Xiao Yanzi and Xiao Li waiting for customers at Jin Mei Salon.

Under the salon’s sterile lights, the hairdressers sat in the waiting area — some in chairs, some squatting in a typical Chinese fashion that hinted at a provincial upbringing. Despite their neat hairdos and smart maroon polo shirts, the girls at Jin Mei, a salon in Shanghai surrounded by construction zones and high-rises, could not escape their slightly country looks, having migrated from rural villages in other provinces into the city.

They were celebrating the first night of Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, in front of the television in the near-empty salon, busily gnawing guazi, or sunflower seeds, spitting the shells in a garbage can while glaring impatiently at the last customer of the day. Since Chinese New Year is the biggest holiday of the year, they were supposed to get off work at 5p.m., but at 8 p.m., Xiao Yanzi, the stylist, was fixing the last hairdo of the Lunar Year. The boss always orders them to keep serving customers as long as they keep coming.

Jin Mei’s employees mostly hail from Anhui Province, a relatively poor region that exports a large portion of its farming population to Shanghai, several hours away by bus or train. Most of these girls migrated around age 18 or 19 after leaving school. Most ended their schooling at middle or high school; the prospects of attaining a higher education in the impoverished rural school system are few, so extra years of school tuition seem like a waste when city jobs are readily available.

Shanghai’s booming economy, which grew 15 percent this past year and leads China in gross domestic product, has been drawing thousands of hopeful youth from the countryside for over a decade. Before the Reform Era began in 1979, peasants were essentially chained to the land. The government, fearing disorder, used a draconian household registration system — the “hukou” system — to enforce a huge economic gulf between the countryside and the industrialized cities. But over the last two decades of frenetic modernization in China, regulations have been loosened to facilitate economic development, and the massive tide of labor in the cities has inflamed the cultural and economic tensions along the rural-urban divide dating back to Chinese antiquity.

As I’ve researched the cultural identity of migrants over the past several months, certain patterns have become evident, both disturbing and banal. Youth are being siphoned into different strands of urban culture, from the seedy underground to the neon and polyester trappings of the twenty-something mainstream. I see them as individuals caught up in a mass phenomenon of unprecedented social change — some sink, others rise, and still more just drift. The Jin Mei salon is an unwitting laboratory, as its girls are transformed into passive recipients of modern ideas of beauty and leisure, as well as, for the first time in their lives, agents in control of their economic and social destinies.

Testing the waters

Though rural parents tend to guard their children closely, especially girls, the drive for economic advancement has eroded centuries-old child-rearing convention. Traditionally in both rural and urban China, youth are expected to remain at home until marriage, and afterwards, to serve their parents when they become financially self-sufficient. But the girls at Jin Mei revealed that their parents for the most part supported their leaving home for work, since even the lowest-paying job in the city is still viewed as a step up from “spending a life with your face to the ground and back to the sun” — an old saying describing a farmer’s toil. Farmland in China has historically been a ball and chain for peasants, especially under the household registration system, so it’s no wonder physical mobility in the Reform Era has been equated with economic mobility.

One factor that enables parents to be more relaxed about their children leaving the village is that youth workers are seldom truly “on their own.” Workers in salons and other enterprises rarely arrive in a new place without contacts or work arrangements. In many cases, a friend or relative helps arrange work in advance.

Nineteen year-old Chun Xiang, who arrived at Jin Mei around the time of the Spring Festival, mistakenly thought migrating would be her first experience living without her family. A girl with blank eyes and a soft smile, she exuded the kind of sweet restlessness characteristic of girls fresh from the countryside. Her older brother had tried to convince her to move to Beijing, where he worked as a migrant, because salons had a reputation for being “complicated” — a code word for being involved with the sex industry.

Instead, she decided to go to Shanghai, lured by the prospect of more independence. But once she found Jin Mei through friends and family, there was no shortage of concerned lao xiang, or fellow villagers, floating about the salon. Her lao xiang arranged to keep her out of the dormitories — cramped rented rooms down the street, each shared by several girls — and got her a place to sleep in the back room of the salon, presumably to keep her safe and more isolated. “I guess you could call me lucky,” she said, her bashful smile lined with a touch of disappointment. (By the summer, however, her father would order her to come back home, fearing she would xue huai, or “go bad,” living so far from home.)

Even with relatives in the city to act as guardians, parents are somewhat justified in worrying over how their children will fare. The migrants in Shanghai I’ve met, not just at the salon but in other vocations as well, always tell me that the youth fresh from the village all have one thing in common: their ignorance. Kids from the countryside are dai, or slow-witted, when they first arrive, easily taken advantage of, too willing to work for nothing.

My friend from Shandong, Xiao Chen, a pretty 26 year-old who first landed in Shanghai to work in a shrink-wrap factory, giggled as she recalled that her family feared she would be kidnapped and sold — a phenomenon not unheard of in China but primarily the stuff of urban lore. According to her, you have to “learn how to take care of yourself” sooner or later, since scam artists, criminals, and local prejudice against outsiders are rampant. Her main advice to younger migrants is, “If other people look down on you here, you just look down on them back.”

The process of adapting to city life requires one to build an armor of aloofness against those who seize every opportunity to exploit rural naiveté. Though the city might not be crawling with sexual predators as some parents fear, girls soon learn that shady guys in pursuit of short-term “girlfriends” abound, especially in the underground club scene, which is linked to drugs and prostitution. Girls must struggle to balance the quality of dan cun, or “purity” — the hallmark of Chinese female virtue — with the maturity needed for survival. The two elements may seem contradictory, but as many girls discover, maintaining the dignified, virginal exterior requires a special grade of toughness.

Young male migrants also tend to wise up quickly once exposed to the harsh urban environs. Chen Da Ji, a male hair stylist who recently left Jin Mei to open his own salon, recalled how he had struggled to survive as a migrant in Guangdong. In a quiet, weary voice that suggested a fragility incongruous with his loud golden highlights, he told me that the migrant youth who come into the cities today aren’t like the migrants of his “generation,” who left home several years ago. These new kids have nice clothes and pocket money. While most salon workers these days sport cute cell phones, when Chen first struck out on his own, he was constantly out of touch with his family and friends. He spent years scrounging for money through whatever odd job he could find, and he recalls bitterly having to sleep on the street in Guangdong for a time.

Among both males and females, there is a visible divide between the migrants who have been disciplined by city life and those who have been hardened by it. Jin Mei’s workers fill the salon with a teenish buoyancy — occasionally grumpy about overwork and low pay, but well-adjusted overall. The more jaded migrants I’ve seen, hanging out at night or at other salons, have distant, slithering eyes, and even though they seem carefree, drinking and smoking with friends, their forearms betray quiet moments of self-destructive boredom: rows of cigarette burns dotting tender skin.

A New Year’s banquet hosted by a salon owner for his employees.

Homecoming and going

If I visited her village and saw how the peasants lived, Song Jing, a hairdresser from Hubei just shy of 20, told me quietly one night during the week-long Chinese New Year celebration, “tears would start to flow.” Around closing time, as the last employees dawdled in front the television watching muted music videos, the native of Hubei with a head of frizzy highlights was getting ready to turn in. She was sleeping in the back room of the salon to keep an eye on it, since crime rates shoot up around the New Year celebration. She would soon be able to sleep in her own bed in her village, but ambivalence would follow her home.

Much of the warmth she once felt toward her lao jia or hometown had evaporated since she had settled in Shanghai. Everything there, she feared, would seem unfamiliar, including the old friends she had not kept in touch with since leaving the countryside over a year ago. But she knew that she would also seem unfamiliar to the people at home. The city had aged her. When she was living in the countryside, she was “like a child,” but now, she said, she carried herself more like an adult, more cultured than her rural counterparts. “I feel like I’m in a different world,” she reflected bashfully, as if embarrassed to reveal the softness she should have left behind in her village.

Twenty-two year-old Ni Ke, a skinny hairdresser from Anhui with a shaggy bob, told me she no longer thinks about home much. When she talks about her life now, her mouth curls into a spunky smile with just a hint of a sneer. She has settled into Shanghai quite well since arriving three years ago at 19. Today, she shares an apartment with her boyfriend, a migrant from Jiangsu who works in a nearby salon. Though her parents are pressuring them to get married, she told me one night at the salon as she shampooed my hair, she values her personal space and is resolved to maintain her independence as long as possible. “There’s no point in getting married early,” she said, reflecting a modern concept of romance shared by many of her co-workers.

The financial security found through city work has chipped away at the village tradition of marrying young and settling down in the male spouse’s laojia. Ni Ke and her boyfriend have debated over where they would end up if they did get married — her hometown or his (an issue that many couples break up over, she told me). Or maybe they would opt to stay in Shanghai, free from the parental concerns that they had already shrugged off in deciding to live together.

The city also draws better-off youth, who have things other than poverty to escape. Xiao Li, a short young girl with brown bangs and a mischievous smile, came to Shanghai in 2000 at age 16 not to make money, but because her parents’ constant fighting was making her miserable. Xiao Li’s decision to leave high school for the city was outright rebellion, not filial duty. Her father was a local official who had invested heavily in the developing local economy. Her parents’ squabbling over finances, not a lack of income, drove her into the city.

Xiao Li thinks her family was happier when they were poorer. Watching their newfound wealth unravel her household taught her that “whenever you have money, it’s never enough, you always want even more.” But this February, Xiao Li went home for the first time in two years. She now finds that the rareness of a return visit makes her presence that much more valued. She also attracts the admiration of old friends who have not “experienced the world (jian guo shi mian),” and who group her among the “city girls … [who have] seen everything, experienced everything.”

Despite the economic limitations of their work, the glossy habitat of the salon symbolizes contemporary urban China in contrast with the muddy, messy countryside. Jin Mei offers an opportunity for these girls to see themselves in a different light. Instead of the drab backdrop of endless rice fields, mirrors and walls plastered with posters of models frame the girls as they lather and scrub the heads of customers with mechanical efficiency.

If the ennui of the service they provide is dulling to the senses, the city around them at least offers stimuli that they would never encounter in the countryside: chintzy, massive arcade-karaoke-entertainment complexes; the neon lights of the Bund — a famous strip of landmarks overlooking the Huangpu River, where many migrant youth spend their first awkward dates; and 24-hour convenience stores and noodle shops. Though they are not rich enough to enjoy the middle-class comforts of their wealthier customers, they are still exposed to urban life on the mammoth scale of China’s most rapidly developing metropolis. For many of them, seeing the world through the fogged glass of the salon window will wipe out the possibility of living in the country ever again.

Death by haircut

A typical migrant youth in Shanghai will tell you that his or her village is a ghost town during most of the year — populated only by elderly, disabled or incompetent people, and very young children, left in the care of grandparents as their parents work city jobs. The population exodus has been so dramatic that the domestic grain yield was at its lowest in 12 years in 2003. The only time of year when such villages ever seem full is during the Chinese New Year. And even then, not everyone goes back. The passing of Chinese New Year for Jin Mei’s workers indicates the flow of youth between the city and the countryside has worn holes on both sides of the culture gap. Of course, the workers, mostly in their late teens and early 20’s, seem hardly aware that they are products of a monumental population shift. The main shift they feel is a personal and physical one.

Soft and polished, hair carefully highlighted and layered in an approximation of the Asian celebrities featured on television screens and magazine pages, the female workers have been careful to erase signs that they were once country bumpkins. Betraying one’s rural background is anathema to the low-end beauty industry here.

The male workers trade in T-shirts for tight trousers, pointy shoes and sport jagged, streaked hair, emulating the swanky, vaguely effeminate image of Asian pop stars. The deflowering of Jin Mei’s girls begins with their first haircut — the hacking of the black ponytail. Xiao Li, who worked the register at Jin Mei through the New Year holiday, recalled that when she started her job at 16, she cried when they cut her streaming black locks and gave her a layered bronzed bob. Back then, she joked, she was so shy that when any of the male employees talked to her, she would turn bright red. Now, at 19, as she smacks her gum, grumbles about how uncool her uniform is, and flirts with male coworkers, she displays an impulsive boldness uncharacteristic of a country girl.

For Wen Wen, a petite, angelic 17 year-old — adored by older coworkers as a little sister — getting her hair dyed and cut for the first time at 14 was a jarring experience. After losing her black ponytail, which she had always liked before it was deemed unhip by the salon staff, her reflection in the mirror startled her. “I couldn’t get used to the sight of myself,” she said. But now, displaying coifed upswept locks that hint of a Japanese anime character, Wen Wen sees her new style as a step toward her dream of “making people beautiful.”

The symbolic death-by-haircut of their rural identity is a minor trauma soon to be forgotten in the midst of non-stop labor. Money is hard to hold onto in Shanghai, as the cost of living far exceeds that of the rest of the country. An ordinary female salon worker in Shanghai can hope to earn around several hundred to 1,500 yuan per month (US$180), while hairstylists (a profession reserved for men) can make around 5,000 yuan ($600). These wages are still much more than they could ever hope to earn back home, since farmers on average earn less than one third the salary of non-agricultural workers — 2,622 yuan compared to 8,500 yuan for urban residents — and the gap is growing as cities like Shanghai hurdle into the global economy.

With no dependents, young migrants feel less pressure to remit income to families back home, so they can instead save toward a new apartment or a long-term goal of starting their own business. But the work schedule and relatively low income means that employees are usually too worn out by the 70-hour work week to do anything on off-days but rest and spend extra money on Western fashions, cell phones, and Internet bars.

Yet such jobs, with set wages and hours, are coveted among migrants. Other jobs in restaurants and construction entail dangerous working conditions and perhaps even less possibility of advancement. Since kids are constantly trying to find ways to enter the city workforce, Jin Mei has easy pickings.

Workers are acquired by Jin Mei’s boss, Liu Bing, a former lawyer who found entrepreneurship more promising than the legal bureaucracy. His wife, herself a migrant who worked her way up in the salon business to the managerial level, provides valuable connections to friends and relatives in villages in her home province, Anhui.  The husband-wife team prefers youth who display a certain measure of suzhi or “class,” with some schooling and good Mandarin rather than a rural dialect, displaying docility as well as competence. The further they seem from the city dweller’s stereotype of the unkempt farmer girl, the better they are for business. As their boss and their caretaker, Liu is proud of the relationship he has with his staff. “We give them a stage,” he said, and they cultivate their own abilities until they are ready to “take off” on their own. If workers prove themselves competent enough, he gives them a share of his salon franchise.

The village girls the bosses commonly encounter are mostly eager to experience city life and the opportunities it promises. Still, some girls — who, according to Liu, don’t know what they’re missing — are reluctant to leave what is familiar. And some discover too late that they are not mature enough to handle the city, jumping from job to job in frustration, or even returning home, overwhelmed by the pressures of living and working in an urban environment.

The anything-goes atmosphere of Reform Era China leads some youth to move faster than they can afford. A 19 year-old hairdresser named Gu Xuan told me that she had already opened two salons with her parents’ savings in the town area of her laojia since the age of 17. She was unable to cope with the burden of managing a business, and both shops closed after a short time. “I don’t even like to think back to that time!” she said, remembering her parents’ deep disappointment. Now, she has resigned herself to a humbler position as a salon employee. She looks back wistfully on simpler days when she was still a student. “When you’re in school, all you want to do is just have fun. But when you’re out of school, you really wish you were studying again.”

For individual workers, mustering the drive to rise up and insist on more than just scraping by is the greatest challenge. Many of those seeking upward mobility are disappointed during the months or years it takes to establish financial stability. Unskilled jobs — entry-level positions in service industries like beauty salons — are much more abundant than skilled ones. Many migrants I’ve met have a relatively easy time finding work washing hair, waiting tables, or doing construction, but cannot break into office jobs or more skilled professions. They have an even harder time raising enough capital to start their own shops, since most people have to negotiate loans with parents or relatives, who often aren’t much better off than they are.

When they first arrive, girls are expected to pay a few hundred yuan in “deposit” money just for the opportunity to work. Some girls spend several months in the “apprenticeship” phase, during which they earn no wages. And even after the boss decides to finally put them on the payroll, economic advancement still rests upon the boss’s whim. It is a mild form of the commodification of youth, particularly females, as cogs in the global economy.

At Jin Mei, sharp gender distinctions in the workforce also impose limitations. Boys generally begin as apprentice haircutters, hoping to work their way up to stylist. Girls generally do not advance beyond hairdressing, massage, manicuring, and other beauty services, despite the fact that the apprenticeship period for women seems almost as intensive as that for male hairstylists. Gu Xuan told me one evening, kneading my arms absent-mindedly during a semi-professional massage session, that male customers don’t trust women to style their hair. In Shanghai, traditional men only trust male stylists, and the management reinforces the status quo by refusing to train female workers in a “male” line of work.

But for a typical girl from the countryside, even such limited economic opportunity was unthinkable a generation ago. Now that young women are streaming into the city and for the first time tasting independence — at least financially if not socially — many are determined to earn their way into a business of their own.

Xiao Yanzi, one of the senior hairstylists (and the only woman stylist in the salon), first came to Shanghai over ten years ago at age 17 with her cousins, to see the city and check out job prospects. Once she saw how much city life contrasted with her sleepy rural town back home, she knew she couldn’t return. She could earn up to 300 yuan  ($36) a month working in the city, more than ten times what her father was making as a rural laborer. She’s quietly worked her way up here, acquiring enough to buy a 30 percent share of another salon in the Jin Mei franchise, which includes several hairshops and a spa. She harbors distant dreams of starting her own salon, but the last time she tried, her grand opening unfortunately coincided with President Bill Clinton’s visit to Shanghai, which prompted the local authorities to crack down on all “illegal” salons that had yet to acquire a license.

She smiled tiredly when asked about her future plans. “I’ll just keep working here,” she remarked matter-of-factly. Xiao Yanzi is determined never to return to her hometown to settle down. Though she sees herself as an Anhui native — and although her new baby daughter has been sent to Anhui to be looked after by her parents — there is enough Shanghai in her and her husband to keep her firmly grounded here.

The countryside revisited

The New Year holiday or “Spring Festival” is the only occasion that brings migrant youth home in droves, if only for a few days. Every year, migrants with enough money for a ticket pack buses and trains bound for the countryside. In many villages, left desolate by the exodus of able-bodied men and women to the cities, this is the one truly vibrant time of the year, when the returnees shower family and neighbors with candy and red gift envelopes stuffed with cash.

Youth are also pressured to return home in order to maintain certain social institutions. Migrants in their twenties are often expected to xiang qin or look for marriage partners in their village. Matches are often made by parents, so the “introduction” process is accelerated.

Homecoming is also a way of making an individualistic contribution to the community, however. As young adults, migrants also find in the week-long celebration an opportunity to prove that the bitter work they have endured has finally paid off — in the warm smiles of their relatives, the feasts and dances of rural tradition, and the eagerly anticipated, if ephemeral windfall of money and gifts. In this respect, the real power of being a rural-to-urban migrant is felt not in the bittersweet benefits of city life, but in the importance a returnee acquires when demonstrating hard-won success and a cosmopolitan aura.

Then there are workers who stay in the city, either because their boss doesn’t allow them to leave or because they choose not to. Either way, their job has become the weight that anchors them to the city, the same way a fallow field grounded the peasants of the previous generation.

Wen Wen was determined to go home this year. Last year, as a new arrival, she was not in the portion of the staff allowed to go home, so she had passed the New Year in the salon. Wen Wen was at first excited to spend the holiday in the city. “As it was getting closer to the New Year, I felt really happy,” she recalled. “But when New Year’s Eve finally came, I felt very lonely.” She greeted the New Lunar Year in front of the television at the salon, bored and thinking of how happy she was as a girl when her whole family would gather in her village for feasts and traditional ceremonies. She missed her grandmother, who had raised her while her parents worked in another city situation common in migrant families.

But she has never regretted the decision to leave the village. “I felt Shanghai was really a city for young people,” she said. “I had to go there and see what it was about.” In her laojia, she felt smothered by relatives. “You can’t always depend on your mother and father,” she said, with the wisdom of a precocious child. “I wanted to live independently.”

Her mother and father at first did not want her to leave home at such a young age, but after she pleaded with them, they eventually let her take her first train ride — 24 hours — from Guangzhou to Shanghai. Two years shy of the legal employment age, she had relatives lie about her age to get her the job at Jin Mei. (By the time her boss discovered her real age, she had already ingratiated herself as a diligent worker.)

Wen Wen turned out to be a fast learner and got through her training period in just one month. Her co-workers were all charmed by her cuteness and good nature, she made friends easily, and her boss, she said, is very kind to her. She now lives with several other girls in a dormitory apartment near the salon, who play the role of older sisters. By observing the older employees, she studies how to be an adult and how to treat customers with impeccable courtesy. “I feel I’m older now, more mature,” she reflected.

This year, she was able to display her grown-up self in her hometown. She took a bus and arrived home just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. The reunion was only partial because her father had stayed to work in Guangzhou. But Wen Wen was ecstatic to see her grandmother waiting up for her, looking older than before. “I couldn’t say anything. The first thing I did was hug them. That felt good.” She repeated to her grandmother over and over that her salon job was wonderful, “just to keep her from crying more.” No one’s pride matters more to her than her grandmother’s. The first 500 yuan ($60) she earned at Jin Mei went to fulfill her promise as a young girl that “the first money I make, I’ll send home to you.”

But the initial euphoria of the Spring Festival soon passed. Her friends back home now regarded her awkwardly. “They’re not as nice to me as I am to them,” she said. “They all say I’ve changed!” When her old friends told her that she did not seem as talkative and outgoing as she was before she went to the city, she replied, “You’re just not making an effort to understand me. I’m still the old me.” But Wen Wen was not too hurt by the loss of her childhood friends, as she had made plenty of new ones among her coworkers in Shanghai.

It was as if the coziness of home had departed just as she had. “It’s not as bustling as it was before,” she said, “because many people my age and a little older have all left to work.” In the countryside, the year moves in cycles, and when the Spring Festival crowds leave, the dusty shell of a village begins another year-long wait.

Passing the New Year and passing time

Back in Shanghai, on New Year’s night, the Jin Mei workers were rewarded for their overtime with a night of singing along to overproduced Chinese pop music in a crowded multi-story entertainment center down the street. Shanghai does not offer much variety in terms of nightlife for youth of modest means, just a chance to croon along to your favorite pop singer in a cramped rented room or converse in a cubicle with a net friend or wang you. But despite the crushing density of the city, youth who are feeling out their new home manage to locate pockets of privacy, or at least anonymous gratification.

Shanghai spreads out before its migrants like a spilled toy box. For many, it offers at least a temporary oasis of social indulgences that make the countryside seem unlivable in comparison. For others, the city cuts deeper into them, and they enmesh themselves in a Hades of organized crime, drugs, prostitution, and gambling to obtain wealth and prestige.

Whether they are escaping pressures at home or chasing the fantasy of wealth, urban youth migrants are discovering that China’s developing economy has opened up a platform for self-exploration that never previously existed for their demographic. The decision to return home or to stay in the city for the Spring Festival plots a migrant youth on a matrix of space and time, on which two generations and two wildly different environments cross. At the crux of this clash between rural and urban cultures, migrant youth work, play, and carve out a place for themselves, and the beauty and peril lie in the fact that no one can tell just how long it will last. Whether or not the youths’ dreams ever materialize, the sense of individuality that flowers in the struggle to find one’s place in this congested city is priceless.

Go to part two

Michelle Chen