Shengliver’s Note: This entry was written over a decade ago (in 2008), when the boy, Zeng Shaoqing, joined my class. I learned about his family through his English journal. His dilemma is shared by tens of millions of others in China, who shuttle between city and country. This section of the Chinese population on the move play a vital part in contemporary China’s transformation—urbanisation and industrialisation. Will they be given more rights? Will they still be treated as second-class citizens? Where will the national policy go? All the answers you and I have to wait to find out. Ten years on, the institution has witnessed a lot of positive changes, but more should be done. Most of the places mentioned in the entry—Shiyan, Yunxian, Fangxian, Nanhua, and Yetan—are located in Hubei Province. Huadu is one of the districts of Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong (also known as Canton).
“Where am I from?” This question was posed by Zeng Shaoqing, one of my pupils, in his English journal.
If you ask me where I am from, I will have no idea how to answer it. Is it odd? Not at all. Let me tell you why.
My grandfather was a native of Fangxian. In his twenties he moved to Yetan, Yunxian, where my father was born. My father, when he was an adult, relocated to another town, Nanhua, Yunxian, where I came to this world. I did not stay at Nanhua long. When I was four or five years old, my parents migrated to Guangzhou. They found their jobs there and later purchased our home—a flat in a tower block in a neighbourhood in Huadu District. I started schooling there. I did kindergarten, primary school, and junior high school where my parents worked. A problem arose when it was time for high school, however.
No high school in Guangzhou was ready to take Zeng Shaoqing in, because I have no Guangzhou City permanent resident permit issued by the Public Security Bureau. My father was helpless. He had no alternative but to send me back to Shiyan, Hubei, for high school. I still hold a Shiyan permanent resident permit. That’s why I am here at this high school in Hubei. But where is my home? My home is in Guangzhou. I am studying here all alone. My parents are 1,000 kilometres away from me. I am lonely sometimes.
Where am I from? Am I from Fangxian? No, that’s where my grandfather was from. Am I from Yunxian? No, I have no home there. Am I from Shiyan? No, I have no family here. Then you might say I am from Guangzhou. If I am from Guangzhou, why can’t I attend high school there? So where am I from, teacher?
I am at a loss.
To be honest, I was at a loss too. Reading this journal entry, I felt a surge of anger. What a stupid system! Do we need a better example to illustrate its absurdity? This boy is a perfect one.
What trouble has the system caused to the boy and his family? Because of the blizzard in the past holiday, he spent over 40 hours on the train journey back to his home in Guangzhou, and after the holiday it took him no less trouble to travel all the way up to Hubei from Guangzhou for the new term.
The boy’s predicament has something to do with a Chinese institution called hukou. What is it? I need to elaborate here.
A Chinese citizen’s hukou is his permanent resident permit, officially called Household Register. Every Chinese family has such a document issued by the local Public Security Bureau. This permit, with data about the members of the family, their ages and genders and their occupations, stipulates where the family is supposed to reside permanently. It in a sense tethers a Chinese person to his original residence (often at his birth place), which is registered with the local public security authorities. Nowadays a lot of Chinese, a large portion of them peasants, move around the country for better job opportunities. When they migrate to a city outside their home province for a job, they cannot, mostly, obtain the city’s permanent resident permit. They apply for and are granted a temporary resident permit, which allows them to work and live in the city for a prescribed number of years. But holders of the permit, who do not count as regular citizens of the city, are not entitled to the same benefits as their regular counterparts. They have no access to normal medical care or social security of the city. Their children have no equal access to the city public schools—they either have to attend low-quality makeshift schools or buy/bribe their way into a regular school. It seems as if the migrants have adopted a city as their new home yet the city would not adopt them.
Although the government has been attempting to reform this rigid system, it is still standing there largely intact, creating a barrier to the migrant workers striving for a better life. For instance, there is a rule in China that a high school graduate sit the national matriculation test in the province where his permanent residence is registered. His parents may have been working in a city outside their home province for over ten years, yet he still has to go back to his ancestral area—his parents’ hometown—for school, for he does not qualify legally as a permanent resident of the city, where he has virtually been growing up.
Sometime last year, one of my boyhood pals, who had been working in the Chinese capital for over 15 years, rang me up. He told me that he was planning to send his daughter back to Shiyan for junior high school, for he said that it would be impossible for the girl to sit the national college entrance exam in Beijing when the time came.
This system is irrelevant to today’s China. The country has been getting more and more mobile. The mobility does good to the whole nation. The nation is better than yesterday largely thanks to this ‘free’ movement of the Chinese population. There is no reason why the government should not facilitate it further. The entire system of hukou has to be overhauled.
I wish that one day all the Chinese kids could stay where their parents are. A happy childhood is the foundation for a productive life later on in one’s adulthood.
Shengliver Studio 