When we get to the finale of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company‘s original production China in Transition: Animal Folklore to City Life, you might be wondering if we forgot our costumes – why after a stunning display of the dazzling, colorful costumes from China that our audiences often gush about, we’d choose to end the production in street clothes. (And poor people’s unfashionable ones, at that.)
Our finale “Migrant Workers Go to the City” is an award-winning contemporary Chinese dance piece by Northeast Normal University that made a big splash in China in 2007. It comically and poignantly brings to light the joys and sorrows of the 253 million Chinese migrant workers who have left the countryside with little more than a checkered vinyl bag to seek a better life in the city – the largest mass migration in human history.
I still remember watching the piece in my living room last year. Towards the end of the piece, the famously frantic “Flight of the Bumblebee” music (a curious choice for Chinese dance, I know!) ends abruptly and the dancers look like they are frozen in time. A folksy Chinese song finally breaks the silence, and inexplicably I can’t keep it together. Tears start flowing from my eyes, and I know immediately that I want to set this piece on the company. (In an uncanny coincidence, [Atlanta Chinese Dance Company Artistic Director] Ms. Lee found the Chinese folk dance piece “Paper Airplane Letters” about the migrant workers’ children just a few days letter. Left-behind in the countryside while their parents look for work in faraway cities, their innocent longing brought us both to tears — and we knew we had the last two pieces of the production set.)
I’ve thought a lot about why “Migrant Workers Go to the City” spoke to me the way it did – why it prompted a visceral reaction from an American born, suburban Atlanta raised Chinese, worlds away from the subject. Even though I couldn’t make out the words of the folksy Chinese song until I got a hold of the lyrics much later, there was a strange familiarity in the complex emotions behind the impassioned stares in that silent moment. Homesickness. Injustice. (Failed) Expectations. Camaraderie. Willpower. Perseverance. Hope. It’s like, “I fought so hard, traveled so far, for this? You want me to do what?!” And then realizing that it’s my best option and sucking it up and doing it anyway, because I believe – I believe that it will get me where I want to be one day. It goes without saying that my life in no way resembles that of a migrant worker, but almost every line of the song seems like it was written about my own life here in America — especially the tumultuous years of my early 20s fighting my way into the professional dance world in New York City.
It’s a universal desire to live a prosperous life – to make something of oneself, to lay the groundwork for a better future for the next generation. The journey, of course, is vastly different. As the book Scattered Sand by Hsiao-Hung Pai so poetically illustrates, Chinese migrant workers are scattered throughout the globe — from the capital city of Beijing, to the mines of the Yellow River Basin, to the factories of Shenzhen (home to Apple supplier Foxconn’s largest factory), and even abroad in Russia, Great Britain, and the United States. For more than two years I lived among them on East Broadway in Manhattan Chinatown, home to workers from China’s Fujian province. I didn’t know this until I started doing research on this piece, but I used to live right across the street from what once was the headquarters of snakehead Sister Ping — the infamous villain/hero who helped thousands of Chinese migrants enter the US in urine-stenched cargo containers that journeyed by sea for twice as long as the Mayflower did, some 300+ years later (between 1984 to 2000). Sister Ping’s family owns the restaurant that still stands at 47 East Broadway today, and its flashing LED sign told me the time and outside temperature whenever I looked out my window — which was multiple times a day, every single day. But I had no idea of its history, blissfully ignorant of the hardships endured by the people I bumped elbows with on the street everyday.
Our production focuses on the workers who migrated within China by train over the past few decades. Their decision to leave their children in the countryside seems so heartless, especially when voiced by an eleven year-old child in a paper airplane letter she hopes will reach her parents in the city. But unable to find enough work nearby and fearing that their children cannot enroll in public schools or have access to healthcare in the city (thanks to China’s “hukou,” or household registration, system), they find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. Sometimes they’re taken advantage of with unpaid wages and inhumane working conditions, looked down upon by “real” city folk as the lowest rung of society. Always, there are blood, sweat, and tears.
But it’s their will to go on — their belief that if they endure the intolerable, life will be better for their children, and their children’s children — that I carry in my heart everyday. I think back to an eighth grade girl I met when I worked at Chen Dance Center in Manhattan Chinatown — born in America, returned to her grandparents in Fujian as an infant until she could go to school so that her parents could work without having to take care of her. I used to chat with her in the hallway as she waited for her little sister to finish dance class. Often she’d be carrying the groceries she’d just bought for her family and talk to her little sister, just a few years younger, as if she were her mother. I remember the day she told me she got into Brooklyn Tech, one of New York City’s elite magnet high schools with admission rates as low as the Ivy League. I never got to know the girl’s parents, but I like to imagine that the prospect of this very achievement was what kept them going everyday in a mind-numbing, dead-end job thousands of miles away from home — away from their very own daughter for the first few years of her life.
“Migrant Workers Go to the City” won’t have the same extravagance that ACDC’s previous finales have been known for — there are no long sleeves, no ribbons, no fans. To be completely honest, the prospect of setting this piece scared Ms. Lee and me to death. (It still does.) We imagine that some people may feel it’s devoid of beauty. But is there anything more beautiful than the resilience of the human spirit and the universality of our dreams? Not in my book. Cheers to looking beyond the surface and into the depths of humanity!
Atlanta Chinese Dance Company performs “Migrant Workers Go to the City” as the finale of our original production China in Transition: Animal Folklore to City Life on September 24-25, 2016 at the Infinite Energy Theater in Duluth, GA. Purchase tickets here.
Photo of the Atlanta Chinese Dance Company by Stephanie Gough.