A Portrait of a Left-Behind Child

Jia Yi shows what life is like for a left-behind child in Hunan province

I recently saw a documentary at Asia Society called Jia Yi, which focuses on a family from a farming village in Hunan province. The parents make the decision to go to Guangzhou to make more money to provide for the family, but that means leaving behind seven-year-old Jiayi and her younger brother with their grandparents.

The film gives a rounded portrait of the family, though mostly following Jiayi as she walks several kilometres to go to school, a bare room with antiquated wooden desks. After school she has to take the cows out to graze before dinner, wash clothes in the river, and then feed her young brother his food before doing her homework.

For us in the city folk to watch this child do this and then come home to a dirt floor with no running water and very little electricity is a rude awakening to realize people in China still live like this, that there are still tens of millions who have yet to benefit from economic reforms.

Jiayi does her best with her chores and cares very much for her younger brother, but she gets scolded for getting low grades -- her grandmother says she watches too much television, and yet the television is on all the time in the room... how is she supposed to concentrate on her studies?

Jiang Nengjie has made several docs on left-behind children

Director Jiang Nengjie follows her, her younger brother and grandfather as they make the long trek to Guangzhou by train to visit her parents. While her father is excited to see them, their mother is alternately exhausted and upset -- she works the night shift in the factory and the children interrupt her sleep, and at the same time she feels guilty for leaving them behind.

Jiayi's father explains his wife got pregnant before they got married, and so they had to find other means of income to raise a family as farming wasn't enough. He can't get a good job because he doesn't have much schooling. Meanwhile his wife misses her children terribly and she cries a lot. She worries they won't even know who they are as they only see their children a few times a year.

These are the sacrifices the parents make when they leave home to work -- tens of millions of them doing mind-numbing work in factories to make more money than they would tilling the land. As a result there are millions of left-behind children all over the country, left behind not only because the parents aren't there, but because they do not have access to good education and other resources which makes them even more behind than their counterparts in the cities.

Jiang brings these issues to light and in stark focus -- there have been many news stories about left-behind children but hardly a face to them, and Jia Yi gives a very good picture of the situation for many of them.

What's also interesting is that Jiang himself is a left-behind child. In fact his family is neighbours with Jiayi's family, which is why he was able to film so much of the family for many months.

He recalls as a child his mother was away the whole time he was in primary and secondary school, and even university, while his father left later to earn more money to pay for Jiang and his younger brother's school fees.

A typical rural school with left-behind children

While us city folk may think Jiayi may need more financial resources, Jiang disagrees. He believes what she lacks the most is a good education, not just academic, but also family education; this is hard to remedy as her parents aren't there to raise her.

The parents also believe others look down on them, thinking they have deserted their children, when in fact they are doing whatever they can to keep in touch with them via video chats or phone calls. Remote parenting may not be the best solution, but technology has allowed them to correspond often with their children.

It is hard to figure out what the solution is, except to somehow create industry near the places where the families are so that the parents don't need to go so far away. But factory owners aren't going to do this due to the lack of good transportation networks for distribution and so on.

While the Chinese economy is slowing down, some factory workers have returned to their villages to farm -- at least they can feed themselves. However this leaves the state off the hook for providing a safety net despite the huge sacrifices these people have made.

It's a story that won't go away right away, but it is a plight we should all be aware of and the consequences that will result from having so many left-behind children in China.