A Sent-Down Family's Way Back: From a Uranium Mine to Shanghai's Old City | Housing and Our Lives #19

When a word as large as "history" is set in front of us, grand narrative usually swallows it. We wanted to do what sorting we could through interviews at the small scale, and we began this record with housing — the thing people watch most closely in their own lives.

Wang Jiazhou comes out of Laoximen subway station in Shanghai, crosses Zhonghua Road and walks down Menghua Street to his parents' home, one lane from the Confucius Temple. The high-rises and wide roads vanish at once; ahead are narrow lanes and a low skyline.

This area is called Laoximen — Old West Gate — after Yifeng Gate, the western gate of the walled Shanghai county town built in the Ming dynasty. The old walled area is now called the Old City, held inside Zhonghua Road and Renmin Road, the two streets that follow the line of the vanished moat. The Old City is taken to be the place Shanghai grew from, and even after the port opened to foreign trade in the late Qing it remained the Chinese-governed district next door to the foreign concessions.

Wang Jiazhou finished technical secondary school and drives an ambulance for the 120 emergency service. He was born in 1985 in a small town called Gucheng — Old Town — in Le'an County, Fuzhou, in eastern Jiangxi. It was in fact a new town, named after the village of Gucheng beside it.

In 1957 uranium was found at Xiangshan, near Gucheng, and the next year geologists arrived to sink shafts. This soon became China's largest uranium mine — Mine 721 — and specialists kept arriving from all over the country. At the peak in the early 1990s, Gucheng, where the mine's headquarters stood, held 50,000 people.

Wang Jiazhou's father, Wang Le, was one of the sent-down youths who left this courtyard beside the Confucius Temple in Laoximen. In 1970, while working the fields in Le'an, he was recruited into Mine 721 by chance, and he worked and lived there for 29 years, until he moved back to Shanghai in 2000. His mother, Yao Lan, comes from Pingxiang, Jiangxi; she moved to Mine 721 with her parents at six, later took a job at the mine, and retired in 2005, then came to Shanghai to rejoin her husband and son.

In the courtyard Wang Le is washing vegetables at a row of sinks, his voice loud, his laugh easy. Yao Lan, who had been talking with him, nods and smiles at the visitor.

Their home is one of five units cut with wooden partitions out of a row of tile-roofed houses some ten meters wide, and then cut again into two floors. The room downstairs is about two meters high, two wide and five deep. A big bed at the far end spans the full width and takes up nearly a third of the floor. A wooden ladder leans at the doorway; you climb it on hands and feet to reach the loft, the other bedroom, where the sloping roof leaves even less room to stand than downstairs, though the ridge is high and daylight falls through a dormer. Neither floor has a toilet. The kitchen is built on outside — two square meters, room for one stove and one person standing.

Wang Le says the later additions and the side door cut in afterwards keep most visitors from noticing that this is the last of the three courtyards of a traditional Jiangnan mansion. They live in the rearmost row, meant originally for storage, which is why it sits lower than the houses in front. His grandmother, who brought her children from Hangzhou to Shanghai to join her sisters, was the first of the family to live here. The rooms must have been bigger then; by his childhood the house already looked as it does now. He was the fifth of six children, and eight people were packed into these two floors — 17.5 square meters.

When Wang Le and his son came back to Shanghai in 2000, his mother, his third brother and the brother's daughter were still in the house, so father and son rented a 10-square-meter room from a neighbor for 300 yuan a month. In 2005 Wang Jiazhou's mother arrived from Jiangxi and moved in with them. In 2008 the third brother and his daughter moved out; Wang Le and Yao Lan moved into the old house with his mother, and Wang Jiazhou kept the rented room. He was 23, and it was the first room he had ever had to himself. Wang Le's mother died in 2010; Wang Jiazhou gave up the room and moved in with his parents. He married and moved out in 2013, and his parents have lived in the old house ever since.

Since the summer the government has repainted the houses here, replaced the roof tiles and put in flush toilets. The toilet takes a square meter of the Wangs' small room, a meter from the dining table, with nothing around it. In the northern part of the Old City, two large blocks are being cleared this year. I asked Wang Le whether the government repairing the houses meant no demolition. "Not necessarily. The government changes its decisions often too," he said.

The house may count as a shack, he told me, but it would still sell for 2.6 million yuan, mostly because it is zoned for several of the Old City's good schools. Six household registrations sit on it, though: besides Wang Le, his wife and his son, there are his third brother and the brother's daughter, and that niece's two-year-old child. The niece has not made up her mind about selling.

So it sits. For 18 years the Wangs have watched the neighborhood change. A few years ago a row of old people sat out in the lane whenever the weather was good; almost all of them are dead now. Thirteen households ring the courtyard, all neighbors of decades' standing back then. Seven of the old families are left, and their young people have moved out; some rooms stand empty. The other six households are now low-paid migrant workers.

"The Luckiest Arrangement"

Wang Le was born in 1953, in the last of the "old three classes," the school cohorts of 1966 to 1968. At the end of 1968 Mao Zedong called on "educated youth to go to the countryside," and for someone his age being sent down was certain; the only question was where.

The next year the school notified him that he would go to an army reclamation farm in Heilongjiang. Everyone knew that remote, freezing Heilongjiang was the worst draw. Just then the elder Shen daughter from next door sent word from Fuzhou: Fuzhou could take in all the younger brothers and sisters in the courtyard. Ten years older than Wang Le, she had gone to Yongxiu, Jiangxi, in 1960 to study at the Communist Labor University, was assigned to Fuzhou after graduating, and in 1968 had just been sent down to a village there for re-education. Her production team had no quota for taking in sent-down youth, but she did not want her own brother and the neighbors' children suffering somewhere else, so she went and asked for a few places.

They could go together, to a province neither hot nor cold where, people said, "nobody had ever starved to death." The young people and their families were delighted. In April 1970 Wang Le and the friends from his courtyard took the train to the countryside of Le'an, in Fuzhou.

"To this day I still think it was the luckiest arrangement," Wang Le says.

The first year they grew rice, with more than two days off a week. Each month the government gave them 40 jin of rice, half a jin of oil, half a jin of meat and 8 yuan in pocket money. When the year's ration of grain and oil ran out, the brigade drew two barrels of rapeseed oil from its ramie-cloth workshop — oil meant for sizing cloth — and gave it to the sent-down youths to eat. Six months later Mine 721 came to the village to recruit. All Wang Le knew about Mine 721 then was that the only bus on the road belonged to this big work unit. Every one of the Shanghai youths signed on. Nobody expected to get back to Shanghai, he says; here was a chance to join a state enterprise, so he decided on his own, without time even to tell his family.

At the mine none of the Shanghai group was sent underground; all of them got surface jobs. Wang Le guesses someone in Fuzhou looked out for them. From the second year on, every young man hired went down the shafts. New workers came from everywhere, but two groups dominated — sent-down youths from Shanghai and young workers transferred from mines and factories in the north, one or two thousand of each. People from Jiangxi were a minority, mostly from Fuzhou and Nanchang. As at many big state enterprises, the local dialect at Mine 721 was Mandarin.

No one knew exactly what a uranium mine did to the body, only that it was bad for it, and that the men underground came down with liver and lung disease more often. So Mine 721 paid better than ordinary employers: two tins of milk powder a month per person, plus several jin of eggs, vegetable oil and pork.

There were older, skilled workers too. Yao Lan's father came from a Jiangxi mining-machinery plant and worked in the same shop as Wang Le — Wang Le on repairs, his future father-in-law on machining.

In 1981 Wang Le married Yao Lan, then a telephone operator, at Liantang Village, where the mine's headquarters stood at the time. The following January the two moved into a 16-square-meter dormitory room in Gucheng, six kilometers away: a three-story Soviet-style block, four households to a floor, a corridor down the middle, rooms on the south side, each family's kitchen on the north, one shared toilet per floor.

The building went up in 1964, and its grey-brick face looked new again after every rain. The Gongxi River ran past the east side of the town on a bed 200 meters wide. Over the next 20 years Wang Le watched the sandbars in it spread until, at a glance, they looked like a beach. He blames Mine 721's growing population: when electricity and bottled gas ran short, people went up the hills for firewood, and a hill could be stripped bare in a few months. At the peak in the early 1990s, Mine 721 of the Ministry of Nuclear Industry employed 11,000 people, and Gucheng, where the workers and their families lived, held 50,000.

"In the Wang family I had the first television, I had the first sofa, and I had the first son!" Wang Le says, raising his voice at the memory.

Wang Jiazhou was born in 1985 at Mine 721's Gucheng hospital, the best hospital in all of Fuzhou. That year Wang Le went to the supply and marketing cooperative in neighboring Chongren County and paid 1,190 yuan — about 30 months' wages — for a 14-inch Japanese ORION color television, and added a three-seat sofa to the little room.

"Our work unit was well ahead of its time," Wang Le says. Deep in the mountains as it was, the state enterprise offered living conditions and a cultural life far better than the surrounding county's. Fresh fruit, chilled hairtail and other food from outside the province arrived all year round. By the late 1990s every small unit had its own television station; Gucheng's auditorium held 1,996 seats, and holiday performances went out live to every part of the mine (Wang Jiazhou watched his father belt out songs on television more than once). New words from outside kept entering the workers' vocabulary — they were saying "cool" in the 1990s — and people in the county called it "mine speak."

Because so many people came from Shanghai, Yao Lan says, every year after the Spring Festival visits home you could stand on a Gucheng street and see which down jackets and which bags were in fashion in Shanghai that year. One year, Wang Jiazhou says, a KFC — in Shanghai or in Nanchang, he isn't sure which — ran a "schoolbag meal deal," and after the holiday classmates turned up at school one after another carrying KFC schoolbags. Gucheng in the 1990s, he says, was like the film Shanghai Dreams: news from outside always set off a restlessness in the little town.

Mine 721's ore went by rail to the northwest to be refined, feeding the key raw material into China's nuclear weapons and nuclear power. Its rise and fall followed nuclear policy exactly. From the 1980s and 1990s the state began capping its output. By 2000, Yao Lan remembers, ore from Africa was not only cheaper than Mine 721's but better. The habit of state enterprises running whole societies had also left Mine 721 fat with departments. "Ninety percent of people never went down a shaft," Wang Le says. "Gardens section, housing section, welfare section, the TV university, the water and power company, the radio station — every department you can think of, just like a city," Yao Lan says. By the late 1990s the mine was pushing workers to transfer out, paying the receiving employer 20,000 yuan a head; each departing worker got two cubic meters of timber to crate up his belongings, and the mine sent trucks to carry families to every corner of the country. The employers taking them in were as far off as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and north China, and in trades with nothing to do with mining — a glucose plant, for instance.

"For a while somebody was packing up almost every day. In the end a third of the people transferred out," Yao Lan recalls. "Partly everyone wanted to end their days where they came from, but the bigger reason was not wanting the next generation to live under the shadow of nuclear radiation." She and Wang Le both say radiation never caused panic at Mine 721 — but the next generation having to face it was another matter.

"You Came to Shanghai to Suffer With Me!"

In 1979, at the height of the wave of sent-down youths returning to the cities, Yao Lan came to Shanghai with Wang Le for the first time. Wang Le was not planning to return; he meant to marry her in Jiangxi.

He had warned her that the family home was small, without saying how small, so she was shocked when she walked in. Wang Le's father lay in bed coughing; a coal stove burned in the corner. Wang Le did not find it easy either. "Every time I came back to Shanghai it took me days to adjust," he says. It was not only the size but the lack of a toilet or a bathroom; used to modern life at a state enterprise, he felt the drop.

"You came to Shanghai to suffer with me!" As he says it, Wang Le turns and smiles at his wife.

In 1987 two-year-old Wang Jiazhou made his first train trip to Shanghai in his parents' arms. After that the family went back at least twice every three years, always the same way: board at Jiangbian Station in Gucheng, take the 123-kilometer Xiangle line, built in the 1960s to haul ore; collect in Nanchang the tickets a local friend of Wang Le's had bought for them; then ride a hard seat from Nanchang to Shanghai.

"That's why he could draw trains at three, and draw them beautifully!" The picture Wang Jiazhou likes best as an online avatar is a photograph of himself at ten: in a T-shirt and shorts, licking a popsicle at the camera, a red train tearing across the railway bridge behind him. He was watching trains in Shenzhen, where he had gone to see his father, then seconded to the construction of the Daya Bay nuclear plant.

He became a railfan properly only after he moved to Shanghai. In 2004 he stumbled onto some railway forums — a whole new world, full of people who loved obscure facts and loved swapping them, and a great filling-in for a life that was often lonely after the move. Since then he has spent every holiday on what railfans call "operations": riding a particular line to study everything about it — the alignment, the placement of stations, the infrastructure, the geography and people along the way. In 2014, for instance, before the new Guanjiao tunnel opened on the Qinghai-Tibet line, he made a special trip from Shanghai to ride the old Guanjiao spiral west of Qinghai Lake — "the ladder to heaven" — one last time before it passed into history.

While we talked the door stood open and the neighbors came home one after another, calling in to say hello. The family was discussing its own affairs and did not mind at all being overheard. The cramped rooms and the shared living seem to have given them an idea of privacy unlike that of people in commodity housing. Years ago the Wangs owned the only round banquet tabletop in the courtyard, and neighbors borrowed it when they had guests. When the Wangs themselves had guests, the tabletop went to a neighbor's room instead — borrowing the room, in effect. The neighbor would eat early and go out for a walk, leaving the room free. Once a neighbor had so many wedding guests that he borrowed several neighbors' rooms and set a table in each.

Wang Le saw all this after he came back to Shanghai in 2000.

Getting the Whole Family Registered

Wang Jiazhou's household registration moved back to Shanghai in 1995, earlier than it should have. That year the Confucius Temple area was rumored to be up for clearance, and to stop residents from suddenly adding heads to their households to claim more compensation, the government planned to freeze registrations. So the subdistrict office let the children of sent-down youths move their registrations back before the freeze. As Wang Le remembers it, clearance was rumored once more in 2001, and after that no one raised it again.

In 2000, with Wang Jiazhou about to finish middle school, his parents decided it was time to send him to Shanghai; any later and the language would be harder to pick up. At home the family spoke Mandarin. Wang Jiazhou had learned Shanghainese from his father and from the Shanghai people at the mine, but his accent and vocabulary were no longer the city's.

One day that May he picked up his bag and set off alone on his formal "return to Shanghai": five hours by train from Jiangbian Station to Nanchang, a ticket and a meal at his father's friend's house, then 12 more hours in a hard seat to Shanghai. It was nothing like as routine a year as that makes it sound. In 2000 the family made 13 trips between Jiangxi and Shanghai — for Wang Jiazhou's high-school entrance exam, for choosing a school and enrolling him, or simply because his parents came to keep him company when they feared he was lonely.

On one of those trips Wang Le left Shanghai for Lianyungang, to see whether he could transfer to the Tianwan nuclear plant. The pay there was far better than at Mine 721, and if the transfer went through he could concentrate on earning money. Even then, he says, as when he left home as a boy, he never assumed he had to end up in Shanghai. When he learned there was no opening at Tianwan, he went back to Gucheng and handed in his resignation.

At the end of 2000, 31 years after he left home, Wang Le came back to Shanghai for good.

"It was pretty hard on my father in that period," Wang Jiazhou says of his father's first six years back. Wang Le worked five or six cooking jobs in that stretch, sometimes in restaurants, sometimes in canteens, the shortest half a year, the longest a little over a year, with a few months at home in between.

Yao Lan spent those years piling up overtime to save three months of leave for Shanghai — "three months as an hourly maid," as she puts it: waiting on her elderly mother-in-law, looking after her son and husband, and keeping house for a niece who had not yet married.

Like nearly every sent-down youth who came back, they had to fight over household registration. The rules were vague and left room for judgment, so for a full year across 2004 and 2005 Wang Le went to the police station every Thursday, on the station chief's open day, to make his case. His registration came through in 2005. Yao Lan's took until 2010, five years after she arrived.

By one account, 30 percent of Shanghai's million sent-down youths never returned in the wave that followed 1978. How many of them, with their spouses and children, eventually made it back to Shanghai is hard to find figures for. But more than a thousand retired sent-down youths came back to Shanghai from Mine 721 alone, not counting their spouses and children. Their registrations set off no end of quarrels with the families they grew up in. The reason was almost always the house: the sibling who had become head of household did not want them registered, for fear they would come to claim a share. Plenty of returnees signed statements renouncing any claim to the property in order to get registered. When demolition or a sale came around, the fights often broke out again.

As Wang Le and Yao Lan saw it, the usual pattern among Jiangxi returnees was for the children to hold Shanghai registration while the parents kept theirs in Jiangxi and drew Jiangxi pensions, even while living in Shanghai. Some, with nowhere to live, worked a few years in Shanghai and went back to Jiangxi. A whole family registered in Shanghai was very rare. Wang Le thinks his family managed it at the old house largely because his mother was still alive then — though his third brother, he adds, is a man who honors his brothers.

Retiring 14 years early for his son's sake, getting his Shanghai registration in time and starting to pay into the city's insurance, qualified Wang Le for a Shanghai pension of 4,800 yuan a month — twice what he would have drawn in Jiangxi had he not retired early. Among the thousand-odd retired Mine 721 workers back in Shanghai, the great majority draw the Jiangxi pension. After some cases of fraudulent claims, from a certain year on they have had to mail their fingerprints to Jiangxi once a year.

"Tear It All Down and It Isn't Shanghai's Old City Anymore"

A small room does have one advantage: it is warm. But since the government changed the roof tiles, Yao Lan says, the loft that used to be sealed is drafty on every side and the air conditioner can't heat it. So, I asked, is she hoping for demolition? "How could I not? His grandmother used to say in her last years, 'I don't suppose I'll live to see the demolition.'" The closer Wang Jiazhou came to marrying age, the more anxious his parents grew.

At the Spring Festival of 2007, with Shanghai housing prices climbing wildly, the three of them spent the holiday at Wang Jiazhou's maternal grandmother's home in Pingxiang. Mother and son went out for nothing more than a stroll, wandered past a new compound by the railway selling 110-square-meter flats for 118,000 yuan with a 200-yuan deposit, and decided on the spot to buy one, purely as an investment.

In 2011 Wang Jiazhou found a three-bedroom small-property-rights flat in Huaxin, a town in Qingpu District on Shanghai's far western edge, going for 320,000 yuan — several dozen blocks built, a second phase planned. He sold the Pingxiang flat and bought it, with the idea of making it the home he would marry into.

But Huaxin was a new district only just carved out of farmland, with no life around it. From 2013 Wang Jiazhou used the run of the city that driving an ambulance gave him to look over housing in several outlying town centers, and settled on Jiading Old Town, which he judged to have the best life around it. In 2016 he sold the Huaxin flat and bought a two-bedroom in an old compound next to the Jiading Old Town museum, at 18,000 yuan a square meter.

"Of course we hoped demolition would give our son a flat to marry into, but we couldn't wait for it. Jiazhou had to buy and sell, sell and buy, on his own," Yao Lan says.

Wang Jiazhou married in 2014 and lives in his wife's family's flat; the Jiading place is rented out for now. Wang Le and Yao Lan are planning to move to Jiading after the Spring Festival. Wang Le says he is a man attached to old things, and he likes the convenience and the historical depth of Jiading Old Town. Like the Shanghai county town of old, Jiading Old Town is still ringed by its moat, and not far from their flat stands a Confucius temple.

He does not long for demolition the way Yao Lan does. "If we could knock through to next door and have twice this space, I'd still be glad to do the place up properly and stay here," Wang Le says. "But right now it really is too small, and decorating won't solve that." He even reckons that with twice the space he would rather stay in the old house than take the compensation terms of seven or eight years ago — resettlement housing nearer the city center and very likely larger.

Since the start of this year, north of Fuxing East Road, the two big blocks of Yalong and Fuyou — also part of the Old City — have been cleared on a large scale, affecting more than 10,000 households. South of Fuxing East Road, at the same time, the old houses are being repaired.

"Tear it all down and it isn't Shanghai's Old City anymore. You might as well call it Huangpu New Town or Nanshi New Town. The whole thing has been cut apart," Wang Le says.

"The other day the media said a few streets here are going to be protected. My feelings about that are mixed. I don't want to leave either; I hope they do the work well. But living conditions have to improve first, and living here right now is genuinely inconvenient," he goes on. "Thinning out households is the best answer — then you can add private toilets and kitchens." As for who should be thinned out, he thinks it should be the families whose rooms have stood empty for years.

He remembers the Laoximen of his boyhood as the busiest commercial stretch inside the ring, with the flagship stores of the old brands lined up along Zhonghua Road — Qiaojiashan, Dafugui, Quantai, Lao Tongsheng. "I've noticed Shanghai's commerce has changed shape. It used to run in lines; now it's all dots. Everything has moved into the malls, and there's nobody left on the street."

"The resettlement estates are dead quiet. I'd rather go back to Mine 721," he adds. But that is a feeling, not a plan, because Mine 721 is no longer somewhere anyone can go back to. He and Yao Lan visited Gucheng last year and found the grass below their old flat waist-high. The mine was restructured in 2002; of its 10,000-plus workers, only a hundred-odd stayed, and Gucheng was all but abandoned. Its residents moved into compounds they had jointly financed in Fuzhou, Yingtan and Nanchang. Yao Lan and Wang Le were offered a purchase quota then too, but they knew they would never come back, and gave it up.

"Who back then would have thought about investing in property?" Wang Le says.

(At the interviewees' request, all names in this article are pseudonyms.)

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are by Jiang Yifan.