Bridging two worlds: a new life for Susie Cheng

ZHAOQING, China — Susie Cheng grew up in a hamlet of mud huts, where her father still raises pigs, picks persimmons and plows fields with a water buffalo.

It's a way of life her ancestors knew for centuries — and one that 20-year-old Susie has left behind.

Seven years ago, she packed up and left her village, looking for work to support her family and eventually made her way to this booming city near China's southern coast.

In this new world she owns a Hotmail account, has a passport for foreign travel and is rising from factory work into a supervisory job at a small Seattle-based company. She sends up to half of her income to her father, sustaining the extended family back home. The two worlds are just 600 miles apart. But they might as well be different Chinas. One is quickly modernizing and growing richer; the other is being left behind in poverty.

Susie is one of an estimated 150 million young Chinese who have crossed this divide in the past 15 years. They are the largest and swiftest human migration in history — three times the total of the immigrant waves that left Europe between 1846 and 1939.

This flood of labor has become China's economic lifeblood, enabling thousands of factories to flourish along China's coast. The factories, in turn, bring the world knocking, eager for inexpensive clothing, machinery and electronics.

It also poses serious challenges. Workers like Susie are demonized around the world as competitors who steal jobs from higher-paid workers. China's government is grappling with how to keep the flood from overwhelming the cities.

But, increasingly, businesses in China and around the world see these aspiring migrants as customers, vital to their future.

As she grows more prosperous, Susie buys more clothing and food. She flies on airplanes and sometimes eats at McDonald's. She has joined the global economy. And with that move, she and millions of Chinese have tasted the new world.

As Susie found, there's no going back. In her village, or fung, she says, "You just feed the pigs and get married."

Stepping out of

the normal pattern

The factory is a two-story town house like any other along Zhaoqing's dusty streets, except for the big yellow sign out front that reads, "MTI, Seattle, Washington."

At her workbench, Susie assembles rotors for highly efficient electrical generators about the size of footballs. Dressed in a blue work shirt, her long, auburn hair pulled back in a high ponytail, she carefully snaps powerful magnets around the middle of a foot-long metal tube. Her slender arms ripple as the magnets fight and flip. Her fingers are pinched with blood blisters.

At the other end of the workshop, Susie's 17-year-old brother, Charlie, hooks a fan belt up to a finished generator. MTI pays for him to attend engineering school, and on his day off he volunteers as a "tester."

"You're doing a good job, little brother," Susie calls to him as she knocks magnets into place. "You're a big man."

Susie started working for Seattle engineer John Devine, MTI's founder, three years ago as his live-in cook. A native of Sichuan province, she made spicy dishes like la zi ji (pepper chicken) when the stout, grandfatherly Devine was in town.

Devine is trying to do for the generator what Bill Gates did for the PC — make it small, affordable and ubiquitous.

He came to China not just for the workers, but for an ample supply of the rare element that goes into the magnets his generator uses. He also came because China needs clean, renewable power.

His deceptively simple device puts out 40 percent more power than similar generators on the market.

Within weeks of working as a cook for Devine, Susie had talked her way into a job at MTI. Devine soon asked her to help as a guide on a business trip to meet suppliers. She kept quiet during the meetings. But afterward she said the interpreter — a woman with an MBA whom Devine hired for $300 a day — was holding information back.

"Susie skewered her," Devine said. "She stepped right out of the normal Chinese pattern of keeping your mouth shut and doing what you're supposed to."

That earned her another rung on the ladder — a passport so she could travel with Devine. Susie is the first person from her village to get one.

Her work now spans two roles, alternating the work shirt she wears at her assembly bench with a suit, briefcase and cellphone for meetings with shippers and suppliers in her growing role as office manager. She tracks parts, inventory and costs in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

"I showed her once," Devine said. "After that it was, 'Get out of my way. I know how to do this.' "

Devine believes in paying his employees well. Susie makes $206 a month, double what most women in urban factories make. MTI also pays her rent and the $875 yearly tuition for Charlie's three-year vocational school.

Another rarity: Susie is an MTI shareholder. In fact, Chinese employees own half the stock. Susie doesn't yet know what that means, Devine says.

"But someday she will."

All of this means that Susie can buy enough food and clothing for herself and Charlie, give Charlie some spending money — and still send money home each month to support her father.

Tentatively learning

to be a consumer

Every now and then, Suzie has enough left over in her budget to buy a luxury for herself.

Recently, Devine suggested Susie should buy the boots she's been eyeing in a neighborhood store.

"No!" she said with a frown. She was wearing her suit, trying to be businesslike, and seemed embarrassed by his focus on her personal desire.

But the avuncular boss urged her to reward herself.

"You've been talking about those boots forever," he said. "You should just go and buy them."

Even though she's the primary breadwinner, Susie puts herself last. She doesn't even have a savings account.

So the boots are a big deal. As her income grows, Susie is learning, tentatively, to be a consumer. It's a shift that should encourage companies like Starbucks, Microsoft and Boeing, which hope China's growing consumer class will thrive.

Finally, one day after work, Susie steps into a modern store to try on the boots — calf-high, brown leather, wedge heels, white stitching. On sale, they cost $50 — a quarter of her monthly salary.

She pulls them on and appraises them carefully in the mirror, her face a mix of skepticism and joy, like Eve and the apple.

Temptation wins. She pulls the cash from a bank envelope. It's payday, after all.

On the way back to the factory, she buys candies for her cousins and a large fleece blanket for her father. She will bring them tomorrow when she makes a rare visit back to the fung, her village of Caoping.

An extraordinary

transformation

Susie's climb from farm to factory to front office is an extraordinary advancement. But China is nothing if not extraordinary. It took 150 years for the U.S. to move from plantation farming to railroads, telegraphs and mass-produced Fords. Here it has happened in 30 years, since economic reform began in the late 1970s. China's economy has boomed. It is now the third-largest in the world, based on purchasing power, and doubles in size every eight years. It is the world's biggest user of coal, steel, grain and meat, and affects global markets for everything from apples to microchips to zinc.

Despite that success, China's future is far from certain. Protests by farmers are on the rise, and cities are far too crowded to hold the millions more who want to come.

Most find only dead-end jobs. Some are hired as teenagers to make electronics and fired after a few years because new, younger workers are available from the steady stream of migrants.

There are other obstacles to success. Rural migrants like Susie usually can't formally register to live in the city, so they are cut off from social benefits. Like undocumented workers in the U.S., they can be sent back to the village any time. They have less education and fewer connections than most legal migrants. And migrants typically do dirty, dangerous and demanding jobs that others avoid.

Yet they keep coming, an estimated 20,000 a day, the equivalent of Seattle's population every month. An uncertain future in the city is better than certain poverty in the village.

The world she

left behind

Growing up, Susie — known in the village as Jun Yu — was a bright student. But around age 9, she started to skip school. Her mother had just left the family, for reasons the family wouldn't share, and Susie needed to help tend the fields two or three days a week.

Her father, Jia Fu Cheng, had started work in a nearby coal mine when she was 5. He lasted eight years. By age 38 he had black lung, and Susie, then 13, had to go to work in the city so he could quit the mine.

It's a mine where his brother, Susie's uncle, still works. It looks like an ordinary train tunnel cut into a hill: A red brick arch surrounds a black half-circle hole with two rails running out.

At midday, miners slowly emerge, blinking into the sunlight, straining as they push creaking black carts heaped with coal. At a ledge, they shovel the soft, shiny ore to waiting dump trucks.

One of the last men out is Susie's uncle, Jia Hua Cheng. Everything about him is black: face, hands, his tattered suit coat, the ground around him. The air swirls with black dust. This is his half-hour lunch break in a day that began at dawn with a 90-minute walk to the mine from Caoping. He is 35, but his exhausted face looks 50.

When he returns home at 7, he must still tend his fields for food.

He earns about $3 a day, making enough in two months to pay for a year of school for his sons, ages 7 and 10. The work is grueling, and dangerous. Cave-ins, blasts and other calamities kill 6,000 coal miners a year in China, according to government figures.

Today, Jia Hua and his wife, Huai Cai Wang, face the same choice Susie's father faced seven years ago: whether to splinter the family for a job in the city.

Feeling like a star

during a rare visit

Susie's 600-mile journey from city to country usually begins with 36 hours on a train. This time she'll fly that portion — in just an hour — because Devine is paying for the trip. But she won't reach home until traveling another 11 hours on a bus.

It's a cold December night, and as Susie arrives in the village her father's small house is full of relatives. This is a big occasion, one of perhaps a dozen visits since Susie left seven years ago. The family slaughtered one of its two pigs in her honor, and Susie is treated like a star.

She bestows her gifts: blanket for her father, a pack of fancy chopsticks for aunt Huai Cai and velour slippers for guests to wear, creating an air of luxury.

Susie's new boots do not go unnoticed. Her aunt spots them as soon as Susie walks in. She says she could buy 12 pairs of shoes for what those boots cost, but she's happy Susie has them.

In the kitchen, aunt Huai Cai stirs spicy Sichuan dishes in an electric wok. The rest of the family gathers on four low benches around the only heat in the house — a small charcoal burner in the main room. It's so cold the butchered pig is simply stored on the floor in the back room. The family doesn't own a refrigerator.

The five-room house, lit with fluorescent tubes, has bare concrete floors and clean white walls, blank but for a clock and a picture of Chairman Mao. It has no plumbing. Water comes to the kitchen through a thin plastic hose.

Still, it's one of the best houses in the hamlet. Susie's father, Jia Fu, built it last year with money she sent him, reusing windows and doors from his old mud-brick home.

Jia Fu, a small, sprightly figure with an impish grin, opens beer bottles for the visitors. Aunt Huai Cai puts out the food: pork rind with ginger and peppers; bean sprout soup; pork with chilies and ginger; green beans with chili paste and garlic.

Talk turns to Susie's life in the city, and money. Her father asks how much her apartment costs. She says $200 a month, an enormous sum in the village — two months of work at the mine. Susie quickly adds that she pays only half the rent.

Of course, the apartment is fully paid for by her company. She doesn't tell her dad that. He doesn't question too closely how she stretches her $206 monthly pay with enough left over to send him $50 to $100 a month.

Indeed, by rural Chinese standards, Jia Fu is well off. Susie's income is six times the rural average. In addition to the new house, Susie pays for her father's everyday needs: pigs to raise, farm crops and a large bin of rice in the kitchen. Also luxuries: a Western-style bed and a color television so new it sits in a box, waiting for a broadcast system to be installed in the area.

Such wealth was unthinkable for a farmer 30 years ago. China had just come through a devastating famine that killed an estimated 20 million to 30 million people in the early 1960s. Rural incomes have since climbed tenfold, and hunger is much less of a problem.

But urban incomes have climbed twice as fast.

In Caoping, more than 90 percent of kids who finish school leave the village, says Susie's former teacher, Chen Duo Yi, who has taught here for 35 years.

Migration is inevitable, maybe even beneficial, he says. "Because people go, the village gets richer. It gets new houses especially. This is what must be. This is for the next generation."

But money sent home doesn't create opportunity for young adults. During Susie's visit, she meets only one other woman her age. Liu Mei, who is 18, moved to Caoping after less than two years in Guangdong, where she earned $100 a month in an electronics factory. She married a farmer from the village, and they are now expecting their first child.

She wanted the calm of village life. But economically, it's hard.

"We don't have money and we don't have guanxi [connections], so we're waiting for a job," she says.

Excitement at

starting a new life

Susie's journey was different. She remembers feeling excited when, at age 13, she glided up the Yangtze River by boat with another aunt, Xiang. It was the first time leaving the valley of her childhood. "I wanted to do more studying, but I couldn't because I needed to support my brother and father," she said.

Her excitement faded when she reached Chongqing, a city of 4 million in Sichuan province. She went to work at Xiang's direction, while friends went on to school. The feelings of deprivation are difficult to share with a stranger. She speaks obliquely.

"I felt homesick," she says finally. She cooked and washed clothes, then Xiang moved her to several cities, where she says she worked as a waitress, a cook in a mining camp and a cashier at a hair salon. The aunt sent money to Susie's father but also used the income herself.

When Susie joined MTI, Xiang came to the factory and grabbed her by the shirt, demanding that she come back and work for her. Co-workers drove the aunt off.

Now that she's on her own, Susie wants to go back to school, to fight the shame she feels when colleagues dismiss her as uneducated. She took some English classes and plans to get her high-school diploma, after Charlie gets his degree.

"Then that will be two people" in the family who are educated, she says. "That's really good. So nobody can say I didn't finish school."

In a poor village,

leaving is inevitable

In the village, a light snow overnight has dusted the hills and rooftops. Susie's aunt Huai Cai is cooking rice and reheating the food from the night before. Her husband, Jia Hua, left at daybreak for his walk to the mine.

Huai Cai gives their 7-year-old son, Pan, a steaming bowl of rice. It's Monday, and he's on his way to school.

"Hurry up," Huai Cai urges him.

Susie is excited to be home. She puts on corduroy knickers, city fashion. Her dad tells her to roll them down.

"It's too cold," he says.

"Later," Susie says, and rushes outdoors.

She hasn't brought any other shoes, either. So later, when she goes to dig potatoes with Li Ze Zhi, a relative, Susie wears her new brown boots.

As Ze Zhi swings a hoe into the soil of the small patch behind her mud-and-straw house, Susie stands with her hands pointing out daintily from her sides, eyeglasses perched on her nose, trying not to get her boots dirty.

Her efforts fail, however, and her boots sink into the soft dirt.

Neighbors visit constantly at Susie's house. They huddle around the charcoal burner chewing sunflower seeds and eating mandarin oranges, served on a big platter.

But despite her family's relative wealth and generosity, the poverty in the village is unmistakable. The children wear winter coats, but several neighbors don't have much more than layers of shirts. One woman has just a thin cotton jacket, and her leg is shaking with cold.

Deprivation makes leaving the village inevitable, even for the older generation.

After the neighbors leave, Susie talks with her father and uncle, urging that Huai Cai, who is 30, come to work at Devine's company. She can take Susie's job, and Susie will do more management work.

It's an agonizing decision. Huai Cai would like to stay and care for Pan. But if she does, her husband will have to stay on at the mine.

If she goes, he could quit and they could afford more education for the children, more luxuries, like Susie's boots.

There really is little choice.

"Of course, I'll feel very homesick," she says.

Uncle Jia Hua agrees. He will stay and raise his sons.

When the boys are grown, all three will leave Caoping.

The fung? "I won't miss it," Jia Hua says. "I'll come back to visit, but not to live."

They will leave their fields, forfeit their claim on the land where their ancestors are buried, and follow Susie's path into the new world.

"Village life is not bad," Jia Hua says, "but we're too poor."

Alwyn Scott: 206-464-3329 or ascott@seattletimes.com