Read: 2025-12-31
Recommend: 6/10
This book reminds me of Evan Osnos’ Age of Ambition. My favorite character in the book is Siyue. The book explores a wide range of topics, including Foxconn’s labor practices, single parenthood, children’s education, and the experiences of dissidents in China. The observation that “the city is a place of labour, not of living” particularly resonated with me and brought back memories of my own time living in Beijing.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
She spent two years there, but she wasn’t happy. What bothered her most about the factory wasn’t the strenuous work – it was the way that the factory managers took every opportunity to squeeze the workers. In the bathrooms, a female manager stood by the shower stalls chiding them to hurry up, to save on hot-water costs. They had no hot water to drink, or to wash their clothes in. Every minute of the day was taken up by working, eating rapidly, queuing for the showers, or doing laundry. There was barely any time after the evening shift to wash: overtime could stretch until 1 or 2 a.m. The next day, everything would start again at 7 a.m. Leiya knew that going from the dormitory to the warehouse every day, seven days a week, was not what she wanted.
To Siyue, her dorm-mates were the most human people she had ever met. They had personalities, opinions, senses of humour. They were down to earth, warm and curious about one another. They were the opposite of the ‘good kids’ at Siyue’s high school, who were disciplined, cold and hypercompetitive. Original thoughts would distract you from your studies, so the ‘good kids’ had to give up their personalities. Perhaps, Siyue thought, her new ‘bad girl’ friends had kept their colourful personalities by being resigned to not doing well at school. The good kids had ignored Siyue: they weren’t interested in anyone who they felt was irrelevant to their exam scores.
China has around 1,400 universities that grant undergraduate degrees. About a hundred of these belong to the ‘Project 211’ group of elite universities, where less than half a million students enter each year. The competition to squeeze into China’s top universities is higher than almost anywhere else in the world. Overall, China’s 211 group admit five out of every hundred students who apply, the same rate as Harvard University. Beijing’s Peking University accepts just one in a hundred applicants.
One day, when she truly couldn’t shake the feeling of being an impostor, she called the man who had hired her and told him that she felt she wasn’t good enough for the job. He listened calmly, and then said, ‘Do you want to know why we hired you? It wasn’t because your English was the best out of all the teachers who auditioned. It was because of our Olympics slogan: Our volunteers’ smiles are Beijing’s best postcards. We think you capture that spirit perfectly.’ For the first time, Siyue was being told she could be a role model.
‘We can learn one sentence per hour,’ Siyue replied, projecting the confidence in them that she knew they needed to hear. ‘That’s thirty sentences each month. After three months, everyone will be able to pass the exam.’ At least once every class, she would walk through all the rows of the students holding a microphone for them to repeat an English phrase into. She knew there was a vast difference between being able to listen and being brave enough to speak. She tried to introduce some silliness to ease their nerves: when a soldier was too shy to say anything, she would ask for ten press-ups. After this made the soldiers laugh, they started to relax.
In her textbooks, she had learned that Chinese citizens were equal before the law. At that point, despite years of Marxist slogan-reciting in her compulsory politics classes, she had never thought in terms of the power of ‘capital’ versus ‘labour’, but Zhang’s case against Foxconn startled her with the size of the gap between the vast multinational and the injured man.
This generation of rich parents had risen up through a brutally competitive business world. They knew their children would face even tougher competition in school than they had faced, and would find it difficult to repeat the same economic success they had. They were especially fearful of them ‘falling off the ladder’ of society, as Siyue put it. And the ladder was growing very tall: the distance from a villa in the suburbs of Beijing to a migrant workers’ dormitory in an underground bunker.
Business was booming, and rivals were circling. Siyue and Benji were caught in the cut-throat competition for children’s time. As a result, they grew used to seeing their students poached by other tutoring companies. Sometimes they would make progress with a kid, gradually developing his confidence, only for his mother to sign him up for the exam-cramming centre down the road. Now that her son was ‘fixed’, he had to get back to test prep. It was sad for Siyue and Benji to see students disappear into cram schools, but they knew that they had little control over what happened outside of their school.
The cities wanted rural workers to fuel their factories, but they were only wanted as labour, not as humans. Leiya and her fellow workers were expected to go back to their ancestral villages for health care, for retirement, and for their children’s education. For them, the city was a place of labour, not of living.
Within a few hours, her yoga teacher messaged her to ask if she would like to join a WeChat Group of Magda Gerber fans. Gerber was the founder of the Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE) method, which shared many principles with Positive Discipline, but was specifically tailored for infants, with recommendations for everything from bedtime routines to nappy-changing.
A few weeks after she gave birth, Siyue visited the RIE centre in Beijing; four months later, she attended her first course there. Siyue’s biggest task was to prepare Sulan, who would become Eva’s caregiver while Siyue was at work, to raise Eva with the RIE guidelines in mind. She knew this would not be an easy process: many parents are hostile when their children suggest new parenting methods to them, seeing this as a criticism of their own methods. Siyue gently explained RIE’s core principles to Sulan, which revolve around instilling a sense of security, respect and boundaries. Respect, for example, was expressed by telling the infant what the adult intended to do before they did it. In RIE workshops, Siyue had participated in an exercise where the adults in the room took a tissue and tried to wipe something from another adult’s face as if they were a baby without warning them first. The natural instinct when someone came at your face out of the blue was to flinch; it felt like an attack. Babies can feel that fear, too, the instructor said. So first tell them, ‘I’m going to wipe something from your face.’ Give them time to react. Then do it.
When Eva was three years old, Siyue gifted Sulan a series of online life-coaching classes, geared towards professional women in Beijing. Sulan didn’t like the idea, but she went anyway: Siyue had already made the payment. In their first round of introductions, Sulan told the trainer she was attending to become a better grandmother. In the end, she got so much out of the course that she recommended it to her own friends. The biggest change she noticed in herself was that she became more confident; she wasn’t as prone to helplessness or self-criticism. Previously, in moments of self-doubt, her body would generate a damp anger, a heat that wouldn’t disperse. The coach taught her to pause and ask herself certain questions when she felt the heat rising: in short, to coach herself. Sulan liked this practice. She complained to Siyue less and trusted herself more to solve issues on her own. She felt far less anxious, capable of observing instead of immediately responding to the urge to judge and criticise.
Siyue often considered herself fortunate to be a single parent. One of her friends, who was going through a divorce, emphasised this to her: ‘Siyue, you are so lucky. When you have a husband and a child, you have twice the burden of parenting.’ Though she believed the men in her friendship circle did more than most, they still did less than 50 per cent of the childcare in their marriages. Women were expected to manage the overall project and keep track of the tasks that weren’t done. All in all, Siyue felt lucky to be part of a two-woman team. When she first moved to Beijing, Sulan had urged Siyue to find a husband, but after a while, she stopped. Sulan became acquainted with many of Siyue’s female friends and often cooked them elaborate dinners of beef stew with bamboo shoots, as well as braised pork belly, cut into thick chunks with the gum-sticky skin still on. She was often quiet, a natural listener, but willing to offer her insights if asked. She didn’t make unwelcome comments about anyone’s weight or use of make-up. In return, the women opened up to her about their lives: their experiences of being single, what they did for work, and how they supported themselves. Sulan’s best friend in the compound was Eva’s playmate’s grandmother, who looked after her daughter and son-in-law as well as her granddaughter. She would complain to Sulan how tired she was every day; it wasn’t just the number of mouths to feed, but that the mouths were prone to arguing in the ever-shifting dynamics of a household with three adults and one child. She would reminisce about the days when her daughter was single: ‘What a good life we had back then!’ she would say. Now she was always busy, and when she wasn’t busy, she was exhausted.
Barely a year after Sam started working at the New Commune, the police began hounding the landlord to kick her colleagues out of their Beijing office. The police frequently used this tactic with activists they didn’t like but didn’t have enough reason to arrest. It was never clear if their ultimate goal was to drive the activists to other cities, where they would become other police forces’ problems, or simply remind them that, at any moment, the government could make their lives difficult.
With the rise of social media, many political blogs flourished on WeChat’s Public Accounts platform, threatening to transgress the unspoken boundaries of censorship. Some issues were clearly untouchable: the leadership’s family wealth, for instance, and issues related to territorial integrity, like the future of Taiwan. But throughout the 2010s, the areas of sensitivity multiplied to the extent that editors could no longer predict the government’s reaction to any piece of media with much accuracy.
In our student society, we talked about the sixty-year history of the People’s Republic of China…We exaggerated the beauty of the first thirty years after the revolution and the problems of the past thirty years after Reform and Opening Up. We were given a wrong view of history.
The industry was rife with exploitative sales practices that preyed upon parents’ insecurities and vulnerabilities. Her fellow entrepreneurs regarded the reforms with a mixture of despair and begrudging acknowledgement that there was, as President Xi put it, a ‘chronic disease’ at the heart of the tutoring industry. Nobody liked the strong-arm sales tactics, and nobody wanted their own children to be squeezed through the same machine. Yet the reforms didn’t solve the essential problem: families still experienced the education system as a prisoner’s dilemma of competitive cramming. Those who could afford it carried on hiring tutors in private, hoping to gain an advantage over those who didn’t. One consequence of the reforms was to extend the power of the Education Ministry, police and local government by giving them another opportunity to extract fines.
Leiya’s mother was growing old in the city, but part of her wanted to go back, or perhaps wanted to be the kind of person who would want to go back, to be like the Chinese saying: fallen leaves return to their roots. She would keep putting off the decision.
At the time of this writing in the summer of 2023, the Chinese economy is slowing down. Such a slowdown is inevitable for a country that had been growing at breakneck speed. The incredible rate of growth in the 1980s introduced an unprecedented level of social mobility by lifting people out of almost uniform poverty. Now, class inequalities have set in once more, and the inevitable economic slowdown means it is harder to achieve any kind of mobility unless structural impediments and injustices are addressed.