Dustbound Fates of Guangdong

Back home, making a living means farming. In the south, it means working in a factory. The phrase "making a living" has two ends: one rooted in the land, one at a factory gate, and one in a person's life. The green trains head south again and again. When the doors open, the first things to pour out are woven plastic sacks, then young adults, and finally people with hair half turned white. Making a living is hard. Their fingers blister and bleed, but they wrap them in tape and keep working. They add another hundred yuan to a remittance, then eat pickled vegetables themselves. Their children are back home, seen once a year. When they miss them, they stare for a long time at the address on the remittance slip.

Some lose their way trying to make a living: some fall in with street gangs, while others are trapped in the sex trade, bearing children for others and never standing up straight for the rest of their lives.

But most stay on the right path: saving enough for rent, school fees, and a train ticket home. Some start working in factories at sixteen, supporting their younger siblings, then their parents, then their own children. Some cough as they say, "Just two more years, and my kid will graduate." But when that day finally comes, they still say the same thing: "Just two more years. My kid is getting married."

Where does their path to a living lead? To the other end of the remittance slip, to the workshops that finally open, to the north and south connected by green trains at New Year. SARS arrives, then labor shortages; factories close and open again. The remittance slips they have saved up become renovated homes back in their hometowns, their children's tuition, and the cities that grow from their hands twenty years later.

At first, they work for a meal. Later, they work for someone they love. At the other end of the remittance slip are their parents; in the schoolbag is their child. Being needed is what makes a living possible.

Twenty years, a whole generation. They support the old above them and the young below them, with no room to live for themselves. But somehow, they make it through.

This thousand-chapter story lays bare the hard lives of you, me, and everyone else. It is well worth reading.