Quotes of the Day

For the first 20 minutes of her new life in Shenzhen, Mo Yunxiu stood perfectly still. Behind her, sleeper coaches rolled groaning into the city's crowded bus depot. Ahead stretched a tangle of freeways already teeming at 10 a.m. on a Sunday. A plastic bag containing a package of sour plums, a water bottle and the remains of a loaf of sliced bread—snacks left over from the overnight ride—hung from her left wrist. Her right hand gripped the handle of a small suitcase on wheels, and she leaned against it stiffly as if for support. It was a bright morning, and Mo squinted as she fastened her eyes on the traffic racing past her.

Mo said nothing but it was clear she had a lot on her mind. She was 17 years old, and farther from her farm in Guangxi province than she'd ever been. She knew no one in Shenzhen, and had nowhere specific to go. This was a place she'd dreamed about. She had seen pictures of Shenzhen's high-tech factories on television, and she pictured herself working in one, wearing a smart uniform and making a good salary. But her dream had left out the scenes between the arrival of her bus and her arrival in paradise.

At last, for no discernible reason, Mo moved. Dragging her suitcase, she walked uncertainly and very quietly asked a policeman for directions to the nearest bus stop. There, she stood silently again for 20 minutes, looking at the buses come and go and wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. Finally, she asked a stranger where to find a cheap place to stay. Within minutes Mo was back on a bus, pressing her face to the window, watching the sprawl of her new home slip by.

Our arrival in Shenzhen had been fraught with anticipation: for Mo because she had so much riding on this journey; for me because I was writing about what would happen to her. I'd told Chinese friends that I wanted to find a country girl lured from home by the promise of the city. My curiosity was only partly professional. I'd written often about China's 100 million-strong floating population and wanted to see firsthand how migrants like Mo start from scratch in a new place. But I was also curious about how that journey might feel. My father's parents and my mother's grandparents had migrated to New York from Europe when they were not much older than Mo, and I had often wondered what it was like for them after they stepped off the boat.

Mo had been introduced to me by her cousin, a successful, self-made tour guide in Yangshuo, a vacation spot on the Li River about 640 km from Shenzhen. When I met Mo, I thought she was all wrong. I wanted a typical migrant—whatever that meant—and Mo had tinted hair and stylish, bleach-striped jeans. After a three-month stay with her cousin—living among tourists and backpackers—she already seemed a bit worldly.

Mo had been one of the best students in her middle school, but high school cost $500 a year—nearly seven times her farmer family's annual income. If she got a decent job in Shenzhen, she figured, she could save enough money in a year or two to attend a vocational school and learn a skill, like computer programming or English, which in turn could get her a better job. She wanted to build a new house for her parents and, if she had money left over, treat herself to "one of those tape recorders, the kind with the earphones that you can listen to in bed before you fall asleep." She believed Shenzhen had the power to change her life.

I was impressed by Mo's determination—and by her courage. She had only $100 when she boarded the bus in Yangshuo. It seemed to me an incredibly risky proposition, but when I'd pressed her to tell me how she would manage, she just shrugged her shoulders. She'd work it out when she got there. "Bu yaojin," Mo would often say: "It's not serious."

But now that she'd arrived in Shenzhen, it all felt very serious. I started to worry that the trip had been a mistake. I had made a pact with Mark Leong, who'd come along to photograph Mo's journey, that we would try our best to observe Mo without interfering in her decisions; we'd agreed to intercede only if we thought she was putting herself in danger. Now we wondered if we'd been irresponsible to put so much faith in the dreams of a 17-year-old who'd never been more than three hours away from home.

Two days before leaving Yangshuo for Shenzhen, Mo returned to her parents' farm to say goodbye. A tractor took us the final few kilometers on a dirt road. Mo's father—dressed in a straw hat, plastic sandals, shorts, and a shirt covered in neatly sewn rectangular patches—was at work in the vegetable garden. Mo hadn't seen him in three months, but they waved to each other so casually that at first I didn't realize who he was. When we reached the house, Mo greeted her sister-in-law and two-year-old niece with even less fuss. We'd brought some squash vines for lunch; wordlessly the two women started preparing them for the frying pan.

Mo's father, Li Simin, had come to the village of Matou in 1972 to marry. His own father, also a farmer, had been executed as a landlord after the Communists came to power in 1949. His wife's family had lived in Matou, a village of about 50 households, for generations. When China decollectivized land ownership in 1980, the family received five mu of rice paddies and two-and-a-half mu of ordinary land—all together half a hectare. Neither of Mo's parents had ever traveled outside Guangxi province. "Being a farmer is relatively difficult," Li told me when he got home, but he sounded modestly satisfied with what he'd achieved. The family ate the rice he grew, raised pigs and grew oranges and pomelos for cash—about $75 most years—and could now afford to eat meat a few times a month.

The mud-brick house was comfortably cool and airy. Its four rooms were clean and furnished with the barest of necessities. The only decorations were a portrait of Chairman Mao and some calendars tacked to one wall, and a row of Mo's certificates of academic merit hung neatly on another. In the corner sat a television the family bought for about $120 in 2000, its edges still cushioned in blocks of Styrofoam.

Over lunch, which included a dish of cured ham, Mo and her parents exclaimed how lucky we were to be visiting when the loquats were ripe. The farm had a single mature loquat tree, and this was the only fruit the family didn't sell for profit at the market. There was a hint of courtliness in Li's gesture when he offered the rare treat as dessert.

Li clearly had a soft spot for his only daughter. But he had no reservations about her decision to move to Shenzhen. "I couldn't leave," he explained, "I didn't have the right requirements. But now things are better. If kids want to go, they can just go." Besides, he added with a small laugh, Mo was stubborn. When she was little she'd once refused to go to school for a whole year.

In the afternoon, Mo took a walk through the fields, picked some loquats and showed off the rosebush and the two geraniums she had planted when she was a student. Ever since she could remember, Mo said, she had been told that she lived in one of the world's most beautiful places. Not having ever seen other places, she had been skeptical. But the grandeur of the landscape was unmistakable. The expanse of teetering limestone hills and the rice fields in their shadows made me wonder if she would feel bereft when she left it behind.

Mo made a final stop in her bedroom, where she pulled an enormous stack of books from beneath her bed and picked out a few dog-eared English textbooks to bring to Shenzhen. And then it was time to leave. I expected an emotional farewell. Instead, Mo simply told her parents that she was leaving, tousled her young niece's hair, and walked toward the road without looking back.

The local Shenzhen bus dropped us off at Gangxia, close to the center of downtown. The buildings were more than 20 stories high. When an alley plastered with signs for boardinghouses came into view, I heaved a sigh of relief. The neighborhood looked promising: crowded and poor, but not seedy. Mo's eyes were fixed on the ground. We wandered aimlessly for nearly an hour, passing restaurants, hardware stores and boarding-houses. There were people all around, but Mo didn't ask anyone for advice. Once or twice I asked her where she was going: she said she didn't know. Eventually we wound up where we had begun. Mo slipped into the first boardinghouse we'd seen and emerged a few minutes later with her first smile of the day. She'd found a room. It was just big enough to hold a single bed, an electric fan and a plastic basin for washing clothes. It looked safe. It cost $3 a night.

After a quick lunch, Mo started to look for work. We walked all afternoon along wide roads lined with skyscrapers. I recognized them as luxury apartments, and could tell that we wouldn't find factories in this neighborhood. But Mo couldn't discern this, and I reminded myself that people aren't born with an understanding of how cities work.

Even here, though, Shenzhen revealed itself as a city thriving on migrant labor. Walls, sidewalks, trees and sewage pipes were covered with phone numbers of people selling ID cards and the documents out-of-towners need if they are to work legally in Shenzhen. (Mo had proper papers.) At one intersection we came across a bulletin board full of job announcements, mostly for hotel workers and security guards. The salaries were high—up to $200 per month—and most employers wanted applicants under the age of 30. While Mo studied the board, a couple of men walked up and offered unsolicited advice. "Don't believe these ads," they told her. "They're fakes. They trick you into paying deposits, and then they disappear."

That night, Mo washed one of her three sets of clothes and hung them in my room to dry—hers was too small. "Tomorrow," she said, spreading a Shenzhen map on my bed, "we'll go to Longhua." Earlier this year, a woman from her village had come home and said that she'd worked in a factory in this industrial, Shenzhen satellite town, but that was all Mo knew. "I think Longhua has a lot of factories," said Mo, "but I guess they don't put them on the map." She was wearing a nightgown with a teddy bear on it, and she looked exhausted and very young. I frowned, then caught myself and tried to look encouraging. "Bu yaojin," she said.

The next morning, Mo got on the wrong bus and found herself heading in the opposite direction from Longhua. She had wasted a 3-yuan fare, about 40¢. We crossed the street, paid another fare, and Mo spent the hour-long ride with her head in her hands, feeling carsick. On the back of each seat was an advertisement for the "Special Career Recruitment Pages" of a local newspaper. "Look for work every Monday in the Southern Metropolis News," it read. But I wasn't sure if she noticed. At the Longhua stop, Mo squatted on the sidewalk for nearly half an hour. Behind her was a giant sign for the Star River Talent Market, an employment agency. For a long time she seemed not to see it.

The Star River office had a giant bulletin board cluttered with hand-painted and computer-printed job listings. Most adhered to a standard format: the number of people required, the age limits, in some cases height requirements, whether the job included food and lodging, and the salaries. Mo wrote down the address of a factory looking for "ordinary workers" and we tried to find it. The search for the Meiyu Electric Works ate up the rest of day. First we walked, passing factory upon factory with signs on their doors advertising vacancies. Then we took a bus in the wrong direction. We reached Meiyu four hours later on motorcycle taxis. The guards at the gate told Mo she had to register at a different office. It took us an hour to walk there. By the time we arrived, the job Mo wanted had been filled.

Looking for the bus stop to get back to Shenzhen, Mo got lost again. Eventually, in desperation, she overcame her aversion to asking directions and we boarded our last bus of the day. By then Mo had spent more than $2 on bus fares. She hadn't had lunch. "Longhua isn't what I'd expected," she said as we headed back to the boardinghouse. "I thought it would be smaller and the factories would be easier to find. It's a bad place." Tomorrow, she said, she would stay closer to her base. As we neared Gangxia, she leaned in to my ear. "There was a moment today," she whispered, "when I didn't think I'd find my way back."

That night, I left Mo and went to find an Internet café. When I called the boardinghouse to say I was on my way back, Mo sounded giddy: "Can I tell you something? While you were out, I found a job." The next morning, she bounced in her chair as she related the story. On the bus back from Longhua, she had spotted a restaurant with a "Help Wanted" sign in the window. Later, she retraced the route, found the restaurant and waited an hour for the manager. He offered her a waitressing job on the spot. The salary was only 500 yuan, or $60, a month, but the job came with free room and board. "I was so happy last night," said Mo, "I thought I was going to die."

I walked with her to the restaurant, which was on a bustling, tree-lined street. While Mo went inside to put down a 260-yuan ($30) deposit for her uniform, I noticed the restaurant was open 24 hours a day and also had rooms for rent. I worried it might be serving more than food. But there were grandparents playing with babies right outside, and the neighborhood seemed safe. A cab driver said the restaurant was known for 24-hour dim sum and nothing more exotic.

Mo emerged a few hours later with a shiny tag stamped with her employee number—and an enormous smile. She seemed more like herself than she had since we'd left Yangshuo. She elbowed Mark mischievously when he took her picture, and sang along to pop music emanating from a CD shop. That afternoon, we shopped for necessities. Mo weighed each purchase heavily. She bought a ceramic mug for 3 yuan instead of a 5-yuan plastic mug with a cartoon character. After buying a towel to use as a blanket (22 yuan), she decided she could live without a pillow. A blue plastic bowl to wash her clothes cost 4 yuan—twice as much as it would have been at home, she said. As we walked, she pulled it out of the bag to admire the pictures of a dolphin and an elf stamped inside. "Beautiful," she sighed. Her one extravagance was a fork. It cost more than a pair of chopsticks, but for some reason she wanted it badly. Her bill for the day came to $5—the most money Mo had ever spent.

After her first day at the restaurant, Mo and I parted ways. A week later, I returned to watch her on the job. It was grueling work—darting through a sea of dim-sum carts to pour tea at tables for up to 11 hours a day, seven days a week. Her feet were sore from standing in the flimsy cloth shoes she had to wear with her uniform; her wrists ached from carrying heavy trays. The older waitresses didn't talk to her except to order her around. She was tired, but it wasn't serious, she said.

As the weeks wore on, her stamina grew but her enthusiasm dimmed. When I called to check up on her, she said she was too worn out to make use of her English books or to see Shenzhen's sights. After a solid month of work, she still hadn't received a cent of her salary. On her first day off she went to an amusement park and looked in through the gates; she couldn't afford an admission ticket. She'd decided she wanted to work elsewhere, or just head back to Yangshuo. But, to prevent her leaving, her boss wouldn't pay her and refused to refund the 260-yuan deposit she'd paid him for her uniform. She had no contract. She was trapped.

Just before the end of her second month, we met again. I was shocked at how different Mo looked. Her smile was just as broad, but the ruddiness in her cheeks had gone. She was so pale that her skin had an almost greenish cast. She was now on the night shift, walking the empty streets with a friend after she finished work at the restaurant at 2:30 a.m., then sleeping during the day. But she had a new plan. Her boss—who still had yet to pay her salary—told her he wasn't letting her quit because she was a hard worker. Flattered, Mo reckoned she could take it a little longer until he found someone to replace her. With her usual optimism, she assured me the money would come eventually and that for now she was fine without it. As soon as she was paid, she'd decided, she would head home.

"I've figured it out," she told me exuberantly over a Coke. "I'll go back to Yangshuo and work two jobs. At night I'll waitress at a café and practice speaking English with the customers, and during the day I'll try to find people to let me be their tour guide." The money, she admitted, might not be as good but at least she would be near her family. She could always return to Shenzhen if she changed her mind, knowing now that she could make it on her own. "Shenzhen was fine," she said, "but home will be better."

• Susan Jakes
• For one migrant, the future is a city