a word if they heard a female voice.
‘How have you been?’ I asked.
‘I’m not good. Not good at all. Couldn’t find any work at all in Shenyang,’ he said. ‘I’ve tried really hard in the past month. Since you left, things have got considerably worse and most people have given up their job search in Shenyang – sixty out of a hundred migrants have returned home to their villages. I’ve hung around here long enough. But no sign of a job.’
‘I’m so sorry, Peng!’ I said, not knowing how to reassure him. ‘What are you planning to do now?’
‘I’m going home, back to Fuxing. I’ll help out on the farm for a while…and see what happens. I can’t stay in Shenyang anymore – I’m going mad! And everyone’s leaving. I am dead scared, sister. I don’t want to end up like Ah Shan.’
There was a pause.
‘You know Ah Shan?’ he asked.
I struggled to remember.
‘You met him in the Lu Garden labour market,’ Peng said. ‘Ah Shan couldn’t live with the pain and shame of staying jobless for more than six months. He took his own life – just a week after you left. One day, he just jumped into the river right by the labour market and drowned himself.’
I was speechless. I really didn’t remember Ah Shan. He must have been one of the many job seekers who had gathered when I talked to Peng. Peng described him as an honest man, ‘although you probably wouldn’t notice him in a crowd.’ Peng was obviously upset about the death. He’d spent days searching for work alongside Ah Shan and they must have built up a friendship. For Peng, friendship meant a lot. He was trying to hold back his tears as he spoke. I advised him to return home for a break and told him to call me whenever he needed to talk. Then we hung up.
The next day, he returned to Fuxing on a three-hour bus trip. Going home didn’t turn out to be much of a break. His father, who had never left to work in the city, did not sympathize with him. ‘Other villagers’ sons can make money in the city. Why can’t you?’ he nagged. The accusation was hurtful, but Peng ignored it because he didn’t want to talk back to his dad. He tried to justify staying in the village for a while. But it wasn’t yet harvest time and there was little farm work. So he spent some time cleaning the front yard and sorting the farmhouse storage for his dad, and cooked dinner for him every evening. ‘Have you learned a few dishes in Shenyang?’ his father asked, not knowing that Peng had never had time to cook during his time in the city.
Two weeks later, his father got on his case again, and this time he was much harsher: ‘If you don’t move your ass and go work in the city, we won’t be able to survive.’
Peng packed his bag and left home the next morning. Shenyang was the only large city nearby. He had to return to the Lu Garden labour market, which held nothing but memories of failure and Ah Shan’s suicide. How could his father understand? ‘I am just like his working buffalo,’ Peng told me.
One day, waiting around Lu Garden in the early morning, Peng met a recruiter from Hebei province who was looking for candidates to go and work as security guards in Beijing. Peng was thrilled with the opportunity. He had worked as a security guard before. And wouldn’t it be great to leave Shenyang and work in the capital? He took the offer immediately, without negotiating.
The security company was called Tianhe Antai ‘Heavenly Peace’. It was one of the largest security companies in Beijing – and infamous for its covert operations, which included running drug deals, regularly bribing the public security department, and deceiving and transporting rural migrants into unpaid jobs. But Peng was a stranger to Beijing. How could he know? All he knew was that he was to board a bus from Shenyang to Beijing, along with fifteen others – all older than Peng – to start a new life.
The whole busload would soon be joining the army of migrant workers who performed the dirty work for China’s grand capital: building apartments for its new rich, cleaning its streets, planting trees along its avenues, guarding its properties. Each of them was as hardworking as the next, but the younger migrants, like Peng, were more equipped with information about life and employment in the cities and less willing to tolerate poor conditions and more prepared to stand up for their rights. Would his father ever understand?
The trip to the capital was a long one – ten hours. Peng had taken so many bus trips before, and each time he’d told himself that he would make a success of himself and send the much-needed money home. He would be proud of what he could do for his family. He nibbled at the steamed buns that he had brought with him for the trip. He had only two.
It was well past midnight when the bus finally arrived. As it turned in to the depot, Peng wondered where they were: the place didn’t look remotely urban. A few other buses were parked, but no one was around. Under the dim streetlight, Peng could see two men selling steamed buns on the side of the empty street. Wasn’t this Beijing? ‘Gongzhufen,’ said the conductor – a quiet part of the city.
Peng and the other fifteen villagers got off the bus and looked around in the semi-darkness. Another bus would take them from this east Beijing depot to Daxing district, in the south of Beijing, where the company was based. Though the depot was not well lit, their many pairs of eyes found the right bus stop soon enough. Daxing, it said. This second ride lasted another hour.
Daxing district, situated on the periphery of Beijing, is clogged with factories of all kinds – ugly even at night. The district comprises nine towns and eighteen townships, and has a total population of 650,000, more than 75 percent of them migrant families who have created their own communities. They come from Hubei, Henan, Shandong and Hebei provinces, as well as from the northeast.
Tianhe Antai has many security contracts with companies in Daxing, to whom they supply migrant workers recruited from Shenyang and elsewhere. The company is housed in a first-floor office in an ordinary-looking street. You can easily miss it. On arrival, Peng and the others were asked by the recruiter to hand in their IDs. ‘It is just our normal procedure,’ he said. ‘It’s for our records.’ But after a few days, the workers realized that they weren’t going to get their IDs back. Peng’s repeated requests for his were refused. But none of them protested, for fear of offending the company.
They were then sent to guard a business nearby which they were told was an insurance firm. During the first two weeks, they were also told by the security company not to leave the premises under any circumstances. They were to station themselves right at the gate, but they were not to step outside the compound. They were to eat in the company canteen. Peng became very concerned, because this was the first job where his movements had been restricted – but without his ID, he couldn’t simply get up and leave. As time passed, he began to feel trapped. He and the other workers talked about what to do. Should they approach the management collectively? Should they be more confrontational? The shared feeling, however, was that there was little recourse, so the subject was dropped. Meanwhile, the men were desperate to be paid.
Passive cooperation did not bring them peace. In fact, things got worse. When they asked for their weekly pay, they were told that there was no pay yet and they’d have to wait. At the end of the second week, their request was again rejected, without any reason given. The workers realized then that they would not be paid at all. Not one yuan. They didn’t voice their concern because they didn’t really understand what was going on. Peng, however, did: He and the others were simply being treated as rural peasants who were so desperate for work that they’d accept whatever deal was on offer.
Peng wanted to flee. But to do so, he’d have to fight a large security company. How many bodyguards and thugs did the company have at its disposal? Peng had no idea, though he
