The Child Left Behind
As much as Shuhan enjoyed it, she was not expected to pluck potatoes in the field and go home covered in dirt. As a girl, Shuhan was expected to be virtuous, gentle, and soft. Traditional Chinese values teach that male is yang, and female is yin; male dominates the outdoor, and female serves the indoor; male establishes his careers, and female educates her children. In her name, Shu means ease, and Han means inner or patience, both reflecting the desirable female virtues.
Shuhan grew up in Qionglai, Sichuan, a rural town in southern China. A tomboy, she only hung out with boys in elementary school, and biked home by herself every day. She liked to spend time in the internet cafe watching Japanese Shonen anime, an action genre that features young male heroes. Once, she lost track of time while online-gaming with her buddies. When she started walking home around dinner time, she bumped into her mother on a moped.
Mom came to pick me up today, she thought cheerfully. However, Mom had in fact alerted the police that her daughter was missing, and been anxiously looking for her all over the town. They returned home together, where Shuhan lived with her mother, father, and grandparents.
But this was about to change very soon.
China adopted a market economy in 1978, and the ramifications continue to be felt today. With cities fast developing, the country undergoes massive labor migration. Workers move from rural to urban areas, leaving behind children, elderly, and married women at home. The poor-rich gap between the rural regions and cities is wide. Workers are driven into cities in search of jobs and better economic opportunities, and the migration occurred both internally and internationally. The household registration system mandates that children can only receive free education and social welfare in their hometown. Thus, bringing one’s family into the city is not financially optimal. In a typical case, parents send back paychecks and return home on major national holidays. The left-behind children live with relatives, usually grandparents, and in some cases by themselves.
The All-China Women’s Federation reported that there were 61 million left-behind children in 2013, accounting for a fifth of all Chinese children.
When Shuhan was in seventh grade, her father left for Canada to work in a Chinese restaurant. Two years later, Shuhan’s mother went to the U.S. to work in a massage shop that her sister owned.
They were a three-person family, separated in three countries.
For her parents, the reason behind the decision to leave was straightforward — it was simply the quickest way to make the most amount of money. They were working class people who never went to college, but wanted their daughter to have the best education. In the new countries, they worked hard and saved money for Shuhan.
While poverty was reduced and spending encouraged in response to labor migration, sociologists began to notice that those left behind experienced heightened emotional distress and loneliness. In 2015, four left-behind siblings who lived by themselves committed suicide by consuming pesticide in a rural village in Guizhou. The oldest was 13, the youngest five. Recent research concluded that psychological issues were common among those left-behind, the majority of whom were found in central-China, where the population is high but the economy is not as developed as the east coast, in provinces such as Henan, Anhui, Guangdong, Hunan, and Sichuan where Shuhan grew up.
She lived without her parents throughout high school, taking care of herself and her grandparents. She attended a boarding high school in Chengdu, a major city two hours away from home. Every Friday, parents would come and pick up their children to go home for the weekend. Those who weren’t picked up would complain that they had to ride the subway for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, Shuhan stepped onto the street with her luggage. She waved down a motor tricycle which was a cheaper alternative to taxi. The motor tricycle took her to the train station so that she could board another ride for an hour and half. The roads to her hometown had been under construction for two years, so every week she went through the rugged ups and downs. While on the train, she flipped open her phone and check the WeChat status, the equivalent of a Facebook, on which her friends had posted what they had for dinner already. Her stomach growling, she thought about how nice it would be to have a guokui right this moment. A unique street dish from Sichuan, guokui is a meat-stuffed flat cake deep fried in oil. Hungry and upset, she reminded herself to be strong.
Towards the end of high school, Shuhan applied for the College of William and Mary, a university in America as her early decision. She got in. She envisioned a wonderful new life in America, where she would reach her full potential, and have the freedom to be whoever she wanted to be. The West had been introduced to the East as a place where people worship individuality and expressiveness. Shuhan imagined mingling with white and black people, doing bold and unconstrained things — sports and activities that were non-mainstream in her hometown. It was her gateway to new beginnings.
In middle school, Shuhan’s favorite anime was Detective Conan. Conan has a good friend, Sherry, who is incredibly intelligent and helps Conan solve murder mysteries. Shuhan’s name became Sherry when she came to America, because she loved the character, and it seemed that every other Chinese student in America adopted English nicknames that are easily pronounced, so she did, too.
Hyped up during freshman orientation, Sherry was exposed to the chanting, honor pledge, ice-cream socials, and campus tours like someone going through a carwash for the first time — an intensely colorful experience that lasts for 5 minutes. English sounded twice the speed compared to how she learned it in high school. The face-to-face conversations were much harder than the TOEFL, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which is required for international students applying to U.S. colleges. “Not to mention the deep exchange of ideas, even daily communication was a struggle,” she explains. When her freshman hall mate introduced herself, “My name is Lizzie,” Sherry responded, “Lesbian?” Two years later, Lizzie still pokes fun at Sherry for hearing the name wrong.
After the initial honeymoon period of coming to the U.S. was over, Sherry fell into the dark alley of loneliness. She had a desperate need to belong. Two months into freshman year, people around her began to develop their own circle of friends, but she had not found her friends yet, only acquaintances. Sherry named this period of her life as the “No Friends Era.” She was feeling inferior, unconfident, and devoid of any merit. Life looked gray.
Culturally, Sherry felt she could not assimilate. She did not know what to talk about: the movies, TV shows, books, music, celebrities, and activities she liked were vastly different from her American peers. Behaviorally, she was withdrawn and did not want to say hello. When she was in the hall bathroom, she would step back into the stall if she heard someone enter, in order to avoid social contact. She feared meeting people, but at the same time yearned for friendships. This was not how she expected her new life to be.
She worried about how she looked in the eyes of the world. As a collectivist culture, Chinese are deeply aware of others’ opinions. Anthropologist Francis L. K. Hsu wrote, “an American asks, ‘How does my heart feel?’ A Chinese asks, ‘What will other people say?’” In China, there is a great emphasis on interpersonal bonds, and a typical Chinese person is under the constant scrutiny from the actual and imagined others.
Sherry recalls the self-doubts, “Do people like me? Do they judge me? I felt so Chinese — If I had an opinion for others, of course they would have an opinion for me.” During this period, Sherry reminded herself to be strong, and that she had been through worse times.
The “No Friends Era” improved after the spring break of freshman year. Sherry signed up for a community service trip, and volunteered at a soup kitchen in Richmond, VA with a group of W&M students. She comments, “I realized that we shared something in common. There was poverty in China, and there was poverty in America. We all needed to cook, and we all needed to eat.” She saw an American girl holding a knife in a dangerous way, so she showed her how to chop food safely by curling her fingers. “The trip gave me the courage to talk to others,” she says.
Similarly, community service is taking place in China. With increased media coverage for the left-behind children, social activists have responded with volunteer teaching. Typical volunteer teachers are recruited from urban colleges and high schools. They would travel to rural areas for a period of time to interact with local children.
Mary, a junior at W&M, volunteered in Shouning, a rural region in south-ease province Fujian for two summers. She remembers, “The kids were happy. It was not as hard as people imagined, since everyone else (in the school) was left behind.” She added later, “But I saw one negative case — a boy in second grade smoking.” Problematic behavior is often attributed to the lack of parental supervision. It is reported that the left behind children are associated with higher rates of injuries, accidents, juvenile delinquency, and sexual harassment.
Hunter, the Chinese tutor at the College of William & Mary, has formed a student organization titled LEEP, which is short for Left-behind Children Education Empowerment Project. Unlike traditional volunteer groups, LEEP wants to provide online classes for underdeveloped schools. LEEP aims to offer music, art, and computer science classes which are given less emphasis in rural schools. Hunter says, “I want to show these students new things, and expose them to different people. I want them to see an American student converse with a Chinese student in W&M.”
In the summer of 2016, Hunter and a group of W&M students visited Hanjiagou Elementary School in Guizhou, where the principal greeted them warmly and showed them around. There were around 100 students and ten teachers.
Hunter says, “We visited a student’s family. The boy, who lives with his grandma, told me that he misses his parents very much.”
The biggest challenge for LEEP was to raise enough money to purchase a projector and a computer. They raised funds online via WeChat and other social media sites, as well as by selling bubble tea in front of the college’s cafeteria. After a semester’s work, they have now reached the project goal, and are planning to launch the classes.
In 2016, Sherry’s father and mother came to visit her in the College of William and Mary. That was the first time her family reunited after six years of separation.
Her father was finally able to secure his green card after multiple attempts, and he now lives with his wife in New York City. Sherry used the money she earned from working in the college’s cafeteria to pay for her parents’ stay at Day’s Inn. Additionally, she works in in the campus recreation center as a personal trainer. She still rides a bike, and on top of that she rock-climbs, plays flag football, and has signed up for a skiing trip.
Sherry describes her father’s job in Canada, “It was a very tiring job that took a toll on his health. He washed dishes and ran errands for low pay, and now he has diabetes. A five foot six man, only 99 pounds. Every month he sent money back home for my education, and only took out what he needed.” Now, she finds it a little difficult to communicate with her father. After six years of separation, conversations don’t easily flow.
Gradually, Sherry developed a circle of friends in W&M who were between ten to forty years older than her. She was a magnet for non-traditional students. “I found it difficult to connect with people my age. It didn’t click. It was so much easier to hang out with older people who wouldn’t judge me.”
The Chinese social problem of the left-behind children has been extensively documented by BBC, ABC, PBS, Wall Street Journal, and so on. BBC reporter John Sudworth argued that China has completed industrial revolution in a few decades, compared to a century by other countries, so it was not a surprise that it comes at the cost of millions of children neglected while their parents seek work in the city. In February, 2016, The Chinese State Council, the administrative body of the government, has issued a document that encouraged parents to bring their kids to live with them, or have one parent stay at home, and prohibits leaving children under 16 years old to live alone. Chinese NGOs have raised money to provide free lunch, as well as updating classroom infrastructure for the schools. But according to Joseph Lim, the founder of Children Charity International, an organization that visits the left-behind children and sponsors their education, what these children need the most is emotional nurturance that fosters their psychological well-being,
“We always tell them, ‘You know, compared to any children outside, you’re the same. You have a name, you’re a human being. You’re of value. We come here because we love you. And we value you as a human being’.”
