Building Dreams, Bearing Scars (Chapters 0-2)

May 25th, 2025:

Uncle He (second from the left) and I (third from the left), at Futian Disability Center's reception area

The Legal Consultation Room at the Shenzhen Comprehensive Service Center for the Disabled sat on the ground floor of a big but unassuming complex in Futian District. At 9a.m., a handful of social workers, lawyers, and doctors passed through its small parking lot, sipping coffee while heading towards the front door. A quarter of an hour later, a tall man with a crutch arrived pushing a wheelchair, his faded grey sleeveless top out of tune with a pair of black wide-leg trousers. A social worker settled him into the chair with careful diligence, and it was then that I saw his prosthetic leg beneath the fluttering chino.

His voice had been here long before he did. In fact, he had called the Legal Consultation Room six times over the past two weeks, asking the same question: Is there a way for him to secure the documents that will transfer his mother’s apartment into his name? Time and again, the answer looped back to the same catch-22: his older brother, who holds the physical deed, refused to hand it over. This morning, the man—Uncle He—brought fresh medical records and a typed note of his mother. He gripped the wheelchair’s armrests, and asked the same question for the seventh time.

“Yeah, I know we’ve had this conversation six times already,” his voice was plain and steady. “Each time I hoped the answer would be different. Perhaps there is another way out.” In the Service Center’s large and empty hall, his decades-long journey of hope and misfortune converges. From muddy rice paddies in rural Henan to Shenzhen’s clattering assembly lines, from blistering construction sites to the quiet hospital ward, Uncle He now sits at the Consultation Room’s threshold, perhaps the final barrier between him and the home his mother saved a lifetime to provide.

Uncle He walked a well-trodden path. His story is the accumulated history of China’s first-generation migrant workers, whose dreams of fulfilling filial duty and forging a stable future collided with the realities of industrial workplace injury, inadequate legal protections, and fractured family bonds. Yet the persistence that shines through his unwavering visits to the Center echoes something uniquely essential about the migrant city of Shenzhen: its promise of inclusivity and modernity, tempered by its unrelenting strive for efficiency.

Uncle He straightened as the volunteer lawyer stepped into the room. He had rehearsed his case countless times, and over the calls the lawyer had come to understand his situation as well as he did. Today, after two weeks of calling and many more floundering, he must finally walk—or roll—through the last threshold. The door of the apartment his mother and him had worked so long to purchase, was opening up to him. And with it, the reckoning of all he had sacrificed over more than five decades.

Seeded in the Fields

Uncle He’s earliest memories were drenched in scorching sun rays and earthy dampness. Born in a small village in Henan Province, he mastered the skills of planting rice seedlings before he learned to tie his shoes. “Back then in the village, rarely did any kids wear shoes. And when they did, the shoes were white cloth shoes simple and monotonous in their colors and designs and everything. Rarely did these shoes have shoelaces.” Growing up, the image of rustic life was etched deep in his mind: his father’s worn straw hat casting a moving shadow in the paddy fields, his mother’s calloused hands hardened while making baskets out of millet straws. “In our village,” he recalls, “we all depended on the fields. The fields were either everything or nothing. We failed if the rain failed.”

He was in his teenage years when he first heard of a place called Shenzhen. Returnees from the South carried cash and stories. They boasted of the beach and ocean, of city lights and asphalt roads, thick bills dangling from their sweaty palms. “They bragged and boasted on and on about the sea: how big and beautiful and blue it is. And about the work they secured, which paid them more in a month than one could possibly earn in a year in the nearby town. And there’s so much more. Roads full of cars. Skyscrapers, still in construction, reaching toward the clouds. The scenes were unbelievable back then.” For Uncle Liu, the exotic prospect of modernity was unimagined and unimaginable. And it soon proved intoxicating.

Catching snippets of the returnee’s narratives, Uncle Liu began to carve out Shenzhen’s cityscape in his imagination. “There’s the Guomao building, propping up a huge disk-like ceramic plate at the very top. I thought it was there to collect rainwater from heaven. Then there’s Mt. Huaguo (known as Mt. Lianhua today), like a big, green pyramid…Now that I’m used to Shenzhen, they don’t seem anywhere close to being impressive. But back then it was eye-opening, and it attracted me so intensely.”

Not only was the cityscape attractive; Shenzhen presented equally alluring economic opportunities. “I wished I could’ve been among the returnees I saw, wearing new leather shoes and mechanical watches, holding stacks of cash in hand. I yearned for a chance to work in Shenzhen. Back then, all I wanted was to earn enough to build a solid brick home back in the village, so I can house my parents, marry a wife, and raise children. A big house was all you need for a successful rustic life; it’s a symbol of wealth and stability that attracts girls and their parents alike, and parental approval was perhaps the single most important thing for a marriage,” he recounted. “So when the next wave of returnees departed for Shenzhen again, I packed my stuff in a large plastic bag and followed. I thought I’d return in a harvest season or two.” But the triumphant return trips never came. Year after year, he harvested wages in place of rice, his savings dissipating into the cost of survival.

According to the annually-published China Statistical Manuals, at the turn of the 21st century, some 50 to 80 million rural residents flooded into towns and cities, gravitating towards the promise of higher wages. Many of them were first-generation migrant workers, the backbone of Shenzhen’s rapid ascent from a small fishing village on China’s periphery to a manufacturing powerhouse central to the nation’s economy at the dawn of Reform and Opening Up. Yet, the early years in which China transitioned into a free market urban economy were characterized by incomplete labor protection, inadequate municipal regulations, and rampant nativist backlash. Migrant workers were stigmatized in newspapers and forcefully deported en masse. The Hukou system blocked newcomers from accessing public goods. Employers weren’t required to pay into employees’ social insurance. The current Labor Law wasn’t instituted until the 21st century. Denied protection and inclusion, for every rags-to-riches story, thousands more struggled in cramped rooms in urban villages, without access to social or medical insurance, vulnerable to wage theft and grueling schedules.

Uncle He’s childhood dreams echo the historic themes of rural disenfranchisement and filial piety. He spoke of his mother’s soft and slender hands, knotted and hardened over decades of farm work. “When I left,” he recalled, “she clenched my hands and joked with trepidated hope and encouragement: ‘Don’t forget your parents when you become the big boss from the South. I’m waiting for you to make a life for us.’” Uncle He made a dual promise of duty and escape, one that went on to guide him into factories and beyond for the next three decades of his life.

Factory’s Pay and Flexibility’s Cost

It was early spring of 1992. At age nineteen, Uncle He stepped off the Green-skinned train at Shenzhen Station, a single plastic bag hanging on his slender but masculine shoulder. The city’s skyline glittered with half-built towers and raucous construction sites. But cranes or scaffolds were not where he was headed. Introduced by fellow migrant workers from Henan, he worked his first jobs behind rows of humming machinery, in factories that transformed metals into phones, and textile into clothing, bound for European and American markets.

“I did whatever they told me to,” he recalled plainly, “everything from molding, screwing, packing, trimming. With fellow Henan workers, I jumped between different tasks and factories, mostly electronics and textile. So I moved and was moved time and again and barely learned a single skill.” He was first assigned to a plastic component line in a small electronics plant in Shekou Industrial Zone. “I started with a monthly wage of four or five hundred [RMB]. Back then it was unbelievable. In the 1990s in the town beside my Henan village, the richest people earned less than 50 [RMB] per month, and any monthly pay above 10 meant prosperity. And all of a sudden, I’m promised many times that number.”

Not every promise materialized. “That was the standard basic wage. You can earn more working overtime, or less by getting fined by your line supervisor. My wage got deducted for missing quotas or producing defective pieces, for so-called ‘quality control’ purposes. But overall in the 90s, the pay was solid and nobody dared to be too harsh, since every factory was looking for workers back then. When I can’t take it anymore, I switch jobs.”

By the turn of the century, Uncle He had cycled through well over ten factories and even more assembly lines. One month would find him soldering circuit boards; the following, tightening bolts on calculator casings; the next, trimming textile threads from dresses. With each reassignment came a new dormitory bunk, a new public shower room, and a new set of rules. “It was a time of abundance. All of a sudden I had so many choices and earned so much, and I felt that I had to do something with my money.” With this conviction, his savings soon melted into spendings: hanging out with friends he made at cybercafes and BBQ restaurants became his favorite.

National data from annual Statistical Manuals documented Shenzhen’s prospects of abundance. At a time when workers in the capital city of Beijing earned 221.08 RMB per month on average, factory workers in Shenzhen commonly earned twice or three times this number. Stories of diligent migrant workers earning over 1000RMB per month in overtime pay abounded. Notwithstanding alluring economic opportunities, many newcomers were labeled with the stigmatized title of the “Three Without” in the thousands: without local Hukou documents, without a stable place of residence, without a formal source of employment, situations more than common for new migrant workers. These unfortunate individuals often found themself treated as criminals during “Strike Hard Against Crimes” campaigns and deported in line with Custody and Repatriation policies. Only those that survived and stayed had the chance to prosper. But even then, prosperity came at a cost.

Uncle He still remembered the searing heat of midsummer 2003. Temperatures soared above 39°C. Humidity turned the factory floor into a steam bath. “There were a few fans hanging on the ceiling, but the boss didn’t install extra ones,” he recalled. “Metal gets colder than air when the air is cold, and hotter when the air is hot. We all stood at our stations, soaked in sweat, metal pieces, hot and hard, pressing against my hands like steam irons. But the line kept going. Those near the start of the line are paid per item, and those near the bottom are paid per hour. So the guys at the start worked ferociously for higher pay, and that meant more work for us down the line. We can’t stop, or else we couldn’t keep up with the pace by which stuff is churned out at the top of the line. You lose the line, you lose the job.” Shenzhen’s industrial boom was built upon a remorseless turnover: though workers can choose between employers, they were no more than one in the hundreds of thousands of workers who arrive after Chinese New Year each and every year, only to create a disposable labor pool that cycles through factories.

Uncle He also witnessed how Shenzhen’s relentless pace went through boom-and-bust cycles, propped up and weighted down by international demand. The SARS outbreak that struck in 2003 led export growth to plummet across Guangdong Province, triggering lay-offs. “I had a full shift the day before I was told to go home. We had very little explanation or severance,” he recalled. Abrupt dismissals like this were made illegal by the 2008 Labor Law, but prior to its enactment, labor protection for migrant workers was severely limited. For many like Uncle He, the only practical recourse was to hop onto the next factory, perpetuating a cycle of precarious employment. 

The year following, after nearly twelve years in plants that spanned Shenzhen’s evolving, migrating industrial belt, Uncle He first felt his body protest. Repetitive strain injuries intruded on sleep. His factory issued health checks, but they were at best cursory and focused primarily on infectious diseases to the neglect of musculoskeletal problems. Unpaid sick leaves eroded his wages and attracted resentment from his line manager. “He told me many times, ‘if you can’t do this job, then don’t do it. Leave it to the guys waiting in line for this job.’” The door to unemployment was wide open.

Over the years, Shenzhen’s factories gradually shifted toward automation, with robotic arms and smart suspension systems replacing assemblers. The swelling workforce engendered by unprecedented urbanization offered alternatives for physical labor. Uncle He, and other first-generation migrant workers who switched jobs frequently like him, faced obsolescence in the absence of a specialized skill or a documented claim to seniority. He had been sending money back to his parents, but it was around that time that he first considered returning home himself.

In this period of uncertainty, a friend’s brother-in-law introduced Uncle He to a hardware factory in Longgang, with overtime and an easier line. “My task was to file and polish metal studs. It took more steps from start to finish. It was finer work with slower pace, one that not every newcomer to the factory could handle, and so presented slightly higher pay. I, by the way, got that position only because of my friend’s guanxi [personal connections].” But that reprieve proved fragile. By 2010, the economic downturn had forced many of the factory’s buyers in Southern and Eastern Europe to cancel orders, and he found himself swept out of the factory gate again. “That was the second time I felt so uncertain about my situation,” he shrugged. “Looking back, I’ve unexpectedly spent almost two decades in Shenzhen, so much longer than what I had in mind. And at that time, I felt I was left with nothing. I had no job. I wasn’t rich. I wasn’t in good health: my joints ached from work, and I coughed frequently.” Uncle He found himself, again, at a crossroads.

When the lights turned green, Uncle He turned toward construction. “A lot of the factories I knew were closing, or moving to escape rising rents, or forced to move for demolition and renewal. As a whole, they fired more, employed less, and wages did not grow as much as they had. But some Henan folks told me that construction sites still had abundant opportunities.” Construction work was notorious for its physical demands and harsh working conditions, but presented higher day rates and less stringent workplace rules. Soon, Uncle He embarked on a journey that, ironically, heralded both cash and ruin.