Hsiao-Hung Pai is a journalist, originally from Taiwan, who now lives in London. Scattered Sands is her account of her travels in China, making friendships with and hearing the stories of rural migrants. Her journey begins at Moscow's Yaroslavsky station where she catches the trans-Siberian train laden with petty traders who have been trying their luck in Russia and are now returning home. They talk movingly of the insecurity and hardships of life in Russia, the money constantly extorted by the police, and the fear of racist attacks.
In China, Pai visited the informal “labour markets” of Shenyang in the northeast where migrants wait to be hired, the unlucky ones spending the whole day sometimes for nothing, sometimes for a few hours poorly paid work. She then travels to the labour-exporting areas of Sichuan still afflicted by the catastrophe of the great earthquake, to the grime-covered coal-mining areas of the Yellow river with their terrible accident records, and to the brick-making areas near Tianjin. Another chapter covers a visit to Pai's mother's home province of Shandong on which her mother joins her. It contains an interesting account of the surprise of learning that they are descended from a wealthy landlord, and the tensions of meeting up with relatives they have never known, some quite prosperous and some very poor.
Pai's next visits were to Guangdong, where the recession has hit so much of the export processing industries, and Beijing, where she talks to people working in construction and security for very poor pay. Her next chapter on Fujian is focused on people-smuggling, the snakeheads and international migration. Here she is able to build on the research for which she first became famous on undocumented Chinese workers and their exploitation in the UK (Chinese Whispers: the True Story behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour, Penguin 2008). Her last chapter, on Xinjiang, provides a very brief discussion of the ethnic tension to which heavy Han migration into the “autonomous region” and the Han domination of the oil industry has given rise.
Pai's immense strength is her ability to relate to people and to get them to talk frankly and interestingly about their lives and their feelings. No doubt shared language and ethnicity are helpful here but personality obviously also plays a role. She is able to show people that she cares and the value of her interviews is enhanced by the fact that she stays in touch with her interviewees sometimes across years and is able to pick them up a second time and see what is happening to them down the line. On several occasions she even finds people she first knew as smuggled workers in Britain now back in China.
Pai's tone is unremittingly pessimistic. Only rarely does she report a successful migration story. Again and again she comes across those who have found no work, or work that pays barely enough to live on, leaving nothing to spare for sending money back to help the family at home as most migrants hope to do. Working and living conditions are always terrible, wages are paid in arrears and when companies fail to pay up at all, sometimes for as much as six months labour, migrants have little redress. And yet workers still set out on their migrations with hope, often backed by loans from their families which in the case of workers attempting to get abroad are immense, sometimes amounting to over £20,000. This may all be lost if they are caught en route.
Of course many other studies, mostly more focused on one region or one industry than this book, and some with participant observation have reported on the abuses to which migrant workers are subject. Yet in most of these it can be seen that the majority of the migrants, in accordance with migration theory, get something out of their venture. They may indeed endure terrible working hours and poor working conditions but they earn far more than they would in the villages and manage to save something. Particularly perhaps in the case of young women, they enjoy freedom from family control, extended horizons and leisure pursuits that would be impossible in their places of origin. Although homesickness can be a problem, the mobile phone has revolutionized communication for most, even when they are thousands of miles apart.
Pai's account is gloomier than most because she was researching when the recession had already set in and work was difficult to find. Moreover, many of her interview sites were “labour markets” where people were seeking work, rather than work places where people already had it. Finally, her informants usually compare their situation with what they had dreamed it might be when they set out from their villages. Only rarely do they contrast it with the lives of their parents. In other studies, when this is done, despite all the hardship and disappointments that many migrants still suffer and the enormous growth of inequality which is such a negative characteristic of today's China, one does get a sense that many have benefited by being lifted out of poverty and that for many, the decision to migrate is rational. Pai reminds us of the vulnerability of migrant workers to economic downturns, the particular difficulties of older workers, and the stress of living with constant uncertainty.
The great strength of this book is that the voices of the workers themselves come through strongly in Pai's anecdotal style. This is investigative journalism at its best, engaging and concerned. Academics will miss a more theoretical framework and lament the lack of an index, but it is to be hoped the book's accessible style will gain it the wide audience this important subject deserves.
