From Ginseng to Gears (Chapters 2-4)

February 10, 2025:

Mr. Hu (Brother Hu), driving me through the streets of Shenzhen in the evening.

The Collapse

When the pandemic hit in 2019, it tore through his line of work like blight through a harvest.

“It came outta nowhere,” he said, voice suddenly higher, almost forced. “Our team disbanded. Boom. Done.”

No supply chain. No store traffic. No shelf training. No demand.

“Everyone was home, locked in. Pharmacies became ghost towns. What of the people who still had jobs? They weren’t spending on supplements. They were saving every yuan they had. People who are concerned about survival don’t pay attention or money to ginseng. We went from planning quarterly targets to sitting in the dark wondering what to do next.”

He went back to his apartment. Stayed there.

“I sat there. I lied in my bed. Days, weeks. Like I had been back in the Northeast. Then months. I watched the city go quiet. Like someone turned off the switch.”

When Shenzhen lifted restrictions in 2022, he emerged blinking into a world that no longer had a place for the ginseng sales manager he’d been.

A Family Redrawn

“The thing was, my wife and daughter had come down by then,” he said. “My girl graduated college in 2021. Took the high-speed train—8 a.m.—straight to Shenzhen.”

His voice warmed at the mention of his daughter. She had thrived in the city that had exiled him.

“She transferred her hukou registration to Shenzhen,” he said, proud and bitter all at once. “She got the urban residency. Because of her degree, she got a subsidy too—fifteen thousand. Maybe sixteen. She’s officially a Shenzhen person now.”

He, despite having arrived earlier and having worked years in this city, was not.

“I’ve never had Shenzhen hukou,” he said. “Never qualified. Big cities don’t give it easy.”

A Wall with a Welcome Sign

It’s impossible to understand his story without understanding the significance of the hukou, China’s household registration system. Instituted in the 1950s, the hukou binds every Chinese citizen to a registered locality, categorizing them as either rural or urban. Originally designed as a tool for population control and resource distribution, hukou today determines where a person can legally access public education, healthcare, housing subsidies, and even employment opportunities. A hukou system essentially acts like a visa, or permanent residence card, except one for a person’s birthplace.

For decades, rural migrants like him built the cities they couldn’t fully belong to. In the late 20th century, they poured concrete into the bones of metropolises but were shut out of their schools and deported from apartments. They worked twelve-hour shifts in factories yet remained foreigners on paper. In Shenzhen, a city that blossomed from a fishing village into a megacity in less than four decades, the hukou is more than a bureaucratic formality—it’s a gate.

“My daughter, she got hers easily,” he said, voice solid and grounded with pride, perhaps admiration. “Because she had a degree. Shenzhen wants talent. College students get a subsidy—fifteen, sixteen thousand. You know, they’re considered ‘human capital.’”

He used the term with a knowing smirk.

“I’ve worked longer than she’s been alive,” he continued. “But my work isn’t considered talent. Talent, by the way, is seen as something quantifiable, with a hard, fixed cutoff line. I’m not part of a quota. I’m not data.”

In fact, the city’s “talent recruitment” policy has been one of the boldest in China. In the past decade, Shenzhen launched various incentive packages to attract college graduates, scientists, and entrepreneurs—offering them not just subsidies but also streamlined hukou access, housing discounts, and even bonus points for children’s public school placements. But it created a hierarchy within the migrant population: a new class of urbanites who arrived late but were welcomed early.

“Back in the day, they wanted our hands,” he said. “Now they want our brains.”

“My daughter thinks differently, She grew up with books, with the internet. With the idea that cities are the future.”

He recounted how she majored in computer science, landed an internship at a startup in Nanshan, and then transferred her hukou to Shenzhen within months of graduating. “She knows how to talk to HR. Knows how to upload documents to a government app. I can’t even figure out half of all the Apps and WeChat mini-Apps for getting and renewing my taxi driver certificates. We need a ton of certificates.”

His daughter belonged to a China that spoke the language of subsidies and policy optimization. He came from a China of handshake deals, cash settlements, and face-to-face negotiation. “People from the Northeast are famous for being good drinkers, and that’s how I striked many of my ginseng deals. You gotta go to the dinner table to meet managers, to get close to their procurement department, so they feel like handing you a deal—a favorable one, ideally. Then after the deal’s closed, you gotta buy them another meal to thank them, right? I can drink a lot more than the managers here in the South, so I was very good at it, you know. Some of the bosses in Guangdong don’t drink at all, and then you’ve got to meet them in a teahouse. It’s very different from my hometown. If you don’t drink, you can’t close a single deal in the Northeast.”

“My daughter doesn’t drink; she hates it when I drink as well. She says it’s unhealthy, and calls it a waste of money. She tells me to invest. I tell her, ‘Girl, I’m just trying to make today’s rent.’”

At home, they lived in parallel rhythms. She worked 9-to-9 at a tech company. He drove mostly from noon to evening and on weekends, catching the commuter crowd or those who’d missed the last subway. They rarely had dinner together, but when they did, he said, they didn't have much to talk about.

“She says I’m too nostalgic,” he laughed. “Says I act like Dongbei was heaven. Maybe she’s right. But isn’t that what parents do? Remember the best of where we came from, so our kids can forget the worst? What’s the point of getting stuck over the worst?”

He didn’t like to talk about the worst. Not because he hadn’t experienced it, but because, as he put it, “我们那代人，吃苦是常态。(For our generation, hardship is just normal.)”

He’d seen people cry over lost pensions, or the homeless getting chased away from under the bridge. He sees gleaming skyscrapers in the CBD and overcrowded, shoddily constructed 城中村 (Cheng zhong cun, “villages within cities,” neighborhoods housing primarily migrant workers, reminiscent of tenements in American inner cities). “The point wasn’t to complain,” he said.