Bridging two Worlds:
a new life for Susie Cheng
By Alwyn Scott
ZHAOQING, China — Susie Cheng grew up in a hamlet of mud huts, where her father still raises pigs, picks persimmons and plows fields with a water buffalo.
It's a way of life her ancestors knew for centuries — and one that 20-year-old Susie has left behind.
Seven years ago, she packed up and left her village, looking for work to support her family and eventually made her way to this booming city near China's southern coast.
In this new world she owns a Hotmail account, has a passport for foreign travel and is rising from factory work into a supervisory job at a small Seattle-based company. She sends up to half of her income to her father, sustaining the extended family back home. The two worlds are just 600 miles apart. But they might as well be different Chinas. One is quickly modernizing and growing richer; the other is being left behind in poverty.
Susie is one of an estimated 150 million young Chinese who have crossed this divide in the past 15 years. They are the largest and swiftest human migration in history — three times the total of the immigrant waves that left Europe between 1846 and 1939.
This flood of labor has become China's economic lifeblood, enabling thousands of factories to flourish along China's coast. The factories, in turn, bring the world knocking, eager for inexpensive clothing, machinery and electronics.
It also poses serious challenges. Workers like Susie are demonized around the world as competitors who steal jobs from higher-paid workers. China's government is grappling with how to keep the flood from overwhelming the cities.
But, increasingly, businesses in China and around the world see these aspiring migrants as customers, vital to their future.
As she grows more prosperous, Susie buys more clothing and food. She flies on airplanes and sometimes eats at McDonald's. She has joined the global economy. And with that move, she and millions of Chinese have tasted the new world.
As Susie found, there's no going back. In her village, or fung, she says, "You just feed the pigs and get married."
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