A sorry tale
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Migrants aren’t supposed to look like this
May 13th 2017 | PICUN
NATIVES of China’s capital find it all too easy to ignore the millions of people who have moved to the city from the countryside. The newcomers live on building sites, or in windowless rooms in the basements of apartment blocks. Many of them rent cramped accommodation in ramshackle “migrant villages” on the city’s edges. Beijing-born residents often treat the outsiders with scorn, blaming them for much of the city’s crime and its pockets of squalor. It is usually only when the “peasant workers” flock back to their home towns to celebrate the lunar new year that Beijingers grudgingly admit the migrants are essential—for a grim few weeks the city is bereft of delivery boys, street vendors and domestic helpers.
Recently, however, one such worker has caused a national stir with an autobiographical work circulated online. The 7,000-character essay, titled “I am Fan Yusu”, describes the hardships of Ms Fan (pictured): the deprivations of her rural childhood; her hand-to-mouth urban existence after she left home at the age of 20; and her marriage to an abusive and alcoholic man whom she eventually abandoned. Since then, she has looked after their two daughters alone.
Few city-born Chinese would be surprised by such a story. What has captured their imagination is Ms Fan’s ambition and determination, as well as her literary passion and flair—migrants from the countryside are often regarded as uncultured bumpkins. Within days, her essay had been viewed millions of times. She has become such a celebrity in China that she appears to have gone into hiding to escape local reporters who have been searching for her.
As a girl, Ms Fan devoured Chinese literature as well as novels in translation such as “Oliver Twist” and “Robinson Crusoe”. For the past few years she has lived in Picun, a migrant settlement on the outskirts of Beijing. There she has used the little time off she has from her job as a nanny to write essays and poetry. The widely held stereotype has it that China’s migrants leave their rural lives behind for one reason only: to earn more money than they could in their villages. Readers of Ms Fan’s account discovered that some have a bigger dream—of intellectual improvement. “I couldn’t bear to stay in the countryside viewing the sky from the bottom of a well, so I went to Beijing,” wrote Ms Fan, who is 44.
That this could be a surprise is a sign of pervasive urban snobbery. Tens of thousands of people have posted comments on Ms Fan’s essay, many expressing sympathy with her travails and praising her writing. Many others, however, have not been able to resist nitpicking over her style, as if trying to prove that someone from the countryside who did not complete high school could ever write truly polished prose. One blogger called the essay “a bowl of coarse rice”.
Urbanites’ usual disregard for rural migrants is evident in Picun, which is home not only to Ms Fan and more than 20,000 other people from the countryside, but also to the capital’s only museum that pays tribute to the migrants’ contributions to city life. The privately run institution is small and receives very few visitors—a pity, given how it reinforces Ms Fan’s story (she has taken part in a writers’ workshop there). The exhibits make clear that the migrants routinely suffer from dangerous work conditions, the withholding of wages and state-imposed barriers in their access to housing, education and health care.
Migrants from the countryside numbered 282m at the end of last year, 4m more than in 2015 (an increase in just one year equivalent to the population of Los Angeles). The hardships portrayed in the museum and in Ms Fan’s writings are shared by nearly all of them.
