Lost Angels

Lost Angels

Children of migrant workers no longer know where to call home By Yuan Yuan

Li Tengfei is a primary school student in Qingshui Village, southwest China’s Sichuan Province. Li’s parents work in factories in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, which is more than 1,000 km away from his home. They only return home once a year around the Spring Festival, or the Chinese lunar New Year. Li spends the rest of the year with his grandfather in the village. The Li family is typical of the 40 households in Qingshui.

Li’s grandpa cooks for Li every day, but he cannot help his grandson with his studies except for pushing him to finish his homework every day. Li receives phone calls from his parents once a week, but every week the conversation is more or less the same. “They ask whether grandpa is healthy and ask me to study hard,” Li said.

Most local children’s parents have left the village in order to earn money in cities.

Huang Qin, a 10-year-old girl who lives next door to Li, also has parents who work outside the village and she too only sees her parents once a year. “I really hope I can stay with them every day,” Huang said. “I wish they were with me and would take me to parks often like parents living in cities.”

Short union, long separation

In November 2011,The New York TimesBook Review announced its list of the 10 best illustrated children’s books of 2011.A New Year’s Reunion, written by Chinese author Yu Liqiong, was included in the list. In the book, Yu describes a four-year-old girl named Maomao who is excited to meet her father during the Spring Festival.

At first, Maomao thinks her father is a stranger and even cries when her father tries to approach her. But gradually, she gets close to him and begins to follow her father everywhere. When the time comes for her father to leave, Maomao gives him a gift to remind him of the Spring Festival they spent together.

PRIMARY LABORER:Two boys in Linlan Village,Fengshan County in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region,whose parents were working in cities, help each other to carry corn collected on August 1,2011

Yu, who was born in 1980, said the inspiration came from her own childhood memories. “My father is an engineer and had to leave home to go to many places across the country to work on different projects,”Yu said. “I only saw him during the Spring Festival. Sometimes I couldn’t even recognize him when he came back.”

Yu said she was surprised that the story of Maomao received so much positive feedback.“Many people who read this book say it is a vivid description of the family conditions of migrant workers nowadays.”

In Yu’s childhood, there were only a few migrant workers. “I think it is a coincidence that Maomao’s story happens to re fl ect the situation of migrant workers’ families today,” she said.

Family reunions are always important when family members don’t live together. For migrant workers, the situation is even tougher.

However, family reunions are not always as warm and happy as the one depicted in Yu’s book. Chen Zhengyi, a primary school student in Baihua Village, Sichuan, said that he felt indifferent toward his parents’ return.

Chen’s parents came back for the Spring Festival in 2011. But instead of bringing back new clothes and toys as presents, all Chen and his sister got was one chicken drumstick each,which they fi nished in fi ve minutes.

“I don’t even want them to come back, it’s not fun at all,” said Chen, who prefers to go to his neighbor’s house as “they have color TVs and telephones and have more fun.”

Chen has no telephone at home. Every time his parents call, his neighbors must ask Chen’s grandmother to come to their house and answer the phone.

BACK HOME ALONE: A girl passes by a wall slogan reading “Left-behind Children Are Priority of Education” in Handian Village, Luohe, Henan Province, on October 20, 2008

Chen’s parents sometimes want to speak to him but usually they fi nd that after two or three sentences they have nothing more to talk about.

“I even cannot remember what they look like,” Chen said.

This year, his parents didn’t return for the festival. “They work in Zhejiang Province,which is more than 2,000 km away, and to come back, they have to spend at least 3,000 yuan ($476) on transportation. They said it is more worthwhile to save the money for the children,” Chen’s grandma said.

But the children seem to need more than money. Chen has a very close friend who also comes from a very poor family but his friend’s father lives in the village and spends time with his son every weekend. Chen often hears his friend say “my father says,” and feels upset every time he hears the phrase.

Li Xingjun, the headmaster of Chen’s primary school, said the time many village children spend apart from their parents leaves a heavy burden on local schools.

“For example, when we teach students to love their family and parents, they ask why their parents don’t love them,” said Li, who revealed that 80 percent of the students in the school only see their parents once a year.

“These children become introverted and more aggressive. They don’t want to study and since their parents aren’t around, it’s hard to control them. They sometimes even fight with the teachers,” Li said.

Following their parents

Compared to the children in Qingshui, Chang Jian seems lucky. He was able to accompany his parents from Anhui Province to Beijing.Living in a flat outside of Beijing’s North Fifth Ring Road, Chang’s parents sell vegetables and Chang attends a school for migrant workers nearby.

“We brought him from our hometown in 2009 as his grandparents all passed away and there was no one to look after him at home,”said Chang’s father.

But it was so hard to find a school for him in Beijing that Chang spent his fi rst year in the city following his parents as they sold vegetables. Now, Chang is 10 years old but only in the fi rst grade of primary school.

Chang’s parents are happy that they have fi nally found a school for their son, but Chang is still not happy with city life.

“I have no friends here,” he said.“I haven’t been to the Summer Palace,Tiananmen Square and other tourist attractions. I don’t even know what they look like.”

Chang’s sense of isolation and not belonging is common among children of migrant workers who are living in cities. Rejected by public schools due to restrictions of China’s rigid residence registration (hukou) system, migrant children must attend private schools for migrant workers’ children. These schools typically don’t offer a high standard of education and frequently close down as a result of fi nancial dif fi culties.

When the schools close down, students are forced to drop out and some are eventually sent back to their hometowns.

“Every time a new semester starts, we notice a lot of familiar faces are missing,” said Yan Zhaoshi, founder of a school for migrant workers’ children in Beijing. “Some leave because the parents really cannot afford the education, some just return with their families to their hometowns.We try our best to keep students here.”

Zhao Minqing, a college student at Tsinghua University, is a regular volunteer at a Beijing-based school for migrant workers’children founded by a charity organization called Compassion for Migrant Children.

“Most of the children at first are very shy and don’t want to talk to teachers at all,” Zhao said. “We once held a party that allowed these children to meet students from public schools,but they didn’t seem to have much in common.”

“It is a pity because many of the children here are gifted and clever,” Zhao said.“But they can’t get a normal education. It’s a waste.”

Where is the home?

Statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed that the number of migrant workers in China had reached 242 million at the end of 2010. These migrants left 58 million children in their rural hometowns, while approximately 50 million children followed their parents to cities.

“Most of these children feel at a loss as to where their home is,” said Wang Xiaozhang,a sociology professor at Zhejiang University.“The social stigma attached to migrant workers may explain the loneliness and isolation felt by their children.”

Wu Guangyi, a construction worker in Beijing from central China’s Henan Province,always asks his son to spend his summer vacations in Beijing, believing it will broaden his vision and allow him to learn new things.

“My son is active and talkative at home,”Zhang said. “But every time he comes to Beijing, he becomes very silent. I don’t know what I can do to change that.”

“The intense feelings of social rejection that migrant workers experience work to lower their children’s self-esteem,” Wang said. “They fail to adapt to city life, as the bias and prejudice they fi nd are hard for them to overcome.”

“Migration has changed the traditional de fi nition of home in China,” said Zhang Yulin,a professor at Nanjing University in Jiangsu Province. “About 70 percent of rural families do not live together under one roof. The separation and displacement that the children of these broken rural families encounter set back their development, preventing a whole generation from reaching its true potential.