more than what he would earn in six months in his village. But he missed his family. His cousin got him a job in a bakery, where he worked day and night for six months. He studied every component of the operation until he mastered it: ingredients, oven temperatures, and baking times, learning which factory provided the best but cheapest flour, and calculating how many cakes a customer would need per month.
He figured out that his boss earned more than 5,000 yuan per month, and so, with money he had saved and borrowed, he started his own bakery. My mother admired the Lis for their courage, and unlike other parents in our neighborhood, she encouraged me to play with Li Chun. She said that Li was good at “bitter eating,” a Chinese term to describe people who are hardworking.
Li Chun and I spent a lot of time playing in either the backyard of his parents’ bakery or in the small, open space outside our own back door. In the bakery’s empty yard, Li Chun liked to inspect grass and tree leaves, crawling around, looking for snails, and chasing cats that yowled in protest. One day I told him I had come to Lutai on a bus that took forty minutes. He said the train that had brought him took more than a day.
“You’re lying,” I told him. “Trains don’t go that long!” I had never been on a train.
“If I am lying, then may I turn into a little dog,” Li Chun said, grinning and mimicking a thirsty dog. I laughed. He also laughed, revealing a missing front tooth.
Li Chun told me his hometown, Hunan, was green even in the winter, and that his grandfather lived beside a bamboo forest. In his grandfather’s magical hands, poof, bamboo became chairs.
“In Hunan,” he said, “people lived in two-story houses. The first floor is for dining and storage, the second for bedrooms. For the Dragon Boat Festival, people race real ‘dragon boats’ on the river. The bow is shaped like a dragon’s head,” he went on, outlining the shape in the air. “It’s not like here, where there’s nothing.”
I realize now that we exchanged these stories to escape our reality. No matter where we were from, being migrants felt like a trap.
Even after my parents were able to buy our house in the hutong, using money they had saved after two years added to the money they had borrowed from relatives and friends, we still did not fit in. Li Chun was my friend because we were alike—outcasts. We didn’t have other friends and were largely ignored by our neighbors. The street committee, a form of local government, never bothered to tell our parents about policies or decisions that would affect us, as they would inform the other locals. Whether it was raising the sanitation fee or selecting delegates for the National People’s Congress, we were kept in the dark. Many of the Lutai people believed we had come to take their jobs, and because of that we were made to be invisible. But I thought it was not all too bad. When they didn’t like something, it was the Chinese way to pretend that it did not exist. It reminded me of Mengmeng, though I no longer feared being taken. Instead, Li Chun and I enjoyed sneaking around wherever we liked: Li’s cake shop, the abandoned factory, the pond at the north end of the h
utong where I could pick lotus. Nobody reported our whereabouts to our parents like people in the village would have done. Nobody teased me with their mean jokes. I simply did not matter. I was not one of them.
* * *
The locals had three favorite topics: how to get rich, the rumored hutong demolition, and President Jiang Zemin’s love life. A few months after we moved to our hutong, there was talk of a demolition. The locals were excited about the prospect of being given new apartments as compensation by the government and developers, as had already happened in other neighborhoods. People loved the new apartments, which included indoor bathrooms and kitchens. But this caused anxiety for migrants like us. Even now that we owned our house, would the government treat us differently because of our rural hukou? Some people said the new apartments would be provided only to employees of the state-owned factories. But others said it was nonsense; every family, as long as they could provide the house’s ownership certificate, would be treated the same. We had moved to a filthy place where we were ridiculed and looked down upon as if we were dogs, but it was the best life we could’ve hoped for. Mom did not want us to return to the village and farm for the rest of our lives. My parents had made a sacrifice and, though I despised the hutongs, I understood why it mattered that we remain there. No one knew the truth, our fates rested in the hands of the government, and we were left to wonder.
“My brother knows the head of the Land Bureau,” Wang Jianli boasted one day. He was swigging a beer. His white T-shirt was rolled up to his chest as he tried to stay cool. “He told me this whole area will be torn down soon.”
“Really? Then we should haggle!” Wang’s friend said. “I won’t move unless I get a good deal. I want a new apartment at least twice as big. Let’s see who can hold out longer, me or the government.”
“It’s definitely happening. I hear a businessman wants to build a factory here,” said another neighbor.
“No way!” Wang Jianli said. “The government is going to build a highway right through this town!”
These discussions went on for hours, covering everything from the size of their future apartments, to the long dining tables, colorful vases, and black leather sofas they would furnish them with. Rushing to the public toilet in their pajamas in the early mornings and clambering up ladders to fix roofs in the rain would be things of the past. I wanted to believe these stories, and not the stories that said we’d be displaced. Instead I, too, thought of what my room would be like. I wouldn’t have to share with Yunxiang anymore. I’d put up pretty posters for decoration and read alone in my room. I trusted that the government, as I had been taught, would take care of us. My family and I would be safe.
Villagers thought Lutai townspeople had it made, but only those who lived in the town knew of its difficulties. People worked as long as twelve hours in the factories, sometimes the whole night if they took the late shift. Those few hours Wang Jianli and his friends spent under the poplar tree could be the happiest moments in their day. For a few hours, they could dream of better jobs and higher earnings. In the town, even locals like the Wangs lived in the cracks, between city and village circumstances. If they hadn’t found an “iron rice bowl”—a stable job in a government-backed institution—by now, life in town was almost no better than in the village.
Though the Wangs, Cuis, and other Lutai locals thought they were special, a town is not a city, and they wanted more than anything to become “real city folk.” My parents had climbed one step up, from a village to a town, but it was the big race up to the city that every Chinese person wanted to win. Most of us just didn’t know how to get there, so it only made the competition more heated. The more migrants could be held back, merely for being outsiders, the fewer people there would be in the race.
Lutai townspeople were not bad. But the country was changing. People like Wang Jianli’s parents had felt a sense of security as factory workers in the Mao era, but that security no longer existed. Many migrant workers did what were considered low-level, if necessary, jobs like construction and street cleaning, but when they started entering the factories the Lutai people really began to despise them. Migrants were only supposed to be bike repairmen, trash recyclers, or street vendors—not factory workers. The migrants did any and every kind of work to avoid returning to their villages. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people arrived in big cities like Guangzhou and Beijing, looking for jobs. Even little towns like Lutai could not escape the rising tide. The migrants worked hard and long; they had a greater sense of fear strapped to their backs. Men like Wang Jianli wanted fortune or a life in the city but did nothing to work for it. There were many stories of people quitting their factory jobs and moving to cities like Guangzhou, while Wang complained it was too risky. Once you have stability in China, you don’t want to risk it—perhaps you might never have it again. And it took a lot of hard work to keep climbing—there were always people ready to pull you down, especially when you’re a migrant.
I learned that one of the worst things to be in China was to be an outsider or different. On the other hand, Wang Jianli’s pride at being a local outweighed his desire to work harder and achieve more; he was complacent. My family and I had no such pride of place, and so achievement was all that mattered.
Every day, Wang Jianli longed for the government’s demolition order and the fat compensation check it would bring. But the rumors came and went, and Wang Jianli’s demolition dreams didn’t come true until twenty years later.
Chapter Five
The Young Patriot
My mother and father began to successfully run the kindergarten. Enrollments increased, but it was my mom’s personal mission to use the day care to help migrant families. Some local parents banned their children from playing and studying in the same classroom as migrant children. Most private kindergartens did not want to risk upsetting the local parents, who had more money and were more likely to pay their fees on time. Nor did they tend to be late picking up their children like the migrant parents, who often worked exhaustingly long hours doing manual labor. Such prejudice was only a shadow of the cruelty migrants experienced, and an illustration of how systems are set up to make it tougher for generation after generation to climb out of the cycle of poverty.
Mom made it a priority to help them. Four days a week, I had dinner with other migrant children, who often showed up with dirt-smeared faces or the same juice-stained T-shirt from the day before. Sometimes their parents would not arrive until after 8 p.m., apologizing with sheepish smiles on their worn faces. My mother did not scold them. She knew they were working, and I loved having more friends and tried to help my parents by sharing my toys and creating games for us all to play.
One of my best friends was a girl named Haolin, from Inner Mongolia. Her parents had a roadside car repair shop and worked from seven in the morning to late at night, seven days a week. Sometimes Haolin’s mother left her with us on the weekends, and when we visited my grandparents in Caiyuan, we would take her with us.
Though my parents ran a kindergarten and were helping migrant families, we were migrants, too, and faced the same scrutiny. When Yunxiang was ready to start middle school and I primary school, my parents struggled to find places for us. My mom’s friend Xiangju asked the headmaster of the school where she taught if we could attend, but the headmaster refused on the basis of our rural hukou. The government had issued a regulation saying that children of migrants could go to the local school only if their parents paid extra money. To enroll Yunxiang my parent would have to pay 3,000 yuan for the three-year middle school, and 3,600 yuan for my six-year primary school. In total, it was one quarter of the money my parents had paid for our house. The extra charge was levied because we were “borrowing education resources” from local children. Xiangju advised Mom to give the headmaster “gifts” if we wanted a chance at a school interview.
My parents had so little money. But what would be the point of moving to town and then failing to give us an education? My mother confided in
Yunxiang and me. Many migrant families found themselves at this crossroad. They had to either put their children in private schools or send them back home to attend in their village. Yunxiang and I knew bribery was wrong, but we also wanted to attend school. We were all in it together.
A few weeks later, my parents stacked heavy bags of rice on their bicycle seats and placed large, trussed-up crabs—a seasonal specialty—in their baskets for the headmaster. The crabs were each bigger than a rice bowl. I remember my mother’s misty eyes as she packed the bags and put some cash in a lucky red envelope. The night before, she had counted out the crisp bills. It was 1,000 yuan, almost two months’ living expenses.
Xiangju led my parents to Headmaster Zhang’s apartment, which was in one of the nicest compounds in Lutai. Two guards sat in a little house at the entrance and took down their information before letting them in.
Headmaster Zhang looked at my parents as if perplexed, and feigned refusal of the “gifts”…before finally accepting them. When my parents were about to turn to exit, he said, “Children from villages sometimes find it difficult to catch up with Lutai students.” My father wanted to argue that his children were smart, but my mother stopped him: Just smile and nod.
With the “gifts” and 6,600-yuan extra “fee,” Yunxiang and I were accepted. My parents began working harder than ever to maintain our living expenses and school fees. If getting out of the village was a long, hard journey, we were right on track.