Little America in Fuzhou
From September 2005 to July 2006, I lived in Fuzhou, a large coastal city located in southeastern Fujian Province. For the most part, Fuzhou resembles any other Chinese mega-city: ubiquitous construction projects, fancy new shopping centers, decaying apartment blocks (one of which I called home), and little snippets of the past like Buddhist temples and ramshackle street markets. For me, the most interesting feature of the city was its proximity to Taiwan. The distance between Fuzhou and Taipei is a mere 145 miles, yet to get to Taipei from Fuzhou required a stop-over in Hong Kong. Funny world, indeed.
Soon, I discovered that Fuzhou had another interesting feature: an unusually large number of the locals have relatives overseas. I once asked my high-school class how many of them had cousins, aunts, or uncles in the US alone, and nearly half raised their hands. One day, a student of mine introduced me to her “sister”*, a teenage girl from Toronto.
*The generation of Chinese born after the implementation of the One Child Policy tends to refer to cousins and even close friends as “sister” and “brother”, which can be confusing at first because few of them bother to clarify the actual relationship. The Torontonian, upon being introduced as my students’ sister, subsequently rolled her eyes and said, “we’re cousins”.
Recently, Ben Ross (an old friend of mine from Fuzhou and fellow China blogger) wrote that he has heard Fuzhou dialect spoken on the streets of Chicago, where he now lives. In San Francisco, I once asked an immigrant Chinese where he came from and was not surprised to hear “Fuzhou” in response. Chinese from every province immigrate, but a disproportionate number of them come from little Fujian.
A new dispatch in Slate points out why this is: immigrants who become established in a foreign place will later send for their spouses or siblings to join them in the rush for prosperity. This pattern is known as “chain migration” and explains why certain villages near Fuzhou have an acute shortage of working-age men. In fact, a great number of people left in these places are babies and the elderly, as working couples living overseas will send their offspring (equipped with US passports) back to the motherland to live with their grandparents as per Chinese custom.
Will this trend continue? Fujian’s geographical and linguistic proximity to Taiwan means that the city has attracted an enormous amount of venture capital from the latter, turning Fuzhou into one of the wealthier cities in all of China. Despite being somewhat lacking in tourist attractions, Fuzhou has far more five-star hotels and fancy restaurants than, say, Kunming. Should this prosperity trickle down to the middle and working classes, the Fuzhouese might find the idea of emigration less attractive. Or, perhaps, those who leave the country may find themselves replaced by Chinese from the interior drawn to the city for its booming economy.
In any case, read the whole Slate piece.
(photo: my old neighborhood in Fuzhou, taken in 2005)
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