by Rob Schmitz
Zhao had her own response to Gaige Kaifang: After losing out on an education during the Cultural Revolution, being forced into a marriage arranged by her parents, and then raising her children in a village with trees stained jet black from the surrounding coal pit, she seized this new autonomy as an opportunity—and moved to Shanghai.
Like Deng, she planned to get there by train. Before she left in the spring of 1995, the women in Zhao’s village suddenly stopped talking to her. “They looked at me in disgust,” she said. “Why on earth would a woman move so far from home? All of them stayed at home knitting, and most of them were unemployed. They thought I was leaving to take part in some immoral business,” she said coyly.
When the Chinese New Year holiday arrived the following year, Zhao and her coworkers returned to their village wearing blue jumpsuits with the Beishang Electronics patch emblazoned on the breast pockets, dispelling any myths about working girls in the big city. “We were proud, and we looked it,” she said. “We showed them we weren’t working in some dirty massage parlor. We were working hard, eating bitter,” she said, repeating the familiar phrase chi ku in Chinese, an expression that came to define the country’s first wave of industrious migrant workers.
“RED ROSE, WHITE ROSE, tulip, Lilium ‘Casa Blanca’…” Zhao took inventory of her shop while I looked on, asking about prices. “Lilies sure are expensive this year—I sell them for 150 yuan a bunch, and still the quality is poor! Aiya!” (That was about 25 U.S. dollars.)
It was early 2012, the final year of Chinese president Hu Jintao’s leadership, and the nation’s economy—a juggernaut that had grown more than 8 percent a year for the past two decades—was beginning to cool. One thing I had learned as an economics reporter in China was to take what economists say about the country with a grain of salt. It’s difficult to know what’s happening when its own leaders admit—like a smiling future premier Li Keqiang did to U.S. ambassador Clark Randt over dinner in 2007—that the country’s GDP growth figures are “man-made.”
Economists have other ways, of course, to gauge China’s economic health: trade figures, industrial electricity output, local government debt. I have my methods, too: small-business owners like Zhao. “Look at these orders yesterday,” Zhao said, showing me a price list from her wholesaler. “Fifty red roses cost 500 yuan, and nineteen blue roses are 570 yuan. Just a couple of years ago, it cost 3 yuan per rose. Now it’s three times that! I used to give baby’s breath to customers for free—I can’t do that anymore.”
The year before last, Zhao earned ¥100,000 of profit—around $15,000—but not this year. Prices were going up and she was losing customers. “I have a feeling we’re in for tough times,” Zhao told me.
The red characters on the awning above the door to Zhao’s shop read Jin Le Hua Dian: “Bright Happiness Flower Shop.” The first character is borrowed from the name of the Jinjiang Hotel, one of Shanghai’s oldest establishments, situated two blocks from her corner. The second character means “happiness,” taken from the Street of Eternal Happiness.
Each morning at eight o’clock, Zhao hoists the rickety metal gate to her Jin Le Flower Shop and drags a waist-high table in front of a window filled with the bright fuchsias and yellows of her wares inside. Atop the table sits a basket with pink tissue paper; underneath, a few buckets. Shortly after opening, a delivery van arrives with an order of fresh flowers from a wholesale market near the Hongqiao airport, where they’re flown overnight from Kunming, the flower capital of China in the southwestern province of Yunnan. Zhao and the delivery boy exchange a “Zao”—“morning”—and they unpack the van together onto the sidewalk in front of the motorcycle repair shop, which won’t open for another hour. Zhao begins cutting flowers on her table, discarding the stems in the buckets below, and wrapping the top sellers—roses, lilies, and tulips—in tissue to fill orders for bouquets phoned in the day before. She’ll then place the rest of the flowers in plastic white vases neatly arranged on three levels of shelves lining the window and inside wall.
When the shelves are full, it’s hard to walk inside the shop without brushing up against rows of Technicolor petals smelling of spring. On the floor there’s room for just two stools, a green plastic container of boiled water for tea, and a tiny table Zhao will unfold for lunch each day. At the back of the store, a counter is littered with the trappings of floral retail: a calculator, a phone, a television remote, and a large mirror, to which the week’s order forms are taped. Bright Happiness Flower Shop measures ten feet by ten feet—every inch has a purpose.
While the prices from Zhao’s wholesaler were steadily on the rise, Internet vendors had begun to battle for her customers. The invisible competition prevented her from charging more, and she swallowed the difference. Two workers helped with deliveries, but before long, she wouldn’t be able to afford them.
“What about your sons?” I asked. Big Sun and Little Sun were now in their mid-twenties, and they’d left the coal mine to live with her in Shanghai. She cackled, as if her offspring were hopeless vagrants.
“Aiya. Neither of them wants to work for me. Big Sun asked me the other day, ‘What if it rains? I don’t want to deliver flowers in the rain!’ They don’t know what it’s like to eat bitter.”
Both men had found jobs servicing the city’s wealthiest residents. Little Sun cooked at a Greek restaurant, and Big Sun worked the counter at one of the dozens of golf courses emerging from the suburban swamps on Shanghai’s outskirts. “I make more than my sons,” she told me, “but they say they’re happier.”
“ ‘We have a lot of coworkers and we have fun together,’ they reminded me again yesterday,” Zhao said in a mocking voice. “They’re just like all young people today, who don’t want to actually work. They want jobs with freedom, rest, good pay, and a happy work environment. They ask for too much and they’ll never be satisfied. We asked for nothing.”
AFTER TWO YEARS of eating bitter on the assembly line at Beishang Electronics, Zhao’s supervisor had news for her: “You’re too old to work on the line,” he announced coldly. “You’re fired.”
Zhao was thirty-one years old.
It was 1997, the year Deng Xiaoping died. He had left the legacy of Reform and Opening, and it was working splendidly. Factories along China’s coast were quickly becoming the largest manufacturing force the planet has known: the workshop of the world. Over the next ten years, 250 million people—a number close to the entire population of the United States at the time—would pick up and leave rural China to be part of the largest human migration in recorded history. “It was almost scary to walk into a factory during that era,” recalled an acquaintance who worked in the boomtown of Dongguan then. “You would have hundreds of people lined up in circles around the gate, pushing to get forward to read the signs about what kind of worker they were hiring. You’ve seen the movies where people are trying to leave the city before the invading army comes? It was like that, but they weren’t trying to leave. They were trying to get in.”
And that’s why Zhao was out. Chinese factory bosses preferred to hire young women. Their fingers were more agile, Zhao’s boss told her, plus management had decided to fire everyone over the age of twenty-five. “You should feel good you made it this long,” he told her. Zhao cried, pleading with him, but factory bosses didn’t trust older workers. They were more likely to complain about working conditions, and their seniority meant they had sway over their younger coworkers.
Another line worker introduced Zhao to an older man who ran his own flower business. Zhao tended the shop and made deliveries, and in return the man taught her how to arrange flowers and how to write calligraphy. “His son studied in Australia and married a Japanese girl,” Zhao said. “His wife is a deputy schoolmaster. His suzhi is very high.”
Suzhi was a term I often heard Chinese say with reverence. Its meaning had evolved through thousands of years of Chinese history, and it was a difficult word to translate. Essentially, it referred to the “inner quality” or the
“essence” of a person. Confucian tradition held that a person’s suzhi was determined by qualities such as birth, education, and knowledge of classic texts. Today, it has evolved to mean “educated and civil.” The phrase was now en vogue again, thanks to its use in China’s state-run media and other state propaganda, and Chinese citizens whose suzhi was high, the message went, would better represent the People’s Republic.
“When I first arrived in Shanghai, I was a stupid peasant,” Zhao told me. “I didn’t know anything about saving money. If I made a thousand yuan, I’d waste it on clothes. When I met my laoshi—teacher—it changed my life.”
Laoshi’s most important directive, Zhao said, was to never rely on a man.
“He told me, ‘You have to become independent, master skills, and manage your money,’ ” she said.
It was a fitting lesson, considering how her marriage had turned out.
ZHAO HAD GROWN UP sickly and therefore useless to the family farm in rural Shandong province. As a teenager, she had frequent bloody noses and her gums bled. The first time she visited a hospital she said she was so tired she couldn’t walk.
Her father called her lazy. It turned out she had leukemia.
As families often do in the countryside, hers promptly sold their pigs, chickens, sheep, and a single ox to pay for a medical regimen that combined East and West. Between weekly blood transfusions and bone marrow transplants, Zhao slurped down live mudfish. She spent her days in a hospital ward with seven other leukemia patients. Within months, all seven had died.
She was surely next. Her parents sold a few more animals to make one last purchase: a coffin. Zhao’s mother attended a Christian church in the village, and she arranged to baptize her daughter before she died. Others were called on to pray for Zhao’s health. They even killed a lamb, believing it would help save her.
When she recovered, they considered it miraculous. “Was it God who saved me?” Zhao wondered. Regardless, she began attending church, thankful for her good fortune.
But while she had found Jesus, she had lost her chance at finding a good husband. Zhao could no longer bear children, villagers whispered. The family had no assets except for an unused coffin, others said. Zhao wasn’t bad-looking, but her illness kept the village men away.
Her aunt found a man whose family knew nothing about Zhao’s medical history. The man was short, ugly, and “from the mountains”—meaning desperately poor—but he was her lone suitor. The family was thrilled.
Zhao was not. Nineteen at the time, she took one look at the confused-looking peasant, and immediately described her bout with leukemia in great detail. His family didn’t believe the story. “People from the mountains in China are born suspicious, and his mother thought I was trying to trick him out of a dowry,” she said.
A month after the couple married, Zhao was pregnant. Two years later, they had their second son and were fined a month’s wages for violating China’s one-child policy. Money was tight, and her husband would argue with her about finances after a long day at the coal mine. He would often hit her, and Zhao began to think about leaving. She couldn’t pursue divorce, because her husband threatened to kill her father in return. One day, Zhao asked him: “Can you be nicer to me? I promise to stay here with the children.”
The short, fat mountain man didn’t answer.
So the married mother of two left for Shanghai alone, becoming a pariah to her husband, her family, and to everyone else in the village except her mother.
“People from my hometown value emotions and relationships above money,” she told me, shaking her head. “They’d die, they’ll cry, they’ll sacrifice their parents, their homes, their money, all for a man.”
Zhao motioned to the shelves of colorful flowers. Her life was full of ugliness, but her shop wasn’t.
“Life is endurable here, but the whole situation is still very bitter. I cry when I think about how things have turned out,” she told me. “But it’s not about me anymore. I’m living for my sons now.”
SOON AFTER Zhao established her corner flower shop on the Street of Eternal Happiness, her husband sent their firstborn to Shanghai. Big Sun, Mountain Man had determined, would be a resident of China’s richest city. Zhao was thrilled.
“If he could make it to college, everyone in my hometown would be so proud of him and we would have a chance to change our family’s fate,” she said.
Big Sun was in the sixth grade at the time. The boy had inherited his mother’s tall, broad body and high cheekbones. He was popular among his classmates at the Zaozhuang coal mining bureau school; he was a fast runner and had earned good grades.
Big Sun’s prowess in the coal town followed him to Shanghai; he earned top marks in his new school. A year after attending a neighborhood primary, officials from a local junior high recruited him for his athletic ability. Later, he graduated from Shanghai’s Bi Le Middle School as the champion of the thousand-meter dash and the first-prize winner in essay writing. He was at the top of his class. If he kept at his studies, he would test into an elite university. In the meantime, Zhao’s flower shop had taken off and she was fielding orders from all over Shanghai. Dreams of making it in the big city were coming true for both mother and son.
Eight-year-old Little Sun, however, was suffering back home. His father was busy with multiple shifts at the mine, and he was often alone. The boy grew withdrawn, often locking himself in his room to read books. He hung up on Zhao when she called, and refused to speak to her during her visits. When she invited village kids to play with him, he hit and kicked them. They didn’t come back. Little Sun was a liushou ertong, a “left-behind child.”
Soon after a quarter of a billion Chinese had migrated to the coast, doctors began to recognize psychological problems among the children like Little Sun who didn’t make the journey. They had inferiority complexes. They had low self-esteem. They were afraid to interact with others. They were often unwilling to take their parents’ calls, and they were emotionally detached. According to one government study, half of them suffered from depression and anxiety disorders.
State media estimated there were 61 million left-behind boys and girls: one out of every five children in China.
Zhao was too busy to read research about left-behind children. She sought advice from Little Sun’s teacher, who guessed that her son was autistic. She promptly removed him from school and sent Little Sun to a special institution dozens of miles away in the county seat.
Back in Shanghai, Big Sun would soon encounter problems, too. He’d graduated from middle school and was enrolled in one of the city’s most prestigious high schools, just a block down from his mother’s flower shop on the Street of Eternal Happiness.
But before classes were set to start, Zhao received a call from the school, inquiring about her son’s residency status.
Zhao had dreaded a call like this. Chinese household registration laws—which, among other things, govern where a child may attend high school—are strict, and neither she nor Big Sun was registered to live in Shanghai. However, the city was in the process of reforming these laws, and some of her friends from other parts of China had successfully become Shanghai residents. Zhao ran her own business in the city and Big Sun was excelling at one of its top schools. She hoped these things would help him gain entrance to a Shanghai high school.
Zhao told the truth: “I told them our household registration permits were from Zaozhuang.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Finally, the woman spoke. “He’ll have to return there if he ever wants to attend college.”
Chinese law required students to sit for the national college entrance exam in the place tied to their household registration permit, forcing them to attend high school there, too.
Zhao thought about all the work she had done so that her children could have better lives, the hopes she had for Big Sun, and the promise he had shown. All of it—the endless studying, his high class rank, his prize-winning writing—suddenly seemed l
ike a big waste.
Big Sun was going to have to return to the coal mine.
MUCH OF CHINA may be on the move, but the country’s household registration system—known as hukou—ties Chinese families to their hometowns. If you ever want to hear a Chinese farmer curse, rant, and complain, utter “Hukou.” After nearly a decade living here, I had yet to meet any rural Chinese who were happy with the system.
The grumbling went back millennia. Rulers since the Shang dynasty 3,500 years ago had understood the importance of keeping a meticulous registry of all households in China. It ensured steady tax revenue and a continual stream of young men to serve in the military. It was also useful for keeping close tabs on any potential sources of social and political unrest. Chairman Mao later discovered an additional use for the hukou system: building China’s command economy.
After taking power in 1949, China’s Communist Party began its push to industrialize, looking to Stalin for help. The USSR’s propiska—or internal passport—system had helped the Soviet leader build a socialist economy by keeping workers in industry and agriculture separated, restricting their movements inside the country.
And so, beginning in 1958, Chinese who lived in Shanghai were granted urban hukou. Most everyone who lived along the Street of Eternal Happiness—like their urban counterparts in cities all over China—were assigned to work in factories. In villages like Zhao’s—which comprised a vast majority of the population at the time—they were assigned rural hukou and forced to join collective farms. Checkpoints at train stations and along roadways prevented either group from traveling outside the city or village where they were registered. China’s new government could control who worked where, and account for each citizen’s economic output for the state in minute detail.
There were problems with the system. During the Great Famine, a rural hukou was, for many, equivalent to a death sentence. At the time, more than half a billion rural hukou holders worked for collective farms where the government took its share of the harvest before farmers were allowed to eat. Much of the forfeited food went straight to China’s urban residents.
