China's annual long march

Li Guangqiang rises early and pulls on his sharpest city clothes: dark jeans fashionably distressed, puffy down coat, black pouch slung over one shoulder. An outfit carefully chosen to announce: I am not a farmer or a villager. Not anymore.

Li's journey will be long, and he has no time to lose. Heading out into the dry, dirty cold of a Beijing winter, he rolls his suitcase along frozen canals the shade of curdled milk, through the warren of alleyways where he and other migrants sleep in makeshift shelters of concrete block walls and corrugated tin roofs.

When the holidays are over, when he makes his way back to work on the construction of the new Microsoft site, his home will be gone, swept aside in booming Beijing's tireless bouts of gentrification. But he's not thinking about that now, because these are the dying days of the old lunar year.

Today Li will go home.

Figures loom out of the darkness and make their way up the worn steps of the bus station, lugging booty for seldom-seen families: gifts of clothes and food wrapped in auspicious red to ring in the Year of the Rabbit, boxes of cheap toys, sacks of grain hefted on broad shoulders.

Li is one of many now.

This is the world's largest human migration: Every year, millions of workers flee the big cities and industrial hubs en masse and retrace their steps to their home villages.

These precious days are the most eagerly awaited of the year: a rare chance for rest, and the coming together of families painfully split apart by economic necessity. Self-conscious spouses are reunited. Children peer shyly at parents they haven't seen in a year. Men who are mocked and exploited in the slick cities puff out their chests and strut, get drunk on rice wine and lavish their hard-won cash on their families.

Many of the workers sleep outside train stations for days to get tickets, then stand packed tight as cattle in train carriages. Li opts for the relative comfort of the bus for the 12-hour trip to his village, about 400 miles south of Beijing in Shandong province.

In the drowsy din of the bus station, Li's eyes dart anxiously from gate to gate, but he tries hard to appear nonchalant. The 38-year-old has been making the journey for 16 years, and tries to adopt the swagger of the big city.

"I used to get very excited," he says, shrugging, "but now I go back and forth every year."

Li's bus is called, and he joins the crowd surging through the gate. They toss bags into the belly of the bus, scramble aboard and elbow their way down the aisles. Every seat is full, and almost all of the passengers are men.

The bus shudders to life and pulls onto the road. It rumbles south past shopping malls, gas stations, construction sites. The bus is filled with the click of cellphone cameras taking parting shots as Beijing falls away.

Turn on the heat, the passengers beg.

No, the driver replies. It's a waste of fuel.

The passengers do not insist. They're used to shabby conditions and physical discomfort. Soon the bus is rocked by snores and coughs. Li doesn't sleep; he just waits.

Familiar journey

Li is not tall, but there is a bullish solidity to his body. In repose, his features fall into a wary stillness, and his eyes narrow as if he is perpetually on the lookout for a trick. But his smile is quick, spilling unexpected relaxation over his face.

When he migrated to Beijing in 1995, he planned to stay only a few years. He'd make some cash and go home.

But now he's addicted, not just to the money, but to the city itself. He describes his village as unsophisticated and dull.

"I'll stay in Beijing until I'm 50," he declares.

Hours fade, and the bus rolls over country roads cluttered with the tokens of Chinese growth. Factories and sprawling construction sites are overhung with cranes and fronted by billboards showing the housing developments that soon will be completed.

In the early afternoon, the driver pulls over, urges everyone off the bus and then locks the doors. This is the lunch stop; always the same place, Li grumbles.

In the restrooms, waist-high partitions separate one stinking hole from the next, and icicles drip from the ceiling. In the cafeteria, Li grimaces at vats of oily vegetables and indistinguishable meat.

"It's not clean," he warns, and heads back outside. In the trash-strewn parking lot, he stuffs his hands into his pockets and stares at the horizon until the driver finishes his lunch.

The landscape turns to mountains and thicker trees, then flattens out again into fields as darkness falls.

The county seat is gaudy with lights, the market stalls and supermarkets packed with shoppers from surrounding villages who've come to town to stock up on holiday delicacies and decorations. Everybody is a little more flush with cash at this time of the year.

Li is the first one off the bus. Early fireworks burst into pinwheels in the sky.

He snatches up his bag, pushes past the taxi drivers and finds his cousin waiting for him in a ramshackle silver van. They smile shyly, light cigarettes. They don't embrace.

The van pulls out of the city, back into the darkness of a country night, on rough roads that slice through the winter-dry fields of wheat and corn.

Li's house looks dark and abandoned. Last year's faded wishes for prosperity and happiness, printed on red paper gone to pink, still cling to the metal gate.

He makes his way through the courtyard and onto the concrete floor of the sitting room, bone-cold and bathed in thin sulphur light. A television flashes and flickers behind a cotton curtain.

"Hey, come out here!" Li shouts gruffly.

Ducking her head bashfully, his wife sweeps slowly through the curtains. She is only 39 but she looks older, much older, than her city-dwelling husband. She has pulled her hair neatly back from a face grown ruddy and chapped from the sun and wind. For her husband's homecoming, she wears a padded cotton jacket printed with bright red swirls.

Li shoots his wife an impatient, unreadable look. She stands at his side uncertainly. Their 13-year-old son comes skittering over the threshold from the yard. Both father and son seem embarrassed to make eye contact, let alone touch; the boy stares at the floor and races in nervous circles around his father.

But the uneasy moment is broken, diluted in cries of welcome as neighbors pour in to greet Li.

He has made it home at last.

Price of prosperity

Nobody remembers just how Liloucun village came to be. There is a vague story, something about how a group of Li men moved here 300 years ago in search of wider tracts of fertile land for farming.

The name translates as "Li house village," and the men who live here today all bear the surname Li. The exact relations are lost to time, but the villagers assume their blood is shared, and intermarriage is forbidden. Men remain in the village, choosing wives from elsewhere, and the village daughters marry out.

Today, Liloucun is home to 160 people, three computers and a single car, the rattling silver van.

There are two main roads; at their intersection are two general stores, a fertilizer shop and a small restaurant. There is no running water, and the town got electricity only a decade back.

Most of the money comes from migrant workers. About 40% of the villagers leave home to join China's urban workforce.

The migrants' salaries have bought bricks and lumber to replace the grass and mud once used to build homes. People proudly show off their televisions, washing machines and refrigerators; everybody knows who has what, and how much it cost.

The price is paid in absence. Most of the year, these hamlets are ghostly, drained of the young and fit.

For these two weeks of the holiday, though, the village looks like its old self. Couples get married, taking advantage of the luck of a new year and the presence of migrating relatives. Roving holiday markets spill from one village to the next, peddling live fish, dried lotus, pigs' heads, hand-pounded sesame oil, mountains of fireworks.

During these fleeting weeks of holiday, everybody has everything. But it doesn't last, and sometimes the cracks of distance show.

Fractured family

Li's children have grown up without him. He seems uneasy around them, scoffs that their mother gave them names that are embarrassingly rural.

His son, Shengshun, has been acting out. He skips school, runs off with his friends. To the fury of his teacher, who threatened to ban him from school, he dyed his hair bright red. His grades are terrible; in a few years, he'll probably follow his father's example and migrate to a big city.

Now he trails after his father, hurls himself at the older man, who brushes the boy away. He manages to lure his father into a wrestling match, but it doesn't last long.

As for 15-year-old Yingying, she is tall and dreamy. She earns better grades than her brother, and helps her mother in the kitchen. She pines for adventure, of becoming a factory girl someplace bustling and distant.

"I always think outside is better than my village," she says.

New Year's Eve is drawing closer, and Sun Fengzhi is mincing goat fat for the stew, banging it over and over with a shining cleaver. She married Li more than 13 years ago, when she was 26. She has hardly seen him since.

It's cold in the kitchen; her breath hangs in front of her mouth, and the fat is freezing. Her thick, strong fingers ache from the work.

Since coming home, her husband has shared his son's bed, not his wife's. He has spent a lot of time visiting his friends, driving around in his cousin's van. He wears his nice city clothes, and although his family speaks to him in local dialect, he stubbornly replies in the Mandarin of Beijing.

With her husband out of earshot in the yard, Sun describes a melancholy family life.

"He went away and I had to take care of everything," she says quietly. "It was really difficult for me. I had to take care of the kids myself. I used to hold them so long my arms were in pain. I had to be their father and their mother."

One of the neighbor women slips out to warn Li: Your wife is criticizing you to outsiders!

Inside, Sun's face is clouding over with coming tears, her voice hardly audible.

Li bursts into the room.

"Stop complaining so much!" he yells at his wife, who cringes and shrinks from him.

Their son joins in, echoing his father's orders: "Stop complaining!"

Sun drops her reddened eyes and turns her attention to the goat stew.

On the wardrobe, in pride of place, hangs a picture of Sun and three other women. They stand in factory smocks, smiling shyly at the camera. She looks younger and prettier, but the photo is only 2 years old.

That year, Sun tried her hand as a migrant worker. She left her children with her parents and found a job at a DVD component factory in Qingdao. Those days were happy. But her son grew unruly; nobody could control him. After six months, Sun returned to the village.

Li is sullen. His efforts to portray a family life unscathed by his gaping absence have fallen apart.

"I guess you can tell, since my wife just says whatever comes into her head, that we don't have a very good relationship," he says grimly.

Still they try to put on a happy face. A few days later, the whole family travels two miles down the road to visit Sun's village.

"I don't go to her village very often," Li says. "It's something I have to do."

Ancient rituals

The day of New Year's Eve is clear enough that the sun pierces the chill, heralding the coming change of season; the entire holiday period is called chunjie, or spring festival.

Li wears a gray woolen sweater and jeans as he works in the back courtyard. Much of his holiday is spent catching up on the repairs, the broken water pump on the well, the loose tiles on the roof.

Then it is time to change the faded banners decorating the house. Li climbs a bamboo ladder and, as his son stands below peeling off strips of tape, they hang the auspicious couplets purchased for the New Year. Across the top of the gate, gold letters on a strip of red paper read: "Happiness and fortune will prevail."

As the sun drops low, the menfolk begin one of the most important rituals of the holiday, burning fake paper money for their ancestors.

The earth crunches underfoot as they walk through the wheat fields. Seven generations of Li ancestors are buried here. There are no gravestones, just simple mounds of dirt for each of the families.

Without uttering a word, Li squats with a cigarette lighter and ignites a bundle that looks like old yellow paper towels.

He explains later that his father, who died in 1989, was cremated in keeping with the Communist directive against traditional funerals, and his ashes were buried somewhere in a small box in the field.

"Really, I don't remember exactly where. I just approximate," he says with a sheepish shrug.

The women aren't invited to the ritual. By Chinese tradition, they're not really part of the Li family, maintaining their birth names for life.

Instead, they spend the day cooking.

They roll out rounds of dough the size of coasters and with nimble fingers wrap them into dumplings that will be the main attraction of the festivities. On New Year's Eve, dumplings are to be eaten at midnight, but the Lis don't want to wait.

By 7.30 p.m., the older men are seated around a low coffee table in a chilly sitting room with motorbikes parked behind the sofa. A bamboo pole lies across the entrance from the courtyard to keep out Nian, a mythical monster who is said to emerge at the New Year to attack children. Loud noises from the firecrackers and fireworks are also supposed to scare him away.

Although Li is younger, he also joins them; he has a prominent place in the family: the eldest son of the eldest brother. The men pick disinterestedly at the food with their chopsticks, lavishing more attention on the baijiu, distilled alcohol, that they're pouring into tiny shot glasses.

The women flit in and out of the room, eating a few bites, but they don't sit for more than a few minutes. They begin to drift into a bedroom off the courtyard to watch television.

Outside, the younger people have gathered on the crossroads to set off the fireworks. Little children clutch cigarette lighters in tiny fists in anticipation of lighting the sparklers. The older boys scamper about with excitement. The men carry out the boxes wrapped in shiny red paper.

Each family has bought its own stash of fireworks, but they'll set them off at the crossroads so everybody can see who could afford to buy what. Across the fields, splashes of color from richer villages are visible in the sky.

A few stragglers on their way to dinners in neighboring villages roar by on motorbikes or three-wheel cars, dressed in their holiday finery. They shout out New Year's greetings as they pass. By now the fireworks are popping.

Each fresh explosion drenches the street scene for a split-second like a strobe, and then it's gone.

The holiday will soon be over, and Li and the other migrants will head back to a place they don't call home.

【美国《洛杉矶时报》网站2月20日报道】题:中国一年一度的长征(记者  梅甘·斯塔克  白思卉)

    李广强(音)起得很早,他穿上他最漂亮的城市衣服:故意磨损的时髦深色牛仔裤,宽大的上衣,肩上还挎着一个黑包。这套精心挑选的装束是为了表明:我不是农民,也不是乡下人。不再是了。

    他拉着手提箱穿过他和其他农民工居住的临时工棚。春节假期结束后,他将回到微软新大楼的建筑工地工作。那时,他的住所将不存在了,消失在迅速发展的北京一轮轮中产阶级化进程中。但他此刻没有想这些,因为这是即将结束的一年的事。

    这一天,李广强将踏上回家的旅程。这是世界上规模最大的人口迁移:每年,成百上千万工人离开大城市和工业中心返乡。这宝贵的几天是一年中人们最期盼的日子:这是休息以及为了生计痛苦分离的家人团聚的少有机会。

    1995年李广强刚到北京时,他打算只在北京待几年。他想赚些钱后回家。但现在,他不仅对赚钱着迷,也对城市本身着迷。他说他的村庄单调乏味。他声称:“我要在北京待到50岁。”

    几个小时过去了,李乘坐的大巴车驶过到处是中国快速增长象征的乡间道路。李第一个下了车。他的家看起来灰暗陈旧。他穿过院子走进客厅。他粗声喊道:“嘿,出来!”

    他的妻子害羞地低着头,从门帘后慢慢走出来。她只有39岁,但看上去比她在城市生活的丈夫要老很多。李不耐烦地看了妻子一眼。他们13岁的儿子从院子跑进来。父亲和儿子似乎都不好意思进行目光接触,更不用说拥抱了。但邻居纷纷前来欢迎李回家的声音打破了尴尬的时刻。他终于回家了。

    李楼村(音)有160名村民,3台电脑和一辆汽车。村里有两条主路；十字路口有两家普通的商店、一家化肥店和一个小餐馆。村里没有自来水,10年前才通电。

    村民的大部分收入是农民工打工挣来的。大约40%的村民离家加入中国城市劳动大军的行列。农民工的收入使村里的茅草屋变成了砖瓦房。人们骄傲地炫耀自己家的电视机、洗衣机和电冰箱；人人都知道谁家有什么,价格多少。

    在一年中的大部分时间里,这些小村庄像鬼村,年轻人和身强力壮者都外出打工。但在两周的假期中,李楼村看起来又恢复了原样。在飞逝的春节期间,人人都拥有一切。可这并不持久,有时距离导致的裂痕开始显现。

    李广强的儿女成长的过程中父亲不在身边。他和孩子们在一起时似乎感到不自在,他嘲笑妻子给他们取了农村人的土名字。李的儿子经常逃学。让老师气愤的是,他把头发染成了红色。他的成绩很差；几年后,他很可能和父亲一样到大城市打工。

    他15岁的女儿身材高挑,喜欢空想。她的学习成绩比弟弟好,还帮助妈妈做家务。她渴望冒险,梦想着成为遥远的繁华都市里的工厂女工。她说:“我总是想外面的世界比村里好。”

    自从回家后,李一直与儿子一起睡,而不是妻子孙凤枝(音)。他经常走亲访友。他穿着漂亮的城市衣服,尽管家人和他说方言,但他固执地用普通话回答。

    李在院子里时,孙凤枝讲述了她忧郁的家庭生活。她平静地说:“他走了,所有的事情都得我来料理。对我来说真的很难。我得自己照顾孩子。我得既当爹又当妈。”

    一个邻居悄悄走出来对李说:你老婆在对外人说你呢!李冲进屋子。他对妻子大吼:“别那么多抱怨!”

    儿子只有两岁时,孙凤枝当过一段时间打工妹。她把孩子留给自己的父母照顾,在青岛一家DVD工厂找到了工作。那段日子很快乐。但她的儿子变得越来越任性；没人管得了他。6个月后,她回到家里。

    春节的大部分时间里,李广强都在家里忙着修这修那:井里坏了的抽水机,房顶上松了的瓦片。假期很快将结束,李和其他农民工将回到他们不称为家的地方。