1This interview was conducted in September 2015 in a fast-food restaurant near the interviewee Li’s home.

2Li is a young man who was born in 1992 in the city of Luzhou, in Sichuan Province. In 2003, when Li was in the fifth grade in primary school, he went with his parents to Shanghai and studied there. Before fifth grade Li had lived with his uncle’s family. At that time, in addition to finishing his studies, he had to help his uncle do some farm work, leading his parents to think that life in Li’s hometown was too hard, so they took him to Shanghai, where they lived together.

3After arriving in Shanghai, Li entered Zhuguang primary school, a private primary school for migrant children, where from grade one to grade five there were two classes in each grade, with 40 to 50 students in each class. Li, who had just arrived in Shanghai, quickly adapted to life there and got along well with his classmates. In school, what made a deep impression on him was the sternness of the head teacher of his class, who would assign a lot of homework and punish the students by beating them on the palm if they made a mistake on a test. Almost all of the students in the class were punished. Most of the teachers in the schools for migrant children came from rural or county schools. In their experience, treating students strictly was a way to help them achieve good results. However, in some cases, this method also prompted an aversion to and a weariness of learning on the student’s part.

4After finishing primary school, Li went to Yuhong middle school, which was also a school for the children of migrant workers. A neighbor of Yuhong middle school is Xuhang middle school, which is a public school for the locals in Shanghai. At that time, students were admitted to Yuhong middle school without having to take any entrance examinations. As long as the students signed up, they could get the qualification to go to school. Li entered Yuhong middle school in 2006, but at the end of the second year he dropped out. The lack of a middle school education became a barrier that kept him from continuing his studies later. After 2006 the Shanghai municipal government issued a stricter ban on schools for migrant children, and it gradually disqualified those private schools from starting a middle school department. Therefore, when Li was in junior grade one, Yuhong middle school had all three junior high school grades; but when he was in grade two, the third grade of Yuhong middle school was removed. This was another reason why Li failed to finish his middle school education and get his diploma. Recalling his studies and life in Yuhong middle school, Li thought they were pleasant. In those days, in the rich learning atmosphere, he was among the top three or five students in the class. And in his spare time he enjoyed playing table tennis with his classmates. Although his school was separated by a wall from the local Xuhang middle school in Shanghai, Li, who was still young at that time, sensed no injustice at all, other than the fact that he felt the facilities in the neighboring school were more advanced. He did not feel that his schoolmates were segregated from local students and residents either. One of the reasons for this was that more than 90 % of the teachers at Yuhong middle school were outsiders whose teaching ability, in the students’ eyes, equaled that of the teachers in the local middle schools, and they got along well with the students.

5The direct reason for Li’s giving up his studies was that he became infatuated with online games in the second grade of middle school. Internet cafés were popular in Shanghai after 2000, and a number of them emerged around Yuhong middle school. Li and several of his classmates spent their lunch money on online games every day, until they were addicted to gaming. However, the money given to Li by his parents was limited, so in order to get more money for games, he had the idea of going out to work and make money on his own.

6In 2008, when Li finished his studies at the end of the second grade of junior middle school, he dropped out of school. At that time, he was younger than 18 years and was too young for getting a job in a steel plate workshop. Guided by a relative, he borrowed an 18-year-old’s ID card to get the job but not more than a month went by before he quit the job; Li’s departure can be attributed to a workplace visit by his parents, who thought the job was too hard for a teenage boy and stopped their son from working there. Li’s second job was as a security guard in a Fortune 500 company, where he was asked to work 12-hour shifts every other day. The work consisted of standing guard and saluting when leaders came. Li said this job made him feel confused and hopeless, and he thought his future was dark. He found that he had not gotten much education, and he had the idea of pursuing further study. However, as Li had been out of school for nearly a year, he had been unable to catch up with his peers’ learning pace. On the other hand, he had also missed the opportunity to enter a secondary vocational school in Shanghai. Considering these factors, Li decided to give up on the idea of continuing to study, and he went back to work.

7But Li did not give up his desire to study. Later, he entered a welding factory and became a worker there. The reason he chose the welding factory was because he could work eight hours a day and have two days off on weekends. He hoped to find a job that allowed him some spare time where he could use the rest of his time to continue his studies. At the welding job he found that even though he worked very hard, he was still far behind the technical workers trained in professional technology. His efforts and progress were appreciated by the manager, and he got an exceptional promotion to be a group leader without a secondary school degree. The working experience in the welding factory enriched his knowledge of the basic principles of electronic circuit and basic maintenance technology.

8This experience led him to be deeply aware that he needed to improve his education and skills in order to better his development for his job. Therefore, Li signed up for a night school (adult education), where he studied at the secondary school and junior college successively. In the secondary school he chose the major of administration. After one and a half years of study he graduated successfully and entered the junior college. Because night school is a form of the adult educational system, there is no need to pass any examination to enter college, and secondary education and junior college education are also open to the population without a Shanghai hukou. At the junior college stage Li chose the mechatronics major with a more technical orientation. At first, he studied very hard and got good exam results. But in the next two years he gradually became lazy, and sometimes he was absent from school. His explanation for this was that boys his age were fond of playing games. But Li was still confident of getting a diploma all the same.

9While Li was at school, the manager of the welding factory planned to move it to Wenzhou. However, Li decided to stay in Shanghai, as his entire family was in Shanghai, so he switched to another factory. Because of the dim prospects in that industry and limited space for personal growth, Li hoped to get a new job after getting his diploma.