A glimpse into the lives, loves and romance of China’s rural migrants

In a stuffy room fitted with an air-conditioner that was struggling as if it was going to die any time soon, I found myself sitting in a circle with more than 20 young Foxconn workers. It was a typical sultry summer morning in Shenzhen, and the workers, now out of their factory uniforms and wearing T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops, looked relaxed and curious.

They had signed up for a regular Sunday English study class, and on that day, I was to be their “guest teacher”. The labor non-government organisation (NGO) that had helped me gain access to these workers had asked me to speak on any topic that might interest the group, while also teaching them a few useful English words. Only a few of the participants in the room were already married, and there were more men than women. Most of them did not know each other well, if at all.

I introduced myself as a researcher from overseas who was now undertaking a project in Shenzhen, and that I was hoping to conduct research on love and romance among young rural migrant workers like them. To break the ice, I asked if they wanted to tell me their favourite love stories.

One male worker responded by saying that he seldom watched or read love stories, and preferred fantasy, science fiction and action movies. Another male work chimed in that “only girls like love stories”, and a third man added, “I think there’s little love in real life, so I feel it’s all fake.” When he was jokingly asked by someone in the group whether he had been hurt by love, he said, “Yes.” A fourth man said, “All the love stories I’ve heard turned out badly; the girls are no good.”

At this point, a young man, who had been quiet until then, stood up and announced that Titanic was the most powerful love story he had ever seen. “DW”, as I later referred to him, then proceeded to give an extremely detailed account of the film. It was obvious from fellow workers’ responses that most workers had seen the film, and resonated with what he said

You all remember the scene where Jack saves Rose by stopping her from jumping into the sea? And Rose’s fiancé then invites Jack to dinner to thank him? A rich lady helps him get a nice dinner suit. At the dinner, Rose’s fiancé wants to humiliate Jack, so he asks Jack where he lives, and Jack replies, ‘Just the other night I was sleeping under a bridge and now here I am on the grandest ship in the world.’

After DW had finished his retelling and sat down, a female worker made a comment about Rose’s fiancé — the son of an iron and steel tycoon — referring to him as a fuerdai (child of the nouveau rich). She said:

He planted the diamond to incriminate Jack … and when the ship was sinking, all he thought about was how to save himself. He was young and strong, so he wasn’t qualified to go on a lifeboat, but he snatched someone’s child, and pretended to be the father.

Then another young woman joined in:

Rose was saved by Jack and went on to have a good life, having several children. Normally, we’d say that if the person I loved died to save me, I should decide never to marry, to honor his memory. But she didn’t. She went on to live a good life, as Jack wished.

Then a young man offered his opinion about why the story was so popular: “People now really want to see [representations of] real love because in reality, real love is impossible to find.” Another male worker agreed:

Because it doesn’t exist in real life, people aspire to it even more. In reality, it’s all about meng dang hu dui [matching doors and windows — i.e., social status]. A diaosi [loser] marrying a baifumei [rich, fair-skinned, and beautiful woman] just doesn’t happen. Which is why people still want to see it in stories.

This discussion about Titanic took place in a local community centre in Shenzhen in August 2015, where I started a longitudinal study of the impact of social inequality on people’s intimate lives. It was my hope that getting people to tell their favourite love stories would shift the focus away from them and onto an often fictional (and hence de-personalised) set of moral circumstances and dilemmas, as a result of which I hoped they would feel freer to talk without thinking that they were directly disclosing very private details about their own lives.

Having expected to hear a plethora of different love stories from workers, I found myself continually going back to that discussion, trying to make sense of how this engaged and animated session unfolded: why had a Hollywood blockbuster, set in an entirely different world, resonated so much with these young workers? My reflections on what took place that morning turned out to be instrumental in shaping the direction and design of my subsequent ethnographic work.

Given the inferior socioeconomic status of rural migrant workers in contemporary Chinese society, it should not be surprising that what resonated most with these workers was the unequal social status of the lovers. Also, the story underlines the moral (and romantic) superiority of the poor man over the rich one, and this may also account for their identification with Jack.

Nor should it be surprising that their moral identification was also gender-specific. To the female Chinese worker quoted above, Rose’s decision to marry and live a happy life, despite the fact that Jack had died to save her life, allowed her to question the merit of the traditional Chinese value placed on female chastity and fidelity.

Yet it is worth noting that Titanic does not have a happy ending. The love between Jack and Rose is immortalised by Jack’s death, thereby also sidestepping the messy business of how their cross-class love might have played out in real life. These workers did not necessarily see this story as proof that true love can triumph over class, nor did they see this way of preserving cross-class love through death as inevitable. Instead, the story afforded them a catalyst to comment on the absence of cross-class love in real life.

It is clear that their interpretations of Titanic were shaped by their own experience of living in the margins, and in turn they also made sense of their marginalised experience through their comments on these cultural texts.

Workers did not use theoretically informed language such as class or status, nor did they engage with intellectual concepts such as Bourdieu’s (1984) habitus or social capital. Instead, they resorted to colloquial terms — fuerdai, diaosi, baifumei — made popular by the wide use of the Chinese internet.

The effortlessness with which workers adopted contemporary Chinese Internet idioms to narrate a Hollywood romance alerts me to the fact that ethnographers need to be attuned to the class-based colloquialisms and culture-specific language with which audiences interpret such texts. They also have to be sensitive to the equivalences and connections — as well as the possible slippages — between the theoretical language of class analysis and socially and historically specific popular idioms.

Like all of us, workers to some extent live out their love, intimacy, romance and feelings through prisms constructed by the media and a variety of other narratives, public discourses and policy statements. In view of this, it is only logical that my investigation of individuals’ emotional practices and choices takes into account how the dominant cultural categories of emotion shape these practices and choices. Cultural texts, ranging from transnational products such as Titanic to top-down state television programs beaming out from Beijing, can serve as useful prompts for interviews and focus group discussions.

This excerpt is from Love Troubles: Inequality in China and its Intimate Consequences by Wanning Sun (Bloomsbury Academic). Get 35% off using the following discount codes: UK: L0V3TRU85UK, USA: L0V3TRU85US, Australia: L0V3TRU85AU, Canada: L0V3TRU85CA.