Encounters: Charlie

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So today was a classic China day:

I tutored seven seven year olds in the morning, which was hell because we were doing clothing and they were bored after the first ten minutes. I revived them with designing the clothing on paper dolls, and lost them again when we went back to the book. Got them back with my "find the tshirt/trousers/socks and get it/them on faster than the other guy" race, and lost them with the fill in the blanks in the book. It kills me.

Afterwards, I had two delicious meat filled baozis (steamed bread with meat and green onions in them...sounds far less delicious than they are) from the woman in Da Chong that thinks it's hilarious that I buy things from her (her laughter always makes my morning after I leave class). Then I took the bus to one of Shenzhen's many ridiculous shopping malls to try to find a blazer at H&M. No luck, so I grabbed a muffin and coffee at Starbucks. I know. I can't help it.

After my second tutoring gig with the two most adorable and willing-to-act-out-dialogues-to-their-full-potential-type students, I went home for a little and then went to the gym for my hot yoga in Chinese class. After explaining again that I only understand a little Chinese but I understand yoga, I walked back and got some delicious jiaozis (dumplings) from my neighborhood noodle shop on my way to a hairwash with Mindy.

Encounters:

The kid that washed Mindy's hair was 16 years old. He spoke wonderful English-- his English name is Charlie. He had left high school and moved to Shenzhen three months ago so he could make more money. His whole family is back in Hubei Province. His parents are farmers. I was nearly comatose from my glorious scalp and neck massage, but I was following their conversation at times. I caught the part where he asked Mindy how much money she made per month-- a common question in China. She rounded down and told him 10,000 RMB per month. For the sake of conversation, she returned the question, and he laughed and said 500RMB per month. 500RMB. Per month. That's like US$70 a month, or about $2.5 per day. I made 650RMB from my side jobs TODAY. We told him to try to find a job using his English, but he described the challenges of doing that in a city like Shenzhen that has so many people that have graduated from college. I knew that the hair wash people, just like the masseuses, are barely paid anything, but they had never actually told us before. I had always side stepped the whole salary question. So much for communism-- the market demand for our services dictates how much each of us is paid. The geographies of our births resulted in our current situation: Charlie, the migrant from Hubei, and MVA, the migrant from the U.S. I know that's not a fair comparison, but take the teachers at my foreign language school. They make somewhere around 12 times what Charlie makes. Talk about disparity...and he lives five minutes down the street from me. That's Shenzhen for you.

"Shenzhen was alive. People called it the 'Overnight City' because growth had been so fast; sometimes they compared its rising buildings to bamboo shoots after a good rain. Intellectuals in cities such as Beijing sneered at Shenzhen for all the usual reasons--no history, no culture, no class--but the city meant something entirely different to migrants from the interior. To them, it had a living character: strengths and flaws, cruelties and successes. In a nation of boomtowns, Shenzhen was the most famous of them all."
-- Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China


Note: I found out about a week later that the hairwash kids usually are provided with free housing and food as part of the deal. With rent and food taken care of, 500 RMB per month makes much more sense. Good ole' socialism.

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