Leaving It All Behind — page 2

Two days before leaving Yangshuo for Shenzhen, Mo returned to her parents' farm to say goodbye. A tractor took us the final few kilometers on a dirt road. Mo's father—dressed in a straw hat, plastic sandals, shorts, and a shirt covered in neatly sewn rectangular patches—was at work in the vegetable garden. Mo hadn't seen him in three months, but they waved to each other so casually that at first I didn't realize who he was. When we reached the house, Mo greeted her sister-in-law and two-year-old niece with even less fuss. We'd brought some squash vines for lunch; wordlessly the two women started preparing them for the frying pan.

	I thought it would be smaller and the factories easier to find. It's a bad place.. —MO YUNXIU,  17-year-old migrant worker

Mo's father, Li Simin, had come to the village of Matou in 1972 to marry. His own father, also a farmer, had been executed as a landlord after the Communists came to power in 1949. His wife's family had lived in Matou, a village of about 50 households, for generations. When China decollectivized land ownership in 1980, the family received five mu of rice paddies and two-and-a-half mu of ordinary land—all together half a hectare. Neither of Mo's parents had ever traveled outside Guangxi province. "Being a farmer is relatively difficult," Li told me when he got home, but he sounded modestly satisfied with what he'd achieved. The family ate the rice he grew, raised pigs and grew oranges and pomelos for cash—about $75 most years—and could now afford to eat meat a few times a month.

The mud-brick house was comfortably cool and airy. Its four rooms were clean and furnished with the barest of necessities. The only decorations were a portrait of Chairman Mao and some calendars tacked to one wall, and a row of Mo's certificates of academic merit hung neatly on another. In the corner sat a television the family bought for about $120 in 2000, its edges still cushioned in blocks of Styrofoam.

Over lunch, which included a dish of cured ham, Mo and her parents exclaimed how lucky we were to be visiting when the loquats were ripe. The farm had a single mature loquat tree, and this was the only fruit the family didn't sell for profit at the market. There was a hint of courtliness in Li's gesture when he offered the rare treat as dessert.

Li clearly had a soft spot for his only daughter. But he had no reservations about her decision to move to Shenzhen. "I couldn't leave," he explained, "I didn't have the right requirements. But now things are better. If kids want to go, they can just go." Besides, he added with a small laugh, Mo was stubborn. When she was little she'd once refused to go to school for a whole year.

In the afternoon, Mo took a walk through the fields, picked some loquats and showed off the rosebush and the two geraniums she had planted when she was a student. Ever since she could remember, Mo said, she had been told that she lived in one of the world's most beautiful places. Not having ever seen other places, she had been skeptical. But the grandeur of the landscape was unmistakable. The expanse of teetering limestone hills and the rice fields in their shadows made me wonder if she would feel bereft when she left it behind.

Mo made a final stop in her bedroom, where she pulled an enormous stack of books from beneath her bed and picked out a few dog-eared English textbooks to bring to Shenzhen. And then it was time to leave. I expected an emotional farewell. Instead, Mo simply told her parents that she was leaving, tousled her young niece's hair, and walked toward the road without looking back.

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Aug. 18, 2004	Aug. 19, 2003	Aug. 20, 2003