I Am a Flower Adrift in the Wind: The Survival Story of a Migrant Girl in Dongguan
If every boy who leaves his homeland is a blade of grass without roots, then every girl who finds herself far from home is a flower adrift in the wind.
For all kinds of reasons, people have long held prejudices against migrant workers, especially young women who leave their villages to work elsewhere. They look at our lives with curiosity, suspicion, or outright contempt, imagining all sorts of stories about us.
What I am writing here is my own account—the most complete and honest portrait I can offer of the lives of migrant workers.
—Author’s Note
I often came across newspaper and television reports about the lives of migrant workers, and for reasons I never quite understood, the media seemed particularly interested in migrant women.
According to many of these reports, a migrant girl was either vain and eager for money, eventually becoming a prostitute or a mistress, or else she was trapped in conditions so brutal that she could barely survive, living a life of darkness and degradation.
As a woman who spent many years working in the Pearl River Delta, I was furious whenever I read such stories.
Not only for myself, but for the countless girls who quietly worked in factories, earned their wages, and tried to build ordinary lives.
Because the reality was very different from those reports.
The media seemed drawn to the unusual cases, the sensational stories, the lives at the extreme edges of society. Whether deliberately or unconsciously, they often overlooked the ordinary lives of the vast majority of migrant workers.
As someone who had spent years as a migrant worker myself, I felt that I had both the right and the responsibility to show people, the media, and society what the lives of migrant women were really like.
Even as I write these words, I feel a deep sense of frustration.
Because the very terms dagong zai and dagong mei—“migrant worker” and “migrant working girl”—already carried a certain contempt for people like us.
When the Pearl River Delta was first transformed by China’s reform and opening-up, outsiders who came to work there were commonly called bei zai and bei mei, lao zai and lao mei, or dagong zai and dagong mei.
The insult and discrimination contained in the first two sets of terms were obvious.
Eventually, only dagong zai and dagong mei remained in common use.
Over time, those terms came to refer almost exclusively to people working on factory floors—the so-called blue-collar workers.
Everyone else became gray-collar, white-collar, or even gold-collar.
But I have always stubbornly believed that if you take the words literally, anyone who works for someone else rather than being their own boss is a dagong worker.
By that definition, gray-collar, white-collar, and gold-collar employees are all dagong zai and dagong mei.
Even government officials.
They are not their own bosses either. In one sense, they work for the government.
So, in that sense, even civil servants are dagong zai and dagong mei.
The irony is that many of those people—people who are themselves working for someone else—would never admit it.
So be it.
That leaves me speaking only for the narrower group traditionally called migrant workers: the men and women who leave the countryside and take the hardest, least respected jobs in the cities.
I want to show you what our lives were really like.
The ranks of migrant workers have continued to grow. I hope that by telling our stories, people will gain a fuller and deeper understanding of who we are—and that society and the government will pay more attention to us.
I was born in a small village called Huashuping, in the central part of Sichuan Basin.
Huashuping was neither a broad, open plain nor a land of famous mountains and rivers. It was surrounded by endless rolling hills.
The hills were like human faces: some gentle and rounded, others rugged and sharp.
When I was little, I would stand on a hillside and look down.
Streams as green as jade wound happily around Huashuping and disappeared into the distance, toward places whose names I did not know.
Rice paddies stretched green in front of the houses and behind them. Golden rapeseed flowers filled the fields, and reeds swayed in the wind.
The air carried the earthy smell of damp soil mixed with the fragrance of fresh grass.
People and nature seemed to live in perfect harmony.
Life was quiet.
Peaceful.
Back then, Huashuping was such an insignificant little village that few people outside it had ever heard of it.
Most families still lived in the small houses their ancestors had built.
The walls were made of packed earth, and the roofs were covered with straw.
Those houses had endured generations of rain and wind. They had stood there through dynasties that had come and gone, until the houses seemed almost fused with the earth beneath them—dark, weathered, and silent.
If you stood at the entrance of the village and looked inward, the far end seemed to dissolve into a single mass of gray and black.
As soon as you entered, the first thing you saw was a huge old locust tree with thick, spreading branches.
To the left stood a well.
To the right was the ancestral hall.
All day long, water splashed and sparkled around the well, carrying the women’s laughter and singing far across the village.
Summer nights were especially lively.
The village dogs would stretch their necks toward the crescent moon and bark at it.
Meanwhile, families would gather beneath the old locust tree, old and young together, waving half-worn palm-leaf fans and chatting about this and that.
Those were the happiest hours for the children.
Some sat quietly listening to the adults tell stories about things that had happened long ago.
Others ran around laughing and chasing one another.
Even the naughtiest children were rarely scolded.
The land around Huashuping was fertile.
Besides producing two crops of rice a year, the village was also known for its fine reeds.
When spring arrived and the weather warmed, young reed shoots pushed out of the earth like slender green arrows.
It seemed that one day there was nothing, and the next morning they had appeared everywhere.
The tender shoots could be eaten.
Peel away layer after layer, and inside was a soft white core as delicate as jade.
One of my favorite dishes was young reed shoots stir-fried with chili peppers.
They were slightly bitter, but delicious.
After another spring rain, the reeds shot up more than a foot high.
Their leaves were long and pointed.
By May, the reeds were already more than three meters tall, their leaves broad and lush.
When the Dragon Boat Festival came, the leaves were perfect for wrapping zongzi.
Then winter arrived.
The leaves turned yellow, and the reeds blossomed into clouds of white flowers.
The flowers were soft and downy. When the wind came, thousands upon thousands of them would rise into the air and drift across the sky.
That was when every household began cutting reeds and weaving them into mats.
Almost every family had one or two people who were especially skilled at weaving.
Half of the rice we harvested went to the state as the grain quota; the other half was kept to feed the family.
For most households, the little money earned from selling woven reed mats was what paid for cooking oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and other necessities.
Life was poor.
But it was quiet.
And, for a time, it was peaceful.
Then, at some point, the village began to change.
People started abandoning the land their ancestors had farmed for generations, along with the craft of weaving reed mats.
They crossed the endless hills and went out into the wider world.
Armed with the resilience and endurance of farmers, they took the dirtiest, hardest jobs in the cities and on their outskirts, working day and night.
They poured themselves into the construction and maintenance of the cities.
Yet they also endured countless contemptuous looks and humiliations.
The jobs they took were often the ones society looked down upon:
construction workers, renovation workers, porters, street haulers, domestic helpers, shoe repairers and metalware menders, assembly-line workers, security guards, miners, and every kind of street vendor.
Once these people left home to work, the responsibility fields assigned to their families were often left untended.
The crops disappeared.
Weeds took over the land and grew wild.
A few years later, many of those migrant workers would return home.
One after another, they tore down the mud houses where their families had lived for decades and built new concrete houses on their abandoned fields.
The place filled with new houses became the “New Village.”
The original settlement became the “Old Village.”
Almost overnight, the Old Village was reduced to little more than a dozen households.
Moss covered the stone well.
The old stone mills lay abandoned beneath layers of rotting leaves.
Even the mud houses seemed to have aged overnight.
A mischievous child could scrape a wall with one hand and send dry chunks of earth cascading to the ground.
Some families abandoned their old houses simply because they wanted to claim more land for new homesteads.
The old buildings stood there in ruins, their collapsed walls opening into dark holes thick with spiderwebs.
When you walked into the Old Village, the world seemed to fall silent.
It felt almost completely cut off from everything beyond it.
The people who remained in the Old Village were either unable to leave or simply too timid to do so.
They guarded their few acres of poor farmland, raised a handful of pigs, wove reed mats, and somehow scraped by.
Sadly, my father belonged to the second group.
He was simply too honest—and too afraid—to leave.
And so our family became one of the dozen or so households that remained in the Old Village.
I could never understand it.
Why did my father and mother rise before dawn and work until after dark, laboring so hard that their hands were never idle, yet still struggle to afford even the most basic necessities?
Why did they have to borrow money from one person after another?
Where, exactly, did the fruits of all their labor go?
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