For Migrants, City Life Comes at a High Price

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/world/asia/07iht-letter07.html

Version 0 of 1.

BEIJING — Every working mother knows how essential the caregivers who help us rear our children are.

For nearly two years, Shi Ayi was one such person in our family. A jolly woman from a poor village in Anhui Province, she was flexible about her hours, easygoing with the kids and loved dogs, a big plus when we got a puppy.

True, she broke crockery quite a bit, put my son’s T-shirts and socks in my drawers instead, and scratched the silver, not knowing how to handle things that didn’t exist in her village.

We didn’t especially mind. I was grateful for her good humor and willing attitude, and too busy to look for someone else.

Shi Ayi’s personal life, on the other hand, was a nonstop drama. (“Ayi,” which means “auntie” in Mandarin, is what child-care workers are called here.) An unexpected medical event required financial support we gladly offered. Like so many rural migrants without an urban residence permit, she didn’t have health insurance in the city.

One day she called to say she was a prisoner at home and couldn’t come to work. A neighbor from her village had arrived at her home in Beijing’s outskirts, demanding money because her daughter, who was in a long-term relationship with Shi Ayi’s nephew, was pregnant.

Shi Ayi’s family could have her, said the mother, but since she was already pregnant it would cost them — about 100,000 renminbi, or $16,000, which Shi Ayi’s older brother didn’t have. The family haggled for days, bringing the price down to half that. For weeks afterward, Shi Ayi looked pale.

The stories continued as her life regularly teetered between success and disaster, her hard work at the mercy of financial demands that arose from her lack of security as a migrant and from the traditional ways of her village that were replicating themselves in the city. It was a pattern that echoes in millions of lives here, where many human troubles are resolved at a cash price starting with the demand “Peichang!” “Compensation!” We were supportive, overlooking her occasional absences, listening to the tales. But I drew the line at murder.

It wasn’t Shi Ayi’s fault. One day, looking grayer than I’d ever seen her, she spilled out another story. A different nephew, this one a 16-year-old, had disappeared from his home in Beijing. His parents (Shi Ayi’s younger brother and his wife) were frantic with concern. After two days the police got in touch. The boy was in custody, accused along with a dozen other teenagers of killing a man.

“This will take a million renminbi to fix because the dead man is from Beijing,” she said somberly. “They’re worth more than us country people.”

This may sound cynical, but it’s true.

According to China’s Compensation Law, compensation in murder cases is fixed at 20 times the average annual local income plus extras like funeral costs. (The sum decreases for every year the victim is older than 60, and is limited to five times the average income if the victim is over 75.)

In practice, things can work out differently with the amount often negotiated between the family of the deceased and that of the guilty party, who must pay.

Coming from the countryside where incomes are lower than in the cities, Shi Ayi was right. The life of a Beijinger would prove more expensive than the life of an Anhui villager.

Luckily for Shi Ayi, things didn’t get quite that far, though there was an undeniable tragedy and a death. After her nephew spent a month in police custody, where she said he was hazed by fellow prisoners (“They do it to everyone new in the cell and they do it in the toilets because there aren’t any cameras in there.”) and not given enough to eat (“They keep them slightly hungry all the time on purpose.”), her nephew was deemed not to have actually struck the dead man, a father who died, apparently of a heart attack, after seeing his son beaten with sticks by the gang of youths.

It’s a complicated story, but the 30-something son of the deceased had apparently gotten into an argument with the 19-year-old ringleader of the teenagers in a restaurant. It had come to blows.

Feeling humiliated, the teenager had tracked the man down and arranged for his friends, including Shi Ayi’s nephew, to “teach him a lesson.”

As a result of her nephew’s apparently limited involvement in the attack, Shi Ayi’s family may only have to pay about 10,000 renminbi, perhaps more, to the victim’s family, less than the others who beat the man and especially the main culprit, she said.

And yet what of the nephew? Why had he joined the gang? A 16-year-old can get in trouble anywhere, but what specifically was going on here, I wanted to know?

“No one has any time for him,” Shi Ayi said, looking troubled. “My brother and his wife run a shoe shop and work all the time. He has basically been left alone for years.”

I felt truly sorry for her. Yet as any working mother knows, a caregiver dealing with such intense financial pressures, with an apparently unstable family behind her, must be considered a risk. Reluctantly, I had to let Shi Ayi go, with a double-month wage.

She took it well. “Things change,” she said.