“I recall my childhood, when we four brothers and sisters sat around the table snatching at the few and meager meat dishes… it makes me want to laugh and cry. But my own children have never been deprived,” said Qianru’s mother Xue Jing. Her daughter and son grew up in the care of their grandparents, without any worries about food or clothing. Qianru only has good memories, “I grew up in the countryside. Our courtyard was large, filled with many fruit trees and a vegetable garden. When I was small, my little friends and I played hide-and-seek among the cucumber trellises. We also played on a swing, a rope tied between two trees. We did no farm work, just played in the sunshine and on the soft soil. I think we were happier than city kids who seem plugged into computer games now.”

The All-China Federation of Trade Unions did its own survey on the new generation of migrant workers, finding that 89.4 percent of them basically don’t know how to do farm work, and 37.9 percent have never had any work experience. Many of them were city-born, and the village authorities no longer assign means of production in that case, such as land use rights. Their childhood is almost identical to that of urban children.

Even though the children of migrants working in cities lived comfortably enough, they missed their parents and looked forward to family reunions during the Spring Festival. “Whenever they came back they brought loads of food and other things for us. Many of these things I had never seen before. We children felt our city-dwelling parents lived in another world full of strange, and sometimes amazing, things. But nothing can replace parental love. Despite the gifts brought home for us, my brother and I would rather have been together with our parents and had their love,” recalls Qianru.

Psychologists generally hold that a child lacking parental love becomes a more emotonally demanding adult in later life.

Serve the People, or Yourself

In 1997, Zhang Wanxu and Xue Jing built a new house in their home village. The 200-square-meter residence took all their earnings from six years of work and almost all the savings of both sets of parents. The four members of the Zhang family are all rural residents, entitled to have farmland, and to build a house in the village. Zhang Wanxu and Xue Jing also joined various kinds of rural insurance programs. They feel, “We do not really belong to cities. When we’re old we’ll go back to our village to live. In cities we just serve the people, and everything else is provisional. But we’re glad to do so, and have no regrets, since in many ways we are doing better than back on the farm.”