A Struggle to Find Their Place in Native Shanghai

The doorman at a rundown factory on the outskirts of Shanghai looks like a migrant worker from the countryside. But Chen Zhenlong was born and raised here in China’s most affluent and elegant city.

What wore him down was nearly 30 years as a farmer, horse herder and coal miner in Heilongjiang, in the country’s northeastern corner near the Russian border.

Liu Xiaolong too is a Shanghai native who was away too long to belong now. The only work he can find is hawking cheap roasted meat strips on the side of the road. Nothing sets him apart from the migrant workers around him except his perfect Shanghainese dialect.

The men are living ghosts from modern China’s dark ages: two of 17 million urban youths transplanted to the countryside during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.

It took them nearly 30 years to come home. The reason: They fell in love with women from the hinterland and married, thus forsaking their birthright as Shanghai residents.

This is but one of a lifetime of tragic twists that define China’s lost generation. Collectively known as zhiqing, or “educated youths,” they came of age with the People’s Republic and bore the brunt of some of the country’s most radical social experiments.

Shanghai expelled about 1.3 million middle- and high-school-age youths, or about 10% of the population at the time. Most of them drifted back to the city after the government reversed its policy in the 1980s. An ambitious and lucky minority aced the reinstated college entrance exams and armed themselves for the current economic revolution. But the majority dusted off their peasant rags and disappeared into the city’s low-skill work force. Many of them must deal with aging parents, school-age children and vanishing social safety nets.

Those who didn’t make it back to the city after the policy reversal would have stayed away. But like millions of migrant workers flocking to wealthier cities in search of new hope, they have been driven back to Shanghai by desperate conditions in their adopted provinces. Most of them remain outsiders, surviving on the fringe of a cosmopolitan city that has little use for their broken lives.

“If he didn’t marry me, he could have come back a long time ago,” said Chen’s peasant wife, Wang Huanling, 47, who moved to Shanghai with her husband five months ago to work at the factory. “Shanghai changed so much, he couldn’t find his way back to his own house.”

Chen married Wang just before the 1980 policy change welcoming the zhiqing home. At the time, Chen was working in a coal mine. Despite his slight stature and poor health, he volunteered to leave a farm for the mine because at the time farmers earned only commune productivity points, while mine workers at least drew a small salary.

“Almost 80% of the people who married locals got divorces so they could go back to the city,” said Chen, now 50.

It’s hard for them to talk about it, but they too have considered separating. Chen’s parents in Shanghai strongly opposed such a move after they saw their two adorable grandchildren, both born in the countryside before China’s one-child policy went into full swing.

“If we were childless, then maybe it’d be easier. But I am old-fashioned--what am I going to do after a divorce?” Wang said, rubbing away tears.

Chen continued to dig coal. For 14 years, he toiled in the pit of the earth, pausing only to swallow frozen buns and cold water. Like his comrades, he developed permanent stomach and back problems.

“If I had left, I would be living a much better life,” Chen said.

His younger siblings who didn’t go to the countryside became factory workers, and now they are targets of massive layoffs sweeping the country.

“Even if they lose their jobs, they still have a foundation--a place to live and some living expenses from the government. We have nothing,” Chen said.

He was let go from the mine a few years ago. Unlike laborers in big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, many workers in remote provinces receive no severance packages. The bankrupt industries sometimes can’t even afford to pay regular wages.

Liu also nearly ended up a permanent transplant in Heilongjiang because he married a local woman. Then he and his wife were laid off, he from his construction job and she from a lumber factory. With zero income or opportunity, they had no recourse but to take their chances in Shanghai.

“I never expected life would be this cruel,” said Liu, who left Shanghai when he was 16. “We did everything we were told. Now we have no career, no housing, no money and no security. It’s definitely not fair.”

His younger sister Liu Xiaoying was 15 when she went to the countryside. She was able to come back earlier than her brother because she married an apprentice of her father, a cook in a Shanghai hotel.

“It was not about falling in love in those days. [The] only thing that mattered was finding someone who didn’t live too far away,” said Liu Xiaoying, who was also dismissed from her textile factory job. Unexpectedly, her husband transferred to a nearby township. The only housing available to her now in Shanghai is in an attic space so tiny that she could never stand up straight.

“Who wants to live like wild animals and work like thieves?” said Liu’s northeastern wife, Du Xueyan, referring to their living conditions in Shanghai. “I know people in the northeast who have committed suicide because they can’t find a way to support their family. But here in the big city, it only looks great on the surface. Ordinary people are still suffering.”

Because they have no legal residence and cannot afford to rent an apartment, the couple fought back protesting neighbors to convert an abandoned public kitchen area in his parents’ old apartment building into a temporary shelter. It’s big enough for only one bed. Their son sleeps next to them on a plank of wood balanced on stools.

To make ends meet, Liu peddles mutton sticks and Du sells dumplings on the street. Sometimes they earn as little as $50 a month. That leaves them barely enough for food. Gas stoves are out of the question. They burn coal instead.

“We are like street guerrillas,” Du said. “When the weather is hot, the customers are afraid the meat is not fresh. When the weather is cold, nobody comes out at all. If we rest on a rainy day, we don’t eat the next day.”

Their 17-year-old son, Liu Jun, quit school two years ago. His parents have no money to send him, and he has no confidence that he could catch up with city kids.

“It’s not fair. Why did they have to go to the countryside in the first place?” he asked in his heavy northeastern accent. He says he hates Shanghai because city dwellers look down on out-of-towners who do not speak Shanghainese and he has no friends here. Twice he ran away, taking a train that took three days and three nights to get him back to his birthplace.

Afraid that this would happen to their child, Chen and his wife sent their first-born to live with grandparents in Shanghai. The 24-year-old left when he was 15 months old and never went back to visit his parents.

“My son has no feelings for me--I am a mother to him in name only,” said Wang, digging out old snapshots from the bottom of a suitcase. The only time her children were photographed together was when they were infants.

Their daughter stayed behind with them. But the 20-year-old became a better student than her brother, who now sells CDs in Shanghai. Her parents can’t afford to send her to college, even though she was admitted to a meteorology school.

“My daughter is very close to me,” Wang said. “She told me, ‘I don’t have to go to school, I’ll get a job.’ ”

That broke Wang’s heart. All zhiqing families fear the price of ignorance. The ironically labeled “educated youth” are educated only in comparison with illiterate peasants. The new economy clearly threatens to make them obsolete.

“Before, your class background determined your fate,” said Huang Hongji, another former zhiqing who has written books about this generation. “Now it’s your diploma.”

As luck would have it, a group of former zhiqings from Shanghai was visiting Heilongjiang last summer and heard about Chen’s daughter. They immediately pulled money out of their own pockets to help her go to college. Not long after, a sympathetic businessman even offered her parents jobs.

For $110 a month, Chen now guards the factory grounds and Wang cooks for the workers. Their bed is set inside Chen’s small concrete office. It’s nearly an hour from central Shanghai and its seductive neon lights. But for Chen and his wife, it’s as close as they’ve ever come to feeling that people cared.

“Society has too much to worry about,” said Fei Fanping, a fellow zhiqing who chipped in to help. “If we forget about us, nobody will remember us.”