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Eating Bitterness | Michelle Loyalka | Talks at Google

2,171 views · Published 5 September 2012 · 45:25 · Indexed 29 October 2026

Channel: Talks at Google · 2012 · Nonprofits & Activism

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Every year over 200 million peasants flock to China's urban centers, providing a profusion of cheap labor that helps fuel the country's staggering economic growth. Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Frontlines of China's Great Urban Migration takes readers into the lives of eight rural migrants who have come to Xi'an in pursuit of the newly-imported American Dream. By day each of them finds opportunity in the bustling High-Tech Zone, but by night their lives play out mainly in the dilapidated old village of Gan Jia Zhai. The book is structured to show in rough progression how successfully these individuals assimilate into city life and how conflicted the relationships between their familiar rural roots and newly-minted urban aspirations become. Each chapter introduces a new story and a new set of social issues that, taken together, present a panorama of what it means to embark on the migrant journey.

Eating Bitterness starts with a family of vegetable vendors who would like to return to the countryside but believe only a lifetime of urban labor will open the doors of opportunity for their young daughter. It follows an itinerant knife sharpener who is painfully aware that he represents a rapidly dying breed in the New China; a group of teenaged beauty-industry poster girls who are eager to forget all things old in pursuit of their new material dreams but have no idea how or where to begin; a free-spirited recycler who drifts from job to job just waiting to find an opportunity worthy of his heart's attention; a former farmer who is racked by addiction and plagued with idleness after receiving a huge payout in exchange for his land; a cash-strapped mother who leaves her own children back in the village only to take care of rich people's kids in the city; and a successful storekeeper who lives with her family of four in the back of her linen shop because she has not yet found a way to attain a normal urban life. Eating Bitterness ends with a second grade runaway turned wealthy philanthropist-wannabe who is consumed by a restless longing for meaning indicative of a growing dissatisfaction with the ultra-materialistic direction China is headed.

Though tales of China's economic miracle abound, as do portraits of its peasant poor, little attention has been paid to this vital and growing class of new urban workers who are caught in-between. With a full 300 million migrants expected to descend on China's cities in the next two decades, these people represent both China's greatest domestic challenge in the coming years.

The stories in Eating Bitterness present the human side to China's seemingly unstoppable development machine, and the resilience, determination and grit these migrants display all attest to the human spirit's time-tested ability to persevere. Over and above providing a vast and inexpensive labor pool, by pressing ahead in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles and enduring all manner of hardships this stalwart band of people may well be the unsung hero behind China's rising success on the world stage. There is no exact term for it in English, but in Chinese this indomitable spirit is called chiku, or eating bitterness.

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