The road home seldom easy for China’s workers
Print Edition
XU Shan has abandoned her plans to fly home for the Chinese Lunar New Year.
It will be her third New Year holiday spent alone, about 3,000 kilometers away from home.
“It’s not that I don’t miss my parents, but the long journey home is far too tiring and costly,” said Xu, who works for a training company in Fuzhou, capital of southeast China’s Fujian Province.
To travel back to her hometown in Daqing, an oil-rich city in northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, she would have to get up at 5am to catch a flight to Beijing for a 2-hour stopover before flying on to Daqing. It would be dark when she arrived at the bus terminal in Daqing and the last bus to her home county 75 kilometers away would have left long before.
If she didn’t want to stay in a hotel, she would have to wait for a cab in temperatures of minus 30 degree Celsius and get home around midnight, too exhausted to utter a word of greeting.
“It’s even more discouraging to think that I’ll have to repeat the schedule in six days at most, because I will be back to work on the seventh day of the lunar new year.”
Xu is planning to postpone her homecoming trip to March, when plane tickets are cheaper, but she is not certain if her boss will grant her leave when everyone else in the company is busy.
The massive human migration for the Chinese New Year lasting 40 days around the holiday is a big event for everyone in the country. This year, Chinese people are expected to make 2.91 billion passenger trips across the country.
China has the world’s largest railway network, with 19,000 kilometers of high-speed railways in operation by the end of last year, but traveling is still a struggle for many.
Wang Yatong, a 26-year-old power station employee in Fujian’s Nanping, has chosen to stay at work. He said it would be “a waste of time” to travel home to Pingdingshan in central China’s Henan Province.
His journey home would consist of an eight-hour train ride plus two bumpy, congested trips on long-distance buses.
Train ticket wasted
Wang Hong, a native of Henan Province working in the southern province of Guangdong, planned ahead — he booked a train ticket for the trip home almost two months ago, but two days before he was due to leave, his boss sent him to Beijing for a meeting. The train ticket was wasted and he had to spend three times as much to fly home from Beijing.
In comparison, Old Su’s homecoming trip was more flexible. Su, 45, was one of at least 400,000 motorcyclists traveling from Guangdong to their hometowns in the neighboring provinces.
Su’s trip home to the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region was at least 930 kilometers and took him 37 hours.
A truck driver for a small furniture factory in Foshan, Su was unable to collect his wages for the past three months until last Friday. Su’s boss owed him more than 7,000 yuan (US$1,066), an amount he needed desperately to cover his wife’s medical expenses, who was suffering from anemia and gall-stones.
He made repeated phone calls to the boss pleading for his wages, but to no avail. However, after local officials intervened, the boss paid him 5,000 yuan and promised to pay the rest after the holiday.
Su readily accepted. “The boss is having a hard time, too. Business was bad and he was not making money. Three times last year, the landlord cut electricity because the boss was unable to pay the bills.”
Su thought he was lucky to get paid and even hummed a tune as he packed and jumped on his second-hand Yamaha.
His son, 18, refused to ride with him. “He thinks it’s a shame to be poor and fears people might recognize us if we appear in the newspaper or on TV news,” said Su.
His ride home was bumpy and dangerous. To save time and money, he left at 5am last Saturday and rode continuously for nearly 20 hours before a few hours’ stay at a motel for 80 yuan.
He arrived home in his village in Guangxi’s Daxin County on Sunday evening, exactly a week before New Year’s Eve.
Su said he had two dreams in his life: to drive a motor vehicle and to build a new house. “My first dream has come true, but a new house is still far away.”
To build a new house, even in his impoverished village, costs at least 100,000 yuan, a huge amount for Su and his wife. “But dreams make our lives worth living, right?”
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
