It was with great pain that Spring Grass parted with Richie at Mungsville to go to the city to work in the novel Spring Grass. She has left behind one of her children as she migrated to the city, not to see him again for a couple of years. Richie is not alone in his predicament; he is just one of tens of millions of left-behind children in rural China. The number of left-behind children has been ever-growing since the beginning of the economic leap that prompted many families to migrate into the city in search of employment. Barely able to accommodate themselves in the city, many migrant parents left their children behind in their hometown as they left for work and the promising economic prospects of the city. Even though most parents would migrate with the goal of providing for their children and supporting their future, the social conditions that drove them to this decision and the lack of care from the government makes it impossible for the majority of the children to have a bright future in front of them, left to be a generation of lost children.
First and foremost, the effect of the lack of a parent in the early life of a child has on their emotional and psychological development is the single biggest factor and is at the root of all the subsequent conclusions. Many psychological studies conclude that the role of the parent in the early years of life is irreplaceable and its absence has long-lasting adverse effects. Children growing up with absent parents perform significantly worse across emotional, social, and academic domains compared to children growing up with their parents (Tong 2019). Many parents leave off to the city looking for work to better provide their families back home, to better feed and support their children economically. However, is the cost of leaving their children behind made up for by their earnings in the city? In 2015, in Bijie, 4 siblings of age 5 to 14 were found dead after drinking poison with a note that read, “Thanks for your kindness. I know you mean well for us, but we should go now” (Miller 2015). The parent has been providing them with food and money to take care of themselves, but that was not enough for their wellbeing (Wang 2015). The absence of parental figures and living alone might’ve been a major reason that drove their decision. Yet suicide is definitely not such a simple event as to only be linked to a single cause. There were many other apparent factors such as negligence from the government for children’s mental health and also the presence of domestic abuse from the father. Unfortunately, the tragedy in Bijie was not unique. Many more children face these kinds of extreme decisions in their parents’ absence. The psychological harm of their absence is thus exacerbated by a lack of care from the governmental and educational institutions for their mental and physical wellbeing, in spite of knowing how widespread the LBC problem is.
In extreme cases, the children are left behind to fend for themselves, but most of them are left in the care of their grandparents similar to Spring Grass leaving Richie with her parents. Even though separation was not a foreign concept to the Chinese family, it has never been to this extent and this desperate. Most of the time, fathers would leave the household to work for long time periods and provide for the family. However, seeing that how both parents are leaving the countryside to work in the cities shows the stakes they’ve been pitched against. As seen from Robbie’s struggles to keep his factory operational against the constant demands and extortions, the corruption of the local authorities didn’t provide many opportunities for the locals to make money and gain prosperity. Coupled with the state’s need for cheap labour in the factories in cities leading to their inaction on the issue, it didn’t leave the parents many choices but to follow through. Thus, they left their children behind with their relatives to go out and work. They bagged their hopes and desperations over their shoulders and set off.
The parents hope that even if they can’t save themselves from this kind of hard life, they can work hard in the city to save their children from following through in their desperate steps. Most of the hope was banked on the children’s academic success, as that is the clearest way out of the harsh conditions they face into prosperity. However, it is not so easy for the carp to jump over the dragon gate.
In the absence of the parents in the household, their responsibilities are taken up by the children. Especially the older children become the parent figures to their siblings. They start caring for themselves and their siblings in addition to the household chores. If they’re living in a farming household, they also have to help with the fieldwork that would be taken care of by the parents. All these added responsibilities take away from the time the children could be focusing on their academics. However, it is not fair to put all their burdens on the absence of their parents. The lacklustre state of the rural education system is also to blame for the academic disinterest and low success rates of the children. Scattered throughout the rural landscape many children sometimes take hours to walk to their school. These are hours they could’ve spent studying, working, or taking care of the household. Facing all these hardships on top of the lack of parents to offer emotional and physical support through their academic journey, it is significantly harder for them to succeed compared to the children in the cities. Hence, against their parents’ wishes and hopes, they grow disinterested and jaded of academics. In most cases, they barely complete their compulsory education before leaving to work in the city, like the girl from Last Train Home, at the age of 15 following the footsteps of their parents. This created a constant cycle of migration from generation to generation, with the younger ones carrying the additional emotional trauma of their absent parents in their baggage on the way to the city. The parents are thus unable to break their children free of the fate they themselves faced and lived through. They failed the most fundamental reason that drove them into the city, away from their children, in the first place, and reunited with them by the conveyor belts that separated them for years.
The economic growth spurred by the years of cheap and abundant labour the migrant parents offered in the factories of China seems negligible compared to the social fallout that is the left-behind children. About a third of all the children aged 18 and below in China belong to migrant families. These children grow up in unstable environments and absent parents leading to social and emotional trauma. Even if they went with their parents into the city, proper education remains highly inaccessible to them. This means that a large proportion of the next generation is going into the society severely lacking in education, emotional, and social development. This comes as a potential threat to all the progress and social modernisation efforts of the past years. In the years when the ageing population has overtaken the children for the first time, the quality of their upbringing and education matters more than ever before (Chi 2017). In focusing exclusively on the growth of their national GDP, the government has severely neglected the social welfare of its people. Their policies that caused the migrant parent phenomenon, made no effort to care for its fallout. The numbers took precedence over the people that they represented, a sorrow that many other societies across the world have been and are still facing.
In conclusion, left with no other option the migrant parents who leave to provide a better future for their children ultimately fail in their hopes and goals. They become involuntary cogs in a machine that churns out generation after generation of migrants, stuck in a cycle that they themselves cannot break out of. Their separation was a necessity of the times forced onto the entirety of the rural Chinese society by the government policies and the economic demands. In the stage of globalism, China is not alone. Many families migrate great distances in a search to provide a better future for their children. What China and the world faces today is just the never-ending sorrow of human displacement on the most epic scale.
Works Cited
Chi, Dehua. Debate on solutions for Chinese left-behind children . 1 June 2017. April 2021. <https://findchina.info/debate-solutions-chinese-left-behind-children>.
Last Train Home. Dir. Lixin Fan. 2009. Documentary.
Miller, Michael E. The heartbreaking reason four Chinese siblings drank poison and died. 15 June 2015. 5 April 2021. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/15/the-heartbreaking-reason-four-chinese-siblings-drank-poison-and-died/>.
Tong L, Yan Q, Kawachi I. 2019. The factors associated with being left- behind children in China: Multilevel analysis with nationally representative data. PLoS ONE 14 (11): e0224205. <https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224205>
Wang, Xiaodong. “Deaths ‘expose plight of left-behind children’.” 12 June 2015. China Daily. 5 April 2021.