An Ant’s Tale

From the “At least we’re not China” files: an LA Times article about China’s Ant Tribe, a massive new demographic of college-educated but marginally employed youth, living cramped and hand-to-mouth in China’s rich cities. It’s a fairly harmless piece of journalism, except for the inevitable hint that said Ants may soon provide objective western journalists with their long-awaited Chinese revolution. The article tells but one young man’s story; we’ll tell another’s.

He’s Stone to his foreign friends, a stocky chap with a bristly buzz cut, discount frames, and outsized cheeks that push his face into a perpetual pout, which somehow manages to convey an air of guarded optimism. In 2004, Stone got an IT degree in Luoyang, whose grimy streets seemed positively cosmopolitan compared to his hometown’s. Although he graduated near the top of his class, Stone found himself another ant at the picnic in Beijing. Fruitless job fairs, cattle-call interviews, and a score of hot leads to cold trails thin out the swarm; many of the people he met in his early days in Beijing soon gave up and went home, but not Stone.

“Of course it was hard,” he recalls. “I’m no one special; I had no connections. Actually, if I had known how hard it was, I probably would have stayed in Luoyang. It’s easier to get by there. And my family is close by if things get too bad.” Do keep that in mind, unimpeachable journos, as you await the storming of the Bastille. The Ants are aspirants, not desperadoes. Families that can send their children to college here can and will take them in if things don’t pan out.

And the more Stone saw the frills awaiting even the middle class in Beijing, the more he wanted in. He hunkered down in a tiny, crumbling concrete husk of an apartment with seven other Ants, an hour and a half’s bus ride out of downtown. He claimed seven square meters of personal space, ate a steamed bun for breakfast, hopefully instant noodles for supper, and shared a communal toilet. Truthfully, aside from the commute, it wasn’t that different from college. The malls, flashy cars and classy women he saw day-to-day in Beijing didn’t dampen his spirit, they inflamed it. Chinese ants will crawl through a mile of mud to get at that unwatched chocolate.

The La Times article protagonist, Guan Jian, wants to work in television, presumably as something bigger than a receptionist (or a writer), a tough proposition in any town. Stone just wanted a good job, a leg up, and could build, fix, network, and program computers, no rare feat in China, but at least a practical one. Still, he did a solid nine months of downcast-eye work. He handed out travel agent business cards. He delivered boxed lunches. Whatever covered the 1000-odd RMB he needed to see through another month.

His break, if you want to call it that, came through a friend working for a magazine. Stone BSed about his Photoshop and FrontPage experience, and ended up in the design department. He found himself in yet another crowded, airless room, albeit one with AC, fluorescent lights and carpeting, pulling seventy-hour work weeks for 2000 RMB a month. Stone moved to an apartment a mere forty-minute breeze away (no transfers!), got a box lunch gratis each day, and could at last afford cigarettes. A softer western soul would deplore such conditions, but Stone looked at the job as a steerage ticket to the Promised Land. “I really felt lucky to get that job,” he says. “At last I felt confident I could do what other people had done.”

He even found a girlfriend, a plain but affable young woman who sold pearls at the Silk Market. “She’s really special,” Stone laughs. “I would take her to walk around the mall on our dates, and she would never let me buy her anything. Not even ice cream. ‘Save your money for later,’ she’d tell me.”

Dare we mention the old saw about crisis and opportunity in China? After a few years and a global recession, the magazine struggled for advertising, and took to delaying salaries as a counter measure. Finally the owner folded and slipped off in her Mercedes SUV, owing Stone and his colleagues five months’ back pay. A serious blow to young men less hardy, and with less prudent girlfriends. Three of Stone’s colleagues went back to their hometowns to lick their wounds, and have yet to return.

Somehow, Stone was back at work within two months, this time for an English-training company, designing and running their new website. The rewards of English in China are indeed great and mysterious, for the language was always Stone’s worst subject, yet now he was making a princely 3500 RMB per month. He moved into a tiny studio with his girlfriend, and saved enough for her to buy a share in a new pearl stall, bringing in another 2000 or so a month. Even better, Stone has a carefully-cultivated network of friends and favor-traders who bring him another 1000-2000 per month in freelance design gigs, which he completes at night and on lazy Friday afternoons when the whole office is napping, and the boss is “at a meeting”.

He’s got no plans to buy a car, and knows his own apartment is still in the hazy future. But in very real terms, he’s made it, for the stone is now a pillar for his family. Last summer his father, a machinist, lost a finger to a band saw. Stone paid the bill for re-attaching it, and more for physical therapy.

He’s not easily given to socio-political bandying, but there’s no mistaking the smile on his face when asked if the many Ants who keep coming and getting turned away from the picnic might just swarm the whole party. It’s a very Chinese smile, polite but sardonic, reserved for dumb questions from elders who should have the sense to know better. “I just wanted a chance to have what many others in Beijing have,” he says. “I think other young people, if they don’t get a chance, can find another way, if they really want to. Especially if they’re educated.” Ants seldom do turn on the hive, at least on those Discovery Channel shows. They just build new tunnels.

No related posts.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.