Settling in the City: Niu’s Urban Story

1This interview was conducted in December 2015 in a teahouse near the interviewee Niu’s home. Niu is a young man born in 1987 in Zhoukou city, Henan Province, China. From the 1980s to the 1990s, Niu’s father was a freight driver at a monosodium glutamate factory in his hometown, responsible for delivering the finished monosodium glutamate to Shanghai and other cities. Later, since the profit by the monosodium glutamate factory declined rapidly, Niu’s father left the factory and went to Shanghai for a better income. When Niu’s father first arrived in Shanghai, he got a job as a dump truck driver at a construction site in Pudong. Soon after, Niu’s father found that he could get higher profits from container shipping, so he moved to Baoshan district and began to engage in container shipping in 1999.

2Before grade five of elementary school, Niu spent his childhood in his hometown. After his parents went to Shanghai for work, Niu was fostered at his aunt’s home in Shenqiu, a small county. Since a large number of locals in Shenqiu had become migrant workers, there were a great deal of left-behind children. The school where Niu studied was such a semi-closed school for left-behind children, covering kindergarten to high school. During his stay in Shenqiu, Niu spent most of his time in school and returned home once a week. In the school, the students from primary school to high school lived and studied on campus, and conflicts and quarrels happened among teenage boys. Unfortunately, Niu was bullied by senior grade students, and he became reluctant to go to school. When his parents learned about this, they took him to Shanghai.

3In Shanghai, he entered a school for the children of migrant workers. His classmates came from Anhui, Shandong, Henan, Fujian, and other provinces. Although they were from different areas in China, they soon became familiar with each other. In primary school, Niu’s favorite sport was football, and he always played games with his classmates. He believes his boarding life in his hometown let him adapt quickly and without unease to the new environment in Shanghai. But as for studying, it was not so easy for Niu to catch up with his classmates. Due to the differences in the curriculum system between his hometown and Shanghai, it was very difficult for him to follow the teacher in the English courses, because the English course in Shanghai started in grade two, while in the other provinces it started in the first year of middle school. Therefore, English is a subject at which he had never done well.

4In his primary school, the parents of many of Niu’s classmates were, like Niu’s parents, engaged in the container freight business. From around 1990 to 2000, container cargo was a profitable industry. The price of buying a container truck was almost the same as that of an apartment in Shanghai at that time. During the same period, in order to attract the population inflow, Shanghai implemented a blue-print household registration policy for several years in the 1990s. That is, people who purchased an apartment or a house in Shanghai could obtain blue-stamped hukou which is a kind of household registration in the city that is better than the temporary residence permit but less than the official household registration. But this policy was abolished in 2002, and the blue-print hukou were transferred to formal Shanghai hukou, resulting in a huge differentiation from those non-Shanghai hukou people in education, medical care, and other social benefits. Several of Niu’s friends got blue-print hukou because their parents bought apartments in Shanghai, which rendered them the right to study in high school and take the college entrance examination in Shanghai. On the contrary, Niu’s parents believed that it was more important to expand the fleet and business than to obtain a Shanghai hukou or buy an apartment, which directly led to Niu’s unqualified status to enter local high schools, as well as the inability to take the college entrance examination in Shanghai.

5After graduating from primary school, Niu, who liked playing football, entered a sports school in Shanghai with the support of his father and played football as an athlete for four years. After that, he entered a five-year college in Henan Province that included high school and junior college, majored in computer application management, and graduated in 2010 with a college degree.

6From his graduation to the time of interview, Niu changed jobs four times. After graduation, Niu’s first job was as a salesman in a stock software company. Niu quit the job two months later because he did not pass the certification exam. The second job was as a clerk in a software company, responsible for filling in forms and registering software. After two to three months, he quit this job too, as the software company was suspected of being a pyramid scheme and the income was much lower than he had expected. Niu’s third job was as a salesman in his cousin’s export freight forwarding company, where he was responsible for helping the export factories book cargo spaces. While doing this job, he also did some simple work to help out with his father’s container land transport company, such as running errands and keeping accounts. At the beginning of 2010, Niu decided to leave his cousin’s freight forwarding company and took over his father’s undertaking. At the beginning of 2014, he set up his own container land transport company. This decision was made for two reasons: the first was that his father’s business was too busy and had a shortage of manpower. The second was that after the global economic crisis in 2009, the profit of his brother’s company decreased due to the decrease of export customers, which also reduced Niu’s income.

7At the time of the interview, Niu owned two container trucks and managed more than a dozen container trucks in his container land transport company. His previous experience as a salesman at his cousin’s company, as well as the time spent helping his father, laid a good foundation for him to run his own company. In the interview at the end of 2015, his income was more than 200,000 yuan per year, which was far above the average income level of 71,268 yuan per year in Shanghai.

8At the end of 2012, he married a girl from the same village, and they had a baby in 2014. After starting a family, his life changed a lot. Before marriage, he would spend his leisure time on personal hobbies, such as going out to amuse himself and playing ball, but after marriage he spent more time taking care of the family. Especially after the birth of the child he felt more pressure in the role of the father; thus, he hoped to earn more money and make plans for the future of his child as early as possible. He also said that based on his own experience, he had a deep understanding of the difficulties and problems posed by the lack of Shanghai hukou in education, so he hoped to make preparations as soon as possible to pave the way for his child’s future education. So, he set up his own company and paid for social security in order to accumulate enough points to settle down in Shanghai, so as to get a Shanghai hukou for his child and give his child a better education in the future. He didn’t want his children to have the same job as he did.

9As he rarely went back to his hometown, Niu had few close friends there. Most of his social network is in Shanghai, including the primary school classmates he met after coming to Shanghai and the villagers working in the same sector. Living in the same district and working in the same field made them have more interaction; also, most of the young people’s parents were engaged in container truck freight, and some of his classmates were also engaged in this sector.

10At the time of the interview, Niu had already purchased his own apartment, located in the suburbs of Shanghai: Baoshan district, where he lived and studied as a child, and is also where his container freight business is located. It was slightly crowded for five family members living in a house with three bedrooms and two hallways; residents included him, his wife, his child, his mother, and his little sister. In order to improve the living environment of his family in Shanghai, Niu was trying to buy a second apartment. As Niu’s work, family, and residence were all located in Shanghai, he was trying to take root in the city.