'Culture builders' for lost souls

Public libraries in the Pearl River Delta are playing a pivotal role in offering migrant workers not only the best money-saving hobby but also a 'shelter for the body and spirit'. Luo Weiteng takes a look at the plight of these workers who've found solace in libraries as a place for leisure.

Wu Guichun made a rare trip for a family reunion in his hometown in Hubei province early this year from Dongguan, where he had worked at a factory for two decades.

He traveled light, taking with him the Ming Dynasty short story collections borrowed from Dongguan Library.

The farmer-turned-worker had been earning a living in Dongguan city - a key industrial hub in the Pearl River Delta, the nation's traditional manufacturing heartland that offers all sorts of labor-intensive jobs.

The coronavirus then struck- right in Hubei's provincial capital Wuhan, forcing an unprecedented lockdown across the province overnight.

Wu had initially planned to make a return trip after the Lantern Festival marking the end of the two-week-long New Year festivities. But by the time he got back to Dongguan again, it was already mid-June, just two days before the Dragon Boat Festival.

Dongguan had taken a drubbing from the Sino-US trade tensions, only to be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic that has left businesses reeling as overseas orders decrease.

The shoe factory where Wu worked could have resumed operations by April at the latest in previous years, but its owner, Yang Xiangyang was still gasping for overseas orders in mid-June.

The pandemic swept everyone off their feet. Young jobless workers had to try their luck elsewhere, but for most unskilled, older migrant workers like Wu, 54, they had no choice but to pack up for home.

Before returning to his hometown, Wu had to return his reader's card to Dongguan Library - the place he had visited most during his stay in the city.
He wasn't ready to say goodbye though. At the invitation of a librarian, he wrote a farewell letter in the guest book:
"I've been in Dongguan for 17 years, of which 12 were spent in this library reading books. Books nourish a profound mind and bring a hundred merits but no harm.

"This year, the pandemic has killed off plenty of industries and sent migrant workers packing. Looking back on my life in Dongguan, the library is the best place I've ever been to. Leaving this city isn't my decision, but life has forced me to do so.

I'll never forget you for the rest of my life, Dongguan Library. I hope you'll rise and prosper, benefit the city and spread your wisdom to all migrant workers who come here."

"It's more like a love letter," said another librarian, who took a photo of it and posted it online.

Over the next 72 hours, Wu was on a roller coaster ride pondering over his future. By the time he was bombarded with media phone calls and approached by the local human resources and social affairs department, the irreconciled man was making one last loop in the neighborhood looking for recruitment notices.

He got a new job as a gardener in a residential compound, less than two kilometers from the library, as he had specifically asked to be closer to his favorite place.

Wu's story, with the imprint of a people-oriented narrative and the appearance of serendipity or coincidence of the times, has become one of the most inspirational tales of this turbulent year.

He took a sober, hard look at a sudden blaze of fame. But he was somewhat convinced by his son. "Your words have put the plight of millions of migrant workers under the spotlight. Many unskilled, less-educated workers may not only get a helping hand in employment, but have been inspired to go to libraries for enrichment," Wu's son said. "You really did something good."

Healthy urbanization form
"What has also come under the spotlight is the good, hard road Dongguan has taken to creating a healthier form of urbanization as a cure for the ever-growing complex, delicate relationship between the city government and migrants," said Yao Huasong, associate professor of the College of Public Administration at Guangzhou University.

In times of great isolation, division and uncertainty, such human-centered urbanization that reinforces the themes of inclusiveness, sustainability and social well-being will take on new significance, he said.

For pandemic-stricken cities like Dongguan, the big question is: Can they get migrants back to support a hoped-for economic rebound with better opportunities and benefits?

For unemployed and underemployed workers, a more urgent issue is whether they can find a place in the job market when cities evolve beyond their manufacturing roots for more sustainable, post-pandemic growth. If this may herald the end of a better life earned far from home, can they get help in the cities, rather than being discarded and forgotten, Yao asked.

For decades, migrant workers from every nook and cranny of China have staked their future in the Pearl River Delta region as a stepping stone to riches, enduring strenuous, low-paying jobs as the nation's most dynamic, open and innovative region races ahead with unbridled economic, technological and industrial development.

This has given birth to a mutant urban miracle that has made cities like Shenzhen a showpiece of the most rapid urbanization in human history and set the stage for one of the world's largest city clusters coming into being.

When SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) hit in 2003, Wu had taken a long train ride to Dongguan for greener pastures. Nestled between the dynamic economic powerhouses of Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Dongguan is a melting pot of immigrants. The sprawling city of 8.5 million people had seen just shy of 30 percent of its population granted permanent residence, or hukou, under the national household registration system by the end of 2019.
At 37 then and as a primary school graduate, Wu was among the least competitive in manufacturing-reliant Dongguan. After being rejected by big-name factories, he made a meager living on odd jobs at private workshops in Houjie - a factory town in Dongguan dubbed one of the largest shoe-making bases in the country. He has been included by the complex, sophisticated manufacturing ecosystem of Dongguan since then.

The city's dense, tangled warrens of urban villages, which have long served as enclaves of cheap housing for migrant worker, also included him.
The rock-bottom living costs in the area allowed Wu to live on 1,000 yuan ($147.3) a month and send the rest of his earnings home for his son's education all the way to graduate school.

"In the past decade, I've seen too many migrants lead a radically ascetic life that involves a fair amount of sweat and sacrifice. They've devoted a good chunk of their lives here to feeding families miles away in impoverished hometowns at the expense of an intimate parent-child relationship," said Lu Xiaozhao, who was sent by a Chengdu-based home appliance manufacturer to manage its branch in Dongguan.

"Indeed, Dongguan offers disadvantaged newcomers a place to survive. They may not feel excluded from its dizzying growth, at least not yet. But when it comes to a sense of belonging, even the long-time migrants cannot really give a resounding 'yes'," he noted.

Without a proper urban household status or access to basic public services, migrants could effectively belong to a giant underclass in the city. Once out of work, they're more likely to be abandoned to fate and forced back home.

Yao speaks of an "all-on-my-own" mentality that makes migrants firmly believe that getting employed or getting laid off are their own business. "In fact, most rural workers I've surveyed rely heavily on fellow villagers or relatives for job information. Few attend open-market job fairs and even fewer turn to government-backed employment agencies for help," he said.
"Behind such a mentality is the lack of a sense of identity and belonging. Even with more policies in place to ensure a cushion for the needy, many migrants may have been on the way home before knowing their existence," Yao reckoned.

Despite much focus on helping migrants get a job to eke out a living and have a roof over their heads, their spiritual pursuits and emotional links with the city fail to get equal attention.

While rural workers have helped cities fill labor gaps, they're now trapped in an ever-widening knowledge and digital gap, which makes it even harder for school-deprived migrants to fit in the "concrete jungle", said Wu Jianzhong, library director at the University of Macau.

According to Wu and every other migrant worker interviewed for this article, venturing beyond hometowns to Dongguan for a job was a watershed in their lives. Before heading for Dongguan, Wu's indigent life had nothing much to do with books. Yet, in Dongguan, he acquired the habit of reading due to poverty, and it's the best money-saving hobby he could afford.

Inviting public facilities
After being a regular customer at street book vendors for two years, Wu was introduced by a fellow worker to the library with free air-conditioning, ample seating and a sea of books that makes reading no longer a luxury.

Thus, 12 years began, intertwined with toiling at assembly lines, with no sense of achievement, and thoughts of great people that go beyond the time and space. In the vast world of knowledge, Wu made peace with his past life in a tangle of school dropouts, business and marriage failures, as well as crippling loneliness.

Likewise, Li Donglai shares a profound memory of a dire scarcity of books in his teenage years. Purely out of a hunger for books, he enrolled at the prestigious Peking University as a library science major in the 1980s.

In 2002, just a year ahead of Wu, Li set off "down south" to take the helm at the newly built Dongguan Library. The native of Liaoning province saw the vibrant city as a testing ground and living laboratory to pursue a lofty goal - making a library one of the rare places where everyone is on an equal footing. "For socially marginalized individuals and frustrated urbanites, a public library should be a shelter for the body and spirit," he said.

Li upholds the principle of "treating everyone the same way", with no need to intentionally differentiate from locals, immigrants and the disabled in the library.

He highlighted the importance of making libraries function more obviously as leisure venues to invite less-educated migrants to "take a rest and do some reading". But he also stressed that the literacy levels and spiritual pursuits of the younger generation of migrants cannot be easily underestimated.

He innovated a range of round-the-clock, self-service, mobile library services to ensure that a large floating population scattered across 32 towns within Dongguan can be effectively covered.

Yang Lu, a former librarian in Chengdu, Sichuan's provincial capital, regarded Wu's story as the epitome of well-developed public services and the wisdom of urban governance in the Pearl River Delta region, where the public library makes a living embodiment.

"However, it should be noted that such library services are not necessarily accessible in many less-developed areas. The hard fact is that many people have never been to or even heard of a library in their lives."

"In the past century, a public library has been hailed as 'culture builder' and 'memory keeper'. But I myself would like to see it as a positive response from modernization to the modest hope of human development," Yang reckoned.
As the pandemic has fallen hardest on cities and bred discrimination and prejudice, she believes that a public library, where people can replace ignorance with knowledge, intolerance with understanding, and inequity with access, has what it takes to shape a city of inclusiveness and resilience in a more profound manner.

"Now we've an encouraging example to follow, but we still have a long way to go," said Yang.
Contact the writer at
sophia@chinadailyhk.com