Eating Bitterness

Stories From the Front Lines of China's Great Urban Migration

By Michelle Dammon Loyalka

(University of California Press; 264 pages; $29.95)

Being a migrant in China is a bit like being an illegal immigrant in California. Essentially, when Chinese people move from the countryside to the city, they leave the benefits of citizenship behind.

While holding up the urban economy, migrant workers are denied public education and health care. It's the hukou system, set up in 1958 to keep people tethered to the communes, taking after Soviet policy designed to keep the price of grain low. Now that the government wants labor mobility, the system instead keeps a third of the urban workforce a permanent underclass.

In "Eating Bitterness: Stories From the Front Lines of China's Great Urban Migration," Michelle Dammon Loyalka chronicles their inner lives. She chooses eight migrants living in one neighborhood of Xi'an, the city in northwestern China famous for terra-cotta warriors.

What she finds is fascinating: The nanny loves the spoiled toddler she works for more than her own children, who are stuck back in the countryside until they finish school; the knife-sharpening peddler can't get used to city prices, and impossibly saves three-quarters of his meager income; the innkeeper, returning to her hometown, is preoccupied with keeping her black leather pants clean, next to neighbors washing clothes in the river. She looks down on them and no longer fits in there, but has yet to assimilate to the city. Loyalka writes about people in limbo.

It boils down to politics lagging behind an enormous economic and demographic transition. Calls for hukou reform have been censored in the mainland press. The counterargument is that otherwise, slums would radiate out as far as the Great Wall. But Loyalka doesn't directly challenge the party line. So "Eating Bitterness" seems like a very political book that hardly mentions politics. The omission can be forgiven in this case.

Most people in China are, at best, simply not interested in politics. Or they're terrified of frank discussion, with cause. To keep them talking at all, she has avoided pushing them out of their conversational comfort zone.

The benefits of the reportorial trade-off are sizable. Take an anecdote about innkeeper Hu Yazhen. After dark, she's on the back of her husband's motorcycle, speeding into the city. They stop for dinner at a roadside eatery, which happens to be right next to a parking lot full of middle-aged couples ballroom dancing. He buys a ticket to the makeshift dance hall. He pulls her onto the floor - well, the parking lot - and they start to waltz.

But she's not into it, just going through the motions while her mind is elsewhere, doing math. She is figuring out the dance-hall financials in her head, calculating how much the entrepreneur who opened it makes each night. "New business plans are always rustling around in her brain," writes Loyalka, who does a remarkable job of getting inside their heads.

For a few, there are strange consequences of new wealth, such as aimlessness and gambling addictions. Some are stunted or depressed by the narrowness of ambition permitted here.

Material wealth seems the only acceptable motivation for any work. Country girls in training at a beauty salon are admonished, "If you have economic status, you have everything. Economic status determines your position in society and the position of your family."

An entrepreneur with a chain of fitness centers is afraid his friends would derail his alternative dream, to open an orphanage, so he just doesn't tell anyone. "If you tell other people, they'll think you're talking nonsense, think you're crazy," he says.

On the other end of the spectrum, there's Wang Quanxi, the knife sharpener in his 60s. (He doesn't know his age). Loyalka gets around his conversational reserve by shadowing him as he pedals from restaurant to restaurant, taking back alleys to avoid police who bully peddlers and confiscate their carts. Without enough education to even use a scale or calculate a bill, he brings in about 800 yuan, or $125, per month.

It's barely more than a teenage dishwasher's wages. But he manages to save three quarters of his income. "He's never once thought of living above his means, or even at his means," Loyalka writes. "Instead, he tries to stay as far below them as possible." His monthly expenses are 50 yuan, about $8 in steamed bread, another 50 yuan in rent, and another 100 yuan in sundries.

Details like these make the book read like an ethnography, with a lot of first-hand discovery, and give it lasting power as a historical record of the biggest, fastest urbanization in human history. The profiles, while centered on a neighborhood, are broad-ranging demographically, across a spectrum of 150 million migrants in China today. The storytelling is straightforward; their life stories are not.

April Rabkin, a journalist based in Beijing, has written for Foreign Policy, Mother Jones and Slate magazine.