Family
Hungry for love
By Yi Ling and Gui Juan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-17 10:46
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Fang Zhiqian (left) has lunch with his brother Fang Peng, watched by his mother Xie Kui'e. Xie left the two sons 12 years ago to work in Zhejiang province. She went back to her hometown to take care of them in June this year as the two boys are preparing for the college entrance examinations. |
Fang Zhiqian loves the smell of firecrackers. The pungent, burning chemicals conjure up images of the precious time this 16-year-old spent with his family as a young child.
Fang was only 3 years and 4 months old when his mother Xie Kui'e left home - a nondescript village in Luoshan county of central China's Henan province - to look for a job.
He was 7 when his father left him and his elder brother and joined their mother in eastern Zhejiang province. He had found a job as a pedicab driver.
Fang became one of China's "left-behind children" - the kind whose parents, one or both, work far away from home, leaving the children in the care of grandparents or other relatives.
"My parents aren't in my most pleasant memories," says Fang. The quiet 12th-grader is reluctant to talk about his childhood, because it fills him with memories of loneliness.
As China fast-tracks its way from poverty to prosperity, the world's most-populated country is confronting an old problem - the poor-rich disparity. China's vast rural population has begun to enjoy the benefits of development, though later than their urban peers. More and more farmers have moved to cities to seek a better life.
However, it's a bittersweet process for most of the wage hunters. Often better salaries are earned at the cost of letting the family disintegrate. Children, like Fang, are the victims.
A report released by the All-China Women's Federation in May reveals that China now has more than 58 million rural, left-behind children - almost three times the figure in 2006. And over 69 percent of them are under 14. The left-behind lag in terms of physical and psychological health and learning, and are more vulnerable when it comes to security.
"The issue of the left-behind children, which concerns millions of migrant workers and their families, is of great importance to China's social harmony and stability," says the report.
Fang's hometown, Luoshan, has a population of 730,000, about 90 percent of whom live in rural areas. Since the mid 1980s, more than 220,000 people from Luoshan have moved to work in cities, mainly to Beijing and the eastern coastal provinces.
"They seek jobs in the construction and catering industry," says Xiong Xingming, head of the county's labor and social security bureau.
"Almost every family has at least one member working in the cities and the villages now are only home to the '38-61-99' troops." The figures refer to the dates of Women's Day, Children's Day, and Elderly's Day in China.
Fang's mother Xie made a difficult, practical but heart-breaking choice between attending to her two sons and going to the city to make more money. The family's yearly income was less than 2,000 yuan ($293) in cash, before she left.
Though she insists that she has never regretted her decision, her eyes moisten when she recallsthe day she left home for the first time in 1997.
"He (Fang Zhiqian) cried, lay on the ground, held my legs and yelled, 'Don't go.' I managed to release myself from his arms and ran out of the house, crying," Xie recalls.
"Of course, I worried that the boys would not behave properly when we were not around. But if we didn't leave, they might not have enough food, let alone the money to pay for school fees."
Fang found it hard adapting to the life of a left-behind child. He remembers clearly the day a classmate gave him the "special title" for the first time when he was in the third grade.
"I was scared. I thought it meant that my parents were dead and I had become an orphan. I punched the boy," says Fang.
The only connection with his parents was a phone call every 10 days. During the 30-minute conversation, they mainly talked about the children's studies. Very rarely were the boys asked about their state of mind.
