Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [6]
“My tenants are generally people who want very badly to become urban residents, but only a fraction will be able to do so,” Mr. Xu tells me, as his daughters prepare a lavish meal for the June dragon-boat festival. “They often don’t make enough money to save anything, and it’s becoming too expensive for them. Unless things change here, a lot of them will have to move back. We all want to quit being peasants, and China wants us to become city-dwellers now, but they’ve made it so difficult to get there.”
Indeed, a great many of Liu Gong Li’s residents are like Wang Zhen Lei, 36, and her husband, Shu Wei Dong, 34, who spend their nights in a two-by-three-meter room, built of drywall sheets hung from thin wood joists half a meter below the poured-concrete ceiling of a couples’ dormitory, which is home to a dozen similar chambers, the whole structure cantilevered precariously over a fetid stream. The sole window is barred and covered, except a 60-centimeter slit at the top; light comes from bare incandescent bulbs. Ten hours a day, and often on weekends, they sew garments at work tables in an adjoining concrete room, its walls coated in a shag of lint, equally barren except for a color TV showing a constant stream of Chinese soap operas. The factory, with 30 sewing tables, is owned by a man who moved from a distant village to Liu Gong Li in 1996, initially as a garment worker himself, and who pays his workers by the piece; they earn between $200 and $400 a month. The dormitory room is provided free (which is not the case in all factories). Mrs. Wang and Mr. Shu’s life here consists of exactly 29 possessions, including four chopsticks and a mobile phone; they have never seen the great city of Chongqing beyond Liu Gong Li’s streets. Each month, they keep $45 for food and $30 to cover expenses and send all the rest back to their village to support their daughter’s secondary-school education and to feed their parents, who raise their daughter.
For 11 years, beginning in 1993, the two of them lived in more modern and somewhat less cryptlike worker dormitories in Shenzhen, the all-industrial city in the Pearl River Delta, 1,500 kilometers south. The garment factories there, which made goods for Western companies, had better working conditions and paid more. But they discovered a serious flaw: in Shenzhen, there was no prospect of arrival. No matter how much the couple saved, they could never afford an apartment, and the city offered them no option of purchasing a piece of shantytown housing, of the sort that dominates Liu Gong Li, because none exists in the planned city of Shenzhen. And they had no chance of seeing their beloved daughter, except once a year during Chinese New Year. There was, in short, no future. They moved north, in a painful bargain: they would have a family nearby, and maybe a future for their daughter and their parents in the city, in exchange for working most of the rest of their lives in a pit of lonely darkness.
Like so many people here, and around the world today, they have staked their entire lives on their daughter’s education—something they know is not much better than an even bet. “We all want to have our kids stay in school and get into university so they don’t have to work in a factory like this,” Mrs. Wang says. “But if my daughter doesn’t get in, I would accept the alternative, which is still better than the village—she works in this factory like we do.”
For every 20 families like them in Liu Gong Li, there is one like Xian Guang Quan’s clan. He and his wife arrived as illiterate peasants, spent years sleeping on open-air slabs on construction sites, moved into a concrete hut in Liu Gong Li, and saved. In 2007,