Originally from Anhui province, this shoe cobbler lost his $180/month factory job after a work injury two years ago.
With fireworks lighted across East Asia, January 23 rung in the Year of the Dragon for many Asian communities. But perhaps less obvious, it also marked the culmination of the largest annual human migration on the planet. For the past few weeks, millions of people across China have been on the road, traveling by rail, bus, motorcycle, and any means possible to return to their hometowns for Lunar New Year, the most important holiday in Chinese culture. An estimated 3.1 billion passenger trips—more than two times China’s population—will be made via public transport around this time.
Beyond the cultural emphasis on family reunions during New Years, this phenomenon is largely driven by the 250 million (and growing) migrant workers “floating” around China’s urban centers. Over the last few decades, with coastal cities and industrial zones desperate for cheap labor, many of the rural poor have left their villages and towns in search of jobs and livelihoods. The men often find work in construction while the women join the assembly lines. Despite leaving, they maintain close ties with their hometowns, mostly due to elderly parents and young children who remain in the countryside.
Although migrant workers are the main labor force behind China’s urbanization, they are ineligible for urban hukous, a household registration system upon which access to public education, healthcare, and social benefits depends. Consequently, many migrant parents lack the means to bring their children with them as they work in distant cities; instead, young children are left in the care of elderly relatives at home, and money is regularly sent back to provide for the household’s living costs and the children’s education. In a year filled with 12+ hour workdays, the Lunar New Year holiday is often the only chance for migrants to return home and see their families.
Yinyue and her grandmother
While visiting a hospital in Jiangsu Province around this time, I met a little girl named Yinyue. Her grandmother had dressed her in new clothes in anticipation of the New Year and her parents’ return. When Yinyue’s mother gave birth to her over a year ago, the local doctor diagnosed the infant with jaundice, for which he prescribed herbal medicine and extra sunlight. After five days, Yinyue grew increasingly lethargic and her skin tone remained unhealthily yellow. Her worried mother and grandmother borrowed their neighbor’s tractor and rushed her to a township level hospital, where she received three days of inconsistent phototherapy. A week later, Yinyue’s mother left for Shenzhen, over 1500km away, to join her father at a factory producing battery parts for companies overseas. “My daughter didn’t want to leave her baby,” Yinyue’s grandmother said, “but it was either go back to the factory or lose her job. Then she wouldn’t be able to pay for her daughter’s medical fees.” Neither mother nor daughter had seen each other since.
In talking to Yinyue’s grandmother at the hospital, I learned that they were waiting for an appointment with the pediatrician. Her grandmother is concerned that Yinyue’s cognitive development and growth are lagging behind the norm for her age. “I hope this is just an old woman’s fear, but it’s better to check. My daughter and her husband have been working all year and look forward to coming home and seeing her. They want their little girl to grow up healthy and have a better life.” As we listened, I couldn’t help but think that if only the hospital where Yinyue was originally treated had effective phototherapy, then this would not be a worry for her family.
There is a common expression in colloquial Chinese that roughly translates to “eating bitterness”—used in the context that if you endure the hardships, work the extra hours, and make the necessary sacrifices, successes and rewards—sweetness—will eventually follow. It is a universal concept, manifested in various ways across cultures. In China, this hope has sustained many migrant workers as they work far from home and in environments with little labor protection. But while some migrants have dragged themselves across the poverty line, over 200 million people in China, and over 1 billion in the rest of the world, still live on less than $1.25 a day. For them, both education and access to healthcare are difficult to come by, but are things they strive for—if not for themselves, then for their children. At D-Rev, our mission is to address that gap by designing and delivering sustainable, impactful products that are not only world class, but affordable to the people who need them. Stories like Yinyue’s remind me of why we do the work we do. But with Brilliance, the first product from our Neonatal Jaundice Initiative entering hospitals in 2012, I hope that stories like hers will become more rare.
In the Year of the Dragon, the luckiest of the Chinese lunar years, my wish for the future is that eventually, mothers everywhere will be able to receive the care that they and their babies need—and that their children will grow up healthy and happy.
