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By Root 1685 0

just before dawn, and Dong Lin and Ming Lin expertly build a kitchen fire to boil the morning’s tea, their tiny hands pushing sticks into the grate to stoke the flames. At six-thirty, Dong Lin climbs on her grandmother’s reed-thin back, Ming Lin grabs her callused hand, and they begin the careful half-hour walk, along narrow, muddy pathways across flooded paddies, to the village school. At 11, the old woman will return to bring the children home for lunch, during which they will sit on the porch and watch their grandmother work the fields; at two, she will return them, and then pick them up again at five, for a total of eight walks of two kilometers each.

“I never thought I’d have to raise a set of children at this age,” says Su Xiou as she retrieves eggs from the ground to make soup for me. “It’s because my son is not doing so well in Chongqing, he can’t afford to move us all to the city and put the children to school there. But I don’t mind. They have become very close to me—they are very obedient. Both of them say to me at night, ‘Wherever you go, Grandma, I will follow.’ ” The children seem to worship their grandmother, clinging to her in the fields, though they relish the daily phone call from their father.

These are the children of Pu Jun, the 32-year-old Chongqing transformer builder we met in chapter 1. He has not seen them on a regular basis since Dong Lin was a few months old, almost four years before. But Jun is a devoted father, so he sends a large part of his pay to the village, 300 kilometers away in neighboring Sichuan Province, to support them. Lately, he has been sending about $150 a year. In his wealthier years, he sent back enough to replace the old mud-and-reed shack with a new cinder-block house with a strong concrete foundation, sturdy enough to have withstood the earthquake of 2008. The front room, an unpainted concrete cube, sports a color TV connected to a rooftop aerial, and the children speak almost every day with Mr. Pu on the mobile phone he provided them. In 2005, he tried to improve the fortunes of his parents’ farm by investing his entire savings in a grove of mandarin trees, which would give them a cash crop and improve their lives considerably. But a terrible drought that summer killed the trees, so the family has returned to growing oil seeds, rice, and grain for their own consumption and selling one pig each year. “He is such a devoted and innocent man,” his mother says as she shoos his children from a large pile of seeds, “and all he wants is to find some way to live in the same place as his children.”

An entire generation of Chinese children has grown up without seeing their parents more than once a year, usually for a few weeks during the spring festival in February. Socially, this has created a generation who have identified with their grandparents and often formed close emotional bonds with these elders; this has led to the commonplace tragedy of teenagers having to endure the senility and death of surrogate parents who seem to be their only protectors and sources of love. The stress on the children, isolated from their parents and expected to use their educations to support their family’s escape, is often overwhelming.6 The strain placed on the village is equally profound.

Villages in China often serve not so much as centers of agricultural production but as “social buffers.” It is a system popularly known as Li Tu Bu Li Xiang—“leave the soil but not the village”—turning the peasant homestead into a surrogate for the absent state. For most of the 140 million arrival-city workers who lack urban hukou or stable residency, the village is the only place to send children to school, to obtain medical help, or to get child-care services. These are overwhelmingly fee-charging services for migrants, unaffordable to most workers. Urban apartments big enough for a three-generation family are beyond the reach of all but the most successful workers. Even for those who are able to get schooling, sufficient housing, and support in the city, there are powerful reasons to keep one foot in the