Planes! Trains! Automobiles!
After a delicious meal of Hunan cuisine, we boarded a high-speed train and left Shanghai behind. I’d never been on a real train before and was nearly as excited for the train ride as I was to see another city. Despite my eagerness, all the hype about the train had also left me a bit nervous; I expected to board a rickety old train and to have to struggle for a seat on a wooden bench next to a stinky old man who had no qualms about spitting in the compartment.
My expectations were completely off base and all my eagerness was confirmed. The train was spacious and comfortable (and all the passengers were well-groomed) and featured giant windows to entertain me throughout the entire trip. The train lurched into motion, and I reclined my cushy seat… only to realize within minutes that my en-route entertainment through the window was to be much different than anticipated.
Only miles away from the train station, on the outskirts of Shanghai, I began to see a completely different China. The suburbs of Shanghai near the train station continued until they met the suburbs of other, smaller cities all the way to Nanjing. Their architecture featured cookie-cutter high rises ten to twenty stories tall with drab, utilitarian exteriors.
I knew that this was the area outside of Shanghai was home to migrants, forced to the outskirts as property values nearer to the city center continued to sky-rocket. Prior to the train-ride a teacher of migrant students told me that the migrant populations are constantly pushed further and further from the city; however, I hadn’t taken the time to imagine what these migrant communities might look like. I suppose that I assumed that the Shanghai I knew–full of shopping, eating, and business–continued for miles on end… but that is not what these communities looked like at all.
The train ride en route to Beijing certainly put me in my place. I knew that migrants made huge sacrifices to come to Shanghai. I knew that they made menial wages. I knew that they were pushed to the fringes. Still, I was sugarcoating the migrant experience, romanticizing it, and not actually contextualizing or understanding their lifestyle. As the train barreled through the exterior of Shanghai I couldn’t help but realize how off base I had been, while also realizing how easy my life is if my greatest worry is about sitting on a wooden bench next to a smelly man for a high-speed train ride.
The train ride gave me a glimpse of the migrant experience and therefore helped me appreciate and respect the difficulties that migrants must overcome in light of the luxuries that I had been enjoying for the last week. We travelled across the world for a research field trip; migrants’ children go to underfunded, sub-par schools. We took the high-speed train to save our precious time; migrants often commute over two hours to work. After actually seeing that migrants are not indulging in all of the modern delights and luxury of the Shanghai I had been exposed to thus far, I realized that this train ride taught me nearly as much about migrants as did the lectures I’d attended in the city.
