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

Michelle Chen

(Illustration by David Benque)

Cold, drenched, and hanging from a telephone pole on a rainy March day 16 years ago, Cathy Mulder decided she’d had enough.

Mulder had been with the telephone company for 11 years and was active in the union.  This was her sixth year as a cable splicer, a dangerous but well-paying position she landed after filing numerous gender discrimination complaints.

“I found myself hanging from a pole and decided I could do more for workers than getting soaked,” says Mulder, a 46-year-old labor studies professor with a straight-shooting Jersey accent. A year after the revelation on the pole, the Teaneck, New Jersey native quit her job and went back to school full-time. Two years later, she graduated summa cum laude from Stockton State College with a bachelor’s degree in economics.

Spurred on by her Stockton State professors, Mulder went on to do something she never thought she would do: She enrolled at Temple University and started pursuing a Ph.D. After two years at Temple, she took a terminal master’s and transferred to the University of Massachusetts to finish her doctorate. She has passed her comprehensive exams and is now completing her dissertation.

While race and gender diversity among university faculty and graduate students has increased substantially in recent decades, class diversity has lagged behind, making stories like Mulder’s less than typical. Many working-class academics say it is still unusual to find a Ph.D. colleague who is not the child of a doctor, lawyer, corporate executive or other middle-class professional. Working-class Ph.D.’s have written papers, dissertations, and even books about feeling out of place and misunderstood in the ivory tower.

Since for most fields, graduate school is the only route to becoming a professor, class bias within doctoral programs must necessarily translate into a bias in faculty hiring. But trying to get a statistical handle on that bias is nearly impossible. None of the organizations contacted for this article — the National Center for Education Statistics, The College Board, and UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) — could provide statistics on the class backgrounds of graduate students. Information on faculty class backgrounds is also tough to find. However, the studies that do exist indicate, as expected, a strong middle-class bias among the nation’s professoriate.

When Seymour Lipset and Everett Ladd analyzed the results of the 1969 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Faculty Survey in their 1979 paper “The Changing Social Origins of American Academics,” they found that roughly 60 percent of the fathers of the over 60,000 survey respondents came from professional, managerial, and business backgrounds, while only 25 percent were “of working-class origin.”
Looking at faculty makeup in the 15 years following the Lipset and Ladd study, researchers Joseph Stetar and Martin Finkelstein reported in 1997 that the percentage of faculty from professional and managerial-class families had scarcely changed between 1969 and 1984, although the class demographics of university students changed “significantly” during that time to include more students from low-income families.

In 2001, Kenneth Oldfield, an emeritus professor of public administration at the University of Illinois at Springfield, and Richard Conant from the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, conducted a small-scale survey of the faculty at a Big Ten university. Over half of the 567 professors who responded said they had parents who were doctors, lawyers, or other professionals. Less than 2 percent of the respondents said their parents had jobs in the lowest 20 percent of the socioeconomic scale, in fields like farm work or dry cleaning.

What education destroys

Many people who identify themselves as working-class cite a family history of jobs involving manual labor, service work, and rock-bottom pay. Some, like Mulder, have earned a good living working with their hands. However, the social status of a well-paid manual laborer can be quite different from that of a well-paid white-collar worker.  

Growing up, Mulder used to accompany her father, a plumber, to his weekend jobs. She says that although he earned as much or more than many of the people in the suburb where she grew up, she was “treated differently” because she was a plumber’s daughter.

For Mulder, being working class is about more than money. It is about knowing how to “get your hands dirty,” something she thinks many Ph.D.’s have little experience doing.

Carolyn Law is an editor with fellow working-class academic, C. L. Barney Dews, of This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, a book that features narratives of scholars from working-class and poor backgrounds. She observes, “For poor and working-class people, access to higher education is all about class.”

In This Fine Place, Law and Dews examine the “oxymoron” of the working-class academic label. In theory, earning a Ph.D. should propel a person into the middle class. It is not that simple, however. A college degree does not change a person’s past, and many working-class intellectuals feel deeply connected to their blue-collar roots.

Law still remembers the conversation she had years ago with her mother, a widow who worked a number of low-paying jobs to keep the family going after her husband died. “Education destroys something,” she told her daughter. Law agrees. “It was a break, and it did break something,” she says.

“It comes out in the way I talk. I can hear myself as different from my family now.” To illustrate her point, she contrasts what she calls her “higher education-educated accent” with the Ozark hillbilly twang of her relatives.

Law did graduate work in modern literature at the University of Minnesota, but left the school to pursue a full-time editing career. Her most shocking encounter with class in the classroom occurred while she was an undergraduate in Missouri. The professors in her education courses often talked about “at-risk” children — kids who have no books at home and whose parents do not read to them. Such kids, they warned, would always be a “problem” in the classroom.

“They kept painting this picture of a culturally deprived and deficient home that created this culture of at-risk children,” Law remembers. “And I was one of them.” That was the moment when she concluded that “to be valued in society, I’d have to shift my allegiance. I’d have to buy into the professors’ message, and turn a very critical eye on my home life.”

Law, who was raised in a home with no books, said the professors’ words made her ashamed and ambivalent. “You, on the one hand, hate your past, but want to defend it,” she explains. Her experience might explain why it is so difficult to pin down numbers of working-class Ph.D.’s. Scholars who study the class dynamics of academia use the phrase “class closet” to describe the mentality of Ph.D.’s from working-class and poor families who refuse to talk about their class origins out of fear that their middle-class colleagues will look down on them.

Hidden bigotry

Some working-class Ph.D.’s, like Marjorie Gurganus, think their professional progress has been hindered by middle-class colleagues who buy into negative class stereotypes. Gurganus is a law student who spends her spare time doing pro bono tax work in low-income communities. Before starting law school, she earned her Ph.D. in genetics at North Carolina State University. Her father made his living as a factory maintenance worker while pursuing his law degree at night. Though he eventually finished law school and set up his own practice, he never made much money as a lawyer, and the family still qualified for food stamps.

Gurganus, who worked at McDonald’s for two years while in high school, recalls one Ph.D. who would make fun of her for having worked at a fast-food job. She says that, instead of being impressed by her hardscrabble skills and work ethic, ”He was just horrified” and viewed her as “a contamination” in the lab. She thinks academics from working-class and poor backgrounds take a professional risk when they talk to colleagues about past jobs or problems with money. “Some of them have always worked in a nice, clean place that was always advancing their career,” says the Jacksonville, North Carolina native, who did her undergraduate work at Cornell University. She thinks some middle-class Ph.D.’s have trouble relating to people who have to “deliver pizzas for eight dollars an hour rather than work in a lab for five” just to make enough money to buy groceries. “They start viewing you as someone who has these problems,” she says.

Gurganus left the genetics field in part because she was unsuccessful in landing a position as a professor, a circumstance she feels was partly related to her class background. She describes the Ph.D.’s she was competing with as “more established.” She says many of them already had the standard middle-class accoutrements — “a home, a couple of cars, a stable family, hobbies” — in addition to strong scientific backgrounds. Gurganus believes that, when choosing among candidates with near-equal academic credentials, middle-class professors have little incentive to hire someone from the working classes. She sums up the mindset this way: “If there are several of you who are smart, why take the one who doesn’t have the same background as me?”  

Blue-collar bonding

There is an irony inherent in academic elitism. After all, school is supposed to help level the playing field for people from economically underprivileged backgrounds. Students from working-class and poor families often expect a college education to increase their professional options and provide them with opportunities that their parents did not have. When that optimism butts with class realities, the effects can be painfully disillusioning.

Barbara Peters is a working-class academic from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, who teaches sociology at Long Island University’s Southampton College. “When you’re brought up in working-class and poverty-class situations, you’re taught that education is the ticket out,” she says. “It’s like Nirvana: You’re going to go to college, and your life is going to change. So you’re kind of idealistic.”

Acknowledging that a degree doesn’t offer the access it seems to promise, in 1993, Peters founded an online support group called Working-Class Academics, where professors, Ph.D. students, and independent scholars can discuss what it feels like to be working-class in academia. The group, which started with just 25 members, now has between 250 and 300.

“It’s probably the thing I’m most proud of in my academic career,” says Peters, whose mother was a school cook.

Not everyone is impressed by her activism, however. Peters’s views were once challenged during an online discussion with fellow intellectuals. One person criticized the concept of class labels, saying that people change classes throughout their lives. The same person said that she herself had chosen to be working-class by taking a job as a waitress.

“If you chose to be working class, then you aren’t working class,” Peters replied. That exchange prompted Peters to start the Working-Class Academics list.

Peters, who walks with crutches due to a degenerative arthritis condition, points out that being disabled adds another dimension to her concerns about discrimination. She also notes the challenges faced by women and people of color in the academy. “It’s a matrix of oppression,” she concludes.

Despite the criticism she has faced (some have called her a “reverse classist”), Peters is determined to keep reaching out to working-class intellectuals. “We are here. It would be wonderful if people from the upper classes would listen.” Citing growth in the Working-Class Academics list’s membership, she adds, “I think there are more working-class academics out there than we’d even realized.”

Money too tight to mention

While in graduate school, Amy Feistel worked multiple research assistantships to avoid taking out loans she knew she could never repay. She says she was criticized for spending too much time at work and not enough time on her studies. She remembers one scholar telling her that she was “not cut out for academic work” and would “be better as support personnel than as a scholar.”

Such comments did little to bolster Feistel’s image of herself as an academic. “I felt like I was not provided with the appropriate support to build the analytical skills required to be a scholar,” she says.

Feistel, whose parents struggled to support five children on modest missionary salaries, did graduate work in cultural politics at a top-ranked university. Her family history reveals a mix of classes. She describes her father’s relations as upper-middle-class and college educated, “with well-provided, secure futures.” Relatives on her mother’s side, however, have always had financial problems, often raising large numbers of children on low military salaries.

While Feistel appreciates the support she received from some of her professors, she insists that “one or two people hardly make up for a difficult system.” She adds, “I have always been forthright about my circumstances, but have found the circumstances often make others uncomfortable.”

For working-class academics with few financial resources, the economic obstacles to graduate education begin long before the courses start. “It’s just difficult at every step of the way.” says Paige Adams, who holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Baylor University. She had to scrape together nearly $100 just to take the GRE, a large investment for a woman who waited tables, taught aerobics, and took out $35,000 in loans to finance her undergraduate degree at the University of Houston. She handwrote all of her applications to graduate school because she could not afford a computer. To make matters worse, some of the schools to which she applied did not offer application fee waivers.

“This whole idea that you have to have all of this money upfront puts aspiring working-class scholars at a disadvantage from the start,” Adams insists.

Most Ph.D. students put up with long hours and low pay as teaching and research assistants. However, Adams thinks those from working-class and poor families have it especially hard. “Most people I knew in graduate school had parents that helped them out,” she says. “There weren’t a lot of students there from poor families.”

Feistel remarks, “Working-class academics face the usual issues that all academics face, but I believe the issues are exacerbated by the concerns for daily living: income, housing, food, transportation.”

Jennifer Gibbons, a pharmacology Ph.D. student at Duke University, relates, “I find that many people here in graduate school went to private high schools, or at least large schools where they had the opportunity to have honors classes and take Advanced Placement tests.” Her own high school offered “no real honors classes” and only one AP test: English. The Indiana native continues, “I feel as if I had very many lost opportunities at my school, but had no choice — my parents couldn’t afford to send me anywhere else.”

Carol Williams, a professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, felt similarly disadvantaged coming into graduate school. “Poor results on the GRE is perhaps where I felt most disabled coming to graduate school initially,” Williams recounts. “I felt I came to the exam already lacking basic skills. No account is taken in standard testing for cultural or economic differences, and I feel this favors not only Caucasians, but those from wealth.”

A different world

Sociology professor Michael Schwalbe relaxes in his paper-packed office where a poster for his book, Remembering Reet and Shine, a biography of two working-class African American men living in the South, hangs near the door. Sporting shorts and sneakers, he talks about his journey from Boys Technical School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “I haven’t pursued my career in a conventional way,” says Schwalbe. On his way to becoming an academic, Schwalbe worked as a mechanic, a bartender, a music promoter, and a nature writer.

He calls his decision to buck family tradition and pursue a non-vocational path “risky but freeing,” though he admits he was a little lost at first. “I didn’t know what you do to become a professor.” When he decided to pursue his Ph.D., he considered only two schools: Washington State University for its natural surroundings and the University of Texas at Austin for its folk rock music scene. That way, he figured, if the sociology path did not work out, he could easily pursue one of his other passions. He did not even consider applying to the prestigious University of California at Berkeley, though one of his professors urged him to do so. At that time, Schwalbe had no concept of what he calls “the prestige factor,” and how going to a school like Berkeley might influence his professional future.

Most of the working-class Ph.D.’s interviewed for this article say they grew up knowing much less about the academic world in general than their middle-class peers. “You mean there’s school after this school?” was working-class academic Beverly Rockhill’s reaction when her undergraduate cohorts at Princeton started talking about doing a Ph.D.

The language of academia shocked Jodie Lawston more than anything. “They were talking very theoretically and using language I had never even dreamed of,” recalls the sunny-voiced Long Island native. She describes the students in her graduate program as being from wealthy families and “worlds ahead” in terms of vocabulary. Lawston found their theoretical lingo intimidating at first, but now pokes fun at the bulky phrases. Her answering machine greeting instructs unsuspecting callers to leave their name, phone number, and “a brief ontological explanation of women’s existential dilemmas.”

“The academy is a place for ideas and not for activists.”

During one of her graduate seminars, Lawston suggested that scholars put social theory into practice. According to her, a classmate erupted, “The academy is a place for ideas and not for activists.” Lawston was stunned. She later heard a similar comment from another colleague.

Lawston, whose father is a construction worker, grew up having to deal with things like the phone being disconnected and the heat being cut off in the middle of the winter. “We were not philosophizing at the dinner table,” she laughs. She thinks some of her middle-class counterparts take a hands-off attitude toward social activism because they have not had to do without basic necessities. “Even though they study classism, that’s all they do — study it.” she says. “They don’t really struggle with it.”

Working-class academics themselves struggle with it in different ways. Monique Lyle, a Ph.D. student in Duke University’s political science department, remembers being “really class-conscious” when she began her studies at the elite school. But for Lyle, class has always been a question of both money and race. “In a lot of ways, class distinctions are along racial lines,” notes Lyle, who is black.

Jason Allen, an assistant research professor at Duke, came to the United States from Barnsley, England, and earned his doctorate in exercise physiology from Louisiana State University. He lives with his pal, Gordon, a tomcat who paws for attention during our phone interview. Allen sums up the difference between the United States’ and England’s ideas about class this way: “In England, they care where you came from. In America, they care where you’re going.” Allen thinks American class distinctions are based more on money than birth, but, like Lyle, he also believes those distinctions are impacted heavily by race.

Allen, whose mother works in a bakery factory, has found that many American academics hold British people in high regard. He believes the Yorkshire accent that might have hindered his professional advancement in his native land actually worked to his advantage here in the States. “I moved from working-class to upper-middle class in the blink of an eye,” he says.

The discomfort of straddling

Several working-class academics speak of feeling torn between the world of their families and that of their peers. Carol Williams had a tough time explaining her academic ambitions to her mother. “When I was raising money to attend my program in a master’s degree in England, she stated, ‘Why all this trouble and pain to get a few letters after your name?’” Williams recalls. “She didn’t comprehend the motives for advanced education, nor did she understand what exactly we did there.”

Lyle has had similar troubles. “[My mom] thinks I talk like a white girl,” she laughs. Though she has a strong relationship with her family and loves going home, she does not think they have a real sense of what she does. She feels removed from her extended family and worries that she does not fit in with the black working-class community where she grew up.

Despite the challenges they face, most of the working-class Ph.D.’s interviewed say they benefited from going to graduate school. “I just had a great graduate school experience,” says Adams. “I had a great job, a great boss  …  It just felt like a family. I made a lot of good friends.”

Like Adams’, most of Mulder’s experiences in academia have been positive. Still, Mulder admits, “I don’t know anybody else like me.” Mulder now teaches labor studies to workers and unionists at a satellite campus of Indiana University, a job she got in part because of her unusual life path. “That’s precisely why they hired me,” she notes. “There are not too many Ph.D.’s that know how to be a worker.”

The hybrid advantage

The same family relationships that can complicate a working-class Ph.D.’s relationship to academia can also be a vital source of support. In working-class families where no one has attended college, there is often a sense of vicarious accomplishment in watching one of their own go all the way.

Paige Adams’ mother has been her biggest cheerleader, urging her to pursue the college education she herself always wanted. “She always felt that she missed out by not going to college,” says Adams.  

Jodie Lawston thought of dropping out many times during those first few years of graduate school, but her mother’s words helped her stay the course: “You gotta do it ‘cause we never did.”

In the end, having a foot in both worlds might be one of the working-class academic’s greatest assets. “I’m resigned to a sort of hybrid status, which, as I grow older, I recognize gives me a unique and under-represented intellectual perspective on many issues,” Rockhill says.

Feistel, who now works in educational administration, says her experiences have made her more understanding of the challenges facing working-class students. “I’m in a better position to understand a working-class student,” she remarks. “I’ve been on both sides of the system, and I know how the system works.”

“Mostly what makes me different is a consciousness of what work really means,” adds Law, whose father made his living digging basements with a bulldozer. “To hear some tenured professor talk about their work environment like they’re some kind of miner  …  it really hurts me.”

Other working-class academics, like Schwalbe and Allen, say their life experiences have made them extremely adaptable. “You can move in almost any environment and function with almost any group of people,” says Allen.

Jodie Lawston, who felt “so inferior” to her middle-class colleagues when she started graduate school, now views her working-class background as an asset. “I think it gives you a stronger perspective on everything. I think you’re able to relate to people better,” she says.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

Working Class Academics List
URL: http://www.workingclassacademics.org

MARKETPLACE >
Purchase this book through Powells.com and a portion of the proceeds benefit InTheFray.

This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class by C.L. Barney Dews (editor) and Carolyn L. Law (editor)
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1566392918

Strangers in Paradise: Academics from the Working Class by Jake Ryan and Charles Sackrey

In The Fray Contributor