I have a couple anecdotes to share about families where one or both parents live in a different city from their children, in order to make more money, because there aren't good enough job opportunities in their hometown.
This is a well-known phenomenon in China. They are called "migrant workers" and "left behind children." It sounds awful, being away from your kids, only able to see them once a year- but it's inevitable that this happens, because of the economic disparity between the big cities and the countryside in China. In big cities like Shanghai (where I live), the salaries are higher and the cost of living is higher. In small cities or rural areas, salaries are lower and the cost of living is lower. So, mathematically, the way to earn the most money for one's family is for a parent to live in a big city and earn a higher salary, while the child stays in their hometown where the cost of living is lower. This kind of situation is always going to exist when there is such a big economic gap between different places.
I have several anecdotes about what I've seen in Asia:
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When I was in college in the US, I had a friend who was an international student from China, let's call her Anna. She helped me a lot with studying Chinese. At one point, she told me about a movie called "Last Train Home," which is about Chinese migrant workers traveling home for Chinese New Year. They only get to see their children 1 time out of the whole year. Anna organized a film screening in one of the classrooms on campus, and a bunch of us got together and watched this movie.
Unfortunately, I didn't really have any empathy about it, back then. My feelings were "why are we supposed to feel bad for these people who are only able to see their children once a year? They chose to move to a different city. Nobody was forcing them. They shouldn't have done that." I had a sort of "family values" mindset where we imagine what a "family" is supposed to look like, and if anyone can't live up to that, we naively blame them and say it's because they didn't value their family enough.
And also, I had sort of a "just world fallacy" thing going on. I didn't want to believe that we really live in a world where, for some parents in some places, there is actually a convincing argument to be made that "maybe the best thing I can do for my children is move far away, and leave them behind, and earn more money and send it back so they can have a better life." That's really awful to think about. It's really awful to face the reality that some people truly are in that situation. That, in some places in China, it's extremely normal for the parents to be gone, and the children are raised by other relatives and only get to see their parents once a year.
I didn't want to believe that that was real, so I just thought to myself "I would never do that" and decided that the parents in "Last Train Home" should just simply have not moved away from their children. Like it was that easy.
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Sometimes I see "heartwarming" short videos on Chinese social media about parents who make such long and difficult journeys home to see their kids for Chinese New Year. I feel these are in the same genre as American news articles about "these kids got together and had a bake sale to pay off their classmates' school lunch debt" or "these employees all donated their vacation time so that their pregnant colleague could have maternity leave, how heartwarming." It's not heartwarming- it's messed-up that this situation even exists in the first place.
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Years ago, at a previous job, working as a software engineer in Shanghai, I had a coworker whose wife and child lived in a different city near Shanghai. This coworker would live in Shanghai from Monday to Friday, and go home on the weekends to be with his wife and child. This is a thing that people do, because you can get a better salary and better job opportunities in Shanghai than in other nearby cities.
That was before covid. Now that covid has made it more normal to work from home, I think someone in that situation should try to make an arrangement with their employer where they always work from home on Mondays or Fridays, so they only have to be in Shanghai 4 days out of the week, instead of 5. (I know that in the US, many jobs are fully remote now, because of the societal changes that came with covid, but I haven't heard of fully-remote jobs in China.)
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I have an American friend in Shanghai, let's call her Chelsea. Her husband is Chinese, and his parents live in a different city.
When Chelsea was pregnant, she told me, "my mother-in-law says we can send the baby to live with her?????"
And I said, "Make sure you make it very clear that your answer is NO. Because she's not joking about that."
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Since both me and my husband have full time jobs and don't really want to do housework, we hire an ayi. "Ayi" is what female nannies/ maids/ domestic workers are called in China. It's common for people at our income level to hire an ayi to do housework/cooking/childcare.
We had always hired Chinese ayis before, but at one point, around the time our second child was born, we decided to hire a Filipino ayi. The situation with Filipino ayis is, it's not legal for them to work in this job in China. But, there is demand for them, because they speak English. International people, like me, want to hire Filipino ayis because they speak English so it's easier for me to communicate with them. Chinese people want to hire Filipino ayis who will talk to their kids in English, to help the kids learn. Filipino ayis are generally believed to be better trained and more hard-working, compared to Chinese ayis.
Anyway, we found a Filipino ayi, let's call her Brenda. When we first had her come for a job interview, she told us about her legal situation- she entered China on a tourist visa, and overstayed it, and that was years ago. She has no valid Chinese visa. It's illegal for her to still be in China. She hasn't traveled back to the Philippines, because then she wouldn't be able to enter China again. Within China, she doesn't travel on trains or planes because there's a possibility that they might discover she doesn't have a valid visa. If she has to travel somewhere, she has to ride in somebody's car.
She said that at one of her previous jobs, the family that employed her heard that police were in the area looking for Filipinos working illegally, so they warned her about it and she had to move elsewhere and find a different job.
I felt bad for her, but also I believe that feeling bad for someone is not a good reason to hire them, because then you'll have weird emotions about how you're doing such a noble thing for them, and you expect them to perform gratefulness, etc. Weird strings attached.
Also, I wasn't sure about it, because I felt I didn't clearly understand the legal situation enough to know whether I was putting myself at risk. I'm an immigrant in China too. I don't want to get in trouble.
But, I also wanted to find out more about Filipino ayis who work in China.
But also, Brenda didn't have any experience caring for newborn babies, and I knew in the long term I would need an ayi to take care of the baby full-time when my maternity leave ended. Brenda wouldn't be the right person for that. (In China, daycares typically start at around age 2. Before that, usually people get a grandparent to come and take care of the baby while the parents are at work, or hire an ayi.)
Anyway, we decided to hire Brenda temporarily- and I told her this pretty early on- I said she would probably work for us just a few months, and then we would need to find someone else who had experience with newborn babies.
Brenda was great. She had a good attitude, worked hard, always asked me questions to make sure she was doing things the way I wanted. She was really good to work with. It was easy to communicate with her because she could speak English. I speak Chinese, so that's how I've communicated with Chinese ayis in the past, but it's just easier in English. And my son (who was preschool-age) loved her. (He loves everyone though.)
We paid her more than we would have paid a Chinese ayi. In my experience, Chinese ayis get a salary around 40-50 RMB/hr (this is about 6-7 USD), but we paid Brenda around 60-70 RMB/hr (about 9-10 USD). Actually I have no idea what the normal hourly rate is for Filipino ayis in Shanghai. We just asked her what her previous salary was, and believed whatever she said, and based it on that. I was okay with that because I knew it would just be a short-term thing. If she was going to work for us longer, I would have put more effort into figuring out what a reasonable salary would be.
But, yeah, I felt it didn't make sense to have her work for us long-term, because what I really needed was someone to take care of the baby, and why would I pay so much extra money when she hasn't even worked with newborn babies before? (And she was also looking for more hours than what I wanted to give her- so it just wasn't going to work out long-term. But we really liked her and I'm glad to have met her and found out something about what life is like for Filipinos working illegally in China.)
There were several instances where I felt like, I'm so privileged and out-of-touch with what her life is like. For example, right when she started working for us, I tried to get a key card for her so she could get into our building. You have to go to the apartment management office with your ID and register in order to get a key card. Brenda was very much NOT willing to do that. I felt like... I'm asking her to do something that might put her at risk. Like I'm so out-of-touch, I don't even understand what I'm asking her to do. Fortunately (???) our apartment complex doesn't actually care about security, and the building door is always left open, so she was able to enter the building even without a key card.
Also, sometimes she came with me to pick up my son from school. When we were waiting outside the gate with all the other parents, she would kind of nervously side-eye the school security guards. And I felt like she was being paranoid- but what do I know? It's easy for me to say "she's being paranoid" and judge her, when I'm not the one at risk of being deported. It's not right for me to judge what level of "paranoid" she should be.
She told me she has friends who never even take the subway, because there are police there. She took the subway herself though.
She didn't have a bank account in China. I used WeChat to pay her. (WeChat is a Chinese app for texting and social media, and it also has a payment function- you can easily send people money, and stores in China all accept WeChat Pay, so there's no problem using your WeChat wallet to buy stuff.) She couldn't open an actual bank account because banks require international customers to have a valid visa.
And here's another weird thing- one time, we were cleaning out our kitchen and found an old rice cooker, and we were gonna get rid of it, and Brenda asked if she could have it. To mail to somebody in the Philippines. I found it hard to believe that somebody in the Philippines would want our old rice cooker (do they even have the same kind of outlets there? The US has different outlets than China, I have no idea what they have in the Philippines) but she really wanted it, so we gave it to her. Another time we found a box of cables from old electronics, and we were going to throw them away because we didn't even know what they were from, and Brenda wanted those. I think maybe she could get money from recycling them. In the places we've lived in China, there have always been people looking through the trash bins, looking for things they can get money for. Mostly cardboard boxes and plastic bottles. If we hadn't given those old cables to Brenda, I'm sure somebody else would have taken them out of our trash.
She said that she's heard from other Filipinos that one strategy would be to marry a Chinese man, in order to get legal immigrant status. But, she said, she doesn't really want to. I said, yeah you shouldn't marry someone if you don't want to.
And, yeah, I believe it's a bad idea to marry someone if you don't want to. But I also think it's a bad idea to live in China as an illegal immigrant, but I can't judge because obviously I don't know what her situation was in the Philippines, and why she decided to come to China, and how long she initially planned to stay, and if her life is better in China than it would have been in the Philippines, and if she is earning money for the purpose of supporting family in the Philippines, etc. (Her situation is different from the other anecdotes in this post because she doesn't have kids.) I didn't ask her any of that because it's none of my business. (Also there is a power difference, because I was her boss- she has to act like she cares about my problems, regardless of whether she does or not. So, try not to exploit that.)
There are people in this world who chose to get married for those kinds of reasons, not because of a romantic "I want to spend my life with this person." There are people who are in a situation where that is actually, somehow, a good idea.
From my point of view, it doesn't make sense- she can't even have a bank account, she can't go home and see her family, she can't really travel in China, she always has to be worried about police, she always told me about problems she was having with her landlord, probably it's easy for a landlord to exploit Filipinos who are in China illegally, especially since she couldn't speak very much Chinese, and so on and so on- why would someone choose to live as an illegal immigrant in China? But she knows her own situation, and I don't, so I can't judge. There's a lot of information I just don't have.
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We went on a cruise from Shanghai to Japan. In the ship's main dining room, we were assigned to a certain table, so we had the same waiter every night. Towards the end of the cruise, we were friendly enough with him to chat about what life is really like for him on the cruise ship. He was also from the Philippines. Let's call him Daniel.
We chatted about a LOT of things with him! He said he was happy to talk to us because a lot of the passengers only speak Chinese, which makes it hard for him because he doesn't speak Chinese at all. I started out asking him if the ship only travels between Shanghai and Japan, or if it also goes to other places. And I asked if they have cruises all the time, or if there are some days in between cruises where they don't have any passengers. Turns out, they have cruises ALL the time. Daniel said that after we all leave, the crew has to work hard cleaning all the rooms to get ready for new passengers to arrive that same day. They even bring the waiters in to help with cleaning the rooms.
I asked him if the rooms for the crew were smaller than our rooms (yes).
We had seen the waitstaff all having a meeting in the afternoon, when the dining room was empty, so we asked him what that was about. He got talking about the expectations for their work performance, and how if some customer gives them an 8 out of 10 review, they get called in to the manager's office, like "What did you do???!!!!" (I said, "wait, 8 is bad???") Daniel says, "What can I do, some people just never give anything higher than a 7."
(A week later, when I got the email about filling out the survey, I gave the staff all 10 out of 10. And there was one question on there, "Was there any crew member that told you to give them a good review?" and I put "no" because probably they get in trouble for that. Later there was a question "Was there any crew member that did a really good job?" and I put his name in there, and also the assistant waiter and the woman who cleaned our rooms.)
My husband and I had been wondering about the people who work on the ship- we felt like maybe it would be a good job to have when you're young and want to see the world and you don't have any family commitments. So we asked Daniel about that. He said, his wife also works on the ship. Yeah, it's common for the crew to get married to each other, because you're on a ship in the middle of the ocean, where else are you going to meet anyone?
He said, they have a son. The son is in the Philippines- the grandparents are raising him. And Daniel misses his son a lot, but working on the cruise ship he's able to earn more money than he would in the Philippines, to give his son a good education. And last time he visited home, his son was crying at the airport telling him not to leave... And how he hopes that soon his wife will stop working on the cruise ship and go back home, and hopefully in a few years he will too.
The cruise ship had an activity where you could pay 100 dollars per person to take the "behind-the-scenes tour." No need to do that- you can just talk to the waiter. (I also talked to the Chinese woman who cleaned our room every day.) The people who work on the ship, they know a lot of things. Many of those things they probably aren't supposed to tell you- their job is to give you whatever you ask for, and be extremely polite, and pretend to be happy even if the customers are really annoying and unreasonable, and give you a perfect vacation experience, and make you feel like the world revolves around you...
If you want to ask them things, for your own curiosity, obviously don't do it at a time when they're busy. That's annoying. You should thank them for the work they are doing, show them you appreciate it, be friendly, maybe from there you'll have a chance to ask them about their life, or the practical logistics of the cruise ship, or whatever, if they're willing to talk about it.
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This is a real thing in this world- people who are in a situation where their best option is to live far away from their children. And this will inevitably be true, when some places have much better job opportunities and a higher cost of living, compared to other places. Mathematically, the way to earn the most money and to have that money be used most effectively, is to have the income-earners of the family live in the places with higher salaries, and the children to live in places with a lower cost of living. I feel sad about it, but it's not something that can be easily changed- it's entirely based on the very big economic differences between different places in this world.
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Related:
That's What Radicalized Me (a post about immigration)
"The Case For Open Borders" (book review)
"The Case for Open Borders": Remittances
On "Unjust Marriage"
Dog Hotels and Poverty Existing at the Same Time
