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As parents work as migrants, family life goes wanting
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LAST week I visited my parent’s native place in rural Lianyungang, in Jiangsu Province.
The village building boom that started a couple of years ago did not show any signs of abatement. The roads leading to the village were so dusty that I ventured to take a leisurely stroll around it only after a morning of drizzle, the day before my departure.
Surveying the new village landscape from a distance, I found the lines of newly constructed buildings did present an image of prosperity and promise of good life. But appearances are deceptive. Judging from within, I found that the only thing that can recommend these pompous buildings is their spaciousness, and this spaciousness makes air-conditioning impossible.
The sense of spaciousness was especially accentuated by the absence of key family members. To the east of my native home are two adjacent buildings belonging to two brothers. In normal circumstances the two-story buildings should house ten people of three generations: the grandparents in their early 60s, the two brothers and their wives, and four grandchildren.
But during my week-long stay there, I only met with the grandmother, and had occasional views of one of the grandchildren as he hurried home from school.
The younger brother and his wife, together with his elderly father, are working at a construction site in Qingdao, Shandong Province, while the older brother is working as a laborer in a foreign country that his mother could not specify. The older brother’s wife is working at a factory near home, but she was so busy that she does not see much of her own children. Of the four children, two are staying at boarding schools, while the two younger kids are studying at primary schools, one of which is over six kilometers away. Thus only the grandmother, one mother, and two children are regular occupants of the huge buildings. The grandmother is responsible for taking the two kids to and from school three times a day in a small, three-wheeled, battery-powered vehicle.
Early this year, while crossing a highway, she had a nasty crash with a motorbike rider. The rider escaped from the scene, while she suffered bone fractures and was laid to bed for several months. The two brothers have to work hard elsewhere because they have to pay off the costs of these new buildings, each worth about 300,000 yuan (US$48,000), an astronomical sum by local standards.
By working hard to pay down the debt, these parents are running into a kind of social debt probably more damaging in its consequence.
In a rural primary school class of about 40, which my sister happens to supervise as the form master, she found seven of the students are from single-parent families, a novel concept unheard of 20 years ago.
Long separation from parents is also telling on the health of the children in their formative years, when they have to cope with childhood, their studies and adolescence on their own, without the guidance of their parents.
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