Eating Bitterness

January 30, 2012
Each year, as many as 150 million poorly educated migrant workers flock to China’s big cities, where they chiku (“eat bitterness”), working difficult, low-paying jobs that nevertheless offer better options than rural farming. In her first book, journalist Loyalka offers a handful of lucid, moving portraits of workers toiling in the western city of Xian: the amiable junk recycler Zhang Erhua who drifts from job to job across China; the countryside nanny to a rich urban family’s spoiled toddler; and the enterprising hostel operator whose husband lacks her drive and ambition are all portrayed with nuance and dignity. Most migrants aim to save almost 100% of their meager incomes, but the internal residency–permit bureaucracy denies them full benefits in cities, tying them to rural land allotments that offer the prospect of subsistence farming if all else fails. It’s one of many factors that mean migrants are “neither able to completely abandon their rural lifestyles nor... fully join the urban ranks.” While Loyalka’s writing sometimes sags and a few key context points are repeated without truly conveying how urbanites are passing migrants by, this is a thorough and insightful examination of the gritty, arduous side of the Chinese economic miracle.