Beyond tears and laughter gender, migration, and the service sector in china

the fact that 43.5 per cent of workers in China are now working in the service sector NBS, 2017a, their life experiences are under-represented.I began to work as a waitress of a chain re

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Yang Shen Beyond Tears and

Laughter Gender, Migration, and the Service Sector in China

New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5817-3

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Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Shanghai, China

I was born in Shanghai seven years after the establishment of the Reform and Opening-up policy in China In the year I was born, the country still operated as a planned economy in which food was rationed and purchased

by food stamps In the early 1990s, my parents started a small business My father resigned from his job at a state-owned enterprise (SOE), which was

an extraordinarily risky and unusual decision to make at that time because

SOE jobs were regarded as an ‘iron rice bowl’ (tie fanwan): a permanent job

with sufficient social benefits (Whyte, 2012) The reform of SOEs menced in the mid-1990s and as a result, 28.18 million workers were laid off from 1998 to 2003; by 2003, only 68.76  million workers remained employed in SOEs (SCIO, 2004) Several years after my father’s resignation, the factory where he had worked was closed down and all the workers were laid off; by that time, my father had invested in the Chinese stock market and become one of the most financially successful people from that factory

com-My family benefitted from my father’s risky decision, and we have been relatively well off ever since Yet, I could not take my family’s wealth for granted Individuals’ life chances can take different turns during the dra-matic social transformations in China By contrast, many of my father’s former colleagues lost their jobs during the massive layoffs, and they are living rather difficult lives like millions of city dwellers

I became aware of the rural-urban disparity thanks to a television mentary and through people I encountered in China In 2007, I watched

docu-‘The rich and the poor’, a documentary made by the Japanese media group NHK.  It displayed the drastic differences between the newly rich and migrant workers in China I was sentimental to see a middle-aged rich man

decorate his house like a palace, whereas a middle-aged male migrant worker in Guangdong province searched for the cheapest toy for his child, who still lived in a rural area, in the hope of taking the toy back to his vil-lage during the Spring Festival.1 It echoed a case I came across around

11 pm on a midsummer night in 2010 Some women were waiting by the roadside in an attempt to make a living by carrying passengers by scooter Planning to take the ‘scooter taxi’ home, I agreed upon a price with one of these women Before leaving, she spoke to a little girl, three or four years old, who was sleeping on the cold concrete floor: ‘Mum has to leave for a while Please stay here and don’t move around.’ Her child was half awake and remained lying on the floor On the way to my home, the woman told

me that local Shanghainese children went to bed earlier, whereas her child had to be there until late at night She worked during the day in a super-market and as a scooter driver during the night, and her husband worked

as a scooter driver full-time She had to bring the child with her because there was no one at home I felt great compassion for them

The interaction with my roommate Xiuxiu during my M.A studies from 2007 to 2010 reinforced my resolution to do something for deprived people She came from rural Shanxi province, where coalmine explosions occurred frequently During late-night chats, she told me a lot about her hometown Although coal mining is risky work, it is more profitable than farming As a result, many men choose to be miners My roommate was the first person in her village to complete a master’s programme She wanted to do something to help her fellow villagers, but as a migrant who was new to Shanghai, her schedule was dominated by career development, such as doing internships and searching for a job in order to find a footing

in this metropolis This did not leave much time and energy for focusing

on the development of her village She was the first person from rural areas

I have come to know, and meeting her made me realise how different life trajectories could be The encounter with Xiuxiu reinforced my belief that those who do not need to worry about their own financial wellbeing are more likely to have the ability to help others, so they should take more social responsibility

In the summer of 2008, motivated by Xiuxiu’s story, my friends and I organised a volunteering group to help children in rural Guizhou province

1 Spring Festival is the biggest celebration in China It begins on January 1 of each year according to the lunar calendar, which is different from the Gregorian calendar The Chinese New Year holiday usually lasts for one week It is a festival in which families gather together,

so millions of migrant workers are on the move during this period.

It was the first time I had visited rural China Through teaching and home interviewing, I gained a glimpse of life there I was frustrated to witness poverty there, but was unable to think of any solutions During the global economic recession in 2008, many rural workers went back to their villages,

so this gave me my first opportunity to talk to people who had experienced

migration As a result, I observed that hukou can help explain the deprived

situation of rural migrants before pursuing my PhD studies

In summer 2010, a friend and I made a documentary about an 82-year- old Shanghainese woman who collected used newspapers in order to sell them to recyclers She narrated her life experience of leaving Shanghai to

support the construction of inner China in the Mao era Her hukou was

transferred from Shanghai to Sichuan province, and she was not able to transfer it back to Shanghai even after she came back At that time, living

in Shanghai without Shanghai hukou made it impossible for her to apply

for permission to use gas, a property ownership certificate and even a TV

licence Seeing how obsessed she was with her hukou status, I came to

realise what it meant to more marginalised people

After this, the suicides committed by migrant workers in Foxconn made

me decide to focus on migrants I felt sad about the tragedy, but it also made me feel that I had a duty to do something to change their situation

I felt compassion for pupils who lack sufficient educational resources and for people who are destitute because they were born in rural areas and live

a hard life The compassion for the less fortunate was one of the tions for me to carry out this research

motiva-When I was writing about reflexivity, I recalled George Orwell, one of

my favourite writers, who worked as a casual worker in restaurants in Paris and wrote a book called ‘Down and out in Paris and London’ His vivid account of working in restaurants and experiencing poverty was a great inspiration to me

‘In the face of difficulties, people should maintain their own integrity

In times of success, they should do favours to the world’, is a famous ing by Mencius (372–289 BC) It is one of my favourite mottos, guiding and reflecting my principles Rural/urban disparity, persisting gender inequality, the growing gap between rich and poor: China has many problems waiting to be solved It is my hope to devote myself to making China a better country

SCIO (2004, April) Zhongguo de jiuye zhuangkuang he zhengce [The current

situ-ation of the labour market and its related policies in China] Retrieved June 10,

htm

Whyte, M. K (2012) China’s post-socialist inequality Current History, 111(746),

229.

The process of carrying out this research and writing this book for me has been one of constant self-exploration It has been an interactive process that has reshaped my intellectual orientation and made me adapt my life-style choices It has been a project that has transcended the book-writing itself, and may foster some life-long transformations

I am greatly indebted to my previous teachers and colleagues at the London School of Economics, especially Professor Diane Perrons She provided invaluable critical feedback at every stage in the writing of this book I am much indebted to Professor Rachel Murphy, Dr Hyun Shin,

Dr Ye Liu, Dr Ania Polemia, Professor Charles Stafford, Dr Hans Steinmüller, Dr Bo Hu, Dr Yingqin Zheng for reading earlier drafts of the book and to Dr Bingqin Li, Dr Kalpana Wilson and Dr Marsha Henry, Dr Amanda Conroy, Dr Alessandro Ribu and Dr Nicole Shephard for reading chapters at various stages All of them provided invaluable comments Also, I indebted to my current colleagues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, especially Professor Yang Zhong, who encouraged me to keep on revising the book during the time I was preoccupied with teaching, paper-writing and extra-academic life I am also grateful to Dr Yang Hu and anonymous reviewers for providing constructive feedback for the book proposal My gratitude for my partner Dr Fan Yang is combined with a guilty sense of indulging in romantic love The emotional and intellectual support he has provided is beyond my expectation But without his company the book could have been published significantly earlier

Lastly, special thanks to all the fieldwork informants who shared their bittersweet stories with me Our encounters have enriched my life I hope

that I have presented a responsible and faithful account of their lives, and

it is my humble hope that this work will help provide an impetus for social change, to create a better society for all

It is notable that part of Chap 5 has been published in China Quarterly

For more details, please see Shen, Y (2016) Filial Daughters? Agency and

Subjectivity of Rural Migrant Women in Shanghai The China Quarterly,

vol 226, pp 519–537

1 Introducing Migration, Gender and the Service Sector 1

2 Gendered Subjectivities in a Patriarchal China 29

3 Working in a Gendered, Feminised and Hierarchical

4 The Short-Lived Jobs: From Beginning to End 73

5 Negotiating Intimacy: Obedience, Compromise and

6 Crafting a Modern Person via Consumption? Women and Men in Leisure Activities 127

7 Unpacking the Complexity of Gender, Class and Hukou 151

Appendix A: Doing Ethnographic Research from a Feminist

Perspective 163

Appendix B: List of Informants 187 Bibliography 193

ACFTU All-China Federation of Trade Unions

China

Fig 1.2 Average annual income of employees in Shanghai: catering

dormitory 25

Fig 6.2 A shizi xiu piece depicting ‘a harmonious family is the origin of

Table 1.1 Work schedule for morning-shift table servers and pantry

helpers 22

© The Author(s) 2019

Y Shen, Beyond Tears and Laughter, New Perspectives on Chinese

Politics and Society,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5817-3_1

Introducing Migration, Gender

and the Service Sector

A wave of suicides occurred in Foxconn factory plants across China in

2010, during which 14 workers aged 18–25 died (Lau, 2010) The Foxconn incidents drew my attention to rural migrant workers and moti-vated me to carry out research on migrant workers On the theoretical level, I was interested in finding out everyday operation of gender and class On the personal level, I intended to document experiences of the marginalised groups in Shanghai, the richest city in China

In this book, rural migrant workers (sometimes abbreviated to migrant

workers) refer to those who hold rural hukou and do non-agricultural entry-level work in places other than where their hukou is registered Hukou refers to the household registration system in China that catego-

rises citizens as either agricultural residents or non-agricultural residents.1

It requires every Chinese citizen to be recorded with the registration authority at birth

Prior scholarship has explored migrant women in manufacturing such as Lee’s (1998) and Pun’s (2005) pioneering work on factory girls

in Guangdong province In this book, I aim to develop a deeper standing of rural migrant workers’ lives in the service sector Despite

under-1 The reason why I did not put ‘the’ ahead of ‘hukou’ is that I treat it as a parallel concept with race, gender and class I understand that hukou is used in a specific context, but I intend

to ‘normalise’ or generalise the word by not putting ‘the’ before it.

the fact that 43.5 per cent of workers in China are now working in the service sector (NBS, 2017a), their life experiences are under-represented.

I began to work as a waitress of a chain restaurant in Shanghai I met Yong and Fengyu as soon as I started my work Yong was born in rural Anhui province in 1985 After dropping out of junior high school, he migrated to Shanghai, working as a pantry helper, delivering dishes from kitchens to dining areas in the Meteor restaurant (pseudonym of the res-taurant where I did fieldwork) When I first met him in 2012, he was

27 years old and was extremely eager to find a wife Twenty-seven might

be an age still too young for a middle-class man in Shanghai to ever sider marriage, whereas it becomes a disadvantage for rural men like Yong

con-to find a wife For rural migrant men, age increase is not necessarily in tandem with the growth of professional experiences and wealth; their

‘marriageability’ probably decreases with age Each time Yong’s parents met him, they nagged that he should get married as soon as possible, which made him very anxious He worked at Meteor in the hope of find-ing a wife Considering women are usually overrepresented in the service sectors, he believed that his chance to find a waitress to be his wife was relatively high However, after more than five years of non-stop searching,

he was still not able to find a wife To make things worse, waitresses ited uncooperative attitudes towards him, which made his work difficult

exhib-He thought about quitting the job many times but had no idea where

to go

Fengyu was born in rural Anhui as well She worked at Meteor for two years before giving birth to a son Not long after giving birth, she resumed her job at Meteor in order to provide financial resources for her family She did not think it was a desirable job—a lot of unpleasant inci-dents occurred when serving local customers One day a male customer showed superiority to her: ‘If we hadn’t come to this restaurant, you would have been planting crops and pasturing cattle.’ She hit back, ‘If we hadn’t come, you would have been eating shit!’

Fengyu, like many other waitresses—and even pantry helpers selves—considered being a pantry helper as hopeless and unpromising According to Yong, Fengyu’s attitude towards male pantry helpers is indifferent and hostile Waitresses are supposed to be taking dishes from pantry helpers and delivering them to customers as soon as they can But Yong told me that, sometimes, waitresses like Fengyu just ignored the male pantry helpers They had to stand holding dishes while the waitresses chatted The negative perceptions of the pantry helpers led to waitresses’

them-uncooperative behaviour at work Waitresses’ discrimination rendered it impossible for Yong to find a wife in the restaurant.

* * *Fengyu and Yong dropped out of middle school and migrated from rural Anhui Province to Shanghai, following their families For the past 40 years, numerous young migrant workers follow this trajectory By the end of

2017, China had 171.85 million migrant workers holding rural hukou but

doing non-farm work outside their registered hometowns or home lages, accounting for 12.4 per cent of the whole population (NBS, 2018).Migration results from various intertwined factors, including house-hold registration system reform (Huang & Zhan, 2005; The State Council, 2014), income disparity between urban and rural areas, increased demand for an expanded labour force in cities, rural land reclassification (Song, 2009; Su, 2007; Yang, 2006; Yang & Shi, 2006), and the changing aspira-tions of peasants (Gaetano, 2004; Li, 2004; Yan, 2008) Among these reasons, the income gap is a direct reason that stimulates their migration Take Shanghai and Anhui for example, the annual disposable income of urban households in Shanghai (57,691.7 yuan) was the highest among all the regions in 2016 (NBS, 2017b), 4.9 times the net income of rural households (11,720.5 yuan) in Anhui province (NBS, 2017c) More than

vil-50 per cent of the workers in the Meteor Restaurant came from Anhui Province, particularly from rural Bengbu, Liu’an and Ma’anshan, as dem-onstrated in Fig. 1.1 Shanghai is an attractive destination for Anhui rural workers partly because of the availability of job opportunities and better earning potentials and partly because of geographical proximity

China’s strong economic growth over the last four decades has lowed a pro-urban developmental model in favour of metropolitans and urban residents The rapid growth would not have been possible without high levels of internal migration from the relatively low-income rural regions to the booming cities and industrial regions Migrant workers from rural areas make a vital contribution to China’s economic growth This growth has led to rising prosperity and declining poverty, but also to rising social and spatial inequality Rural migrants’ experiences in Shanghai reflect the social and spatial inequality The formation of a new urban underclass is a consequence of the massive scale of migration In this book,

fol-I aim to illuminate how the shift in location has affected migrants’ lives in

the transformation of post-reform China I address a part of the service sector and highlight both women and men’s experiences in order to anal-

yse the significance of gender alongside social class and hukou status as

markers of social division in China By studying restaurant workers in Shanghai, the book aims to show how a group of people who have played

a major role in the transformation of China have experienced this mation in their own ways

transfor-IntersectIonalIty of Gender, class and Hukou

The book adopts an intersectional approach to examine social inequality Intersectionality emerged in the late 1980s in an attempt to address the complexity of multiple forms of discrimination and social inequality (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013) Since then it has been adopted across disci-plines and has also inspired social movements outside academia Intersectionality can refer to ‘the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institu-tional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these

Fig 1.1 Map of Shanghai and Anhui Source: Mr Wei Yuan made the map for

the book

interactions in terms of power’ (Davis, 2008, p.  68) The question of whether intersectionality is an epistemology, a theory or a methodology is still controversial (ibid., p. 69) It may be more fruitful to address ‘what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is’ (Cho et  al.,

2013, p. 795) It provides a unique way to think about ‘the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power’ (ibid., p. 795)

According to McCall (2005), the categorisation of identities such as gender, race and class is an inadequate but necessary approach to address social inequality It is inadequate in that categorisations simplify social phenomena, and social inequality may be reinforced through the iteration

of identities/symbols in categories; but it is necessary because categories are useful to identify social inequality and can be strategically used for political purposes

In this book, the intersectional approach assists me in three ways, which serves as an epistemology and a methodology as well as a theory First, it serves to justify the shift from a focus on women to research on disadvan-taged people, including disadvantaged men Davis (2008) considered that intersectionality is about the ‘the acknowledgement of differences among women’ (p. 71) While Young (2011) argues that intersectionality needs

to include additional group representation—not only for women, but also for members of other disadvantaged groups Although it is important to address the diversity of women, it would be remiss not to extend this analysis to men

Second, intersectionality helps me understand how multiple

character-istics such as gender, class, hukou, age and so on affect the production of

knowledge, which especially refers to the conversations between me and

my informants The intersectionality of these specific characteristics is taposed with reflexivity and positionality, discussed later in Appendix A.Third, intersectionality functions as a theoretical tool to analyse social

jux-inequality based on gender, class and hukou The book extends the

dimen-sions of intersectionality beyond the triad of gender, race and class by ating the discussion in the context of China and by including the category

situ-of hukou Hukou is a crucial component situ-of intersectionality in this book

because it implicates the urban/rural binary which functions as a social system and is deeply embedded in people’s mentality, impacting on social

status and wellbeing together with social class Gender, class and hukou

intersect to explain social inequality in Chinese society The following

sec-tions elaborate the intersecting categories of gender, class and hukou.

a crItIque of Gendered MIGratIon

and the Gendered servIce sector

As evidenced by the cases of Fengyu and Yong, their motivations to work

in the restaurant and their experiences at work are gendered Migration is gendered in nature; migrant women and men experience it in different ways, although they face similar difficulties such as customers’ discrimina-tory attitudes due to their subordinated situation

Gendered experience of migration is a primary focus of this book Current literature is insufficient in three ways when considering gender, migration and the service sector First, despite the fact that there is a small and growing body of qualitative research in Chinese and in English that focuses on migration experiences and employment, workers’ experiences

in the manufacturing sector are more likely to be emphasised (Chan, 2002; Chan & Pun, 2010; Chang, 2008; Kim, 2015; Lee, 1998; Pun,

1999, 2005, 2012) Only a few have focused on migrant workers in the service sector (Gaetano, 2004; He, 2007, 2008; Jacka, 2006; Yan, 2008) The population of migrant workers in the service sector has been increas-ing in China, with 42.9 per cent of migrant workers being engaged in the service sector in 2014, compared to 33.3 per cent in 2009 By contrast, the number of workers in manufacturing followed a downward trend, from 39.1 per cent in 2009 to 31.3 per cent in 2014 (NBS, 2010, 2015) The number of rural workers in the service sector is too significant to be ignored

Second, current qualitative research on service workers has a strong focus on experience at work per se (Hanser, 2008; Lan, 2003; McDowell, 2009; Otis, 2011); and scholars argue that current studies on migrant men focus on work life, whereas intimate life is missing (Choi & Peng, 2016) While I argue that work and intimate life are interrelated, for example, the primary motivation for Yong to choose to work at the Meteor Restaurant is to find a partner The motivation is also shared by other male workers After working with them for a while, I found that family life is a daily topic among the workers I realised that their primary identities are daughters, sons, mothers or fathers, which encourages me to record their lives beyond work In this book, I endeavour to provide a holistic approach

to examining three arenas of rural migrant workers’ lives: work, intimacy and leisure

Third, the epistemological understanding to view gender as relational is overlooked in either migration studies or employment studies Although

scholars called for a relational and contextualised understanding of gender

in migration studies a decade ago (Donato, Gabaccia, Holdaway, Manalansan & Pessar, 2006), it is not uncommon to see that scholars claim to focus on gendered migration and gender differences while in fact they merely focus on either men or women

For example, according to some qualitative literature on migration in China, migration is gendered not only by motivations of migrants and by the social networks they create in the arrival city, but also by the occupa-tions they take up (Gaetano & Jacka, 2004; Jacka, 2006; Lee & Kleinman, 2003; Pun, 2005) In this literature, migrant women are considered to have special obligations in the household, such as their roles as filial daugh-ters and responsible wives Interestingly, if the research on female and male migrants is compared, these gendered experiences are sometimes not gendered with regard to the responsibilities both male and female migrants intend to escape or the filial obligations they have to adopt For instance, Lin (2013) claimed that sending remittances home (p.  62) and family pressure to give birth to a son (p. 68) amounted to the ‘gendered familial responsibility’ (p. 67) of his male informants Jacka (2006) noted a filial obligation to send remittances home among her female informants as well (p. 179) Furthermore, Jacka argued that the motivations for migrating were highly gendered She pointed out that patriarchal relations and women’s experiences in rural areas were unique motivations for women to migrate and to choose to prolong their stay in cities (Jacka, 2006, pp. 7, 221) But again, Lin (2013) found that ‘for some men it was a path that enabled them to escape traditional gender obligations and responsibilities’ (p. 48) This resembles Jacka’s findings on women

Therefore, gendered differences in the motivation of migration are not clearly established I do not deny the existence of gendered motivations for migration, but my critique focuses on the insufficient evidence of, and therefore the unconvincing argument in favour of, gendered migration—

It is not sufficient to claim that migrants’ behaviour is gendered if only a single gender is taken into account

Apart from the tendency to focus on either women or men, current literature on gender and migration has a strong focus on women The tendency is premised on the presumption that women are disadvantaged

in society, ignoring the fact that women and men can be disadvantaged in different ways due to structural inequalities of gender and class, among others While it is important to focus on women’s experiences and the production of a workplace of women, 55.7  per  cent (83.7  million) of

cross-border immigrant workers are men (International Labour Organization, 2015, p xi); while in China, 68.7  per  cent of the rural migrant workers are men (NBS, 2018) However, migrant men’s subjec-tive experiences are absent in current literature It is not an issue reserved for studies in China alone, and can be seen elsewhere (Choi & Peng, 2016).

Men’s studies have a strong focus on masculinity, which is also seen in the studies on migrant men (Batnitzky, McDowell, & Dyer, 2009; Boehm, 2008; Cohen, 2006; Kilkey, Perrons, & Plomien, 2013; Osella & Osella, 2000) They argue that migrant men’s masculinity can be achieved through migration, marriage, fatherhood and breadwinner status In the literature on Chinese male migrant workers their experiences are appall-ingly under-addressed, with only a few exceptional cases (Choi & Peng, 2016; Kim, 2015; Lin, 2013; Tian & Deng, 2017) Even less literature compares migrant women and men’s experiences (Du, 2017; Kim, 2015).The service sector has been a major economic stimulus in advanced economies Scholars pay continuous attention to gender and the service sector, with an emphasis on women as emotional and aesthetic labour (Franzway, 2000; Hall, 1993; Hochschild, 1983; Otis, 2008; Williams, 2003) and women’s sexualised and commodified bodies (Brownell, 2001; McDowell, 2009; Schein, 2000; Zheng, 2006)

China’s prosperous service sector is in accordance with soaring nomic growth Scholars have come to pay attention to workers in the service industry in China (Hanser, 2008; Lan, 2003; Otis, 2011; Zheng, 2006) Otis (2011) argues that the creation of a service class fundamen-tally transformed women’s lives But the fact that women are overrepre-sented in the service sector does not mean that men do not play an important role As shown in the conflicts between Yong and Fengyu, women and men working together complicates gender and employment relations Gender dynamics at work are important venues to explore However, most qualitative literature on labour and employment which claims to have a gender perspective usually only focuses on women

eco-An increasing number of scholars become focused on men in the vice sector Scholars argue that working class men are disadvantaged at entry-level service jobs that require obedience (Boehm, 2008; Bourgois, 2002; Leidner, 1993; McDowell, 2009; Nixon, 2009) Hegemonic mas-culinities require a man to be assertive and confident (Leidner, 1993), whereas the subordinated masculinity of male service workers is consti-tuted with ‘humiliating interpersonal subordination’, a concept coined by

ser-Bourgois (2002, p.  141) in which working-class men’s masculinity is undermined in interpersonal communication.

Male- or female-centred studies are too limited to inform us about der dynamics and its relation to power relations Still, key questions remaining unanswered concern how female and male workers interact

gen-with each other and experience life in different ways Therefore, the first overarching question of the book is: how were migrant workers’ life experiences gendered? One of my aims is to examine the gendered experiences without

ignoring either gender By focusing on gender differences among the taurant workers with first-hand empirical materials, I aim to analyse the

res-significance of gender alongside social class and hukou status as markers of

social division in China, and to point out that the experiences of migrant women and men differ in various ways

NoNgmiNgoNg: the IntersectIon Between class

and Hukou

In the risk assessment form that I filled in before starting the fieldwork, I envisioned potential sexual harassment that I may encounter in the restau-rant—perpetrated by male customers—based on the literature which highlighted the feminised uniforms female workers have to wear (Hall, 1993; Hochschild, 1983; McDowell, 2009; Pun, 2005) and sexual harass-ment that customers imposed on them (Hughes & Tadic, 1998; Yagil, 2008) But contrary to my expectations, I did not experience customer-initiated sexual harassment myself, nor observe it between female workers and male clients In the Meteor Restaurant, the waitresses’ uniform is a loose black dress attached with an apron, suggesting more of servility than femininity Most of the time, customers did not even look at workers when workers greeted them Rather, workers encountered verbal discrimination and physical abuse from customers from time to time Working as a wait-ress, I was once scolded by a middle-aged Shanghainese man, who called

me a ‘country bumpkin’ (xiang xia ren) when I served him food The

socioeconomic status of most diners in the Meteor Restaurant is in sharp

contrast to that of the migrant workers Class and hukou disparity between customers and rural workers (nongmingong) are too significant, which

may prevent sexual harassment from occurring

Nongmingong is a term that especially refers to rural migrant workers Nongmin literally means peasants, and gong refers to workers The term nong- mingong suggests the class and hukou identities of rural migrant workers

A lot of literature on worker-customer relations in the west (Hochschild, 1983; McDowell, 2009; Pettinger, 2004) and in China (Hanser, 2008;

He, 2007; Otis, 2011) considers class disparity While in China, a subtler

dimension is hukou disparity Both class and hukou serve as important lytical lenses in this book The hukou system has valorised the urban-rural binary in place since 1958, marking the superiority of urban hukou holders and the inferiority of rural hukou holders Hukou is a crucial component of

ana-intersectionality in China, because it reflects social inequality and impacts the workers’ subjectivity and wellbeing Discrimination is inextricably

associated with hukou status, because the urban/rural binarism is deeply

rooted in many people’s perceptions Migration, viewed as rite of passage,

is deeply rooted in profound rural/urban inequality The formation of a new underclass is a consequence of the massive scale of migration

Nongmingong has been used by the state to describe this particular

group The term appears in various government reports such as the annual National Monitoring and Investigating Report on Rural Migrant Workers published by NBS (2018) and the Report on the Problems of New- Generation Rural Migrant Workers released by the All-China Federation

of Trade Unions (ACFTU) (Lv et  al., 2010) The term has become a

political identity promoted by the government Nongmingong endows

rural migrants with a new identity, which serves to shape the workers’ self- identity According to my observations from 2010 to 2014, an increasing

number of my informants began to use nongmingong to describe

selves, which demonstrates that they gradually came to recognise selves as such This categorisation has had a profound impact on the

them-workers’ subjectivity Nongmingong has become a new group, a class and

a shared identity

Some scholars view migrant workers as a new working class (Wang, 2005a) or a ‘new urban underclass’ (Goodman, 2014, p. 3) because they have similar socioeconomic status and a shared identity I agree with the view that migrant workers should be categorised as a new social class because they do not belong to the traditional working class, with urban

hukou and comprehensive social benefits, nor are they farmers in rural areas Class and hukou status intertwine, positioning migrant workers as the

underprivileged group in urban China, the target of widespread nation by urbanites Class helps to explain these workers’ position in soci-ety and is suggestive of difference and inequality

discrimi-As shown in Fengyu’s and Yong’s stories, frequent interactions between workers and between customers and workers complicate gender and class

relationships in the service sector In the Meteor, both female and male

workers are discriminated by customers due to class and hukou disparity

But male pantry helpers are further discriminated by waitresses because of the inconsistency between the masculinised expectation for a man and these workers’ de facto disadvantaged socioeconomic status in society

Gender, class and hukou are perspectives crucial to understanding migrant

workers’ life experiences in the service sector, particularly against the drop of socialism-to-market reforms and the phenomenal internal migra-

back-tion Despite the importance of gender, class and hukou perspectives, how

they operate to impact workers and organisations remain understudied in China, which I intend to remedy in the book Therefore, the second

research question of this book is: How did gender, class and hukou operate

in the daily lives of migrant workers?

Gender, race and class as the classic categories of intersectionality are not sufficient to explain particular situations in the context of China In

this book, I examine how gender, class and hukou operated in the daily lives of these migrant workers I will focus on how gender, class and hukou

are intertwined at different levels by examining their work and intimate relationships as well as their leisure activities But the book addresses these issues beyond the lens of migrants’ gendered experience, paying particular attention to how the service industry, as a gendered and classed regime, is produced and maintained

stIGMatIsatIon of NoNgmiNgoNgIn conteMporary

researchPast literature has explored the issue of rural migrants primarily from a quantitative approach (Choi & Peng, 2016) There has been a significant amount of Chinese-language quantitative literature addressing the issue of rural migrants (to mention just a few, Cao, 2010; Lv et al., 2010; NBS, 2015) Although quantitative research paints a general picture of migrant workers, it is less able to address the complexity and the heterogeneity of migrant workers’ experiences in urban China

Scholarly discussion in Chinese-language literature focusing on rural migrants often treats them as a group to be controlled and transformed; they are seen as challenges to the state, challenges that should be dealt with properly and carefully (Y. Chen, 2008; Hu & Luo, 2001; Tao, 2000; Zhou & Qin, 2004) For instance, some scholars noted that rural migrant workers are to blame for the increasing crime rate in urban China (Y. L

Chen, 2008; Hu & Luo, 2001) It was reported that, in 2000, more than

50 per cent of criminal suspects in big cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou were migrant workers (Y. L Chen, 2008), whereas the ratio

of the population without local hukou to the whole registered population

in these cities was 23.1 per cent (NBS, 2001a), 21.9 per cent (Chen et al., 2006) and 37.9 per cent (Guangzhou Bureau of Statistics, 2003a, 2003b) respectively.2 Some scholars advise that the state should increase social control in order to deal with migrants’ transgressive behaviour (Hu & Luo, 2001)

In addition, migrants are considered a group to be transformed and

their personal quality (suzhi) improved (Tao, 2000; Zhou & Qin, 2004)

For example, Tao (2000) argued that rural migrants have the behaviour of

‘abnormal consumption’ because they ‘prioritise material consumption over spiritual consumption’ (pp.  41–42) He contended that migrants’

suzhi should be improved to have a more correct attitude towards

consumption

The problematisation discourse which scholars used to portray rural

migrants reflects the hegemonic power of the social elites and their sense

of superiority The problems that peasants and rural migrants encountered and the solutions to them have been constructed by the elites and rarely

by rural people themselves (Jacka, 2006), constructed in a way that reflects the taste and concerns of the dominant groups Migrant workers’ own voices are missing in the problematisation discourse

The naming of nongmingong can be considered a process of othering,

which consolidates their low social position According to a survey ating social status in China, rural migrant workers were ranked 77 out of all the 81 occupations listed (Li, 2005, p. 81), indicating extremely low social status The naming also marks the segregation between urbanites and migrants Overt discrimination of migrant workers is now rarely seen

evalu-in the official media, but this does not mean that the barriers between local residents and migrants are disappearing Instead, these barriers manifest in a different way Hostility towards migrants has been expressed

in online forums and social media Xenophobic comments are commonly seen on some local online forums such as KDS, which claims to be one of

2 I calculated the proportion of migrant households in Shanghai (3,871,100/16,737,700 

= 23.1 per cent), in Beijing (3,840,000/{3,840,000 + 11,000,000} = 21.9 per cent) and in Guangzhou (4,281,782/{4,281,782 + 7,029,293} = 37.9 per cent) by myself.

the most influential Shanghai-based forums Some posts complain that local residents’ career opportunities have been reduced by the presence of outsiders, and they narrow local people’s available living space, making Shanghai a less attractive place to live Comments such as ‘life in Shanghai will be better without outsiders’ are frequently made (CosdoNet, 2009; Sorg, 2014; Yewutai, 2009) On the most popular social media platform, Sina Weibo, which is similar to Twitter, some accounts such as ‘Shanghai

Hotspot Today’ (Jinri Shanghai Redian), ‘Mutual Help and Protection of Rights and Benefits of Shanghainese across the World’ (Quanqiu Shanghairen Quanyi Huzhu Baohu Zuzhi) have 97,000 and 130,000 fol-

lowers respectively in June 2018 These accounts differentiate Shanghainese

from outsiders (waidi ren) by posting selective news regarding how

unci-vilised the outsiders are

The prevalent stigmatisation and the invisibility of migrants’ voices

motivate me to focus on workers’ agency and subjectivity How migrant workers exercise their agency and express their subjectivity is the third over- arching question of the book Agency and subjectivity are implicated in each

other’s formation The ability to assert some control over one’s life (agency) is affected by how subjects perceive themselves and the situation

in which they are positioned (subjectivity); in turn, their perceptions of their environment impact on their willingness and ability to act The work-ers’ ideas and practices were constrained and enabled by certain factors and, in this book, the conceptualisation of agency and subjectivity is cou-pled with coercion in order to analyse these factors

The purpose of focusing on the agency and subjectivity of both female and male workers is to understand disadvantaged people from their own points of view, to identify the coercion/constraints they encountered, and

to ascertain whether migrant workers were able to actively change their situation rather than passively accept coercion By focusing on the work-ers’ agency and subjectivity, it has been possible to obtain insight into their daily lives and how they perceived the opportunities available to them At the same time, by conceptualising agency and coercion in this specific context, I aim to make a contribution to feminist scholarship, discussed in Chap 2

So far, I have introduced all the research questions of the book These three research questions overlap The second question focuses on the

everyday operation of gender, class and hukou It points not only to the

workers’ gendered and classed life experiences, but to the construction of

a gendered, feminised and hierarchical workplace (Chap 3) The first

question of gendered experiences has a narrower focus than the second, but it is the focus of enquiry through the four empirical chapters The third question is about the exercise of agency and the expression of sub-jectivity This question is related to the other two questions The discus-sion on agency and subjectivity can be reflected in gendered and classed ways Gendered and classed agency and subjectivity also speak to the ques-

tion of how gender, class and hukou operated in daily life But female and

male workers’ agency and subjectivity also exhibited non-gendered larities For example, both female and male workers’ subjectivities were relational and filial (Chap 5), and both women and men exercised agency

simi-in the form of copsimi-ing and resistance (Chap 6)

MarketIsatIon of servIce sectors and workers

Migrants’ life stories make little sense without taking into account the broader social and economic transformation, including marketisation and commercialisation after open-up reform The service sector is not simply

an evidence of economic prosperity Indeed, it tells us much about ing transformation in Chinese society

ongo-The service sector is equivalent to a tertiary industry or tertiary sector

in China The proportion of service industry in gross domestic product (GDP) has surged from 24.6 per cent in 1978 to 51.6 per cent in 2016 (NBS, 2017d) Catering is a major service sector industry It is the busi-ness of providing cooked food and serving it on the premises to consum-ers (NBS, 2013) Revenue from the catering industry has maintained double-digit growth from 1991 onwards (Jin, 2009, pp. 31, 284) The number of enterprises and the scale of the labour force have witnessed great expansion Food consumption in restaurants continues to be a cru-cial driver of economic growth

In Shanghai, the service sector’s share of GDP in Shanghai rose from 18.6 per cent in 1978 to 69.8 per cent in 2016, which has been in line with the catering sector’s share of GDP in Shanghai (SBS, 2017a) The booming catering sector mirrors China’s burgeoning consumption levels

In 2016, business revenue in the catering sector in Shanghai ranked the second among all the municipalities and provinces in China (NBS, 2017e).The catering sector becomes one of the primary options that migrants would choose to work in upon arrival Eighty per cent of the restaurant workers in China are rural migrants (L.  Jin, 2011) In Shanghai, the assumption that almost all the service workers in the catering sector are

rural migrants is prevalent The catering and hospitality sector ranks fourth among all the sectors that migrants would choose (SBS, 2014a).

Although migrants are better off after migration, especially financially, they are still lower paid, enjoy fewer social benefits and have poorer living conditions than the local population Migrant workers in restaurants share all these characteristics As shown in Fig. 1.2, the average wage in the catering sector, compared to the local average, witnessed a declining trend between 2000 and 2016 in Shanghai It is noticeable that restaurant wage fluctuated around 50 per cent of the local average from 2008 onwards, which is mirrored by the fact that income in restaurants was the third low-est of all the sectors in Shanghai (SBS, 2017a) In the Meteor Restaurant,

my fieldwork site, monthly wages for entry-level workers ranged from

1940 to 2240  yuan in January 2012, 2700–3000  in April 2014 and 3300–3700 in June 2018, similar to the average wages in the catering sec-tor in Shanghai

But before the open-up reform, the gap in income distribution was not

as large as in the post-Mao era (Liu, 2006) The wage system in urban China was guided by an egalitarian approach From 1956 to 1978, wage was highly centralised and controlled by the state (Meisner, 1999; Ye & Wang, 2001) At the time, catering jobs, like many other state-owned

44678 78045

Fig 1.2 Average annual income of employees in Shanghai: catering average/

Shanghai average (2000–2016) (Currency: yuan) Sources: Shanghai Bureau of Statistics (SBS, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010,

2011, 2012, 2013a, 2014b, 2015, 2016, 2017a) Note: From 2014 onwards, Shanghai Bureau of Statistics merged wages in the catering sector with wages in the hospitality sector in the yearbook Wages in the catering sector have no longer been shown separately, which may affect the accuracy of the statistics shown in the table

jobs, were called ‘iron rice bowl’ (tie fanwan), as they were occupations

with guaranteed security and abundant social benefits And because of the strict control over mobility, these jobs were mostly taken up by local resi-

dents with urban hukou.

This situation has changed significantly since China’s marketisation After 1978, the labour system transformed with the political and eco-nomic reform of China The proportion of state-owned enterprises in the catering sector has fallen from 27.9 per cent in 2000 (NBS, 2001b) to 1.4 per cent in 2016 (NBS, 2017f) State-owned restaurants offering job security and sufficient social benefits, and mostly employing local resi-dents, have gradually been replaced by privately owned restaurants offer-ing jobs with meagre wages and scarce benefits, and mostly employing migrants Low wage, minimum social benefits and the perception of res-taurant work as a job for rural migrants make the work unattractive to urbanites Despite their underprivileged situation, however, it should be noted that migrants’ financial wellbeing has been improved through migration And the catering sector continues to be an option, sometimes even the best option, for migrant workers when they first arrive in Shanghai

During the Mao Era, service workers were able to form an egalitarian relationship with customers because they have similar socioeconomic and

hukou status and speak the same dialect The egalitarian relationship can

be reflected from the service that workers delivered Service quality was not an emphasis in the daily work of service personnel On the contrary, it was depreciated Being served was considered improper because ‘good

service leads to revisionist ideology’ (fuwu de hao hui chu xiuzheng zhuyi)

(Qiao, Kanagaratnam, & Tessier, 2003, p. 3; Tang, Ling, & Zhang, 2006,

p.  62) Under marketisation, providing good service to customers is emphasised by employers, echoing the service sector in the west, in which emotional labour is placed at the core (Hochschild, 1983; Nixon, 2009) However, in the context of the commercialisation of the service sector in China, the service sector reproduces a new status hierarchy that reflects the unequal exchange of emotions (Hanser, 2008; Otis, 2011) based on

disparity in class and hukou between workers and clients, as Chaps 3 and

4 will show

The lived experiences of the migrant workers were configured and reconfigured by an unstable constellation of components, including the

state-stimulated market economy, changing hukou policy, transforming

the service sector and traditional patriarchal values that prescribed gender-

specific ways of behaviour In this book, I intend to examine the life riences of migrants working in the public area of a five-floor restaurant with around 300 staff, one of a chain of restaurants in Shanghai The public area of the restaurant refers to the area except the kitchen, includ-ing reception, dining area, pantry area, bars and cashier’s desk I pay par-ticular attention to the most important parts of the migrant workers’ lives: the workplace and their experience at work; their intimate relationships with families and partners; and their leisure time By focusing on the inter-

expe-section of gender, social class, hukou status and age, I aim to illuminate the

operation of gender and class in their daily lives, their gendered ences, the expression of their subjectivity and their exercise of agency in negotiating a range of tensions and hierarchies in pursuit of a better life The book intends to enrich the understanding of internal migration, employment and the service sector in contemporary China

experi-the fIeld and the Methods

I chose Shanghai as my fieldwork location because Shanghai has a ous service sector; in 2016, the service sector produced the highest share (69.8  per  cent) of GDP in Shanghai (SBS, 2017b) In addition, 63.8 per cent (that was 8.71 out of 13.65 million) of the employed popu-lation in Shanghai worked in the service sector, making the city a suitable place to examine service workers (SBS, 2017c) I chose Shanghai also because a significant number of the restaurant workers are rural migrant workers from other provinces The conspicuous inequality between rural

prosper-migrants and citizens with urban hukou makes Shanghai one of the most

unequal cities in China Rural migrants are disadvantaged in Shanghai due

to their hukou status, low wage, few social benefits, and discrimination As

shown in Fig. 1.2, it is noticeable that wages in the catering sector were only slightly more than half the local average from 2009 to 2016 Rural migrants’ socioeconomic status is in sharp contrast to urban Shanghainese Urbanites’ stigmatisation of and discrimination against rural migrants can

be more obvious and more severe in this metropolis, compared to smaller cities

In order to collect first-hand data of migrants’ lived experiences and the restaurants they worked in, I completed a total of seven months of field-work between 2011 and 2014 Moreover, short annual revisits were paid

to Meteor from 2015 to 2018—to trace any major changes that have taken place in the restaurant I used mixed methods, which included

semi- structured interviews, participant observation and two questionnaire surveys, through which I identified that the most important loci of inquiry were the workplace, intimate relations and leisure activities.

I gained permission from the manager in charge of the public area of the restaurant to conduct fieldwork in the Meteor Restaurant I asked the manager not to disclose my personal information to the workers in advance, and he kindly agreed I told the workers that I got my job through an introduction from one of my relatives—the commonest way to find this sort of work is through kinship networks

Interviews and participant observation are crucial to my project Interviewing and participant observation have different emphases I used interviews to explore the migrant workers’ wellbeing, migration experi-ence and intimate relations I have conducted interviews with 49 restau-rant workers in the Meteor The interviews lasted an average of 76.6 minutes and were audio recorded Informal interviews were also held with the management, which explored the employer’s rationale for its organisational strategies I guaranteed anonymity to my informants at the very beginning of the fieldwork and reiterated this guarantee at the begin-ning of each interview The topic guide and the consent form were pre-pared in advance of the interviews

Participant observation is a suitable method for observing how they acted at work and in their leisure time, and how these practices reflected their agency and subjectivity The empirical data about work (Chaps 3and 4) was largely drawn from participant observation, whereas data on intimate relationships (Chap 5) mostly originated from interviewing, because intimate relationships can hardly be observed in the field

I conducted participant observation through working in the restaurant, primarily as a waitress and occasionally as a pantry helper, who is respon-sible to deliver dishes from the kitchen to the dining area Waitressing involves writing down what customers order This enabled me to always carry a mini-notebook and a ballpoint pen in my apron, making it easy to take field notes Sometimes, I took photographs with my smart phone, which helped me remember events I carried a recording machine in my apron during working hours and was prepared to record conversations whenever I felt it necessary I was open about this, and all my informants were aware of it I elaborated upon and analysed my field notes every day

or every other day

During the fieldwork, I wrote 262,316 words of field notes, interview summaries and monthly reports, not including the interviews that were

transcribed after the fieldwork I wrote 9000 words of field notes after the first day of work But the amount of field notes generated each day fol-lowed a downward trend because I started to get more familiar with the setting towards the end of the fieldwork, so there was less need for detailed notes.

To what extent the researcher should present her/his personal ence is an ethical issue of concern (Creswell, 2013, p. 175) As suggested

experi-by Mack, Woodsong, MacQueen, Guest, and Namey (2005), the ethics code of my home institution and the American Anthropological Association (AAA), a researcher should give a truthful response to informants’ ques-tions about the researcher’s role and what the researcher is doing in the field I presented myself to the informants as who I am: a Shanghainese,

an unmarried heterosexual woman, the single child in my family, a research student who is studying abroad and who is now working in the restaurant

in order to collect materials for her research project My informants had different interpretations of my role in the restaurant Many of them con-sidered that I was writing articles that were difficult to understand Some thought I was a journalist, and others understood that I was there to

‘experience life’ (tiyan shenghuo) Although they had various

interpreta-tions of my purpose for doing the fieldwork, they were aware that I was in

a more privileged position than them

The relationships between the researcher and the informants are crucial

to this research, and the researcher’s class, hukou status and gender are

crucial to making sense of the interpersonal relationships A reciprocal relationship can be more productive and more equal than a unilateral rela-tionship Many of my informants would not have revealed as much as they did if they perceived my role merely as a researcher rather than a colleague

or a friend After working in the restaurant for a while, my roles as a researcher, a worker, a friend and even an activist were blurred, which positioned me in a bewildered position Details of my reflections and data- collection and analysis processes are elaborated upon in Appendix A

the Meteor restaurant

In China, restaurant chains are usually characterised by a comfortable environment, standard service and high reputation for events such as fam-ily get-togethers, weddings and birthday ceremonies Brand consumption becomes a trend (Jin, 2009, p. 34) I undertook fieldwork in the Meteor Restaurant, which is one of the biggest restaurant brands in China It

opened its first restaurant in the 1990s and became one of the top 100 restaurant chains in China within five years.

The Meteor Restaurant had 13 restaurants in Shanghai Hereafter,

‘Meteor’ or ‘Meteor Restaurant’ refers to the particular branch where I did the fieldwork, unless stated otherwise The branch I researched most

is located in suburban Shanghai, 1.2 kilometres from the nearest subway station and 12 kilometres from the city centre Xujiahui It consisted of five floors During my fieldwork in 2011, the first two floors were mainly hall areas, which had a large number of tables suitable for 2 to 6 people; the third to fifth floors, as well as some parts of the first floor, had 39 compart-ments altogether, each compartment seating 6–15 persons The restaurant was approximately 6000 square metres including a car park and was able

to cater for 1100 customers From 2013–2018, the restaurant reduced the number of tables in response to declining customer numbers, a result of the austerity measures undertaken by president Xi Jinping in December

2012 to deal with outlandish spending and corruption among officials (Reuters, 2014), and also because newly opened restaurants nearby attracted some of its customers

The Meteor Restaurant is decorated in beige According to its official website, ‘the decoration style of each restaurant is uniquely designed from the exterior to the interior Mixed with Chinese and Western style, which

is fresh, bright and chic…’3 I did a search in April 2012 via the website

‘Dianping’, a restaurant ranking website, of all the comments and back on the particular restaurant branch I used; one-tenth of the com-ments mentioned the decorations Most comments were positive:

feed-‘delicate’, ‘beautiful’, ‘warm’, ‘luxurious’, ‘magnificent’, ‘comfortable’,

‘the crystal lamps are so beautiful’ (see Fig 1.3)

Meteor Restaurant targets a wide range of customers, from working class to the well off, and from budget dining to luxurious catering, but most customers are, according to my observation, urban middle class Meteor Restaurant offers a wide range of food choices at average prices for Shanghai The average expenditure in the restaurant branch was about

82  yuan (£8.2) per person in April 2012 and 117  yuan in April 2018, according to searches via Dianping in April 2012 and 2018 respectively.4

3 For the purpose of anonymity, I do not provide the link to the official website of the restaurant.

4 CHY to GBP was roughly 1:10 at the time of writing.

The expenditure in a compartment (baofang) is usually higher, especially

for business catering

Work Schedule

As shown in Table 1.1, Meteor employees work nine hours a day ing rest time They work six days a week, but the rest day cannot be guar-anteed during holidays, the busiest times for the restaurant According to labour laws (NPC, 1995), a worker should not exceed 44 hours per week (Article 36); in exceptional cases, workers are allowed to work an addi-tional 36 hours per month with additional compensation higher than their hourly rate if they do not work overtime (Article 41) The exceptional cases apply to the restaurant industry But, according to my observation, the workers do not get extra compensation in this restaurant The culture

exclud-of overtime work is prevalent in China According to the Report on the Labour Market in China in 2014 (Zhuge, 2014), 90 per cent of sectors

Fig 1.3 Interior decoration of the Meteor Restaurant

required employees to work overtime Employees in the restaurant and hotel sector worked 51.4 hours per week on average, ranking highest of all the sectors As discussed in the previous part, restaurant wage was the third lowest of all the sectors in Shanghai The longest work hours and the second lowest wages result in restaurant jobs being on the lowest rung of all the occupations in China.

According to Table 1.1, morning-shift workers usually stayed in the restaurant from 9:30 in the morning to 9:30 at night This schedule is subject to change due to the nature of restaurant work Workers cannot leave until customers are gone Working hours for table servers, pantry helpers, hostesses and cashiers in the public area were basically the same, whereas working hours for cleaners were slightly shorter There were morning shifts and noon shifts with similar working hours The schedule displayed above is for morning shifts

As demonstrated in Figs. 1.4 and 1.5, they had to register through a face-scanning machine four times a day I was told by a waitress that, two

to three years ago, the clock-in system changed from a papercard-reader,

Table 1.1 Work schedule for morning-shift table servers and pantry helpers

9:30–10:00 Breakfast Free breakfast is provided by the restaurant.

1:30–3:30 Lunch break Some workers watched TV, used mobile phones or did

embroidery in the assigned area on the second floor; others went shopping and gambling outside the restaurant 3:30–4:00 Lunch Free lunch was provided, usually with one dish of

vegetables and another of meat.

4:00 Face-scanning

4:10–4:30 Meeting 1 Supervisory/managerial level meeting, chaired by the

managers All shift leaders were required to attend.

4:30–5:00 Meeting 2 Parallel meetings for entry-level workers were chaired by

shift leaders in each job position All entry-level workers were required to attend.

5:00–9:30 Work

9:30 Face-scanning Morning-shift workers got off work.

Source: Fieldwork observation

in which clock-in and clock-out time was displayed on the card, to face- scanning, with no card to display the time It was said that the reason for the transformation was that a worker collected photocopies of these paper-cards to successfully sue the restaurant for overtime payment.

Living Conditions of Restaurant Workers

The restaurant workers either live in employer-provided housing or vately rented accommodation The rented accommodation primarily con-sists of urban village and shared (dormitory) accommodation An urban

pri-village (chengzhong cun) literally means ‘a pri-village encircled by the city’

(Liu, He, Wu, & Webster, 2010, p.  135) The residents in those old neighbourhoods with poor living conditions, who were once indigenous people, have been gradually replaced by rural migrants Almost half the migrant workers live in dormitories Living conditions in the dormitories

Fig 1.4 Face-scanning

are representative of all types of migrant housing.5 I argue that the migrant workers’ rudimentary living conditions add a further dimension to their disadvantaged situation in Shanghai, and women can be more disadvan-taged in this particular living environment.

Here, I provide my experience of living in a dormitory, illustrated by photographs I took (see Fig. 1.6a, b) The Meteor Restaurant employer accommodated the employees within two types of dormitories The infra-structure of the old dormitory was rudimentary, but it was only a one minute’s walk from the workplace; the new dormitory was better deco-rated, but was a 15 minutes’ walk from the restaurant Employer accom-modation was free to the employees It only required them to pay bills equivalent to five pounds sterling per month, which accounted for two per cent of their wages I lived in the old dormitory It was a two-floor build-ing Usually, six people resided in a room with three to four bunk beds

5 A fuller explanation can be seen in Shen (2015).

Fig 1.5 Machine for

face-scanning