All posts by Michelle Chen

 
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An uncle breaks the silence

Evolution of an illness


The greasy dishes pile onto our long narrow table at the Thai restaurant in Queens. We are celebrating the college graduation of my cousin Jeffrey, sitting across from me; the 70th birthday of my father, sitting beside me; and the 60th birthday of my uncle, sitting at the opposite end of the table, where I prefer him. My brother, sister-in-law, and aunt and uncle from my mother’s side are here too. Another glass of wine is poured, and someone asks my uncle if he wants to say something. I realize this is his cue to make a speech. After sitting through much of the meal in silence, he lets out a frail voice in accented English, his cheeks pulled into a smile so forced, it must be sincere.

A family dinner with my uncle is a rare occurrence, even though he lives with my mother and father in the apartment where I was raised. He usually makes every effort not to be inside the house when my parents have dinner, perhaps because he thinks eating their food is the one burden he can spare them.

Evolution of an Illness

Since he came to live with us several years ago, my uncle’s presence has evolved from a crisis to a quiet nuisance. These days, he spends most of his limited energy trying to make himself easy to ignore. He takes long walks, returning late at night with his grim, loping gait. He sleeps most of the day. Or when he is anxious, he may lie awake in his dark room for hours on damp sheets.

In return for his efforts to imitate old furniture, my parents accept his sickness and accept he will not get better. That’s more than many in our family are willing to admit, as evidenced by the boxes of vitamins and herbal supplements that have piled up in his room, sent by other relatives with notes of courteous concern.

Though his presence is irksome, my parents know we’re relatively lucky, because my uncle’s illness is not the kind that leads to violent outbursts or deep hallucinations. For years, his medication simply deadened his mind into a state of near-catatonia, underscored by the 40-some-odd pounds he put on as a side effect of the drugs. His brain has limbered up somewhat recently since he started taking a different pill. But his other main symptom remains: his silence, the invasive hush hovering over the apartment like a quivering moth.

While the family’s social contract with my uncle has brought quiet resignation, his diagnosis has helped us make sense of him—more to our benefit than to his. Until then, no one quite knew why, for as long as anyone could remember, he had refused to show any degree of warmth toward other human beings. During his marriage, faint hints of the crisis surfaced at quickening intervals. My uncle’s wife sometimes confided in my parents about his cruel detachment and revealed how, contrary to his family’s hopes, marriage had failed to cure him of his coldness. Jeffrey grew up learning how to ignore and be ignored by his father.

Later, no one could explain why my uncle avoided my grandfather as he lay on his death bed, despite his wish to see his youngest son before expiring, as if a final visit would redeem some of the shame of not raising him right. He was the shame of a proud family that, despite having survived war and poverty and revolution, somehow just couldn’t fix this one ingrate son.

Finding a Language

We issued our own diagnosis first: guai, a catch-all Chinese phrase for weird, strange, and deviant. My parents chalked up his withdrawn nature to a mixture of apathy and a flawed personality. They tried to push him to be a better husband, to be more responsible and affectionate. But after the divorce and the loss of his dead-end office job, not too long after September 11, when he dissolved into babbling paranoia and refused to come out of his apartment for days, and soon had to be forcibly removed and committed to Bellevue… at that point, guai no longer sufficed. 

There is a term for schizophrenia in Chinese, but it doesn’t carry the same currency as it does in English. Like the disease itself, it doesn’t translate well.

My uncle was more talkative when he first arrived from the hospital. Though the paranoia had eased by then, fear would well up in him at night, and he had a habit of jumping out of bed to kneel and pray for forgiveness before my grandfather’s framed photograph in the living room.

Between his convulsions of guilt, my uncle complained. His grumblings were as bland and monotonous as his spirit, but still they ground down my parents’ nerves. He griped about constant insomnia, or about feeling ill and weak with some un-diagnosable ailment. He pestered my parents to give him a job at their store, insisting this would relieve his restlessness. He worried that Jeffrey wasn’t doing all his homework, that Jeffrey’s hair was too long, that Jeffrey would catch a cold because he didn’t wear a hat, and that his mother wasn’t keeping a careful eye on him.

But no, when we asked him in exasperation, he wouldn’t call or meet with his son, or visit him at college. Just as he refused to change his pants or get a haircut.  He deflected anger with blankness. Over time, the complaints ebbed into silence, and we didn’t miss his voice.

Today, the disturbance has calmed down to a low growl, the white noise we’ve all learned to block out. I often pass him on the street in my neighborhood and scarcely make eye contact, rather I let him fade into the city’s anonymous backdrop.  Perhaps in another context this would be a sign of family dysfunction. But the dividend we extract from my uncle’s dependency is the convenient assumption that whatever is wrong with our collective relationship, it is always wrong with him.

My uncle has taught my family a new language of avoidance. My mother and father cope in creative ways. They assign him rote tasks: watering the plants or doing sit-ups before bed. At times, they seem to relish yelling at him—about his reluctance to shower and shave; his fatness; the sweat that beads up on his greasy forehead because he wears long sleeves and sweaters regardless of the weather; and how he eats the same dull breakfast every day, bread and milk, like he’s still institutionalized. With almost puerile vigor, they’ve teased him about his various tics—the tuneless humming under his breath when he chews, the involuntary muscle contractions rocking him back and forth and making him limply stroke his belly, as if strumming a guitar.
 
I no longer see the point in trying to convince my parents this kind of treatment is not very therapeutic for schizophrenia patients. I know it provides a cathartic outlet as they struggle to fit him into a half-lit corner of their lives. And I’m not entitled to criticize; I yell at him too sometimes, after all. And unlike them, I don’t have to breathe the stifling air his illness seeps into their home each day.

My mother sometimes lashes out with subtle hostility. Over dinner, she’ll yell at him for being too timid in reaching out for the fish on the far end of the table—she hates his craven reluctance to ask for anything, as if he’s afraid of becoming emotionally indebted to us. One night she denounced him for not visiting an ailing relative, reminding him of how he abandoned his own parents, and the withering denouncement prompted him to make the trip. Mostly, she rages against his less consequential tics: She’s excoriated him once for not throwing away the box for the tube of toothpaste. Normal people don’t leave open toothpaste boxes; they throw them in the trash. My uncle would generally say nothing and comply, but it isn’t the nonsensical habits that bothered her, but the indifference, the emotional opacity, that gives him an unnerving leverage over us.

My father focuses on keeping my uncle occupied. He urges him to write Chinese calligraphy each day as a form of therapy. Lately, my uncle has become somewhat livelier and talkative—we think it’s because he switched medications—and the recommendations have become more ambitious. My uncle now writes regular diary entries, which my father sometimes reads to monitor his progress. When my father encouraged his brother half-seriously to take martial arts classes with an old master we know from Chinatown, my uncle, who moves like he just emerged from a body cast, stayed quiet. He allows his caregivers the comfort of having urged him to do something, knowing they don’t expect, maybe don’t even want him to really respond.

The New Normal

There have been minor triumphs in recent months since he switched to the new medicine.  He might remark at dinner on the food being too spicy, instead of just chewing mutely. He used to eat only bananas as his evening snack, and now he throws in the occasional apple or orange.

One evening, I asked my uncle if, after about five years, he had become the longest-running student in his day treatment group. He told us many people had been there far longer. My father joked about how long it was taking those students to “get better.” No, I say, it’s about managing the illness, reaching a point where it’s no longer getting worse. You still don’t understand you can’t cure these things, I said. They nod quietly, and my uncle says nothing. The lull dangles in our queer emotional stasis.

As a reporter, when writing about mental health issues, I’ve researched the concept of cultural competency. I’ve interviewed clinicians and advocates about Western mental health care’s failures in working with immigrant households, who often are reluctant to seek professional treatment and have difficulty grasping the idea there is no real cure. Researchers say Asian American families face special challenges due to different concepts of family cohesion, which tend to subjugate the individual will to the communal. Mental health issues in Asian American communities have historically been ignored or misunderstood, burdened by stigma, shame, and a lack of access to culturally sensitive treatment programs.

Still, I can never seem to graft that analysis onto the case study unfolding in my parents’ living room. We’re not ignorant people who think my uncle is cursed or evil. We’re not ashamed. Somehow the disdain my parents heap on him feels justified. He is irritating, unpleasant, and he is constantly there. Before he went crazy, he frustrated us in ways no one else really understood.
We may understand him better now that his personality bears a psychiatric label.

We understand ourselves less; my father’s unshakeable commitment to his brother seems to push the bounds of sanity at times, even if we couldn’t imagine it any other way. Maybe it runs in the family.

I go back to his birthday. Tonight, we rest. We’re at the Thai restaurant in Queens, two generations celebrating two birthdays and a graduation. Two middle-aged brothers face each other across the long table, balding and content. Tonight, my uncle toasts to his son Jeffrey.

He’s happy that everyone is together here, he says, and he’s proud.

I try to focus on his words and not the wheezy thinness of his voice as my mouth pulls into something just shy of a smile. Mired in the moment’s dense awkwardness is this fragile pride we all feel—an emotion pressed flat and smooth by exhaustion.

 

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Cairo
Commentary

Cornerless City

Best of In The Fray 2007. A view of Cairo from the outside in.


I’ve been walking down the streets of Cairo for weeks now, but I’ve never been to a corner. A map of the city’s geography slowly surfaces in my imagination, peopled with various urban landmarks. But in my vision of Cairo, the corners are nowhere to be found.

There are, of course, places where the sides of a block meet at an angle. In other cities, however, corners parse and define elements of urban space, reminders that there is a manufactured grid underlying the people and pavement. In my native New York, corners help orient a civilization that can no longer locate itself with respect to the stars. But here, corners are an afterthought. Edges and angles ebb and flow in a dance between spaces and crowds, like air pockets in clay — incidental to a social thicket that defies any preconceived scheme.

Here, corners are not actually extinct, but rather are like an obsolete tailbone. The newer outlying neighborhoods, where wealthier Cairenes reside, do mimic the clean edges of “developed” metropolises around the world. And the major commercial thoroughfares do fit into roughly perpendicular lines. Still, the Cairo I see, where pedestrians and vehicles blur in the frenetic, dust-caked streets, is fueled by a gnarled urban core that has little use for the conventional corner.

Here, spasmodic traffic neither follows rules nor needs them. Carts of cactus and melon butt against crookedly parked fiats. Clouds of lush trees erupt from scorched ground over an architectural jumble of postwar-socialist concrete slabs, high-rises, and European-style townhouses.

Cairo has plenty of squares — plazas known as midans, which are loftily titled after heroes, or “liberation” (tahrir), or the Sphinx. But these spaces are far from the manicured quadrilaterals characteristic of Western cities. To reserve a corner in the chaos just for hailing a cab or meeting a friend would seem an utter waste.

In the Dokki district where I live, when crumbling sidewalks kiss their cross streets, they typically curl narrowly around the foot of a cement stack of apartments. The “corner” might be colonized by a tree jutting from the concrete, or pensive men — maybe cabbies, maybe poets — sitting and puffing shisha from standing metal pipes. Pedestrians find it easier to share the adjacent asphalt with taxis and donkeys.

Cairo’s layout evokes the lyrical cursive of the Arabic script. Walls, alleys, and other spaces are distinct facets in the landscape, but they sometimes weave into each other, matted and coiling. Even the bricks seem somewhat elastic; the architectural contours rearrange themselves mischievously when you’re not looking to make you lose your way.

When you expect to turn a corner, you happen upon a roundabout, where traffic spools into a haphazard knot encircled by storefronts and cracked cement. Or a twist in your path zigzags into a bazaar of Orientalist clichés, like the Khan Al-Khalili suq, where hawkers haggle with tourists over brass lamps, papyrus posters, and other contemporary relics.

Follow another strip and find it suddenly swallowed by the entryway of a brightly lit mosque, where legions of beat-up shoes stand guard. Inside, socks and foreheads softly touch the carpet, and men check their cell phone messages amid an arabesque of delicate shadows.

In the Zamalek district on Cairo’s central island, artists have spun a would-be dead-end into a buoy of cultural happenings. At the terminus of 26th of July Street — named for the day Egypt took over the Suez Canal — the Culture Wheel harbors concert halls, lecture rooms, and photo galleries. On one side of the venue, beneath chugging traffic, a tiled pavilion flanking the murky belt of the Nile offers refuge to wistful minds.

Despite its physical anarchy, the city falls reflexively into a structured rhythm. Every day is punctuated by five moaning calls to prayer that swell up through the loudspeakers of mosques in simultaneity. For a few minutes, all of Cairo sings with the same tension, aligning the churning crowds into one spiritual refrain.

While the lack of straight lines and angles can feel liberating, it can stifle an outsider. Sometimes each turn reminds me of my alien status as passersby jeer in Arabic and stare. The sharpest corner I’ve encountered, perhaps, is the one that my foreignness backs me into, though I know I will escape by retracing my path back to the order and predictability of America.

But Cairo’s fluid landscape has always enough give to absorb outside elements. The Persians, Romans, and modern imperialists of every sort have occupied the city in turns. The sheer weight of its past collapses borders, mashing together churches and mosques and skin tones of every shade.

In a region percolating with war and paranoia, Cairo spins in relative peace on its own axis, slippery with honey and grease, and the sweat under headscarves and three-piece suits.

You don’t have to be here long to sense the odd joy — hushed but proud, a reason for the city to resonate praise to God each day. Without corners, it’s hard for me to grasp this place and how it plods on with such flair. But I’d rather that Cairo keep its secrets to itself and roll on as it always has, slipping through history’s fingers.

Sherif Megid is a Cairo-based photographer, filmmaker and writer of short stories. His works are inspired by the history and images of the street where he grew up, Sharaa El Khalifa in Islamic Cairo. He has published two collections of short stories and recently held an acclaimed exhibition of his street photography in Cairo.

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Homecoming for Hai Rong

A 16-year-old's uneasy navigation of China's city/country divide.


The homecoming migrant and the author enjoyed a sweltering slow train to Shandong.

The three-wheeled wagon ground to a halt before a sprawling green and bronze field. So concluded the vehicular portion of the trip: 20 hours by rickety railcar from Shanghai to Shandong Province, several hours by bus to the city of Jilin, another few hours in a rickety van to the county of Jia Xiang, where we hitched a ride on a primitive wagon to a small village omitted from most maps.

Now, our driver took one look at the 600 meters of lumpy mud ahead of him, the result of a recent rainstorm, and told us he could go no further. My friend Hai Rong and I would make the final stretch of the migrant’s long pilgrimage to the “lao jia,” or home village, on foot.

Hai Rong, the migrant I was following home, had traveled over 1200 miles and 30 hours to arrive at the family farm — from China’s richest and most dazzling metropolis to a rural heartland that was displaying the first budding signs of Reform-Era modernization. I had come along for the ride, and was now finding myself nearly spent before we got to the front door.

Each step in the soft brown muck felt laden with anticipation. Hai Rong was exhausted, but energized by the thought of being home again after six months of working and living on her own in Shanghai. In a wrinkled white blouse and dusty black skirt, towing plastic bags of gifts and food she had purchased in the local town, the 16-year-old stepped briskly toward her destination: a simple cement compound at the end of the road. I tried to keep pace with her, but lacked her motivation as the weight of my camcorder and backpack mired me in the pasty mud.

Beaming, Hai Rong said that she had a feeling her mother hadn’t slept all night. She just knew, the same way her mother must have known that her daughter had been too excited to sleep the night before the journey. And though her mother had no way of knowing when we would arrive — our train had been delayed several hours — she appeared in the distance just as we neared the settlement. “That’s a mother’s love,” Hai Rong said.

Having traversed an immeasurable distance, the blossoming 16-year-old with a doll face and a ponytail was greeting her mother for the first time in months. The spunky peasant matriarch’s square face crinkled in wind-worn rapture.

The still farmlands of Shandong speed past the train windows.

Paying your dues, Shanghai-style

Like many other youth from the countryside, Hai Rong had left her vocational high school a few months earlier to “da gong” or work in the city — the only way for girls like her to earn a decent living and a chance at leaving the village. Lured by the freedom of living independently, she turned down her mother’s offer to pay for some basic vocational training in her hometown. The city seemed to hold better possibilities.

Once she arrived in Shanghai, Hai Rong found herself interlaced in a network of transplanted relatives. Her older brother, two cousins, and three uncles, all lived in the same part of the city, and had all left the village to pursue Shanghai’s promise of a decent living. Her uncle, a former truck driver running a struggling food distribution business from his tiny apartment, grudgingly agreed to look after her along with her other cousins, but his own financial troubles, along with his temper, made him a less-than-ideal surrogate parent.

As is often the case in urban China’s bustling migrant labor market, Hai Rong landed her first job through a relative: Her cousin set her up as a waitress at a hotpot restaurant. From there, she switched to another hotpot restaurant down the street, a flashier place with a seedy disco and private rooms for rent on the top floor. When the restaurant suddenly shut down, she became a cashier at Happy Island, an Internet and computer game bar with branches all over Shanghai.

Happy Island, unfortunately, had a shady side. Her coworkers had a habit of taking money from the register when she wasn’t looking. Frightened that the boss would blame her if he discovered money was missing, she used her own cash to make up the difference. When he eventually discovered the truth, her boss refused to let her quit and rewarded her honesty with a few days off instead. Hai Rong took this opportunity to escape the city for a while.

Back from Shanghai, Hai Rong greets her mother for the first time in
months.

Escaping backwards

The night before her departure for her lao jia, Hai Rong invited me to come with her. I had heard stories about village life in China; people had told me that a city girl like myself wouldn’t be able to stand it. So I decided that the countryside would test me the same way the city had tested Hai Rong.  

My first challenge arrived by rail — the slow train to Shandong. I struggled against delirium in the heavy Sweltering air, laden with the odor of cheap cigarettes and the sweat of people packed into every square inch. Hai Rong sat quiet and composed in her white blouse and somewhat rumpled knee-high stockings.

She’d always been the more obedient child, she told me. Her mother worried less about her soaking up bad influences in the city than about her older brother, who has a more rebellious temperament. Like many other village parents, Hai Rong’s mother and father, who barely had a grade school education and never left the countryside, saw the city as both an alluring galaxy of prosperity and a nebulous black hole that threatened to swallow their children. That she would “get polluted,” Hai Rong said, was her mother’s main fear.

While Shanghai symbolized escape to her, it also served as a different kind of cage. She had no close friends, and her uncle had taken it upon himself to make sure she was not corrupted by urban life. She enraged him by going to a disco with her cousin one night. Warning her that she would “xue huai,” or pick up bad ways, in that kind of environment, he forbid her from going again.

Nonetheless, Hai Rong’s de-rustification process was inevitable; her family could curb her behavior but not her questioning mind. She told me one night as I walked with her to her worker dormitory that she had no way of communicating with her parents. They lived in a different world, she lamented. “There’s no common language.”

But when we first arrived at her village, the language barriers and parental pressures seemed to evaporate temporarily in the tranquil atmosphere. We followed her softly smiling mother through a maze of alleys overgrown with grass, through the wide wooden doorway of Hai Rong’s home into a small courtyard, where a sheet of wheat kernels dried in the sun on the cement floor.

Hai Rong’s mother told us in a thick Shandong dialect, that just before we arrived, a rainstorm had damaged the power line for the village. We would be without electricity for a few days. Thankfully the 20-hour slow-roasting train from Shanghai had prepared me well for stifling heat.

Hai Rong’s return drew a small crowd of spectators: There were a few elderly people, including her paternal grandmother, and a few children, but most people were in their 30s or 40s. Noticeably absent were people of Hai Rong’s age. Her village is typical of the Chinese countryside near booming coastal cities; children are sent away for school for as long as they have the money and the willingness to study, and then they leave home to work.

Hai Rong proudly gestured to her home’s small luxuries, for which she had a new appreciation after five months of cramped, shabby city living: the date tree at the center of her small yard, fresh grapes ripening on a bush by the entrance, and in the back, vines bearing cucumbers and beans. Everything was free, she boasted. You couldn’t even buy these beans in Shanghai markets.

Now that she was home again, Hai Rong was momentarily liberated from economic worries. In Shanghai she counted every penny and struggled to save some money for her parents. Tasting a bit of Shanghai’s wealth enhanced the bitterness of her poverty, while returning to her village made her feel rich.

In a way, she was. The main room of their home exemplified the rising standard of living among many Chinese peasants, bright and gaudily furnished with mirrors and glossy wooden furniture. A large color television was enthroned prominently on the wooden cabinet, alongside a worn-out karaoke mixer.

Hai Rong presented the gifts she had dutifully bought on the way home. To the sound of cracking lychee nuts and the sucking of ripe peaches, Hai Rong’s grandmother, aunt and mother sat with us in the living room and questioned Hai Rong about Shanghai. Was the pay good enough? What kind of work was she doing? Which was better, Shanghai or the village?

Hai Rong answered patiently. “Shanghai has its good parts and so does this place,” she answered diplomatically. But she added, “Everything is more convenient there.” (I soon had an intimate understanding of this when I discovered that the bathroom for the next few days was a brick-walled compost area behind their garden.)

She took me on a walk through a wooded hillside where she had played as a child. Every time she passed something familiar, she would ask me whether I thought it was pretty.

“It’s not as beautiful as it was before,” she said. It had changed. Or perhaps she had.

She feared that people would say she had changed for the worse. “I’m so glad they didn’t say I gained weight,” she said as we walked around the back alley toward her grandmother’s house. “I don’t know why, I’m just always worried about that.”

But Hai Rong had little to be self-conscious about; her homecoming injected a vitality into the sleepy village bereft of youth.

Her mother was motivated to cook for the first time in months. Usually, she just ate a few bowls of noodles to sustain her through the day. She saved the vegetables in the garden for when her children or husband were home. The younger generation seemed to be the only thing that propelled people to act.

Her village undulated to the rhythms of housework, the seasons, and the family. In Shanghai, by contrast, Hai Rong had entered an existence of atomized modernity. At work, she spent the day in the dimly lit anonymity of the Happy Island, watching bored urban youth while away hours playing video games or chatting online.

But in her village, the empty spaces of urban culture were replaced with empty lulls in conversations with family. She suddenly realized that she was now “not as talkative” as she was before she left; the right words eluded her. Now, when she was with her neighbors and family, she said, “I get annoyed. I don’t want to talk to them … When I respond to their questions, I feel tired, out of energy.”

“When I was younger, I was really rowdy,” she recalled, but her few months in the city had aged her, made her more aloof.

Hai Rong told me that night that she felt like there was no point in staying home for too long. She would go home in a couple of days.

That night, I glimpsed all three members of the family huddled around the bed in the living room, chatting aimlessly in the dark with a sweet intimacy that had eluded all of them for months. But the tranquility of the scene belied the fact that there would be few moments like these for the duration of their lives — maybe none. Economic realities did not permit the luxury of reunification.

A typical backyard in a village household.

Going to town

Hai Rong felt she was of little practical value around the house, since her parents, perhaps in their determination to get the children off the farm, had never taught them how to tend crops. Her presence, however, inspired her mother to get off the farm herself, at least for a day.

The next day, she and her mother pushed their small red motorcycle through half a kilometer of clay-like mud to get onto the only paved road that cut through the village. Every few meters, the two would pause, sweating in the roasting sun, and grab a stick to shove the mud out from between the spokes. I skulked behind them, ashamed yet relieved that my status as the foreign guest exempted me from this duty.

The town, the axis and commercial center around which local rural areas revolved, was typical for rural China. Old Chinese folk opera songs blasted out of storefronts advertising stereo equipment. Farmer’s carts were parked lazily on sandy crossroads hawking peaches and watermelons, clothing shops displayed glittery low-end polyester fashions, some of which were tailored for the potbellied figures of older women, others cheerily adorned with lace, cartoons, and English words for younger girls.

The contents and noise of the open storefronts and the street mingled sloppily. Sputtering motorcycles vroomed past ambling farmers. Middle-aged women, including Hai Rong’s mother, bargained fervently in the dank heat of the little shops, darkened in order to save electricity. Just behind the racks of T-shirts and lace lingerie, you could catch a glimpse of a bed, a crude stove, and a collection of empty beer bottles, shielded by a curtain.

Hai Rong asked me if I, as a bona fide city person, thought the town offered enough in terms of things to buy. She proudly said that this town basically had everything one needed. Everything except a Shanghai salary and a chance to get off the farm.

We visited Hai Rong’s old middle school, a neat white tile building, emblazoned with gold Chinese characters exhorting children to be diligent in their studies. Hai Rong was proud of her school. They had renovated the school grounds and the surrounding area so that it was even nicer than when she was a student. Even the poorer villages in China have seen notable improvements in infrastructure, schools and living conditions, partly due to government public works funding, and partly due to an influx of income earned through labor migration.

“It keeps getting better,” Hai Rong said with a smile. “I hope the next time you come, it’s even better.”

Some things in the village were getting worse, however. The main reason for the visit to the school was to meet with one of the head teachers. Hai Rong’s cousin, the eldest son of her uncle who was now working in Shanghai, had been neglecting his studies to play video games at the local computer bar, where many youth while away their afternoons in tightly packed computer cubicles.

“He’s gone bad,” said Hai Rong as her mother listened gravely to the young teacher’s warnings, delivered in peppery Shandong dialect, that the once top-ranked student was on the wrong path. “He’s been badly influenced by his father,” Hai Rong told me. The short, skinny adolescent had his father’s square, angular face, as well as his temper.

The long distances migrants journey to find a better life in the city often strain family relations, especially for men like Hai Rong’s uncle. He found another woman in Shanghai, who bore him a son. Since his first wife and two older sons found out about the affair, the household had unraveled. The mother’s life at home now consisted of “crying and wailing every day,” Hai Rong told me, and the boys, encouraged by their mother, had virtually disowned their father.

The labor migration phenomenon has atomized families across the country, and this boy’s steady downward spiral was just one indication that economic prosperity could have dark implications for China’s rural communities. “If I were him,” said Hai Rong, “I’d be the same. I’d hate [my father] too.”

Gazing at the campus abuzz with youthful vitality and ripe innocence, Hai Rong was nostalgic for her school days, before she had encountered the threatening urban world, before she discovered the “chou shi“ or “ugly matters” that marred her uncle’s family.

She ran into an old friend, who had been held back instead of advancing to the vocational upper middle school, as Hai Rong had. Hai Rong admired her friend because she was still in school. “But actually, she might admire me,” she reflected, because so many village children dream of finding steady jobs in big cities. If she had felt that her advice would have been valued, Hai Rong probably would have warned the youth that their idealism was at least partially misplaced. But when a teenager’s options in life are either a city of possibilities, both good and bad, or a flat tract of dirt to which her family has been chained for generations, the act of leaving the village is not so much the pursuit of an ideal as it is a quest to survive.

Hai Rong undergoes re-rustification.

Sweet duplicity

The oil bubbled and snarled in the wok. Hai Rong, her mother and I stood in a crude stone room with a small stove. We were making the main dish of the evening — tang gao, or sugar cakes. Hai Rong was eager to show me that you didn’t have to spend money to be able to taste these fritters of sugar, flour, and air — a coarse but cheap and satisfying treat that could be made from just a bag of sugar and dough.

Hai Rong’s mother kneaded and twisted the dough in the darkness as dusk began to close over the fields. She taught me how to drizzle my palm with a few drops of precious oil, and press a lump of dough with my fingers until I formed a small cup to house a teaspoon of sugar. The lump was then patted flat and deep fried into fuzzy patties of golden sweetness. It was a child’s treat for a grown-up daughter thinking of home.

The recipe, like Hai Rong’s lao jia as a whole, was simple. The city bumpkin’s complexities, on the other hand, were outgrowing the place. She bore the impact of the urban environment like a tender bruise. Her impatience and disdain for the country life were evident in her complaints that the people in the village were of a low class, or “suzhi,” or when she expressed her disappointment at how her uncle, whom everyone used to admire for making something of himself in the city, had brought shame upon his family. The realization that people divide themselves when moving between city and village, the discovery of duplicity inherent in Chinese migrant identity, is enough to cast shadows over a girl’s spirit.

Learning how to lie was a baptism of sorts for Hai Rong. One of the first pieces of advice her cousin gave her when she came to Shanghai was never to tell anyone you were there to find work — “da gong de.” Any indication that you were fresh off the farm was a green light for ravenous con men and other shady types who preyed on country kids with half-full pockets. So at the beginning of our journey, riding in the cab on the way to the Shanghai train station, she had replied with a quick “yes” when the driver asked us if we were students taking a holiday.

The habit of giving false answers, which she had come to think of as a game of sorts, followed her home. When we boarded the bus that took us back to the village, one of the bus attendants asked her where she lived. She then led the bus company worker on a 20-minute chase in which she dodged every question about her town and the location of her village, shaking her head and saying “I don’t know” when he asked if she knew how to get home.

I had never thought of being able to tell the truth about my identity as an indulgence, but in Hai Rong’s world, it was. As long as she was a migrant worker, her background would be at best a burden and at worst a mark of shame; to be mistaken for someone else was a relief for her, a temporary escape.

Hai Rong pushes the family’s only means of transportation through the mud on
the way to town.

City bound

The train car rocked gently as it throttled through the darkness.

For the return trip, we had bought tickets for the fast train, mainly at my spoiled American behest, since I didn’t think I’d be able to stomach another day-long cattle-car ride. Of course, even the “fast train” would take about ten hours, and we were too late to get seats — a more popular train often means standing room only.

Hai Rong and I were joined at Shandong train station by her second uncle, who, having returned briefly to his village to tend to farm work, was headed back to Shanghai to continue his job collecting recyclable trash on a bicycle cart. After some searching, we staked out a florescent-lit smoking alcove between train cars, setting up a small camp on our bulky luggage and dining on hard-boiled eggs and fresh-picked peaches.

Like the train we rode out of Shanghai, this one was packed with migrants, mostly lanky men in their 20s or 30s, all returning to city life, and to their city selves. To pass the time strangers chattered about where they were headed and what line of work had brought them there. The men standing next to us were part of a construction team bound for Jiangsu Province, one of countless work teams that were fueling China’s warp-speed development with migrant sweat.

The tracks stretched through the slick, rainy night, delivering the workers to their destinations, where, buoyed by wilting memories of lao jia, they would toil for another month, another year, until they earned enough to take them home to their children in the village.

But for younger migrants like Hai Rong, the goal of earning money in the city is not as clear. There is no feeling of urgency in facilitating the circulation of human and financial capital between the two worlds. There is only the somewhat aimless sense that working in the city is the only path they can take.

Hai Rong perhaps faced even starker challenges than did migrants with families to support, because her struggle was less obvious and went beyond economic subsistence. The harshness of both the village and the city had imbued her with an insatiable determination just to keep going. But without a clear path laid out before her and other young migrants like her, she was straining to attain stability and dignity in a tumultuous metropolis that seemed eager to derail her.

As the train doors opened on our destination, the peace and the sedate comforts of rural life — which elicited both frustration and nostalgia from its itinerant youth — were scattered in the cool haze of a city dawn.

The reporting for this article took place in the summer of 2004 during the author’s year-long research fellowship on internal migrants in urban China.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTOR >

PLACES> SHANGHAI AND RURAL CHINA>

Shanghai official website
URL: http://www.shanghai.gov.cn

Shanghai: Street Life/Night Life, photographed by Howard W. French
URL: http://www.howardwfrench.com/photos/Shanghai-day-to-day

Michelle Chen, “Shanghai After Dark,” Jinx Magazine
URL: http://www.jinxmagazine.com/shanghai.html

Craig Troianello, “The China Challenge: Life in a farming village,”
Yakima Herald-Republic
URL: http://www.yakimaherald.com/newsfeatures/china/china23.php

TOPICS> RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION IN CHINA>

“China’s Economic Reforms Likely to Increase Internal Migration,” Population Reference Bureau
URL: http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PRB&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=6755

Jim Yardley, “In the Chinese countryside, fractured families,” New York Times
URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2004/12/20/news/china.html

TOPICS> CHINESE MIGRANT WOMEN>

Tamara Jacka, “‘My Life as a Migrant Worker’: Women in Rural-Urban Migration in Contemporary China”
URL: http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue4/tamara_intro.html

Zhang Ye, “Hope for China’s Migrant Women Workers,” China Business Review, May/June 2002
URL: http://www.chinabusinessreview.com/public/0205/ye.html

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Commentary

The double agent

Shifting between Chinese and American identities, a Shanghai observer finds herself both alien and at home. Part three of a three-part series.


When celebrating a research subject’s birthday Shanghai style, rather than eating the cake, it is customary to zha dan gao or plaster each other’s faces with it.

Since coming to China on a research fellowship, I’ve spent very little time with other “foreigners.” I have preferred to “go native,” spending most of my time with my research subjects, rural-to-urban migrant workers who think of me by turns as a confidante, a little sister, an odd spectacle of cultural hybridism, or some combination of the above. As I have assumed the identities they apply to me, the way I identify myself has also evolved.

The notion of “transformation” in a foreign land is a familiar cliché to Americans who venture abroad. But during my time in China, my cynicism has yielded to a grudging resignation that I have transformed — and that whether the change has been “authentic” or imagined does not change its reality. Being foreign teaches you not only how different you are, but also how thoroughly unremarkable you can be among the masses in an unfamiliar territory.

The sensation and science of being foreign

The more I see of Shanghai, the more I discover that everyone here has come in search of liberation. Migrants see this city as a way out of poverty. Westerners see a way out of the ennui of ordinary middle-class existence.

Foreigners are a different kind of migrant, in search not of wealth but of self-affirmation. Talented but aimless individuals flock to Shanghai because they feel like China is a place where “things are happening.” This country also attracts the dregs of educated America: sad middle-aged BA-generalists turned English teachers, meandering middle-class 20-somethings trying to cash in on globalization, earthy backpackers whose lives are tucked between the dog-eared pages of a Lonely Planet.

I’ve developed a taxonomy of the foreigner species, known in China as laowai. There are savvy laowai, with their native girlfriends, their slick use of the local slang, their inside jokes about how ridiculous the Chinese are with their uncivilized habits, their pathetic English, their sexual awkwardness and comical willingness to hit on foreigners of the opposite sex. Then there are the clueless with their pathetic Chinese, their fear of loud traffic and unsanitary restaurant conditions, their naïve fascination with all things “classically” Chinese, like pagoda rooftops, calligraphy scrolls, and chintzy kimonos for which they pay scandalous amounts at seedy street markets.

Many of the foreigners I’ve met have passed the initial culture shock and subsequent euphoria phases of being immersed in a new culture. They are now in the jaded phase. They just can’t get used to some things, they say, like the shoving crowds on the buses, the filth in the streets. Some resign themselves to leading a Western existence in China. Like the Chinese American girl I know who, in her three years here, has never ridden a city bus and admits to having not a single Chinese friend.

For its part, Shanghai prides itself on being more “open” to the rest of the planet than any other city in China and currently aspires to be a dazzlingly modern global capital. The city’s come-hither gaze toward the Western world disturbs and frustrates me, though I owe my own presence here to it, and it makes me more determined to distance myself from the foreign influence in this city that I ironically help constitute.

My negative impressions do have a tangentially scientific basis. Assisting a Chinese sociology professor’s study on the lifestyles of foreigners in Shanghai, I learned that most of the interview subjects shared two major characteristics. Whether they had come in the hope of teaching English for a decent salary or slipping into a white-collar post at a branch office of a foreign company, they were in China mainly because they did not want to be at home. “I just wanted something totally different” was a frequent comment.

The other characteristic these ex-pats had in common was that they professed disdain for other expats, looking down on the stereotypical cloistered lifestyle of expense accounts and social clubs.

At a downtown bar crawling with tipsy Westerners, a young man said to me with a smirk, “Foreigners in China are disgusting.” A fellow foreigner, an English teacher — who said he had left his techno party-monger identity behind in Britain because he was “pissed” —mused, “It’s easier than London. But the beer’s more expensive.”

Newly arrived foreigners don’t share the same irritating complacency but irritate me nonetheless with their naïveté. A young woman I met through American friends, apparently unfamiliar with the one-child policy, asked me one evening if abortion was legal in China. Another interviewee, a Canadian man working for a foreign company in Shanghai, expressed awe at the laborers he saw on the streets struggling to earn a living.  “I see the people go by on bikes. Old, old people peddling, ringing the bell, trying to pick up scraps and stuff like that,” he said. “It’s helped make me a lot more conscious of my money.”

There’s something unsettling about this glorification of hardship. In a Westerner’s eyes, the poor of another country become a muddy moral window, reflecting through grease spots and blood stains a pathetic world that makes the privileged feel passively guilty but above all fortunate. The gain seems, like so many other interactions between developed and undeveloped societies, one-sided.

Blending in and mixing it up

I feel at once disgusted by fellow Americans’ self-confidence and impressed with their survival skills, which even the least culturally competent learn quickly.  I hear them peppering their English with Chinese curse words and haggling with shopkeepers like an “authentic” Chinese. But what could be more typically American than assuming that an American identity can be cast off or disguised as one chooses?

But I dismiss their gratuitous efforts to assimilate mainly because I can pull it off better than they can. Looking Chinese gives me a great advantage over non-Asian Westerners, whose tallness, hairiness, angular features, and plump figures jut out in a Chinese crowd. In my own pursuit of authenticity, I always speak in Chinese, shop at neighborhood markets, and eat at the homes of Chinese friends, borrowing their slang. And it feels good to claim the power of residing in two parallel cultures.

Maybe I’m too Chinese for my own good. I’m coarser in China than I am even in my native New York, grabbing mercilessly for a seat on a crowded bus, speaking at the same loud volume — rude to Western ears — that others use when they address me. My questions here are more intrusive, reflecting a traditional Chinese lack of social caution in asking about your monthly salary, or pointing out, as one friend did recently, that your teeth look unusually yellow this afternoon. Unlike Westerners who politely turn down elderly beggars and children selling flowers (which generally encourages their pursuit), I no longer acknowledge their presence as I walk by, the same way Shanghai natives do. We are all pushed forward by the knowledge that if we stopped to listen to every poor person and everyone who takes advantage of sympathy, we’d never go anywhere.
Yet what separates me from the hordes rushing into a modern lifestyle is that I do stop to listen, often through thin walls. My research topic is the rural migrants who flood into the cities for work, upward-striving but poor and often poorly educated. While the economic and social gulf between us is enormous, despite — or possibly because of — the differences between us, we turn the space between us into a synaptic connection.

My American background has made me instantly popular as it makes me an object of intense curiosity. While I disrupt their notions of a classic laowai, they also see me as a fellow Chinese, with American characteristics. Some migrants have sort of adopted me, viewing me as a distant relative living in the big city by herself who needs looking after. They call me xiao gu niang, or “little girl,” and say I should protect myself because I’m dan cun — the Chinese term for pure and naïve. I do feel vulnerable here, but not in the way they think. I want to tell them that they oversimplify me — perhaps reading simplicity out of me the same way I read out of them complexity that I imagine.  I probably seem simpler in China because my language skills limit my power of expression.  Or perhaps their inability to view me in all my complexity reveals not my “purity” but their innocence.

Migrant stallkeepers play cards to pass the time during a slow day.

A complicated woman

While individual complexity is highly valued in the West, in the mind of a rural migrant who has had to adapt to the assault of rough city life, dan cun is a precious and rare quality. One migrant worker I know recently brought his girlfriend (whom he met through chatting on the Internet) from Guangxi Province to Shanghai. A quiet girl, she whiles away many of her afternoons at an Internet cafe or in front of the television in the back room of the construction storefront where he works. Though her personality seems bland and even a little withdrawn, I see why my friend is drawn to her: She had that purity and consistence that is hard to find among urban youth who get wrapped up in the temptations of Shanghai youth culture — drinking, gambling, even organized crime. My friend didn’t seek a perfect match in looking for a girlfriend; he looked for a transparency, an innocence he could simultaneously protect and escape into.

Individuality is not prioritized here simply because to do so is a luxury. In America, I seek interactions with people who challenge me, but I find that intellectual and emotional challenges are most appealing when everyday living is relatively easy. Personal subjectivity becomes important when the impersonal aspects of our lives are settled, stable, and in a sense, boring. For people who struggle with economic hardship, socializing is utilitarian — a release from the burdens of the workday. Romantically, as my friend’s girlfriend showed me, a good match consists of trust, convenience, and a tacit agreement to face future struggles together. Intellectual or sexual attraction is a secondary consideration.

Though I think it would be a stretch to argue that Chinese culture does not value individuality at all, traditional Chinese do tend to idealize simplicity in a girl’s personality. For migrants who are often in dire economic circumstances, a “pure” girl symbolizes comfort, stability, and solace in a tumultuous society. This doesn’t mean women are looked down upon. Certainly, females are much more respected in Chinese society today than at any other time in history. Still, when I observe workers from a local market in their homes, I see that women, apart from work and raising children, are generally devoid of much of a personal life. Men work hard as well, but they also find the time to drink and gamble with friends, often when their wives are looking after their children or their market stalls. Women are supposed to be tough, working to support their families as men do, but they should never be tougher than their husbands. A complex or fu zha personality would threaten the gender hierarchy that upholds this society and many others.

Complexity can, however, be welcome on occasion, especially if it speaks with a foreign accent.  Most of my research subjects and other Chinese I’ve befriended have expressed respect for me because I am a college graduate, an international traveler, and a woman. I know that my difference intrigues them; my foreignness empowers, and I use it to my advantage. I get a slight thrill from stretching gender boundaries when I hang out with male migrants. Once when I went to dinner with a group of construction workers, the boss was shocked that I was not uncomfortable with the situation, suggesting a respectable local girl would never go out alone at night with a group of rowdy men. During a recent visit to a research subject’s house, I had the slightly awkward realization that I was the only woman willing to discuss politics at dinner.

Having it both ways

I still can’t bring myself to call my research subjects “friends,” although they think of me as such. While they tend to simplify me in their minds, I analyze qualities of theirs to which they themselves are oblivious. My conversations with them never feel quite equal and thus can never be fully open. We’re operating on different levels of awareness — maybe even two different levels of power.

They feel privileged to have a friend like me, who offers them a window into a world they’ll never experience, yet who does not speak a strange language or have a white face.  A migrant worker close to my age told me that his village friends wanted him to take me back home on his next visit, so they could see what his “American friend” was like. I didn’t appreciate the prospect of being paraded around like an exotic pet. Yet I can’t be angry with him, because my “friendship” with him is similarly self-serving. My research subjects are my primary sources, and the fact that I can access them makes me feel special the same way they perhaps feel special for accessing an American.

A foreign student once told me that when people see foreigners here, they see money. I’m reluctantly beginning to believe him. People question me about everything from the price of my tape recorder or the clothing I am wearing to my monthly rent or the amount of my fellowship. I’ve been asked for a loan more than once, for rent money, for investment in a future business, for the purchase of inventory. I guess this is what I would do too if I lived in a world where it was crucial to grab every opportunity that came my way. I restrain my urge to yell that being from a First-World country does not make me a credit union.

But in the end, I have to concede my privilege, and it drags heavily on me. It’s not just having financial resources or an education. My privilege is rooted in my insight, my ability to view these people from my American perspective — to pass judgment, to observe their limitations and aspirations and futile hopes — while remaining detached. To me, they are primarily subjects, and friends only when I want them to be more than foils in my China experience.

It’s odd being able to have it both ways, operating as a two-faced double agent, moving back and forth across the culture gap. The more I become aware of the distance between myself and the migrants, the more I want to close it by spending time in their homes, talking with them, joking with them, trying to build some sort of rapport. But there’s always an element of exploitation, because I am the researcher. My investment in this place is not one of the heart but of the intellect, and though I’ve built warm relationships here, despite my determination to see the best in these people, they are not intellectual connections.

And on the other side, I see myself in the context of other foreigners living in China, and I realize that what I despise about them is what I fear seeing in myself — that cold, careless, clumsy superficiality, that arrogance forged from the latent understanding that this whole country is a temporary experience—a cultural experiment that can end any time one gets tired of it. It’s that arrogance of being able to choose one’s environment.

A debatable identity: two halves, or a whole?

Still, I also willingly enforce my arrogance. Cultural divisions feed my American exceptionalism, manifesting itself in my constant assumption that I must be right in a given debate — on China-Taiwan politics, on how much freedom parents should give children, on when a young person should get married — because I grew up in a comparatively democratic country and have a perspective on the world that the Chinese lack, or because I’ve graduated from college and the person I’m speaking to has a rural junior high school education.

I’ve spent countless evenings with a migrant worker from Shandong, in front of a television flashing images of combat in Iraq and the War on Terror, arguing with him about whether Iraq was better off before the American “liberation.” Though I’m hardly a defender of America, I feel compelled to counter the simplistic idea that Iraq was a content and peaceful nation before America came in and screwed everything up. When the same man said that he supported Osama Bin Laden for attacking America on September 11, 2001, a spontaneous twinge of patriotism urged me to ask: “If my parents had been working in the Twin Towers then, would you still support him?” Inwardly, I know I just desire to counter other people’s self-righteousness with my own, and the fact that both sides are probably misinformed affords us the opportunity to argue pointlessly with abandon.

Even among Chinese peers with educational and class backgrounds similar to mine, with whom I previously looked forward to sharing a common youth culture, a condescending attitude has begun to envelop me. I find myself looking down on Chinese young people’s obedience to a system of laws and rules that I see as oppressive. They stomach a dull and creativity-stifling public education system. Though many don’t respect the social structure that they must negotiate, they comply with it in order to get ahead.

Americans do the same thing, of course, but in China, where education consists basically of tests and regurgitation of lessons, complicity seems even more dangerous to an already silenced civil society. With one Chinese friend, a journalist, I debated whether China would soon face political instability if it did not begin to democratize its government. She asserted that China was more stable than I thought, that you could get along fine as long as you did not get involved in politics or voice your opinion when you weren’t supposed to. She prefers to stay away from sensitive issues like political oppression.

I wanted to tell her that her self-censorship is more of a threat to China’s political future than any outright oppression. But I refrained, because there is no way for me to grasp fully China’s political situation. My Chinese peers, at any rate, may be freer than they appear on the surface. The friend who has vowed to stay out of politics recently went through a political “training course” run by her employer, which she was instructed not to report about. In her bag on the way back from work, however, she carried one of the books that has been banned from press coverage.

People are subtly challenging the system in ways that I can’t understand; coming from a relatively enlightened political culture may actually blind me to the nuances of this political change. Who am I to lecture people on the necessity of political reform in China when I cynically ignore what’s going on in American electoral politics, and when my own country prospers at the expense of the freedom of others?

In our elliptical debates on cultural rifts, people have questioned whether I feel more Chinese or more American.  The simplest answer I can conjure is the loaded one:  I feel both Chinese and American. People admire this access to both cultures, instilling in me a pride that I’m not completely comfortable with. I like to be proud of things that I’ve done, not of a background that I did not choose.

But much of my confidence here is rooted in privilege that I did not earn. Sometimes I walk down the street, see people climbing over each other to board a bus at rush hour, spitting gratuitously on the sidewalk, displaying extremely bad hairstyles, begging on the street, walking around with a mass of scar tissue where one’s cheek should be—from a factory accident? A “struggle session” during the Cultural Revolution ?—and I think, Damn it, America is a great country. My hometown, New York, is a rough place, but at least people line up to buy train tickets there, at least most public toilets display a modicum of sanitary standards, at least the contents of your daily paper are not exactly the propaganda of the ruling party, and if the police harass you unjustly, there is a chance that you can seek legal redress through the justice system. Living in China has made me, an unlikely patriot, feel lucky to be an American — even, dare I say, proud.

The author encountered these young girls during a visit to an impoverished Tibetan settlement in Western Sichuan Province.

Through double-doors

The Chinese have a custom of going from door to door, leisurely visiting neighbors, called chuan men. It seems that my lifestyle now consists of jumping among different doors.

I live half my life now among migrant workers, people who have also chosen their environment. But did they choose it, really? “We were forced here,” one woman told me when I asked if their migration had been empowering to her as a female head of household. It’s not freedom to them — it’s economic captivity.

Entering their lives makes me realize that some doors will always remain closed to me. I know they are joking when they tell me to bring them back to America with them (help my son find a job there, all I need is a visa) again and again, but each time they repeat the request, the seams of their smiles bear threads of desperation. They don’t expect me to help them, but they still ask, out of an instinct to pursue any chance of improving their situation.

And why shouldn’t I help them, if I have more at this moment than they will ever possess? Am I selfish? Do my “American values” dictate that they should earn their way out of poverty on their own? Or am I just afraid that if I help one person, there will be nothing stopping me from helping the dozen or so other people I’ve befriended over the past several months who all need money? I think the main reason is my fear that if I make myself an economic resource for these people, they’ll see me more as an opportunity to get ahead than as another human being, and I will begin to see them as faceless, desperate opportunists and nothing more. That’s not the kind of relationship I was seeking when I came to Shanghai. The hectic, overcrowded anonymity of this sprawling city spurs me to try to preserve the best parts of my humanity, both native and foreign, as much as possible.

But underneath the moral conundrums of living as a foreigner in a –developing-world metropolis, what pains me most is that there is nothing keeping me from abandoning my troubling sense of ethics altogether. A foreigner has so much more license to screw up in China. American dollars go a long way here, and the status of being American can buy you a lifestyle of pleasant apathy unimaginable in the West.

I worry about falling into this laziness of Western privilege. In the past century, my native country has displaced China (the once-great empire named the “center of the earth”) as the axis of modern civilization. But when I try to discipline myself into being as un-foreign and humble as possible, in some ways it only reaffirms my foreignness. Who else would have the time and resources to experiment with a denial of privilege besides those who are most privileged? I have an ample research grant that covers all my living expenses while I am here. I try to fulfill the fellowship’s well-intentioned mission of scholarly and cultural exchange.

But it’s hard to approach the task with humility without being tugged by the inherent self-importance of being a cultural ambassador, especially when I know I represent America to the people with whom I interact. As I negotiate this new territory, I’m discovering that the border between native and foreign is surprisingly porous, the line between experience and exploitation so fine, it is almost irrelevant.

This article was written during a 10-month research fellowship in Shanghai. The author has since returned to the United States, though she has not fully recovered from China — and hopes she never will.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > CULTURAL IDENTITY AND LIVING ABROAD >

World Hum
Enlightened travel writing.
URL: http://www.worldhum.com/

PLACES > CHINA >

China’s Communist Revolution, a Glossary
The BBC’s multimedia project on the history of Communist China.
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/special_report/1999/09/99/china_50/default.htm

China Internet Information Center
Official news from China.
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/english/

Asia Times Online
Unofficial news from China.
URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China.html

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News

Migrant makeover

Migrating from rural China to the big city and working at a salon has become a popular route out of poverty and stifling tradition. Such service workers are fueling China’s growing capitalist-style economy. But disappointing and sobering revelations await those with high hopes.


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

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News

Migrant makeover (part two)

Migrating from rural China to the big city and working at a salon has become a popular route out of poverty and stifling tradition. Such service workers are fueling China’s growing capitalist-style economy. But disappointing and sobering revelations await those with high hopes.


Go to part one

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > CHINESE MIGRANT WORKERS >

“Hope for China’s Migrant Workers”
A detailed report on labor migration policy and its impact on women in the new Chinese economy from the China Business Review
URL: http://www.chinabusinessreview.com/public/0205/ye.html

“Dagongmei” — Female Migrant Labourers
An article from the China Labour Bulletin by Australian researcher Tamara Jacka
URL: http://www.china-labour.org.hk/iso/article.adp?article_id=5282&category_name=Economic%20Reform

“My Life as a Migrant Worker: Women in Rural-Urban Migration in Contemporary China”
Another article by Tamara Jacka, from Intersections
URL: http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue4/tamara_intro.html

TOPICS > CHINESE BEAUTY INDUSTRY

“China Plans Regulation to Guide Beauty Industry”
A March 2003 article from the People’s Daily
URL: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200403/30/eng20040330_138927.shtml

“World ‘beauty makers’ knocking China door”
A June 2004 article by Mark Godfrey in China Today
URL: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-04/06/content_321064.htm

TOPICS > CHINESE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

“China’s Divisive Development — Growing Urban-Rural Inequality Bodes Trouble”
A 2001 article by Joshua Levin in Harvard International Review
URL: http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/index.html?id=977&page=5

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Commentary

Shanghai spectacle

Being a female gym rat in China isn’t as easy as it looks. Part two of a three-part series.


I clench my gloved palms around the cold serrated steel bar, at either end of which sit several rubberized 5, 10, and 20 kilogram plates. My knees bent, I attempt to deadlift the weight by pulling the bar over my knees and straightening my back. As I prepare for lift-off, I try to ignore the gawking observers to my left. I suppose lifting over 80 kilograms (176 pounds), for a girl weighing less than two-thirds of that, is generally considered no small feat in China or elsewhere. But the fact that I am in Shanghai makes weightlifting a uniquely challenging experience.

When I joined the First (phonetically translated into Fei Si Te) Fitness Center near my apartment in Shanghai’s Yangpu District, I was not quite prepared for the adjustment process I would have to undergo: an abrupt introduction to the cultural gaps between Chinese and Western concepts of exercise and personal space.

My initiation into the Fei Si Te community brought me the dubious privilege of celebrity status, me being 1) a small-framed Chinese-American female, and 2) an avid weightlifter with an admittedly odd penchant for lifting dumbbells and barbells that are about as big as I am. Thus, not only was I upsetting conventional notions of femininity, but I was also doing so in a booming post-Communist metropolis whose youth culture is hovering precariously somewhere between Maoist puritanism and Britney Spears. So I guess I shouldn’t feel surprised that I attracted stares of fascination mixed with horror and fear as I squatted close to twice my body weight. Not that my weightlifting didn’t draw surprise from male bystanders back in the United States, but at Fei Si Te , the blatant shock plainly smeared on the faces of exercisers was a Shanghai specialty, and months would pass until they began gradually to accept me as simply a grotesque fixture at the gym.

Alone in the crowd

To complicate matters, Fei Si Te, like many new enterprises in Shanghai, is hopelessly over-invested and over-staffed. Though it is nice having an entire gym all to oneself in the afternoon, it is slightly unnerving to be the only other animate object in the cavernous space besides three trainers and the custodian, all uniformed in pert warm-up suits.

On busier days, the five of us are joined by several 30-something ladies who maniacally monopolize every sit-up bench. As I push around the freeweights, the custodian meticulously wipes clean all the cheaply manufactured equipment with pleather trimmings that manage to peel despite hardly being used, and the trainers idle in the 10-foot radius around the air-conditioner, or do a few random chin-ups. They often have nothing to do but watch the exercisers. Though they sometimes offer me advice on good form, which I appreciate, they are more eager to engage the American in conversation about powerlifting techniques, protein powders, bodybuilding contests, and other aspects of fitness culture in the United States of which Chinese are just beginning to catch on and be mass marketed to.

On occasion, a trainer or a bold male bystander has been known to reaffirm his masculinity by jumping in between sets and attempting to throw my barbell around with strenuously displayed ease. I try to warn people against jumping under heavy weights if they have no previous lifting experience, but for some reason, seeing me lift has prompted some to “test” their strength by attempting to imitate my movement immediately after I finish with a weight or a machine. (I do admit it’s gratifying to see a grown man grab and instantly drop in bewilderment the barbell I just lifted, but I’d hate to be responsible for someone’s injury.)

During some memorable lifting sessions, I have been approached every ten minutes with some sort of question about how I picked up such an odd hobby or a comment about my being lihai (powerful) or how I should keep my elbows closer to my side when doing tricep pushdowns. “Are you planning on entering a bodybuilding competition?” asked one trainer. “You must be familiar with that guy,” said another, gesturing to the pair of posters (front and back) of Mr. Olympia flexing his steroidal physique in briefs.  

The body as temple, or high mass?

If I were only more culturally resilient, I might do as my fellow Chinese gym-goers do and chat happily with the trainers from the warm-up to cool-down. For Westerners, though, a workout is either a functional task (sometimes a chore) or a chance to isolate oneself from the hectic stimuli of work and household and focus on simple physical cultivation. In China, the idea of “working out” is still novel enough that the exercise is not so much practical as it is exhilarating, not an escape hatch from the pressures of Shanghai city life but a chance to participate further in modern consumer culture. Though Shanghai’s blitzkrieg of economic development has enabled the city to import the trappings of a cosmopolitan metropolis, recreational activities that seem mundane in developed nations, like “going to the gym,” still hold a spectacular quality for many of its wealthier residents.

In contrast to other parts of China, years of capitalist transition have acclimated Shanghai to the presence of lao wai (foreigners), Western pop music, and European brand names. Yet more personal aspects of the Western lifestyle — from dimly lit cafes to sweat-pumping aerobics classes — still dazzle even Shanghai’s rising elite, representing sophistication accessible only to the moneyed class.

Some cultural intangibles, however, just can’t be bought. Privacy, for instance. China is not only a mass society, but a society of spectators as well, which might explain why at my gym, people seem much more adept at watching others exercise than doing it themselves.

During a one-day promotional event, visitors were allowed a free trial of the equipment, and the usually empty gym was for an hour or so overrun with young men and women in trousers and dress shoes, positioning themselves backwards on the leg curl machine, yanking various limbs and cables back and forth, and nearly running the wheels off of an exercise bike in a frenzy of freshly discovered aerobic energy — all to the tune of techno and mandopop blasting in the background.

A group of gaunt Chinese men in their twenties made no attempt at subtlety when watching me do a few sets of deadlifts from about 10 feet away.

“Do you have to watch me like that?” I said in my best Chinese approximation of my surly New Yorker tone.

“We just think you’re lihai,” said one.

I tried to explain that it was uncomfortable to be observed this way, particularly when I was trying to focus my energy on dragging an obscenely heavy weight up from the floor. I realized that in China, Western amenities are designed for display, and the idea of private activity, within a seemingly “public” space such as a weight room, remains a foreign concept.

The men ambled off soon after I began glaring at them. I complained about the incident to another American gym patron who was also lifting weights. “Different concept of personal space here,” I remarked.

“Yeah,” he said disdainfully. “None.”

But this culture clash perhaps has a deeper significance than personal annoyance. My watchers considered a stare a complement, my subjection to their scrutiny a testament to my “lihai.” Nonetheless, as an American city girl who doesn’t always appreciate being put on the spot, my flattery is dwarfed by unease. Shanghai’s great irony is that its size and bustle afford both the anonymity of a global metropolis and the claustrophobia of vintage urban China. The surveillance I encounter as a fitness novelty reveals that here, what seems like a personal quest for muscular achievement can quickly turn into a spectator sport.

Click here to read Part One of the series.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

THE CHINESE FITNESS TREND >

”Global Fitness Chain to Build First Gyms in Beijing, Shanghai”, published by People’s Daily on March 22, 2002.
URL: http://china.org.cn/english/investment/29295.htm

”China’s Wellness Revolution” by Mark Godfrey, published by China Today. June 22, 2004.
URL: http://china.org.cn/english/2004/Jun/98896.htm

GENDER POLITICS AND POWERLIFTING >

”The Bodybuilding Grotesque: The Female Bodybuilder, Gender Transgression, and Designations of Deviance” by muscle-bound scholar Krista Scott-Dixon of Stumptuous.com.
URL: http://www.stumptuous.com/grotesque.html

“

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Commentary

Eating bitter and other Western dreams of China

An influx of backpackers has made hiking China's Yunnan Province more complex for tourists and locals alike. Part one of a three-part series.


View of Tiger Leaping Gorge from the hiker’s trail.

“Man man shou shi” called the bronzed and leathery man with a crew cut and a donkey as he waited for me to stuff my sweater in my backpack. He was telling me to take my time, as he was planning on following me. Since embarking on the trail winding along Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan Province, I had slowly peeled off the top three layers of clothing I had worn in anticipation of frigid mountain air. Betraying my background as a not-at-one-with-nature New Yorker, I found myself ascending a mountain as the daytime temperature rose rapidly. The jacket and two fleeces went first, followed by the wool sweater, but there was little I could do about the long underwear, at least not with the donkey man following closely behind.

The man tailing me was patiently waiting for me to collapse on the trail. He hoped that I would subsequently avail myself of his donkey and allow him to carry me in a formless, sweaty mass for the rest of the trip. Of course, this made me all the more determined to continue on the narrow, rocky footpath, wishing to match the ruggedness of my surroundings.

Below, the steep shoulders of the green mountain range shrugged into a glistening strip of the Yangtze. Yet as the trail grew steeper, I found myself hardly noticing the majestic scenery and instead focusing on my feet, gingerly feeling around for a firm foothold amid sand, pebbles, and gnarled vegetation. As my hiking companion pulled further ahead and disappeared around the sharp twists, the man stayed a few paces behind and offered the donkey for 10 Renminbi (approximately US$1.25).

“Do I look like I’m about to give up?” I grumbled as I shifted my weight from rock to rock, my knees growing increasingly numb with each step.

“Just about,” he replied. Partially in recognition of my exhaustion and partially to distract myself from the uphill battle as we approached the steepest portion of the trail, known to backpackers as the Twenty-eight Bends, I began to bargain with him. By the time we embarked on the first few bends, I had already talked him down to five Kuai. I’m aware that this amounts to a discount of about 60 cents, but I share the shameless disdain for getting ripped off of many other foreigners It’s not so much a matter of money, but of dignity; no one wants to be the sucker, and no one wants to be the stupid laowai who gets cheated. But perhaps our tenacity in haggling stems from our paranoia that being tricked is unavoidable — and indeed, sort of a right of passage here.

I allowed the donkey to carry my backpack, but remained determined to make all Twenty-eight Bends by foot, or hands and knees if need be. I continued talking with him as he rode the donkey with my pack on his back. Whereas other guides I had encountered at Chinese tourist destinations were mainly desperately impoverished villagers, he was surprisingly cosmopolitan compared to his humble surroundings. He was a miner by trade, since in his area, few people could rely solely on farming for income. He had two children in college and one in the army. The company he worked for had taken him to several Chinese cities on business and once to Thailand as a reward for his hard work.

“I haven’t been to America, though,” he said.

His “been there, done that” tone indicated that, having been outside the country, America didn’t hold the same fascination for him that it did for other Chinese, or maybe that he at any rate preferred Yunnan to any place abroad.

The homes we passed on the trail were scattered, drab brick huts with tile roofs overlooking terrace-farmed crops. I had trouble imagining that any of the inhabitants would leave Yunnan — one of the poorest provinces in China — in their lifetimes, but I suppose the donkey escort, along with the satellite dish hanging over a pair of old women shelling walnuts by the roadside, proved that the villages flanking the Tiger Leaping Gorge trail were as unpredictable as the terrain.

After about an hour of protracted agony, we reached the top of the Twenty-eight Bends, the apex of the trail, whereupon Donkey Man gruffly deemed me lihai or “powerful” and said he was impressed that I made it up by myself.  We edged down to a cliff overlooking the Gorge, where we were greeted by a scruffy villager who took “toll money” from those who used the path to the cliff, which he supposedly built himself.

Liberated from my oppressive layers and most unforgiving chunk of the trail, I could finally take in my surroundings. In the afternoon sun, the Jin Sha Jiang, or Golden Sand River spun a mercury thread between the bases of two chunks of velvety green and gray rock, the Jade Snow Mountain and the Dragon Snow Mountain. The Gorge’s namesake refers to a spunky tiger, the head honcho of the animal kingdom in Chinese myth who made the only successful dash in history across the 3,000-meter deep cleft. Since then, dozens of mortals (that is, overconfident Westerners) have misstepped into the depths of the Yangtze and floated into backpacker lore.

But the footprints that dotted the path before us were evidence that, the hike, which followed the precarious curves of an old miner’ trail, is becoming increasingly manageable, barring extremely bad fortune. The path varies in width from about two knees wide to just large enough for a local farmer and his cows to cross as the American tourist awkwardly yields onto the grassy shoulder. We passed only two other hikers in two days, so it seemed for a while that we had happened upon a place in Yunnan not yet invaded by the tourist industry. However, there were signs that the pristine trail had been deflowered since the rise of the Lonely Planet series. The farmers on the path were not surprised to see foreigners but rather smiled in amusement at hikers striving to “chi ku” or “eat bitter,” with the masochistic trek. The yellow and red arrows directing hikers where to go and marking the distance to various guesthouses (Woody’s, Tina’s, Sean’s) also betrayed the fact that the gorge had long since become an official destination.

Local tourist industry workers: the donkey man and toll collector.

Necessary self-deceptions

In 1997, Salon.com ran an article entitled “The Tragedy of Tiger Leaping Gorge,” by Simon Winchester, in which the English travel writer lamented that civilization was threatening to trample the natural treasures of the gorge.

“There is electricity,” he wrote. “There is talk of telephones. I saw a satellite dish.”
He recorded one villager’s gloomy prediction: “Soon … there will be no more walkers, only cars that will speed through the gorge in a matter of minutes. There will probably before long be a proper hotel in Walnut Grove, not the cozy inn that exists today, and it will no doubt take credit cards, and in its rooms will be color televisions that show CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV.”

Thankfully, six years later, the Gorge has not yet been totally ravaged by tourists, perhaps because the local industry self-regulates its development to keep things charmingly “rustic.” Yet we were not disappointed that our Naxi host at the Tea Horse Guesthouse knew how to make omelets (though the walnut pancakes we requested more closely resembled a plate-sized muffin). The menu, written in English on bamboo slats, also offered hot cocoa, oatmeal, and banana crepes alongside the traditional Naxi baba flatbread. And although CNN doesn’t reach most television sets in rural China, we spent the evening watching Chinese soap operas in our hostess’s living room.

The manager of the guesthouse, a contemporary Naxi matriarch, decided to open her own business when she realized that her house was perfectly situated at the point where many exhausted hikers, en route to other guesthouses, expired and came to her for a warm bed. Tea Horse is apparently the only true Naxi bed-and-breakfast on the trail; the rest, explained our host as she cooked dinner over a country-style wok about a meter wide, are now run by Han people who have settled in the area. Of course, cultural authenticity is a malleable concept when it comes to accommodating guests. Clad in gold hoop earrings and a traditional headdress, she giggled as she offered us a local specialty, Yunnan marijuana leaves in a white teapot.

In the morning, my New Yorker hamstrings still tender from the day before, I was thankful for the few Western amenities we were afforded, including a trickle of running water, before setting off on the remainder of the trail. Our route for the second half of the trail, mostly descending, hugged the craggy mountainside, snaking parallel to the sparkling rapids below. We were undisturbed except for the occasional goat or dog encroaching on our path, and the telephone poles that cut into our camera viewfinders.

As we approached Walnut Grove, the trail merged with a highway at the construction site for a bridge designed to reduce the great tiger leap over the Yangtze to a bumpy four-minute crossing by truck or taxi. But Walnut Grove, unlike Winchester’s grave premonition, was not replete with four-star hotels. It was rather a quaint example of the kind of rural prosperity that the Chinese government is trying to promote in the Western part of the country: lush green terrace farms, simple but well-kept stone homes with fluted tile roofs, and the fresh construction of glossy wooden houses inspired by ancient Naxi architecture. Winchester may have denounced the Gorge’s fall from sublime isolation, but for a peasant family who can put their children through college selling soft drinks to backpackers, the tourist industry is not only a welcome element of modernity; it may be the only chance to clamber at the wealth that the Reform Era has promised the masses.

Again, I encountered the ambiguous footprint of legions of backpackers, who like me sought the singular delights of Yunnan’s mountain landscapes but were not quite willing to admit that the experience was now hardly unique. The wooden signs on the road advertising the town’s guesthouses boasting cold beer and the only Western-style toilet in Walnut Grove did somewhat puncture the lofty pride I felt for having completed the two-day trek. Then again, I might not have completed the journey were it not for the small — yet upon closer examination, not so subtle — comforts that capitalism’s invasion of this once-virgin territory afforded me.

Likewise, if the journey had been any rougher, I’m not sure an urbanite like myself would have been able to appreciate thoroughly the sweeping beauty of the gorge. For the momentary pleasure of conquering the trail, I figured it was worth the slight shame of deceiving myself slightly with the idea of being a true adventurer. Like being duped out of a few kuai by local peddlers, harmless falsities can produce true emotional rewards. The idea is just to let go. The Gorge had been christened by many before me, but in my mind, the green terraces of Walnut Grove were the picture of the Yunnan countryside’s pre-Liberation nubility.

The only true Tiger Leaping Gorge purists may be the idealistic Westerners wrestling with the liberal guilt of their complicity in the tourist industry. The locals didn’t seem to mind, as long as every flapjack they flipped was the equivalent of a deposit in their children’s college savings account. Incidentally, the villager Winchester quoted in 1997, “a kindly man whom passers-by had once named Woody,” is now the proud owner of “Chateau de Woody,” a guesthouse noted in every backpacker guidebook for its charming vistas and Western snacks. The sign outside proclaims a motto befitting the backpacker subculture: “Eat. Drink. Live.” A simple plan for a corner of the world that is growing as complex as it is beautiful.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > ECONOMICS>

“Tourism Helps Boost Yunnan Economy”
Article by Feng Yikun
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/english/China/37548.htm

“An assessment of economic development policy in Yunnan Province”
Article by Andrew Watson, China Representative of the Ford Foundation
URL: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/china/AWP.html

TOPICS > PLACES >

“The Tragedy of Tiger Leaping Gorge”
Article by Simon Winchester
URL: http://www.salon.com/june97/wanderlust/china970610.html

China.org.cn’s report on Yunnan Province
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/e-xibu/2JI/3JI/yunnan/yunnan-ban.htm

TOPICS > PEOPLE >

The Han people
URL: http://countrystudies.us/china/41.htm

The Naxi people
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/e-groups/shaoshu/shao-2-naxi.htm

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