China is a vast country, brimming with diverse people, culture and experiences. I grew up in New York with Chinese parents who did everything they could to instil in me a deep appreciation for my heritage: celebrating Chinese New Year with gusto and bravado, and regaling me with stories based on longstanding traditions. But even with my background and upbringing, I’m still learning new things about China and its people every single day.
Despite the images of towering skyscrapers, smog and booming industry, China as a whole is a largely agricultural nation. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, about 45 per cent of its almost 1.4 billion inhabitants are still considered to be living in rural areas. In 2010 a lack of rainfall in China’s Northern, North-Eastern and Central provinces meant that farmers had to rely heavily on irrigation or risk losing their crops. At the time newspaper headlines proclaimed that this was the ‘worst drought in 50 years’. But just a few years later, the region would once again be crippled by a water crisis that would have villagers and city-dwellers alike struggling to find water for their day-to-day needs.
In 2014 this region, known as China’s ‘Northern Breadbasket’, suffered an even worse drought, devastating harvests throughout the provinces of Sichuan, Shanxi, Beijing Municipality, Hubei, Shandong, Inner Mongolia, Jilin, Liaoning, Shaanxi, Fujian in the south and Shaozhen’s home province of Henan. Without water, people’s livelihoods were in great peril. China Daily reported that the drought had affected over 4 million hectares of farmland, that an estimated 35 per cent of Henan Province’s small reservoirs had completely dried up, and that half of the small- and medium-sized rivers that were essential for irrigation had stopped flowing.
Of course, the impact of the water shortages on actual families is more complex than can be presented in charts and figures. As I started looking into Shaozhen’s story, which began as an investigation into the effect of the drought, I came across more and more startling information about the empty villages in China’s countryside. These villages had almost no residents of working age and were inhabited largely by the elderly and children – children who were ‘left behind’ to be raised by their grandparents while their parents sought work in the city. In a country where rules of mobility and residency are determined by hukou, many migrant workers found they could not take their children into the cities without the right permits. In the cities, their village offspring would be denied medical treatment and education, all of which were tied to the residency system. As farming life became more and more difficult, children were increasingly ‘left behind’. And with the demanding and gruelling schedules that most migrant workers were forced to keep, many children only saw their parents once a year, during Chinese New Year.
Reading some of these ‘left-behind’ children’s devastating stories broke my heart, but it also gave me plenty of room to explore the tenacity and resilience of the younger generation. Shaozhen and his friends learn to rely on each other. What’s more, they realise that by taking on some of the roles and responsibilities of the absent adults they can effect change and have a positive impact on their community. While the characters, along with the village of Hongsha and the township of Xifeng, are fictional, the experiences are real. Left-behind children are doing their best to find their way in an adult world without their parents to guide them.
In the non-fictional world of things, China’s landscape is rapidly changing. While the cities find themselves unable to support the influx of migrant workers from rural areas, the government continues constructing new cities and urban developments throughout China’s rural heartland at an incredible rate. In researching and writing Shaozhen, I was stunned by how different today’s China is, compared to the one my parents emigrated from so many years ago. The impact of modernisation on China’s agricultural backbone is staggering and its final effects, good or bad, are still to be determined. But if there’s one thing my parents have always said about our homeland and ancestry it’s that given the country’s turbulent and colourful past, the Chinese people always adapt to change.