Yuan Ling, "Outside Beijing's Sixth Ring Road"

Yuan Ling

​Outside Beijing’s Sixth Ring Road:  The Vagrant Life of a Family with Five Off-Plan Children[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby

Yuan Ling (b. 1973) is a journalist and nonfiction writer who belongs to the category of “grassroots” 民间 intellectuals analyzed in Sebastian Veg’s recent volume, Minjian.[2]  Like other grassroots intellectuals, Yuan seeks to speak for China’s “silent majority,” and his books and articles explore various themes of suffering and abandonment, ranging from SARS victims to coal miners and more.  For another example of Yuan’s work in English translation, on the last days of an intellectual denounced as a rightist during the Hundred Flowers campaign, see “The Nursing Home Rightist,” translated by Jack Hargreaves and available on the China Channel.

The text translated here is drawn from Yuan’s most recent work, Silent Children 寂静的孩子 (Hargreaves has translated a separate excerpt from the same book here), an ambitious project in which Yuan sought out poor and disadvantaged children from all over China, visiting them repeatedly over a number of years, engaging in a kind of anthropological fieldwork; Yuan describes the project himself in a slickly produced video clip available here.  The result is a 500-page volume that describes the lives of these “silent children” in an affectless prose style surely meant to render the barrenness and poverty of their lives.

In the context of our Reading the China Dream project, Yuan’s piece complements the recent publication of Qin Hui’s mammoth essay comparing China and South Africa, providing in fine, ethnographic detail, confirmation of Qin’s charges that China mistreats migrant laborers and denies them—and their families—the opportunity to integrate fully into urban life.  Indeed, one theme of this excerpt is the role of continuing urban renewal projects in making the lives of migrant workers unsustainable.  Yuan’s work also opens a window onto  the work of China’s non-fiction authors, a relatively underexplored theme.

My thanks to Ian Johnson, for pointing me toward Yuan Ling in a Facebook post (as well as editing the final product), and to Yuan himself, who answered several questions, particularly about the material lives of these silent children.       

Translation

On the last day before summer vacation in 2018, in the employees’ dormitory of a village-run enterprise in Guantou village, Tongzhou, the teachers and students of the eighth grade class of Qinghonglan school push their desks together and celebrate a well-earned meal together, the occasion being a farewell to classmate Li, who is returning to his home village in Anhui.[3]

Classmate Li had saved up some money doing odd jobs, and invited everyone to eat. The school principal found some money as well, in addition to preparing the Dongbei-style banquet himself.[4]  Li had also ordered two cases of beer, and the foam overflows as a few male classmates raise their bottles.  A few retirement-age teachers concentrate on their food, since their daily fare is rather plain, but from time to time, they look up and toast the students with their plastic glasses.  The principal also takes a couple of swallows, and raises his glass to classmate Li, wishing him a smooth trip home.  The distance between teachers and students, in this cramped classroom in what used to be a factory, hardly seems to exist. 

Feng Yaxing is another of the students around the table, although she doesn’t raise her glass.  Her younger sisters from lower grades, like most of the other students, usually have instant noodles for lunch.  The three girls generally share twenty RMB [3$ US] a day for meals, which means that it’s either instant noodles or thin pancakes. 

Classmate Li is not the only student around the table returning to his village.  After this meal, some of the old teachers are also going back to their villages for the summer, and are unsure whether they can return for the next term.[5]  In fact, the school, together with the factory in which it is temporarily housed, might well disappear in yet another wave of Beijing’s urban improvement efforts.

As for Feng Yaxing and her two sisters, Shanshan and Ziyi, as well as her other sister Yangzi, still in kindergarten, and her still younger little brother, there is no possibility of returning to their village, so they have to keep traipsing around the area outside the Sixth Ring Road, following their parents’ peddlers wagon and the fortunes of their precarious schools.

Children Who Should Not Have Been Born

The road home from Guantou village for the three sisters is long.  Because the school bus is too expensive, they first have to wind their way out of Guantou village on foot, and then take the public bus from the south station of Gangshan village for six stops to get to the station in Houqiao, and after that go all the way through Zhuangziying village before reaching their distant final destination.  To get to school in the morning, Dad takes them to the first bus stop in his electric three-wheel cart.  In the heat of summer or the cold of winter, the route seems even longer, or as the fourth sister, Yangzi, who started school in 2018, puts it, “I get up in the night.”

They live in an old, three-room house with a tiled roof and a small courtyard, and it is only in a place this far from everything that they can find a house whose rent is cheap enough for their family of seven.

Aside from the space it provides, there is nothing nice about the house, which lacks anything that might smack of “decoration.”  The main room is the site of daily activities, with a couch rescued from the garbage dump, its color unidentifiable and its two missing legs propped up on bricks.  A pile of worn-out old clothes is on the other side of the room, donated by people who could no longer wear them but couldn’t bear to throw them away.  The pile seems huge, but when winter comes, the family will go through it yet again, looking for anything they can put on their bodies to fend off the cold.  All of the clothes worn by adults or children are second-hand, and they have never purchased overcoats.  “Think what it would cost if we had to buy clothes for all these kids,” says Dad with a wry smile.

The two side rooms are bedrooms, as drab as the main room.  Aside from old clothes and a few beds, at first glance it is hard to distinguish anything else.  In the main room, there is an old television, a second-hand freezer and an electric fan without its cover.  The fan is the color of worn-out cloth, and is barely noticeable.  The television is the same age as the oldest child, and the color of the screen has already faded.  They get what programs they can through a “heavenly wok 天锅” antenna.[6]

What jumps out at you about the family is the group of children.  When they are all sitting on the couch at the same time, they seem out of the ordinary.

These children are the fruits of the parents’ doing odd jobs around Beijing over the years.  The father, Feng Xiuju, born in 1973, and his wife, Liu Fen, two years younger, came to Beijing from their home in Juancheng, Shandong, the year after they got married, and all of the children were born in Beijing, beginning with the oldest, Feng Yaxing.  With the exception of Yaxing, whose residence permit is in Shandong, the others are off-plan “children who should not have been born.”  While they were in Beijing, the family-planning people from Shandong came to their house seven times, but gave up when they saw that there was nothing they could seize.

Lacking money for a proper hospital, the children were born in small clinics, with private midwives.  The parents spent less than 10,000 yuan [1400$ US] on birth expenses for the five of them.  Some villages would not allow the children to be born there, and others were caught up in the demolition and relocation of Beijing’s municipal expansion, and the parents had no choice but to move with the birth of each child.

According Shanshan’s mother’s memories, they lived first in Wujiaying, but after Ziyi was born the village kicked them out, and they moved to Yangjiaying.  After they were expelled from Yangjiaying they moved back to Wujiaying, which kicked them out again.  Then they moved to Houqiao, but after a month, the landlord forced them to move because of the number of children they had, and they wound up in Mige village.  In Mige village Mom got pregnant with the fourth child, but the village would not allow the birth to occur there, and they moved to Zhuangziying and another landlord, and the fifth child was born there as well.  Two years ago in the twelfth lunar month there was a heavy snowfall, and the landlord asked them to move to a side dwelling, because the people in the main dwelling worked the night shift and complained about the noise the kids made when they tried to sleep during the day.  The parents didn’t want to, and moved to their current location.  From beginning to end, they remained in the area of the Beijing Sixth Ring Road.

Out of all of these moves, Shanshan only remembers Mige village.  “I liked it there because it had a yard.”  Actually, the house had been built on a farm outside the village, and has since been demolished.

Having five children earned Mom the nickname “five-children mother” in her home village.  She has heard that there is another “five-children mother” from her village who also had had four girls before having a boy.  Dad says that there are too many children, born too close together, and he has to stop to think to remember their birthdays.  “We’ve never celebrated their birthdays,” he says.  Cakes are too expensive, more than 100 RMB [14$ US].  In the past he made vague promises about buying one, but then forgot it when the time came, saying “the kids didn’t mention it.”  Shanshan says that the school is moving to a new location next year, with a small cake store next to it, and that she will buy herself a cake on her birthday, and celebrate it herself.

The father sort of regrets having five children, saying “it’s scary if you think about it.”  But the birth of a son finally compensated for the earlier hardships, otherwise they would not call him “prince.”  By the second half of 2017, the “prince” is three and a half, and his sisters are fourteen, twelve, ten and six.  The prince and the youngest daughter are in kindergarten, the third daughter in fifth grade, and the two oldest in lower middle school.  Dad often calls the girls “princess” as well.

The illegal migrant schools that the children attend move around as much as the family.  On the eve of the Daxing fire in November of 2017,[7] the kindergarten of the two younger children moved from Banbidian to Zhuangziying, after which it completely closed down, so that for a while the children had to stay home.  The Qinghonglian school attended by the others also moved frequently, winding up in the building of a closed-down kindergarten in Guantou village.

With the birth of the “prince,” the family’s goal was achieved, and Dad went back to their home village in Shandong and got people to help him to do DNA paternity tests and obtain residence permits for the four youngest children, all of which cost more than 9000 RMB [1275$ US].  But in Beijing, where they were born, they remain rootless weeds,[8] never having been inside the Sixth Ring Road, never having visited Tiananmen.  Luckily, since their parents are there, everything is okay.  At one point, the father thought about sending the oldest, Yaxing, back to Shandong, but the mother didn’t agree, saying “either we all go or we all stay.  If we can’t raise them then we shouldn’t have had them.”  Hence the family has stayed together over the years.

The Daily Life of the Children

Outside of the pile of worn-out clothes, there is nothing that speaks of plenty in the house, but happily there is no lack of excitement.  With one sofa and three rooms, there is space for endless drama.

The prince’s favorite spot is on a folded-up blanket on one end of the sofa.  In the summer, his skin is often as hot as fire, and his favorite thing is to touch the skin of someone else that is cooler than he is.  So there is always a lot of roughhousing among the children, but it’s “just fooling around,” according to Shanshan, who insists that “things never get out of hand.”  The prince likes to sleep, and gets upset when his sisters come home from school and wake him up with their noise, so he gets up and quarrels with them until they get upset too, after which he tones it down a notch.  The prince also complains that his sisters “make me angry, or even hit me on the sly.”  And when he tries to hit them back they “run really fast.”  Sometimes this is also to prevent him from rubbing his toe jam on their faces.  Yaxing says that her little brother is very cute, and sometimes she can’t keep herself from pinching his cheeks.

The three older children and the two younger ones divide into two groups on the basis of age.  Within the older group, Shanshan and Ziyi argue a lot, even over a roll of toilet paper or a new pair of flip-flops with flowers on them.  They’ll argue like crazy, but forget it the next day.  This is because the family has so few new things; most of what they have is old stuff given by neighbors.

After the argument is over, the two will also play the monopoly game their older sister borrowed from a friend, which Shanshan figured out after having watched a classmate play it, while the (slightly slower) older sister Yaxing looks on.  The sisters also play checkers, gomoku, and military chess as games that sharpen their minds.  In addition, if Dad is working at home, they sometimes secretly play with his cell phone.  Even the prince knows that there are no games on the phone, but they can download some on the sly, which Dad deletes as soon as he finds them.

There’s no wifi in the house, and they have to go to the little market in the street to use theirs.  Mother lost her cell phone more than a year ago, and hasn’t bothered to get another one.  The sisters talk about a classmate at school who got hooked on the King Glory 王者荣耀 video game, and played it in and out of class, and even when eating, racking up 1000 RMB [140$ US] in fees, which would be unimaginable in their family.

As the oldest, Yaxing has the power to distribute chores and snacks, and she thinks of herself as the “most capable,” but she can’t beat Ziyi.  Ziyi has a violent streak and likes to bawl, for instance if she’s washing her hair and drops the shampoo bottle, and Yaxing hits her, she howls.  Shanshan doesn’t talk back like Ziyi, and when there are not enough snacks to go around she might give up her share to her older sisters, but she can sometimes skimp on her chores or mope.  Yaxing thinks that the fourth sister, Yangzi, is the sweetest.  She has a gentle and pleasant appearance, with bangs and hair cut in a “roof tile” style.  Yaxing herself cut her sister’s bangs.  The mother used to cut Yaxing’s hair, but in the sixth grade she cut it too short, which made Yaxing cry.  It took a long time to grow back, and she hasn’t let Mom touch it since.

All the sisters know that “prince” is the favorite, and that any good food will first be offered to him.  Luckily, there’s not all that much at home that can be distributed unequally.  Dad is good-natured, and although he likes to drink a bit, he never hits the kids.  Mom is a bit gruffer, but mostly it’s just nagging, and she’s only resorted to mild physical violence a couple of times.  Little brother does not really like to be called “prince,” and gravely tells strangers that his name is “Prince Feng,” meaning that he has a surname just like his sisters do.

As for sleeping arrangements, the children are basically divided into three groups.  The parents share a room with the two youngest, where there are two beds.  The three oldest share another room, with Yaxing and Shanshan in one big bed and Ziyi in a small bed next to the window.  In the third year after moving in, Shanshan got tired of always sharing a bed with her big sister, and sometimes shared with Dad and her little brother, and sometimes with her youngest sister, which meant that Ziyi and Yaxing would share.  There’s an electric fan at the head of the big bed, but it’s been broken for a year, so they rigged up a ceiling fan, and in the summer they drag the little bed away from the window and put it under the ceiling fan for the breeze.  Everyone uses the electric fan in the living room during the day, and at nighttime, they move it into the parents’ bedroom.

They can’t afford electric heat in the house.  They used to have a coal stove, which they would take outside at night for fear of poisoning themselves, but now that Tongzhou is part of Beijing, heating with coal is no longer allowed.  During the winter school holidays they stay in the sunshine as much as possible and stamp their feet to keep warm, but during the nights and early mornings they stay in bed, wrapped up in blankets.  Electricity is expensive in the village, so even if they have electric blankets they don’t dare use them.  Yaxing and Yangzi both have frostbite on their ears and the back of their hands, but they still say that “when there’s a lot of people, you don’t feel the cold.”  In early winter of 2018 there were some very cold days, and they finally used the electric blanket in the parents’ bedroom.  There were slight chill blains on the faces of Mom and the fourth daughter Yangzi. 

Although there are no Transformers or dolls, the children don’t want for toys, most of which they make themselves.  In the summer time there’s a big potato with huge roots on the table in the girls’ room, which serves as a sort of decoration.  The first time I visited them in autumn, there was a pot of impatiens on the window sill of the living room that Mom had bought, and the three eldest girls all had pots of their own that they took care of.  Yaxiang’s two pots were inside, while Shanshan and Ziyi brought theirs outside.  Shanshan said, “if they don’t bloom indoors, then we’ll train them outside.”  Ziyi’s flowers were a bit better than Shanshan’s, and they could dye their fingernails with them. 
When I visited again the following summer, the finger paint flowers were gone, and they said that they had not survived the winter.  But there was a cockscomb on the windowsill that the father had received from a friend who set up flowers for exhibitions.

There were two strings of paper cranes in the bedroom of the three girls, which Yaxing had folded over the New Year.  On the mirror on the wall in the parents’ room were the flowery characters “Happy New Year,” written by Shanshan at New Year’s.  When I went back this winter, there were all sorts of paper cuts on the walls of the girls’ bedroom:  a skirt, a basket, an emperor’s crown, a bouquet of flowers, all the handiwork of the girls.

The family often takes in a small dog, which sneaks away from another house.  The girls like to feed it, and although Dad tells them to run it off, the girls hide it in their room.

The children rarely play outside the home.  Shanshan’s explanation for this is that there are few children their age.  When the parents go off to peddle things they bar the main gate, and the children play by themselves.  The father doesn’t worry about people breaking in, saying “there’s a camera in the alley, and everything is very safe.”

Helping Adults

On a hot summer afternoon, Mom is already off to the market to run her fruit stand, and Dad is preparing the stew卤煮 that he will peddle this evening.  There are two huge woks in the courtyard containing four pigs’ hearts, four pigs’ feet, two catties of intestines, together with pork thighs and various vegetables.   The flies are attracted by the aroma, and the heavy smell of hot oil and red pepper makes everyone cough.

After simmering for an hour, the meat turns bright red, and is almost ready.  The children, who had been sitting on the couch watching TV, get up one after the other to help.  Yaxing takes the blender that was on the floor in the hall, adds water from the spigot in the yard to the garlic that she had already prepared.
Also on the floor in the hall are bowls of peanuts, quail eggs, snails and fresh soya beans, all of which are side dishes to accompany the stew.  Dad first boils the chili oil on an old single-burner gas stove, and pours the snails into the pan, while Shanshan looks on from where she is leaning against the bedroom door to make sure the chili oil does not overflow.  The smell in the house grows even thicker, and the flies buzz back and forth.

Yaxing pours the garlic liquid into the plastic bottle that Dad had just washed out and gets it ready to use. Dad takes a big clay pot from the tricycle and wipes it clean, and then adds the braised pork.

A woman calls wanting to buy boiled peanuts, and haggles over the price for a long time, asking over and over whether they are fresh, and offering only 10 RMB for two catties.  Dad says he has never sold them so cheap, but because it is another peddler that he knows, he eventually relents and lets Yaxing take the peanuts to the woman.  There are a few abandoned ofo rental bikes[9] in the yard, and Yaxing hops on one to make the delivery.

Shanshan chops coriander on the board next to the gas stove, bundles it up and waits for Dad to take it, and while waiting, plays with her father’s mobile phone.  Picking coriander is her job.  Yaxing comes back from her delivery and chats with her little sister while the two load the coriander and the garlic liquid onto the tricycle.    Ziyi, the third sister, puts the scales on the seat of the tricycle, and comes back with the bottle of vinegar, which is half-empty.  Dad has her go to the store up the alley to fill it.   She also brings Dad’s apron and his serving tongs, newly washed.  Dad puts a piece of plastic over the clay pot holding the stew and grabs the flashlight he will need for night work.  Preparations are finally finished.

Mom says that Yaxing is the most reliable, and most of the work falls to her.  Yaxing says that Yangzi is the fastest, and can do anything, while getting the other two to do any chores at all requires bargaining.  Neither Dad nor Mom is home for supper, so Yaxing cooks up something that she says is “okay.”

The girls started working when they are very young.  Mom remembers that when they first came to Beijing, and she was cutting bricks left over from the demolition to make some money, she would bring Yaxing and Shanshan and they would set up a little stand beside where she was working, selling popsicles to thirsty people.  Yaxing was a little top-heavy when she was little, and fell down a lot, and she still has scars on her head from that.  When they were a little older, Shanshan remembers standing on the brick pile and grabbing the bricks with the tongs in the way the adults did.

Later on, Ziyi came along.  The parents collected trash in the southern suburbs for a few years, and then picked cotton, and they brought the children with them.  When they lived in Yangjiaying, Yaxian and Shanshan went to an illegal migrant preschool, and after school they went home with the teacher, and Mom came to pick them up after finishing with the trash.  There was only one teacher for the entire preschool.  While the two older children went to preschool, Ziyi was not yet able to walk, so she was left at home in a walker tied to the bed, and she cried and cried all day.  Maybe this is where her violent temper comes from.

When they were in Mige village, Ziyi went to a little preschool run by a handicapped person, which cost 200 RMB [28$ US] a month, and again stayed with the teacher before and after school.  Mom tried to give the teacher more money, but she wouldn’t take it, so she gave her a case of ramen noodles.  Later on, municipal fees on the new housing used for the school added 300 RMB [42$ US] to tuition, and the family moved to Yinge village.  After they had Yangzi, Mom set up a fruit stand, nursing the baby while she sold the fruit, and in the first year they lost 2000 RMB [280$ US].  Later, she got pregnant with the fifth child and continued to sell fruit, stopping only one month before she was due, and opening back up one month after the birth, and the prince grew up around the stall.

One reason that the parents decided to go into the fruit and stew business was that their children could eat some of the leftovers.  At the outset, Mom sold vegetables, but what was left over was hard to preserve, and the children couldn’t eat it, so she switched to fruit.  The stewed vegetables, peanuts and soya beans that Dad sells can also serve as food for the children.  Shanshan and the others do not touch the bags of soya beans left over from the day before, because they’re sick of it.  Shanshan used to like the chicken legs and breasts from the stew, but has now lost her appetite for it, too.  And for a long time now, the children don’t even notice the smell of the stew that lingers in the house.

Mom is a very thin woman, and in the late autumn is wrapped in a second-hand down jacket that covers her from head to toe.  She already has chilblains on her face, because she does most of her business at night after the chengguan 城管[10] have gone home for the evening.  Another of Mom’s duties is to do a big laundry every two weeks, and to see that the kids have a bath once a week.  In the winter, this means taking them to the bathhouse, where it costs 6 RMB [.85$ US] a child.  In the winter of 2017, the bathhouse in the village was demolished, and the kids had to go to a neighboring village.  They did not go often.

When summer approaches, Dad takes the kids in the tricycle to see the dentist.  Yaxing’s teeth are good, with only one bad tooth.  Shanshan says that when she was little she liked to chew on pencils and rulers, and she’s not sure what that did to her teeth.  Ziyi has one decayed tooth, and Shanshan has rotten teeth that have fallen out.  This is what they talk about at their rare dental exams.
At 3:30 in the afternoon, Dad’s tricycle leaves the courtyard loaded with the stew, off to the market with a shirtless neighbor.  The prince yells that he needs to take a shit, and Yaxing finds some toilet paper and heads off with him.  There’s a flimsy toilet next to the poplar grove by the side of the road, a shed made up of a few colored sheets of corrugated metal, the men’s and women’s sections barely separated.  I walk in with my head down. There is a mountain of used toilet paper next to the hole where you squat, and no place to put your feet.  It is hard to connect this place with the children on the sofa.

School and Life Chances

Over the course of the summer holidays that follow the end of the banquet, a student passes through Guantou and discovers that the factory has already been flattened.  “Our school!” Some students share tears and sadness in their Weixin group.[11]

This is the fourth demolition in the two-year history of the Qinghonglan school.  Before Yaxing started going, the school was in Southern Banbidian village south of the Sixth Ring Road, and had a big campus and more than a thousand students.  When the two oldest girls started, there were still more than 700 teachers and students.   The campus is still there, even the cursive iron characters above the main gate, but the buildings are used for something else now, and the teachers and students can’t go back.

In 2017, the school moved to Guantou village in the wake of “relief and repair疏解整治” efforts,[12] and set up shop in a space that had been a kindergarten, so the students said farewell to spacious campus, full of light, and moved into a few dark rooms.  A dark corridor was the students’ main activity area, and they had to give up physical education and even the ritual of putting up the flag.  The name of the school became taboo, and the rusty gate stayed shut, except for when children came out to go to the public toilet.

Around the time of the Daxing fire, lots of children went back to their villages to go to school, or left Beijing with their parents.  With the precipitous decline in the number of students, most of the teachers left as well, leaving only a few retired substitute teachers, the oldest of which were over seventy.  They usually lived and ate at the school, crammed into two dormitories, sleeping on tables.  Among these were two non-certified teachers who despite a lifetime in education had never managed to get on the state payroll, and thus had to fight for their wages every month.  They were old and worn out, did not know how to teach and could not control the students in the classroom. This was a world apart from the school in Banbidian.

Shanshan used to like English, but now she gets a headache when she goes to class because “the teacher’s accent is awful.”  He speaks with a Henan drawl and “everything he says sounds the same.”  By contrast, the math teacher has no accent, so that “if you listen hard you can understand.”

“The boys smoke and drink, and go to school only when they want” says Yaxing.  They smoke right in the teacher’s face.  A girl in eighth grade often skips class because “it’s too hot and I don’t feel like it.”  No one in her family cares, and she has started to learn manicuring.

There’s a lot of flirting, and two of the three girls in Yaxing’s class already have boyfriends.  The girl who plays hooky has had boyfriends since the sixth grade, one per semester.  Yaxing swears she has never thought about such things, and says “their stories never go anywhere, and they’re always breaking up.  It’s a waste of time.”  Yaxing and Shanshan are among the best in their class, but the numbers are so small that there is no longer any point in putting together a formal list.

In the factory in Guantou village there is even less space, and only a passageway is available for activities.  On the top floor, there are a few dozen migrant laborers who pick up what work they can, going up and down every day via an iron ladder.  There are several empty warehouses nearby, and the kids who dare go in and use old mats to turn somersaults and jump around. A welding gun spits sparks not far from the school gate. 

After the factory was demolished during the summer break, the school moved to a small district on Huosha Road, and with only thirty odd students left, the grades were regrouped into two--middle school and elementary school.  Because the school makes noise, people complain, so the middle school moved to a building the principal bought himself, and the elementary school holds classes on Saturday and Sunday, taking Monday and Tuesday off, to avoid bothering the neighbors.

Because Ziyi is starting school, Dad goes to the new location of the school to take a look, and in the classroom finds students of various ages grouped together.  One group is doing a lesson, while another group is doing homework, each bothering the other.  In the teacher’s house where Yaxing and Shanshan go there isn’t even a table.  The students sit on the floor doing their homework on their knees.  Dad feels that the school’s days are numbered.

The question of returning to their home village to go to school hangs in the air, but they have been in Beijing for more than ten years already, and it isn’t clear how they can go back.

They left in the beginning because of poverty, and there is nothing waiting for them back home besides a run-down two-room house that hasn’t been kept up for years.  There is no protection from the elements, to say nothing of serving as a house for a family.  In the decade and more that they have been gone, all they thought about was having a son, and they spent all their money on children, and had never bought or maintained a home.  The children’s grandfather is dead, and the grandmother has epilepsy, and is looked after in her village by her sister. 

There are only three mu [roughly half an acre] of land, and no factory in the township where they could work.  Should they return there will be no income, but if they don’t go back…Beijing is looking less and less like and option. 
Especially around the time of the Daxing fire everyone was really tense.  People were always coming around the places they rented to check up on them.  For a while they weren’t even allowed to use natural gas.  Dad’s tricycle was confiscated, and it looked that would have to go back to the village at any time. 

In 2018, they checked up on the stalls a bit less, and Dad took someone else’s place in the market, but at the same time, a lot of the outsiders had left, and business suffered.  Since business had been bad in 2017 they had debts of more than 10,000 RMB [1400$ US], which they had a hard time paying.  Rent inched up step by step, from “5000 RMB [700$ US] a year if you don’t move” to 9000 RMB [1275$ US] in 2019.  Sending the kids back to the village was starting to look inevitable.

The kids have never spent much time in Juancheng.  In 2014 they went back for a week to take care of hukou problems, and the children got antsy and wanted to get back to Beijing.  When Mom and Dad brought up the idea of going back to the village for school, Yaxing shook her said and said “I don’t want to.”  Shanshan says her sister is worried that she won’t be able to catch up if she goes back, and won’t fit in.  Shanshan says she’s “not all that worried about it,” and that maybe if they went back they could go to a better school, since from the looks of things Qinghonglan is not panning out.

Because the children have always been in private schools, outside the state educational system, their school fees are not cheap.  In the case of Yangzi, who started school in 2018, fees for one semester are 2800 RMB [400$ US], and this was after they knocked off 1000 RMB [140$ US].  In the winter there is a 400 RMB [55$ US] fee for heating, to say nothing of the school bus and meals.  For the two girls in middle school, in 2017 tuition came to 3600 RMB [500$ US] per person per semester, plus 3500 [485$ US] RMB for girl number three.  They never have all the money when school began, and have to pay in installments.  If they go back to the village and board in a school there, the state would pay part of the tuition and costs.

But you can’t go back just because you want to; school transcripts are a barrier.  The Qinghonglan school is not accredited, and thus cannot issue transcripts.  When kids need a graduation certificate to back to the village school, the teachers at Qinghonglan have to find friends and make fake ones using Photoshop.  When they were cleaning up after the banquet, the “three good student” certificate[13] the school had given to the student surnamed Li fell to the floor.  Li left it there, saying it was “useless” and none of the teachers disagreed.  But the teachers did take the empty beer bottles to the recycling for the money.

In the second half of 2018, Dad asked again about the village school, and was told that they could only be enrolled if they had transcripts.  His plan is to finish this year at Qinghonglan, and in the second half of 2019 send them back to the village for school, but he can’t see how to resolve the transcript problem.  Everybody else facing this problem has to use personal connections, but Dad and Mom have been away so long that they no longer have any.

Should the kids go back to the village, only one of the parents could go with them, and the other would have to stay in Beijing to make money, something that is not easy to talk about.  A family that has never split up would have to divide in two.

Mom might be the one to stay in Beijing.  She is the major source of income.  Selling fruit is not easy. She has to fetch her merchandise at four in the morning at a market ten kilometers away, set up her stall between seven and eight o’clock, and she never gets home before eight or nine in the evening.  Dad sets up shop later.  In the morning, he buys what he needs for the day, gets the children off to school, but then can go home and catch up on some sleep.  When his stall was shut down in the past, he had nothing to do, and would have a couple of drinks every day.  Mom resents that.

In the winter, on the road leading to the market where they set up their stall, they go under a highway bridge, where an old Beijinger sets up his tricycle with a DVD player and a microphone, and he sings Karaoke himself.  When Mom sees this, she says “our fate is bad, we weren’t born in Beijing.  They’ve got everything.”

Mom’s plan for her children is for them to study well, “so they won’t have a hard life like me.”

Translator’s Notes

[1] 袁凌, “北京六环外，超生5个孩子的流浪之家,” available online here, and taken from Yuan’s book The Silent Children 寂静的孩子 (Zhongxin chuban jituan:  Beijing, 2019).

[2] Sebastian Veg, Minjian:  The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019).

[3] Classmate Li is probably not “returning to his village” because he wants to.  Like the other children discussed in this text, Li is the target of a conscious government policy that has progressively threatened and closed down the unofficial民办 schools attended by the children of most migrant workers.  In the case of Beijing, the reason given for the policy is the ongoing “urban renewal” and reorganization of the city and its suburbs.

[4] In Chinese, “banquet” is dapencai 大盆菜, in which many ingredients are cooked together in one large wok.  “Stew” might be a rough equivalent.  The original Guangdong version is meant to be quite refined; the Dongbei version (Dongbei refers to Northeast China, the region traditionally designated as Manchuria) is understood to be cruder both in terms of ingredients and skill. 

[5] The teachers are migrant workers as well, many in this school having come from Dongbei.  Their future is as uncertain as that of the students.

[6] This is a wireless satellite receiver that is technically illegal in urban areas with cable service.

[7] The fire occurred on November 17, 2017, in the blue-collar Beijing suburb of Daxing.  Most of those who died or were injured were migrant workers, living in the substandard housing that is available to them.  Municipal authorities in Beijing have used the Daxing fire to justify initiatives that invariably target for demolition lower-end housing, thereby increasing the precarity of the poor and especially the migrant workers.  See https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/world/asia/china-fire-beijing.html.

[8] Literally, “dandelions.”

[9] One of China’s many rental bike services, most of which failed, littering the country with hundreds of thousands of ownerless bicycles.  See images here :  https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268/.

[10] The chengguan might be seen as “social order police” whose job is to enforce a wide variety of municipal regulations.  They are widely reviled in China.

[11] Weixin is an important social medium in China, a mix of Facebook and Twitter.

[12] This is short for疏解整治促提升专项行动, “special measures to stimulate relief and repair,” one of many slogans and campaigns dealing with issues touching on urban renewal.

​[13] Awarded to students who excel in ideology, study, and physical education.