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China's Left Behind Children

Breakneck growth has made China an economicmiracle. But will the destruction of families prove tobe too high a cost?

BY DEBORAH J IAN LEE, SUSHMA SUBRAMANIAN | MAY 1,2012

When Huang Dongyan visited home to celebrate the Lunar New Year in 2011,her son refused to call her "Mom." Huang, 38, tried coaxing him with baby talkand tickles. But five-year-old Zhang Yi ignored her and buried his face in hishat. For the rest of her visit he avoided her, favoring the attention of his 17-year-old sister, Zhang Juanzi, instead. Huang's every attempt at intimacy --games, shopping trips, cuddles -- was rebuffed. "I was a stranger to my son,"Huang recalls, blinking back tears.

Fourteen years ago, Huang left her village of Silong -- and her children -- to

find factory work in Guangdong, 500 miles away from her home province ofHunan. Huang eventually settled in the smoggy city of Shenzhen, the heart ofthe Pearl River Delta manufacturing boom known for its easy access to HongKong and insatiable appetite for cheap labor.

Just three decades ago, Shenzhen was a small fishing village. Today it boasts aGDP of roughly $150 billion and houses factories making goods for theworld's best-known companies, including consumer electronics maker

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Foxconn, which employs an estimated 230,000 workers in its Shenzhen plant.This is the story of one migrant worker family coping with the changeswrought by China's breakneck growth.

After Huang moved away, her mother-in-law watched over the grandchildren

in Hunan, as Huang's work schedule only allowed for visits once or twice ayear. Huang and her husband, Zhang Changyong, left their oldest child Juanziin 1998, when she was only four. Over time, Juanzi grew detached. By sixthgrade the moon-faced girl who once wept at the sight of her departing parentsappeared to barely notice their visits. She grew bored with their attempts tocatch up on her life. Answering their phone calls became a chore -- exceptwhen she needed money. Her brother, little Yi, disconnected at a younger ageby refusing his parents' phone calls and crumbling into his sister's arms whenthey approached for hugs. "My son didn't like being with me," says Huang,who, like many peasants, was allowed two children under exceptions in theone-child policy. For more than three decades, rural residents in China have

relocated to industrial cities for work, comprising the largest migration inhuman history. Today the country has some 221 million internal migrants,according to the 2010 census, of which roughly two-thirds move from rural tourban areas. But while this migration has fueled China's economic growth, ithas also churned up domestic turmoil and social dislocation.

In recent years, researchers have estimatedthat 58 million children like Yi andJuanzi have been left to stumble through their most formative years of lifewithout parental guidance -- a difficult choice on the part of their parents, butone born out of necessity: Rural children lose their rights to subsidizededucation, health care, and other basic services the moment they step into thecity.

The hukou system, designed to control migration and fuel economic success,provides a steady trickle of cheap labor to cities rather than a surge, whichChinese officials fear could lead to unrest and urban discontent. Enacted in the1950s, the system made it difficult for peasants to move to the cities andgranted urban citizens a wealth of social benefits that their rural counterpartsweren't eligible to receive. Two decades later, as industrial hubs discoveredtheir growing need for low-cost laborers, officials opened the floodgates. Butthere was a catch: Officials denied rural migrants the social benefits thatlongstanding residents enjoyed in these cities.

Zhang Jiru, a former factory worker who founded Spring Breeze, an NGO thatadvocates for factory workers' rights, says the hukou system does a hugeinjustice to rural families. "No one can deny that the migrant workers are thereal fortune creators in China, but who are the real beneficiaries?" he asks."The Chinese government and the local urban residents."

On a typical day, Huang wakes up alone on a bamboo mat in her apartment

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building in Longhua, a northeastern manufacturing suburb of Shenzhen and a12-minute walk from her work. Her husband works in another city 50 milesaway, and her 100-square-foot studio, decorated with posters of laughingbabies, barely fits one person comfortably. She rises and pulls on her workuniform, a white collared shirt and navy skirt, and heads to the factory floor.

Huang works in an LED light factory, sliding bulbs under a microscope tocheck for defects. Next to her, tiny lights shine on two rows of assemblyworkers, young men and women who nimbly attach chips to wires and coatthem with a warm-glowing liquid. Drawn blue curtains smother the daylight;besides the hum of the machinery, the room feels still, almost quiet.

Away from her children, Huang passes her free time -- just a few hours a night-- in front of the TV. Sometimes she grabs a midnight snack with hergirlfriends. Dressed in skirts and strappy heels, the factory women giggle overbowls of rice and swap stories about the children they never see. "Sometimes I

feel like I'm still 20," Huang says.

Huang tries to parent from afar, but the phone calls bore Juanzi, a playful, self-assured teenage girl who calls her mother a chatterbox. The only time Juanziseems engaged, Huang says, is when she needs money to pay for new clothesor more minutes on her cell phone. Huang's son Yi often refuses to speak withher unless his grandmother gives him coins to buy candy at a local store. Whenhe gets his money, he picks up the phone, says hello and then hangs up rightafter. "Now I only call when I'm in a good mood," Huang says. As for herhusband, Huang sees him about once a week, but the reunions are no longerexciting. "Now that we're older," she says, "we're no longer romantic."

Huang's only break from Shenzhen life came five years ago, when she got atroubling call from her sister-in-law, urging her to come back home. Villagershad begun to gossip that Juanzi, then 12, had been ditching school, actingrecklessly with friends, and getting cozy with local boys. "You need to behere," her sister-in-law said.

Juanzi had always been fiercely independent, a trait older generations viewedas inappropriate for girls. At age five she learned to travel solo, enduring a 12-hour bus ride to Shenzhen all on her own. By her pre-teen years, she wouldroam around town and traverse weedy trails to meet friends on hillsides ormountain cliffs, far from the prying eyes of adults. Often she never returnedhome at night, finding better company in the bedrooms of her friends -- otherchildren whose parents also worked in provinces far away.

When Huang got the call about Juanzi's wayward behavior, she took a six-month leave from work to attend to her daughter, sitting her down for severallong talks. "When you miss out on an education you become an unskilledlaborer for life," explained Huang, who left school before completing junior

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high. She made Juanzi write her a letter promising to focus on her studies;otherwise, she would have to get a job alongside her mother at a factory inShenzhen.

Huang believes those six months saved her daughter from destruction. Juanzi

wrote the letter, tamed her quarrelsome tongue, and obeyed all of her mother'swishes. She returned home every night to study and to sleep in her own bed.

To Huang, Juanzi's obedience signaled reformation. But to Juanzi, it was atemporary concession she endured until her mother returned to Shenzhen. "Idon't think [those six months] caused much change," Juanzi says. She stoppedarguing, but that was because she preferred silence to her mother's "hottemper," she says. Once her mother returned to Shenzhen, Juanzi returned toher old life.

"My mom doesn't know much about me," she says, adding that her mother

seemed more tuned into village gossip than what was really going on inJuanzi's life. "I wasn't playing hooky," she insists. As for her closeness withboys, Juanzi admits that she had platonic guy pals, the kind she would call"bro" and joke with after school. Then, when one of them patted her shoulderin plain view of the local gossips, her reputation plummeted.

After Huang returned to work in Shenzhen, Juanzi resumed her independentways. Her teenage years were peppered with many more impromptu girlfriendsleepovers, one memorable all-nighter at an Internet caf just for the hell of it,and a birthday bash upon turning 14 that she says was the perfect celebration:Her crew of left-behind friends snuck beer into a secluded mountaintop templeand spent the day drinking, throwing cake at each other, and receiving birthdaywishes from elderly temple-goers, who even shared in their beers.

Privately, Juanzi mourns that she and her mother barely know each other. Thisparent-child disconnect, forged after so many years of absence, seemsirreparable. Juanzi's voice falters when she reflects on the day-to-day intimacyshe never enjoyed with her mother. "It's like something stuck in my heart," shesays. "I cannot breathe." Some migrant workers move their children with themto the city. Xiao Hongxia, the founder of the women's migrant group TimeWomen Workers Service, moved her two children from their rural Hunanhome to Shenzhen in an attempt to rescue them from village isolation. Butsending children to school in Shenzhen costs approximately $160 to $320 persemester per child, according to various migrant parents interviewed, whereasrural education -- which is admittedly substandard -- ranges from around $63to $95 per semester per child. Huang and her husband together earn roughly$781 a month. Paying private tuition for two kids in the city would have beenimpossible.

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Staying in the village isn't practical for the parents either. Back on the farm,Huang's mother-in-law tends fields of peanuts, string beans, corn, and chilipeppers. A few chickens and goats stalk around the farmhouse, but that'shardly enough to sustain a family. "For us rural people, life is not affordable ifyou do not work outside for money," Huang says, pointing to the dearth of

young adults in her village. "We have no choice." Improvements in farmtechnology have reduced the need for physical labor in the countryside, andcheap consumer electronics like televisions and cell phones have exposedvillage dwellers to the opportunities and material pleasures of city living, saysUniversity of Washington geographer Kam Wing Chan, who has studied thehukou system. He notes that technology and migrant life have improvedvillage conditions, but have also forged a sort of "keeping up with the Wu's"mentality. When parents decide to stay in the village, they deny their familythe financial security and comforts that other villagers enjoy. Since her last triphome during the 2011 Lunar New Year, Huang has rethought her approach toparenting. With Juanzi grown up and distant, Huang worries that the same fate

awaits the relationship between her and her son. After months of discussion,even though their combined salary would barely support it, Huang and herhusband decided to bring Yi to the city with them. So on a sultry July day in2011, Huang packs her bags for the long journey home to Silong to collect Yi.Juanzi, who recently started a job as a kindergarten teacher's assistant in aneighboring city, joins her mother on the trip. After a grueling, day-long, 500-mile drive from Shenzhen, the van drops them off at 4 a.m. near theirfarmhouse. The tiny mountain village is silent. Juanzi runs ahead, disappearinginto a hilly forest, calling her brother's name. Through the darkness, Huang letsher feet guide her up the familiar curves on the road back home.