Between Family and Work: Chen’s Life Story

1This interview was conducted in November 2015 while walking around the business street to which the interviewee Chen often went.

2Chen is a young woman who was born in 1993 in a village named Yibin, in Sichuan Province. Her family members include her parents and a little sister, who was in high school in 2015.

3After her father went to Shanghai to hunt for a job in 1999, her mother went to the same city to work with him in 2003, leaving Chen with her grandmother, who lived nearby in her hometown. During her childhood, in addition to studying in primary school, Chen had to help the family with the farm work, including planting peanuts and corn. When she lived with her grandmother, she and her cousins were under the strict supervision of her aunt and uncle on learning and daily conduct, because her uncle used to be a soldier and her aunt was a teacher. In Chen’s view, the discipline of her aunt and uncle prompted her to form good habits as a child, which made her different from the other children in the village who were also left behind. Although Chen’s relatives in her hometown looked after her, they could not replace the role of her parents in the growth of Chen and her sister. “My mother sent me to my grandmother at that time. There was a turning on the road outside the village; I would stare there and expect to see my mother.” When she talked about it, Chen choked up. In her childhood, it was difficult for her to understand her parents’ choices between improving the family’s economic status and staying with their children. Later, Chen’s mother decided to live with her two daughters, so she brought them to Shanghai in 2006. After three years of separation, the lack of parental companionship had also led to the alienation of the girls from their parents.

4In 2006, Chen and her sister came to Shanghai to live together with their parents. In shifting from their hometown to Shanghai, the 12-year-old Chen had to face several changes in her environment. The first had to do with the family environment. After arriving in Shanghai, what Chen faced was not a happy family, but scolding from her mother, who was under high pressure from work and had little patience for her two naughty children. The second was the school environment. Due to the hukou (household registration) restriction, Chen, a student in grade six of primary school at that time, could not enter the public primary school in Shanghai; instead, she could only attend the school for migrant children, which had a poorer teaching quality compared with the public primary school located at a more remote place. Because the school was so far away, Chen had to get up early every day to take the school bus. Another problem Chen encountered was the adaptation of her dialect to Mandarin Chinese. When Chen came to Shanghai she could hardly speak Mandarin, since her subjects at her hometown school were taught in her dialect. In class, on the one hand, Chen found it difficult to understand the teachers who taught in Mandarin in Shanghai; and on the other hand, it was also difficult for other students from all over the country to understand Chen’s Sichuan dialect. Moreover, the difference in curriculum systems between her hometown and Shanghai marked the third difficulty for Chen’s school life. In Shanghai, English instruction started in grade two in primary school, while it began in the junior high school in Sichuan and in many other provinces in China. When Chen arrived in Shanghai at grade six, she was four years behind her classmates in English study, and it was extremely difficult to catch up with her classmates. With Chen’s efforts, she overcame those difficulties little by little, except for her English performance.

5Due to Shanghai’s restrictions for migrant children on the senior high school entrance examination, those students who did not have a Shanghai hukou had to quit their studies after junior high school education in Shanghai. Chen was one of them. With the expectation that she would enter university, Chen’s parents decided to send her back to her hometown in order to continue the last year of study in junior high school and to prepare for the senior high school entrance examination. Therefore, Chen was separated from her parents again and returned to her hometown alone. In her hometown, Chen was in a boarding school where students lived and studied on weekdays and went home on weekends. Students tended to look forward to coming home on the weekend, but weekends meant nothing to Chen because she had no idea where to go during the weekends. “Every time the class was over, during the weekend, I had to think about where could I go. It was a feeling of getting lost. I was lonely in my hometown and had a sense of helplessness.” Although some relatives of Chen lived in her hometown, her mother did not tell her whose home she could visit and stay in during the weekends. At the same time, the idea of a reunion with her parents grew and became another important reason for her withdrawal. In November 2009, only three months later, Chen decided to drop out of school and return to Shanghai, which became an important turning point in her life. Even though several months after she dropped out of school she expressed regret for the decision to drop out and told her mother that she wanted to go to a normal secondary school for kindergarten teachers, her mother rejected her, saying Chen was likely to give up halfway through her school studies.

6At the end of 2009, Chen began to work. By the time of the interview in November 2015, Chen had changed eight jobs during the six years.

7Her first job was as a waitress in a cafeteria. After two or three months, she resigned because her mother thought that it was not a safe job for a teenage girl. Her mother asked Chen to work with her in the curtain factory. In China, the legal age of employment is 16. But Chen was under 16 years old at that time. In order to enter the curtain factory, she used someone else’s ID card to conceal her real age.

8She worked in the curtain factory for around 2 years in the department of quality inspection. She had to work from 8 am to 5 pm, five days a week. Chen thought this job was boring, as she did repetitive mechanical labor. The job could not bring her anything new or any challenges. She was not satisfied with the salary either. She hoped to have some breakthroughs, so she resigned again. Her third job, from March to October 2011, lasting less than 8 months, was as a saleswoman in a real estate agency. Due to the sluggish real estate market and the bleak business outlook, Chen believed that this job was a waste of time and a burden on her youth, so she resigned again. Staying at home for half a year, she found her fourth job after the Spring Festival in 2012 and worked from after the Spring Festival of 2012 to the end of August, lasting less than half a year. The job was as an inspector again, in an LED display lamp factory. Her main tasks included checking whether the light box was safe and qualified, which was also repetitive work with a low demand on her skills. Compared with the job in the curtain factory, this job involved heavy physical labor, and the working environment was dusty. In the LED display lamp factory, she had to work 9 hours every day, earning 2000 RMB yuan per month without overtime subsidy. Chen’s mother was dissatisfied with her job at the LED light factory. As her mother had switched to an electric welding plant, starting at the end of August 2012 she introduced Chen to the same factory. But it was only five months before she resigned, since her mother discovered Chen was falling in love with a colleague on the same production line, and she strongly opposed her daughter’s choice.

9At the end of 2012, marriage became an important issue in Chen’s life. Introduced to him by her relatives in her hometown, she met a new boyfriend, then she went back to Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan Province, and became a salesperson in a shoe store. According to the custom in Sichuan, after getting engaged to her boyfriend, Chen followed him to Fujian Province, where he worked. She found a job as a clerk in the laboratory of a dye factory with the salary of 1,500 yuan per month, only a half of what she made in Shanghai, and she had to work 12 hours a day. The couple was not getting along, and they broke up in the end. Chen returned to Shanghai. From April 2014 until the time of the interview, Chen worked in a mobile phone card manufacturing company as a quality inspector. This workload was also very heavy; thus, Chen had to work 12 hours per day and for half a month she had to work a night shift. What was good for her was that she got a higher income, around 4,500 to 5,000 RMB yuan, including overtime pay.

10This interview was conducted with Chen on 16 November 2015. After that, we kept in touch with each other. In 2018, Chen left the factory and joined in a shapewear distribution and body-building training company in order to start a business with her new boyfriend in Shanghai. By June 2019 they were managing their first franchise in shapewear and fitness training in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, and planned to open a second franchise in the Zhoupu and Pudong districts of Shanghai.