Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [8]
It is rare, anywhere in the world, to find a family who grew up on a dirt floor and made it, in the same generation, into the middle-class world of mortgages and shopping malls. Many more people are like Pu Jun, 32, a slender and somewhat awkward man, who works in one of the scores of villager-owned factories at the bottom of the valley. This particular factory, unlike its neighbors, is quiet, neat, airy, and plunged into a perpetual darkness, which gives it the air of a minimalist cathedral; its 30 employees do the difficult work of refurbishing high-voltage transformers, intricate, toxin-filled devices the size of a car. Mr. Pu is a trained and experienced technician, educated in a trade school near his village in eastern Sichuan and seasoned in Shenzhen’s factories, a background that should be a ticket to middle-class security.
Yet, when I met him in the factory one afternoon, he was in a mood of quiet anxiety, discreetly trying to absorb a blow that seemed to throw the whole venture into question. At the moment, he had $150 in his pocket, leaving him wondering how he’d find the remaining $15 for the month’s rent. This from a man who had spent five years spending nothing on himself. He had been able to tell his two young children, only three months earlier, that they could look forward to living with him in the city by the end of the year.
But things had suddenly gone wrong. His father, 61, had come down with an illness that proved hard to diagnose and required constant medication. The anti-seizure pills, in a medical system that is far from free, now eat up a third of Mr. Pu’s income, which is mainly devoted to supporting his children in the village. He had already endured a series of setbacks, including a disastrously failed attempt at shifting his village farm to fruit trees and the unplanned-for birth of his second child. And his marriage had collapsed. This last, in arrival cities around the world, is not uncommon: the transition to urban life places a terrible strain on marriages. But in Mr. Pu’s case it was the end of this estrangement, just a few weeks earlier, that had cost more: his wife, who works as a dim sum server for $150 a month, had built up considerable debts trying to live on her own. “Now has become my worst time ever,” he said plainly. “We lived apart, and when we live apart we fight, and we get to forget each other’s common goals—we forgot that the goal is to build a future together. And suddenly I’m having to support three generations.”
Now, if nothing else goes wrong, he expects it will be three more years before he will be able to live in the same house as his children, send them to school in the city, and end his family’s peasant history forever. When work slows, he grasps the worn and creased photo of his son, Ming Lin, 6, and daughter, Dong, 4, and quietly whispers to them. He aches for their presence. “I hope the kids will understand someday—understand why we were away so much, understand why we were never there for them when they were learning about the world, and understand the sacrifice we made. I believe we can make it up to them. We want to provide them with a better future than we’ve experienced. For now,” he says, using a Chinese phrase that is almost a mantra in the arrival city, “we will have to eat the bitterness.”
The ex-villager enclave within the city, located on the periphery of our vision and beyond the tourist maps, has become the setting of the world’s next chapter, driven