"I Came on June 9, 1992. Twenty-Five Years of Working and Raising a Family in Shanghai" | Housing and Our Lives, Part 3

Housing is the largest commodity human beings consume, and one of the witnesses to how individual lives change. QDaily is running a series of reports that use housing as a thread, to look at what happened in the past.

It is time to sum up a stretch of history.

Most of our readers lived through only the tail end of it; most of the story was written by the generation before.

What we want to pass on is the part of it worth keeping: a firm belief in progress and development; the conviction that society will keep making more and better room for the individual; that effort earns its due reward; that freedom can be fought for, and that we will get there in the end.

These are, in fact, universal values.

When a word like "history" is put in front of us, it tends to disappear under grand narrative. We would rather use interviews at the small scale to do what sorting-out we can.

We are beginning this record with "housing," the thing people watch most closely in their own lives.

The house Su Ai lived in as a child was big: the extended family had more than a dozen rooms, and a gate she called a longmenzi, a "dragon gate," a long walk from the rooms. Getting inside meant climbing a set of high steps. The floors and roof beams were dark wood, and bamboo, chinaberry and orange trees grew inside and outside the courtyard.

The house was allocated to her family "when they struggled against the landlords," Su Ai says, and the "landlord" lived next door; later the two families often sent each other food. Her memories of those years have gone hazy, except that "Dad liked to read by the kerosene lamp." She grew up poor and went to school up in the hills. She boarded in the dormitory of the commune staff next to the school, and since the commune spared her mother the monthly climb up the mountain with a load of rice, Su Ai repaid the favor by doing chores. The same years taught her to bear hardship and to put up with things.

Su Ai was born in 1974 in Pujiang County, Sichuan Province, a county town of 250,000 people southwest of Chengdu. Her father was already in his fifties when she was born and her mother in her forties; she had two older brothers and an older sister.

Most people from Pujiang stayed and ran small businesses locally. Su Ai's older sister went alone to a textile mill in Jiangsu and eventually married into a Shanghai family. In 1992 Su Ai followed her to Shanghai. She remembers the date exactly: June 9, 1992.

Su Ai was part of the first wave of migrant workers to travel from Sichuan to Shanghai. That year about 40 million farmers across China moved into coastal cities for work. Over the next five years the number reached 140 million.

Shanghai was then redeveloping its old neighborhoods, a period some media outlets later called "the great relocation of a million Shanghai residents in the 1990s." Temporary relocation housing went up in large numbers, which also gave migrants somewhere to land for a while. Su Ai found a place in a row of four single-story relocation houses near Caohejing: a 17-square-meter room piled with honeycomb coal briquettes, where her working life began.

She also lived in a local farmer's house nearby. By then residents had noticed the incoming workers, and would typically build a 10-square-meter room against a courtyard wall to rent out to people from other provinces. Su Ai lived in one such corner for three years. The people she ran into most often were migrant workers from Zhejiang.

Su Ai is now a manager at the Warner Hotel on Lianhua Road in Shanghai. We interviewed her at a shopping mall on Tianyaoqiao Road, where her 18-year-old son was taking an English tutoring class. She puts great weight on his English; she hopes he will end up working at a foreign company.

What follows is Su Ai's account in her own words — one way to get to know her:

"Our House Used to Be Huge — It Belonged to Mute's Family"

You know we used to live in the landlord's house? During the Cultural Revolution, when they overthrew the landlords, they divided up the houses, and our family got a big share.

I was born in that house. My mom told me the parents of Mute next door were the landlords. All these houses belonged to Mute's family — not just ours, the whole row behind us too, more than 10 of them.

Mute ended up with a smaller share, only three or four rooms. Our family was bigger, so we had more. There was my dad, my mom, my two older brothers, my older sister and me, six of us, and altogether we probably had more than ten rooms. Plus a pigsty, a kitchen, a room for odds and ends, and an upstairs room for straw — we burned straw and corn stalks all year.

Ours was the kind of big courtyard compound you find in the countryside. In the old rural houses you ate inside the rooms. I was the youngest, and my mom was always sending me to shut the gate — the longmenzi. I was terrified. I'd run there and run back; it was pitch dark in between, all the way from the room out to the gate. I ran as fast as I could, and my mom would say, "Are ghosts chasing you or what?!"

So even now, when I'm home alone, I check the whole apartment and keep the lights on. I'm still scared. If my husband and son are both out, I shut the door and prop a basin of water against it, so I'll hear anyone who comes in.

The house we lived in was big, with a raised front walkway and a lower one. We grew bamboo and chinaberry and all sorts of things in the big courtyard. It was a fine house — stone below, wood above; you could open the windows and look out, it was beautiful. Back home people said ground beetles and little bugs would crawl out of the damp earth, and we'd collect them and sell them, because they could be used in medicine. Walking into a room was like walking into a small duplex today: you stepped up to get inside, and the floors were wide wooden planks. There was another floor above, all wood too.

Around 2001 they tore the whole thing down. Everyone else was putting up multi-story buildings, so our family decided we should build too, and we put up a modern new rural house. The old one was run-down by then anyway. Burning firewood had smoked the whole place black, and even the dust was black. I don't know if you'll understand this, but every year before New Year we had to go at it with a broom — back home we called it "sweeping the dust" — because firewood smoke flies up and the whole house turns black.

Mute died a couple of years ago. He was smart. Even when I was little, he was a mute who could read and write. Only a courtyard wall separated our two houses. Sometimes he'd cook something and hand it over the wall, calling out "ao ao ao" a couple of times; after he'd eaten he'd walk a big loop around the courtyard to come over and sit with us. Sometimes he cooked in the main hall of his house, and we'd go over there and play cards in his hall.

People in the countryside were all poor, but Mute was very particular about being clean. Whenever he saw me with kids dressed in rags or with runny noses, he'd tell my mom not to let me play with them.

Mute probably had things weighing on him. He could be petty. Sometimes we hadn't done anything to him and he'd take offense and stop speaking to us. When a family made fresh tofu pudding they'd share it around, and since he lived alone we'd send some over too. Other times he'd make a batch, couldn't finish it alone, and send a lot over to us. Then, in a mood, he'd complain that he'd given us too much food, and my mom would say, fine, we'll pay you for it. After a while he'd think it over and make up with us again.

He was about my parents' age, but he never married in his whole life. He lived alone until the day he died.

"In 1992, I Went to Shanghai"

My dad used to sell candy at the neighborhood supply and marketing co-op. Later he left and he and my mom set up a stall at home, a little shop selling candy and cigarettes. I remember it clearly: if someone came in without money, they bought on credit, and the next time they came they paid for the last visit.

Once a sent-down youth kept buying on credit, and then he just left without paying. We went to the local government to look up his address, found where he lived, and my sister walked a very long way — dozens of li of mountain road — to his home to get the money back. It was only ten or twenty yuan, but that was real money then.

People in the countryside still buy on credit like that. There's an appliance dealer in our county who told me, "This appliance is 3,160 yuan, but I can sell it to you for 3,500." I asked him why he'd sell it for 3,500. He said, "If you pay me next year, it's 3,200; the year after, 3,400, 3,500 — I'm not charging interest, am I?"

So people here buy things without any savings: borrow, buy first, write down an ID number, settle later. If I need an appliance now, I buy it and pay when I sell my pigs at New Year, or when I sell my oranges at the end of the year.

One sent-down youth was close to my oldest brother, who was nearly twenty years older than me and died a couple of years ago. That youth came back to the countryside later looking for people, chasing old memories, going to see the place where he'd once been resettled. He found our house, but my oldest brother had already died.

When a sent-down youth ate at our house, the production team still had to hand over grain for it, and he had to pay money too. Say the team gave rice and my mom cooked it: she'd be credited five work points. When the sent-down youths came it was the collective era — there wasn't really money, just work points recorded and grain handed out. Work a day and men got five points, women three; at the end of the month they tallied up your points, and you got grain accordingly. It went by ratio, not one point for one jin of grain: it depended on how much grain came in that year, and it was divided by proportion.

Then it changed: land was divided among households and you had to do everything yourself. I think my sister had it especially hard then. My oldest brother had split off from the family and did no work. All the farm work fell on my sister, and she looked after the family too. It was brutal for her. She was like a second mother to me.

My hardest years were when my parents got old, around 1995 and 1996; the family was struggling. My dad was over fifty when he had me, my mom over forty. Do the math: by the time I was eighteen, my dad was past sixty. A man in his sixties, out in the countryside, couldn't do much of anything by then.

I had planned to work at the plastics factory in town, making plastic bags, for 60 yuan a month. But they said that on top of the 60 a month I'd have to pay a 500-yuan deposit just to get the job, so in the end I didn't go. I couldn't find work, had no income, couldn't go back to farming at that point, and had no capital to start anything.

My sister went out to work first. She went to Jiangsu, to one of those weaving mills the township enterprises used to run — there was a lot of silk weaving in that part of Jiangsu — and her job was trimming the threads with burrs on them. My sister is bold, she'll charge straight at things, even though the pay wasn't much. Later she married and moved to Shanghai. I came for her wedding banquet, and she told me not to go back. There were very few Sichuanese in Shanghai then, and she said it was no fun being here alone, so she had me come and work in Shanghai. That's how I came to Shanghai in 1992.

I came on June 9, 1992. Twenty-five years now, working and raising a family in Shanghai the whole time.

I remember when my sister first married into her husband's family she thought, wow, this is nice. Back in '92 my brother-in-law's family already had wood floors and a bathtub. To my sister it looked like something on TV, the whole place properly decorated.

When I first arrived she told me her mother-in-law had over 30,000 yuan in savings — I remember exactly, 38,000. I said, how can anyone have that much money? Our wages then were 150 or 160 yuan. Think how long it takes to save 30,000-plus. Her mother-in-law was just a factory worker; both husband and wife were workers, and very frugal. She calculated everything, down to which vegetables to buy — the shrewd kind of Shanghainese.

The silliest thing I remember happened right after I got to Shanghai, when my sister took me to buy clothes and leather shoes. It was on Huashan Road, very upscale now, but back then just old houses turned into street-front shops. I tried things on as we went, and as soon as I liked something I wanted to buy it. My sister said, "No rush. You've tried it on; let's look at a few more places in case you like something even better."

I said, "What if it's gone by then? Tomorrow isn't market day. If you don't buy now they'll pack up their stalls, and you'll have to wait until the day after tomorrow."

Back home, market day meant crowds of vendors setting up. Going to market meant taking things from the village to sell in town, and a lot of the shops in town would open. Our little town had market days on the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th — you could buy or sell — and the 2nd, 4th and 6th were market days in Pujiang, our county seat. The county covers a lot of townships, and each township had its own market schedule.

My sister told me then, "That's not how it works here. As long as you have money, you can buy things every single day."

My sister is doing well now; her son is in college. She has an apartment in Xujiahui, and she lives in Songjiang now, where she has a place too.

"Transitional Housing Built for Shanghai Residents Being Relocated"

When I first arrived in Shanghai I stayed at my sister's. My brother-in-law was a Shanghai native and the apartment wasn't big, a bit over 60 square meters, two bedrooms and a living room. The grandparents had one room, my sister and brother-in-law the other, and they made up a bed for me on the floor.

After half a month my brother-in-law found me a temporary relocation house near Caohejing — single-story, built as transitional housing for Shanghai residents who were being relocated. In the end most of them moved on; locals had no use for those houses anymore, so they rented them to people from other provinces. Outsiders had already started coming to Shanghai by then, a lot of them from Zhejiang.

Why did I get that particular room? Because the family that moved out left behind a lot of coal briquettes — honeycomb coal, which people cooked with then. My brother-in-law told me those briquettes would keep me cooking for a long time.

There were four rows of single-story houses, 12 households in each row; I was in the last row. The room was 18 square meters. I fit in a bed, a table and a stand to eat at, plus the briquettes. The rent was cheap, twenty or thirty yuan. In front of the houses was a lean-to where each family had a spot to cook, and one tap for washing vegetables.

On my left lived a fruit seller from Zhejiang; on my right, an old couple with their daughter, who sold tea eggs and fried radish cakes outside Guilin Park. There was also a man from Sichuan who fed pigs for someone.

I usually left for work around 6 a.m., taking the No. 43 bus from Shanghai Normal University, getting on at Guanshengyuan Road and riding to Nanpu Bridge. Some nights I couldn't get a bus home until 7 or 8. Before I left in the morning I'd get my briquette going. The old woman next door who sold tea eggs would take my briquette while I was out, and by the time I got back she'd have put a new one in for me, so she never had to light a fresh briquette and could start cooking right away.

I didn't actually know she was swapping my briquettes. Her daughter told me later, "My mom swaps your coal every single day."

I was working at a factory then, making paper bags — folding, creasing and threading them for people. It was hard at first because the cardboard was stiff; you had to push the board in and pull it through, and it cut your hands. By the end of a day they were cut for sure, scratches with blood in them. It hurt. It really hurt.

Later a colleague of my brother-in-law's who worked at a restaurant near what is now Shanghai South Railway Station got me a job there as a waitress. I was always busy, but I didn't feel tired then. I think I learned to work from my mom; my sister and I are both hard workers, willing to pitch in wherever we go. It wasn't that I worked only because someone looked down on me — I just liked working.

The Shanghainese around me were exhausted all the time, though. They'd work for a bit, then push two tables together and sit down and say how tired they were, no matter what — and I never saw them do anything. I'd ask, "I haven't seen you do any work, what are you tired from?" And she'd say, "Go on, go on, you're a kid, you don't understand."

There's a funny story from that time. I'd come to Shanghai from the countryside, and where I'm from in Sichuan there was basically no fish, so I knew nothing about it. The restaurant had a big tank of fish out front. A customer asked me, "Is the pomfret fresh?" I said, "Of course it's fresh, it was still swimming in that tank this morning." But pomfret is a saltwater fish; you can't keep it alive in a tank, it dies as soon as it's out of the sea. I didn't know. I figured anything kept alive in water has to be fresh, right? Everyone had a laugh at me.

While I was a waitress I lived in the hotel dormitory, four beds to a room, the men's dorm on one side of the first floor and the women's on the other. It was far better than the temporary relocation house. The dorm building was new, the hotel supplied the quilts, and there was even air conditioning — this was the nineties, so air conditioning was still a rarity. My highest pay there was 450 yuan; I sent 400 home and kept 50.

Two or three years later I started selling cosmetics, and small food items too — I did both. Someone introduced me to a counter-promotion job selling cosmetics at the Orient Shopping Center, saying cosmetics was a good line. In '98 and '99 Orient was still a high-end place, and the No. 43 bus went right there, so I took the job.

After the temporary relocation house I'd been living in was knocked down, I lived in a farmer's house over in Caohejing for three years. It was tiny, just 10 square meters, and the rent was 100 yuan, eventually rising to 120. It was really a farmer's two-story house: the family lived on the second floor, rented the first floor to a migrant worker from Zhejiang, and then built an extra room in the courtyard for me. Plenty of people did this; by then locals had seen how many migrant workers needed rooms.

After that I did housekeeping at the Anting Villa Hotel for five years, then moved to the Ruite Hotel, then switched again to the Warner Hotel. I've been at the Warner on Lianhua Road for more than seven years now. I'm the deputy manager of housekeeping, in charge of the room attendants.

When I first started as a waitress I thought people were mean. If something happened with someone else they'd say nothing; if the same thing happened with you, they'd call you out. Say someone forgot to bring a bowl — they'd only say, "Hey, why didn't you bring the bowl?" But if I forgot, it was, "Hey, why do you never bring the bowl?" That tone.

I got pushed around like that a lot as a waitress. When I made team leader I thought, now the waitstaff can't push me around, and other team leaders can't either. When I was promoted to supervisor I thought, team leaders definitely can't push me around now, and other supervisors can't either — the only one left who could push me around was the manager.

Now I'm a supervisor. Nobody pushes me around.

It's the same at every workplace, really; I've seen plenty. However well you do, if you came later, the people who came first will push you around; they'll never quite take to you. Every workplace has it, and it isn't aimed at outsiders — even if you're from Shanghai, when you're new the other Shanghainese will push you around too.

I've never regretted coming to Shanghai. Once I was earning I went home almost every year, but after a few days there I'd feel I had to come back, because I had to keep earning. Our HR manager once went to my hometown to recruit and visited my family's place. Back in Shanghai he asked me, "Your family has so many orange trees, you have so much — why did you come all the way to Shanghai?" To a Shanghainese visitor the place looks like beautiful hills and clear water; what he doesn't see is that if you live there long-term with no income, you can't survive.

Why am I broke right after every New Year? Once the year-end bonus comes I go home for the holiday, and before I leave I hand all my money to my parents, so when it's time to buy a ticket I have nothing. Back home I have another "sister," not by blood, and every time before I set off she'd lend me the money for the train ticket back to Shanghai; I'd pay her back once my next paycheck came.

"It's Been Almost 20 Years — This Apartment Is Just 40 Square Meters"

My clothes and my shoe soles were all made by my mom; she could make anything. When sent-down youths came to our village, they'd be assigned to our family rather than anyone else's, because my mom's cooking was so good and she could make all kinds of local snacks — pork intestines stuffed with glutinous rice, cut into sections to eat; rice cakes fried in the pan; glutinous rice dumplings; rose-filled sweets — all ground and made by hand.

My mom died in Shanghai. She came when I was five months pregnant. I went to work and she looked after the baby; she was already seventy. She used to say that when she got old she'd have to go home anyway. She didn't like Shanghai.

That was in 2000, when she was helping raise my kid. KFC had just caught on, and I figured whatever my kid ate, my mom should try too. After she tried it she said, "This KFC isn't good," and she'd rather buy a whole chicken and cook it the way we did back home. But I thought, even if it isn't good, you should still try it.

I married in 2000. My husband managed a warehouse at an enterprise under the space administration; my sister introduced us. We live in a six-story old public housing building allocated to my father-in-law's family in 1976, a property-rights unit assigned by the neighborhood housing office. My father-in-law was in the military, so he was later allocated another apartment and they moved out. My husband and I have lived here ever since we married.

It's been almost 20 years, and this apartment is just 40 square meters, at the corner of Tianyaoqiao Road and Lingling Road. There's no living room — you walk in and it's straight to the balcony, the kitchen and the bathroom, with two south-facing rooms.

The people living in that neighborhood now are mostly in their 60s, 70s and 80s; there's even a hundred-year-old. They all have apartments out in the suburbs, but this place is close to the center, so they won't move. The apartment is worth 70,000 to 80,000 yuan a square meter now. Nearby are the stadium and Longhua Temple; this whole area is old public housing, no apartment complexes. Ours was in Shanghai's first batch renovated into self-contained units, with our own kitchen and bathroom. The buildings just in front of us haven't been renovated — those people still share kitchens and bathrooms.

We still haven't bought an apartment in Shanghai. We're wage earners; we can't afford apartments that cost millions of yuan.

My son thinks of himself as a genuine Shanghainese, because he grew up here — he has no feeling for Sichuan at all. These days a baby can take either parent's household registration (hukou) right at birth, but when he was born a child's hukou could only be moved here after the age of five. So before that he was registered under mine, and my hukou was in Sichuan; it wasn't until he turned five that his was transferred from Sichuan to Shanghai. His ID number still starts with 510, the Sichuan prefix.

Sometimes he'll say, "Mom, let's go somewhere," and I'll say, "Your mom's an outsider, and people will say you're one too." And he'll say, "No they won't. I have a Shanghai hukou. I'm not an outsider, I'm Shanghainese."

Someone like me, without much education — honestly, I've hit my ceiling. Hotel work isn't anything special either, it's skilled labor. I don't mean to put the hotel business down; it's actually good, comfortable. At this point I at least don't work overtime every day, there isn't much pressure, and I get paid annual leave.

For me, going from Sichuan to Shanghai, this is already good, and the pay isn't bad. But I don't think my kid should take the same road, given that he's in a big city like Shanghai. He's eighteen now, a junior in high school. I signed him up for Web International English, 25,000 yuan a year. He likes the speaking practice, and he can talk to foreigners with no trouble now. A lot of the people in his class are working adults, but I told him never mind that, just go and learn.

With my education and the little I've seen, I can't reach anything high-end, but I want him to do better. He's studying accounting and finance, and if he knows English, a foreign company will certainly beat a hotel like ours — though the pressure will be greater too.

I haven't become rich or important in Shanghai. My husband is good to me, my son does as he's told. I don't have big ambitions, honestly, and I don't ask for much. When we married my husband asked, "What do you want? We should at least fix the place up, right?" I told him I just need somewhere to eat and sleep, because if I can eat and sleep, everything's fine. I've felt that way ever since.

I suppose I'm the type who doesn't worry about much.

Illustration: Lin Yuyao

Cover image: stocksnap, Unsplash