Yean Heng Yan stepped out of her home and walked with small, quick steps towards a pool of light under a street lamp. Twilight was fading in Shanghai. On East China Normal University’s campus, night prompted a retreat back to the dormitories. Some university students greeted Yean as they streamed inside to study. They called her A yi. They didn’t know much about her—she just took care of their bikes.

Yean had straight black hair that stopped at abruptly at her chin. Her short bangs and dark brown eyes formed a perfect doll face. But under the glare of the light, her skin looked tough and weathered. Pulling her red jacket close to her body, she furtively glanced back towards her home and crossed her arms.

            Yean’s home is also her workplace. Her bicycle shop is built against ECNU’s Dormitory Number 6. It leans against the bigger building, so that the outer walls of the dormitory make up a corner wall of her shop. Steel rods hold up a blue tarp roof. The concrete floor is littered with objects in various states of disrepair. Fans, desk lamps and even a pink Hello Kitty clock have been salvaged from the trash. Several bookshelves are lined with literature, math or education textbooks. Some shelves have been placed close together to form a private corner room.  This is where Yean and her husband sleep every night, on a cot next to an old heater.

“I live like this because I have no other choice,” she told me later. “But I promised myself a long time ago. This is not what I want for my children.”

Yean is one of Shanghai’s 4 million migrant workers. She came to Shanghai thirty-five years ago, lured by the city’s promise of higher wages. But like many of China’s 140.41 million migrant workers, her hukou—a residence permit—was not registered in Shanghai. This meant she didn’t have access to social welfare or unemployment benefits. Often, she and her husband had to struggle to make ends meet. Now, as the 54-year-old mother watched ECNU’s students, she revealed how she’d saved her children from a life that looked just like hers.  

“Education. I wanted to make sure my children had an education,” she said.

China’s hukou system functions like an internal passport. It makes moving within China similar to moving to a different country. The hukou is a personal identification booklet that designates citizens as urban or rural residents. In a country with a burgeoning population, the hukou helps the Chinese government control population flow. But since they lack these residence permits, migrants don’t have access to subsidized housing,education, social security or medical benefits.  In October, the South China Morning Post reported that Shanghai’s municipal government was “researching” ways to give migrants access to these essential public services. Although this effort would greatly improve migrants’ social mobility, these proposals have not yet been implemented. The facts remain the same—it is still nearly impossible for migrant families to transfer their hukou from a rural to city status.

Education is one of their only options. According to a study published by the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, if a migrant gains admission to a university and completes his or her degree, they have a strong chance of finding an urban job with a local registration. Financing such a degree is often impossible for migrants. But it was a chance that Yean was willing to take.

“Most people in my generation feel like they didn’t get well educated. We feel sorry for that,” she said. “So we inject all our aspirations into our children, we invest a large sum of money into their education and desperately help them to be well educated in the future,” she said.

Yean is originally from a town in Jiangsu Province called Taizhou Xi Hang. She made the 388 kilometer journey from Taizhou to Shanghai because her husband’s job as a shoe factory worker wasn’t enough to support her family. Yean and her husband spent years living frugally, almost close to poverty, hoping to save enough money to finance their children’s educations.

The standard of living in rural China discourages migrants from finding work in their hometowns. Official reports show that urban residents earn three times as much as Chinese peasants.

 “I prefer Shanghai because I can make a profit here. I can start my own business here, I couldn’t do that in Jiangsu,” Yean said.

Before coming to ECNU, Yean ran a bicycle shop at Shanghai’s Fudan University. She lived and worked in Fudan for 25 years, opening up two moderately successful shops. While Yean and her husband worked in Shanghai, her children, a boy and a girl, lived with their grandmother and attended school in Jiangsu.

“They are really smart,” Yean said. “They studied so hard.”

She looked down at her hands.

“It was hard to leave them,” she said.

She was not the first person in her family to leave loved ones at home. Yean’s father worked in Shanghai, leaving her mother in Taizhou to raise five children. Her grandfather and several of her aunts and uncles also migrated from Jiangsu to work in Shanghai. And after Yean followed in her family members’ footsteps, she encouraged many of her close friends to move to the city.

Andrew Field, a professor of modern Chinese history at ECNU, suggests that Yean’s story is not unusual. Migrants seek out members of their own communities for support in the city.

“Most of the time, migrants are not just coming on their own. They have social networks, usually organized around the place they come from,” said Field.

The Taizhou men who followed Yean’s advice took on jobs as construction workers. The younger women she knew became nannies and house workers.

Migrants in Shanghai take the undesirable jobs that locals aren’t willing to claim. Male workers usually do hard labor. Women usually work in the service industries as waitresses, house workers, masseuses, or sex workers. Since many companies recruit workers directly from rural areas, migrants are often housed in dormitories supplied by their employers. But their living quarters are often squalid and their jobs are rarely stable.  20 million migrants returned home after losing their jobs and homes during the financial crisis in 2008, according to the BBC. Government officials said that 95% of those workers have returned to the cities this year. Whether or not these millions are currently employed is difficult to measure.

Yean said she’s learned not to take stability for granted. In 2007, she was told to close the two bicycle shops she had opened at Fudan University. Her business was located on a street that was designated for reconstruction. She soon found herself without work and without a home.

Most of the men who came at Yean’s suggestion stayed in Shanghai as construction workers, often drifting between jobs. Some of the young women who came married Shanghainese men. But others couldn’t find husbands in the city and returned home to Taizhou.

Yean, concerned about her children, felt as if she had no choice but to stay. Most of her friends’ children weren’t able to successfully pass the gaokao, China’s college admissions test. But her two children passed and were accepted into Fudan University. Both boy and girl, now 21 and 25, studied international finance and commerce.

She found another job at ECNU and continues to support her children. At ECNU, her major source of income is looking after students’ bikes.  For 60 Yuan per year, students can park their bikes in Yean’s shop.  Motorbike owners pay 120 Yuan. Yean makes sure the bikes aren’t stolen while her customers are at school. She also repairs minor bike problems and sells bike accessories such as locks and pumps. She buys books from graduating students and sells them for almost 80% of the original cost. She sells plastic bottles and has even opened up a small snack stand in front of a girls’ dormitory near her shop. She and her husband mend and sell items they’ve found in the trash.

But Yean is self-employed. Her informal contract with ECNU isn’t secure. Since she’s not an official ECNU employee, her job could be terminated at any time. She said that even if she were able to transfer her hukou status to Shanghai, she wouldn’t receive any benefits since her business isn’t registered. If Yean or her husband became sick, they’d have to bear all of the expenses.

“If we had money to save, we’d buy health care,” said Yean. “But we can’t afford it.”

Despite the harsh nature of her life, or perhaps because of it, Yean’s one source of pride is her children. They visit her frequently. Her daughter recently graduated and is now working for an advertising company. But her son, still a junior in college, is finding it difficult to pass the College English Test. In China, the CET is a prerequisite for a bachelor’s degree.

            “I certainly have high expectations of my kids,” she said. “I know I’m not capable of helping them achieve all their dreams, because of my situation. All I can do is keep working.”

            As she sat on a stool outside of Dormitory Number 6, Yean kept an eye on her bicycle shop. She’d like to start a bigger business, but she feels as if it would be too risky. She says she is getting tired of her job and tired of her routine. Every day, she gets up early to cook breakfast for her husband and boil the tea eggs that she sells to ECNU’s students. She fixes broken bicycle wheels and mends shoes until lunch. She takes a nap in her room, then gets up to serve the afternoon rush of students. By the time she’s finished, it’s time to sleep. She knows she’s lucky to have her shop and to have her children. But some parts of her are aching for home.

Her friends from Taizhou often call her and encourage her to go back to Taizhou.

            “I feel like I didn’t spend enough time there,” Yean admitted, her brown eyes squinting into the night. “When I talk to my friends, the people I played with as a child, those are the times I miss my home the most.”