The Return from drudgery:
Article from the WaPo on the efforts of migrant workers to come home for the holiday and to stay alive while sending what they can home to keep the home fires going at all. Money quote: "Living in the city is about making money. But sooner or later everyone has to come back."
In China, a Rare Return
Lunar New Year Allows Migrant Workers to Leave Jobs in Cities for Rural Homes
TANQIU VILLAGE, China
On almost every other day, Cai Weilan wakes up hundreds of miles away in a cramped factory dormitory, facing another long shift making sweaters for strangers across the ocean.
On this day, she wakes up at home. She jostles the coals to life on the concrete floor of her otherwise unheated house, then lifts a pair of knitting needles and a ball of green wool to begin making a single sweater for her 2-year-old daughter, still asleep beside her. For one brief stretch -- this week's Chinese Lunar New Year festival -- mother and daughter are reunited.
"Of course I miss her," says Cai, 23, who has been gone for a full year, leaving her daughter behind in the care of her mother-in-law while she endures the factory life for $80 a month. "At home, there is nothing for me to do. My family needs this money."
In this village in the southern province of Jiangxi, as throughout most of China, migrant workers are heading home this week on packed overnight trains and buses for the most important holiday of the year. They are carrying home to their families things they did not have before -- televisions, sacks of clothing and cooking pots. They are bringing along glimpses of China's burgeoning urban wealth and tales of street hustlers and bosses who cheat them out of wages. They are bearing new expectations for their own lives and those of their children.
In this rapidly industrializing country in which some 900 million people are still classified as rural-dwellers, China's roughly 150 million migrant workers are no less important here than the pioneers who once pushed out the boundaries of the U.S. frontier. One of the largest waves of mass migration in human history, these workers send home nearly $80 billion a year, according to Wang Chunguang, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Many villages in bitterly poor interior regions have seen their incomes doubled and tripled by this flow of wages.
The money keeps younger siblings in school and allows aging parents to seek health care at a time when China's transition from communism to capitalism has turned education and medicine into commodities beyond the reach of the poor. It adds meat and fresh vegetables to the table in places where the land cannot sustain dense populations.
"As China has become the factory for the world, migrant workers are propelling the economy," Wang said. "In many counties, as long as there is one migrant worker in the family, the whole family is lifted out of poverty."
But not without wrenching social costs. Migration has separated families, delivering a generation of rural children raised largely by grandparents. For many migrants, round-trip bus and train fare home can exceed $60 -- more than some monthly wages. Going home for a visit means not getting paid and probably surrendering a job. The New Year is typically the only time workers go home.
"My son refuses to call me mother," said Li Meilan, who has left her 5-year-old boy behind in Tanqiu village with her mother-in-law for most of his life while she and her husband run a small business in Guangdong. "He calls me 'older sister,' and he says, 'You're not my mother.' It's a very bad feeling."
In parts of Jiangxi -- a major source of laborers for the factories of the coast -- virtually everyone from 16 to 55 is gone for at least half of the year, said Zhou Daming, a sociologist at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. It is a trend driven as much by desperation as by the magnetic pull of new opportunities: Many farm incomes are declining as the costs of seed and fertilizer rise and subsidies are cut.
"People are not finding any hope in their home village," Zhou said. "If they are going to build a house or buy clothes, the cash has to come from these wages."
In the past two decades, as China has allowed private businesses to operate and welcomed foreign investment, peasants have flocked to coastal areas for new opportunities. The Yangtze River Delta has attracted rural people from all over the country, with Shanghai and neighboring Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces now holding at least 15 million migrant workers, according to China Economic Quarterly. The dead center remains Guangdong, the southern province adjacent to Hong Kong, which holds more than one-fourth of all of China's migrants.
Guangdong's largest cities, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, showcase the jarring contrasts of China's development. Villa communities adorned with statues of Greek gods are set amid tin-roofed shantytowns that house the itinerant workers doing the building, cooking and cleaning.
This week, those workers are going home, and Guangzhou is the scene of an exodus of seemingly biblical proportion. On a recent afternoon, dozens of buses poured into the city's main train station, bringing thousands of workers from factory towns all over the province. Some wheeled belongings in shiny suitcases and talked on mobile phones. Others carried sacks lashed to their backs or plastic pails balanced from wooden poles slung across shoulders.
Most had to stand in line all day for train tickets, then camp out all night to wait for their departure times. They occupied the pavement en masse, reading newspapers, napping, peeling oranges and playing cards. Police came with bullhorns ordering that the crowds disperse -- to where, no one seemed to know.
Liu Xiuying sat on the curb in a neat pink blouse and blue jeans. She had arrived by bus from Shenzhen, where she earns about $70 a month at a toy factory. She would ride all night on a wooden bench seat to Yueyang in Hunan, then change trains for Xian, the provincial capital of Shaanxi, and then finally take a bus for several hours to her village -- a journey of roughly 1,000 miles, over 36 hours.
Wherever they sleep the rest of the year, migrant workers are clear that home remains home -- a concept laden with significance in Chinese culture. The return trip is a chance to revel in the familiarity of family and to see how their wages are altering the countryside.
Here in Tanqiu, a village of about 4,000 people set in rugged hills about 300 miles north of Guangzhou, women still haul buckets of water for cooking and washing. Slabs of pork hang from lines outside, alongside drying laundry. Children play in muddy lanes littered with trash. The bathroom is, for most, a bucket set against a wall. But many houses now boast new refrigerators, televisions and electric rice cookers. Small shops have sprung up selling instant noodles, factory-made blankets and flashlights from Guangdong.
Cai has been working in Guangdong province since she was 14, returning only to get married, give birth to her daughter and celebrate the Lunar New Year. She speaks of forced unpaid overtime and wages that have stayed flat for almost a decade in factories without air conditioning.
But her eyes light up when she speaks of how her income has kept her younger sister in high school and how she and her husband are saving about $1,200 a year to build a brick home in the village. Some day. They figure they need $12,000.
Next door, Huang Meiyun, 28, and his father have returned from their jobs as carpenters in Guangzhou, where they occupy plywood bunks in a shed with seven other men. Huang's wife works at a factory in another city in Guangdong, allowing them to meet once or twice a month. Their son, 6, stays here in the village with Huang's mother.
"I will definitely return," Huang said, as his son draped an arm on his lap. "Living in the city is about making money. But sooner or later everyone has to come back."
He will come back changed. In the city, Huang has grown accustomed to reading news and communicating with people all over China on chat boards at Internet cafes in Guangzhou. He wants a computer at home now, though the global network does not yet reach the village. He graduated from high school. He wants his son to make it to university.
"We see the other villagers going out to the city and their houses getting better, more money in their pockets," Huang said. "We need to keep up."
In China, a Rare Return
Lunar New Year Allows Migrant Workers to Leave Jobs in Cities for Rural Homes
TANQIU VILLAGE, China
On almost every other day, Cai Weilan wakes up hundreds of miles away in a cramped factory dormitory, facing another long shift making sweaters for strangers across the ocean.
On this day, she wakes up at home. She jostles the coals to life on the concrete floor of her otherwise unheated house, then lifts a pair of knitting needles and a ball of green wool to begin making a single sweater for her 2-year-old daughter, still asleep beside her. For one brief stretch -- this week's Chinese Lunar New Year festival -- mother and daughter are reunited.
"Of course I miss her," says Cai, 23, who has been gone for a full year, leaving her daughter behind in the care of her mother-in-law while she endures the factory life for $80 a month. "At home, there is nothing for me to do. My family needs this money."
In this village in the southern province of Jiangxi, as throughout most of China, migrant workers are heading home this week on packed overnight trains and buses for the most important holiday of the year. They are carrying home to their families things they did not have before -- televisions, sacks of clothing and cooking pots. They are bringing along glimpses of China's burgeoning urban wealth and tales of street hustlers and bosses who cheat them out of wages. They are bearing new expectations for their own lives and those of their children.
In this rapidly industrializing country in which some 900 million people are still classified as rural-dwellers, China's roughly 150 million migrant workers are no less important here than the pioneers who once pushed out the boundaries of the U.S. frontier. One of the largest waves of mass migration in human history, these workers send home nearly $80 billion a year, according to Wang Chunguang, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Many villages in bitterly poor interior regions have seen their incomes doubled and tripled by this flow of wages.
The money keeps younger siblings in school and allows aging parents to seek health care at a time when China's transition from communism to capitalism has turned education and medicine into commodities beyond the reach of the poor. It adds meat and fresh vegetables to the table in places where the land cannot sustain dense populations.
"As China has become the factory for the world, migrant workers are propelling the economy," Wang said. "In many counties, as long as there is one migrant worker in the family, the whole family is lifted out of poverty."
But not without wrenching social costs. Migration has separated families, delivering a generation of rural children raised largely by grandparents. For many migrants, round-trip bus and train fare home can exceed $60 -- more than some monthly wages. Going home for a visit means not getting paid and probably surrendering a job. The New Year is typically the only time workers go home.
"My son refuses to call me mother," said Li Meilan, who has left her 5-year-old boy behind in Tanqiu village with her mother-in-law for most of his life while she and her husband run a small business in Guangdong. "He calls me 'older sister,' and he says, 'You're not my mother.' It's a very bad feeling."
In parts of Jiangxi -- a major source of laborers for the factories of the coast -- virtually everyone from 16 to 55 is gone for at least half of the year, said Zhou Daming, a sociologist at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou. It is a trend driven as much by desperation as by the magnetic pull of new opportunities: Many farm incomes are declining as the costs of seed and fertilizer rise and subsidies are cut.
"People are not finding any hope in their home village," Zhou said. "If they are going to build a house or buy clothes, the cash has to come from these wages."
In the past two decades, as China has allowed private businesses to operate and welcomed foreign investment, peasants have flocked to coastal areas for new opportunities. The Yangtze River Delta has attracted rural people from all over the country, with Shanghai and neighboring Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces now holding at least 15 million migrant workers, according to China Economic Quarterly. The dead center remains Guangdong, the southern province adjacent to Hong Kong, which holds more than one-fourth of all of China's migrants.
Guangdong's largest cities, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, showcase the jarring contrasts of China's development. Villa communities adorned with statues of Greek gods are set amid tin-roofed shantytowns that house the itinerant workers doing the building, cooking and cleaning.
This week, those workers are going home, and Guangzhou is the scene of an exodus of seemingly biblical proportion. On a recent afternoon, dozens of buses poured into the city's main train station, bringing thousands of workers from factory towns all over the province. Some wheeled belongings in shiny suitcases and talked on mobile phones. Others carried sacks lashed to their backs or plastic pails balanced from wooden poles slung across shoulders.
Most had to stand in line all day for train tickets, then camp out all night to wait for their departure times. They occupied the pavement en masse, reading newspapers, napping, peeling oranges and playing cards. Police came with bullhorns ordering that the crowds disperse -- to where, no one seemed to know.
Liu Xiuying sat on the curb in a neat pink blouse and blue jeans. She had arrived by bus from Shenzhen, where she earns about $70 a month at a toy factory. She would ride all night on a wooden bench seat to Yueyang in Hunan, then change trains for Xian, the provincial capital of Shaanxi, and then finally take a bus for several hours to her village -- a journey of roughly 1,000 miles, over 36 hours.
Wherever they sleep the rest of the year, migrant workers are clear that home remains home -- a concept laden with significance in Chinese culture. The return trip is a chance to revel in the familiarity of family and to see how their wages are altering the countryside.
Here in Tanqiu, a village of about 4,000 people set in rugged hills about 300 miles north of Guangzhou, women still haul buckets of water for cooking and washing. Slabs of pork hang from lines outside, alongside drying laundry. Children play in muddy lanes littered with trash. The bathroom is, for most, a bucket set against a wall. But many houses now boast new refrigerators, televisions and electric rice cookers. Small shops have sprung up selling instant noodles, factory-made blankets and flashlights from Guangdong.
Cai has been working in Guangdong province since she was 14, returning only to get married, give birth to her daughter and celebrate the Lunar New Year. She speaks of forced unpaid overtime and wages that have stayed flat for almost a decade in factories without air conditioning.
But her eyes light up when she speaks of how her income has kept her younger sister in high school and how she and her husband are saving about $1,200 a year to build a brick home in the village. Some day. They figure they need $12,000.
Next door, Huang Meiyun, 28, and his father have returned from their jobs as carpenters in Guangzhou, where they occupy plywood bunks in a shed with seven other men. Huang's wife works at a factory in another city in Guangdong, allowing them to meet once or twice a month. Their son, 6, stays here in the village with Huang's mother.
"I will definitely return," Huang said, as his son draped an arm on his lap. "Living in the city is about making money. But sooner or later everyone has to come back."
He will come back changed. In the city, Huang has grown accustomed to reading news and communicating with people all over China on chat boards at Internet cafes in Guangzhou. He wants a computer at home now, though the global network does not yet reach the village. He graduated from high school. He wants his son to make it to university.
"We see the other villagers going out to the city and their houses getting better, more money in their pockets," Huang said. "We need to keep up."