Home(Lessness) in Urbanizing China

Redefining Home

Structural violence exercises its power within people’s daily life. In martial arts students’ day-to-day life, this violence causes them to redefine the meaning of home. According to Bourgois’s theoretical archaeology, Johan Galtung (1969) was the first to coin the term structural violence to distinguish it from personal violence. More recently, Paul Farmer’s (2004) article “An Anthropology of Structural Violence” and the attached critiques (Bourgois & Scheper-Hughes, 2004; Wacquant, 2004) provide an opportunity for rethinking how the concept of structural violence can contribute to anthropological studies in general. By arguing against Farmer’s emphasis on social order and systematic social oppression, Bourgois calls attention to the local understandings of structural power relations by focusing on “the causes, meanings, experiences, and consequences of structural violence” and “how it operates in real lives” (Bourgois & Scheper-Hughes, 2004, p. 318). For martial arts students, their narratives of “what home was, what it is, and what it ought to be” provide a critical lens to see how structural violence has transformed their definitions of home.

In many students’ eyes, their parents migrated away from long established home because of poverty. Poverty split their homes apart. Jiang Qian, a 17-year-old girl from rural Western China, has clear memory of why her parents went to Fujian leaving her and her little brother in their home village. Some relatives had been working in Fujian for several years and had earned some money to build new houses in their home village. Jiang Qian’s mother urged Jiang Qian’s father to follow these relatives to seek job opportunities in other places rather than farming at home. However, Jiang Qian’s father was not willing to leave home. Jiang Qian recalled,

During that time, my parents often quarreled with each other about whether to go to Fujian for work. My mother always complained that my father is a coward and cannot give us a better life like those relatives. After about one year, my father agreed to go with my uncles to work in construction sites. Several months later, my mother went there too.

After her parents went to Fujian, Jiang Qian and her little brother lived with their grandparents, becoming one of millions of left-behind children. Jiang Qian’s story is similar to that of many other students. For these students’ parents, desire for a better life, especially a better life for their children, was the original motive to become migrant workers in urban areas. However, such desires are not necessarily shared by their children. As Jiang Qian put it,

I do not know why they have to work in places far away from home. My mother always says that they work hard just for me and my little brother. She said that when our family has enough money, we can buy an apartment in the place they work, and we can settle down there. But every time my little brother or I are ill, we have to take care of ourselves. My parents cannot be our side. I think if my family is rich enough, my parents can stay at home to take care of us.

When I asked how much money would be “rich enough,” she said that at least as rich as those living in the cities. Though she knows that there are still many poor people in the cities, she insisted that many of these poor people are not locals but migrants like her parents.

A crucial distinction between urbanites and rural-to-urban migrants is whether one has an urban household registration (hukou). In addition to determining educational, medical, and economic benefits, the household registration system has shaped people’s sense of home or homelessness. The household registration system has some historical antecedents in Chinese history. The Republic of China (ROC) established modern household registration laws and a registration system in the early 20th century. In 1950s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) completed the establishment of the new household registration system “with an unprecedented degree of totality, divisiveness, exclusiveness, comprehensiveness, and rigidity” (Wang, 2005, p. 58). As a statecraft, household registration in China

has contributed significantly to rapid but uneven economic growth and technological sophistication, acting as a leading cause of China’s peculiar socioeconomic stratification and characteristics, a key factor shaping China’s institutional framework and future, and a major source of China’s injustice, inequality, and irrationality. (Wang, 2005, p. xiii)

Today, even if one holds an urban household registration but lives in places other than the one in which one’s household registration is registered, one’s rights as an urban citizen will be declined because of the distinction between outside (waidi) and local (bendi) household registration. The policy of university entrance exams provides a useful example. If a high school student would like to take the university entry exam, she or he needs to go back to the place where her or his household registration is located. This policy is still unnegotiable in most parts of today’s China. In many places, migrant children with rural household registration cannot enroll in the urban public schools, or, if they would like to do so, they need to pay school fees several times higher than local household registration holders. Thus, many parents attempt to convert their household registration from rural to urban by meeting “eligibility” requirements. Gloria Davies and Gaby Ramia (2008) give an example of such “eligibility” for household registration conversion. In Changsha, the capital city of Hunan Province, migrant workers wishing to convert from rural to urban household registration are required to meet one of the three criteria:

ownership of a residential dwelling of more than 60 square metres; investments in Changsha of at least 500,000 yuan in value or taxation payments in excess of 20,000 yuan per year; or possession of a technical college or university qualification with the technical college qualification (zhongzhuan) as the minimum standard, together with social security contributions totalling at least 12 months and the requisite approval of the local bureau of labour and social security. (Davies & Ramia, 2008, p. 144)

For rural-to-urban migrant workers, none of these three criteria is easy to meet. Some big cities like Beijing and Shanghai have more criteria that even many master and doctoral degree holders cannot meet.

The relationship between household registration status and educational opportunity is tight. For example, like many other migrant families, Xiao Dai’s parents left his hometown in rural Jiangxi to go to Beijing when Xiao Dai was 3 years old. When Xiao Dai reached school age, he enrolled in a local primary school. Xiao Dai’s mother wanted him to study in the public schools in Beijing. But it was strictly not allowed for migrant children without local household registration to enroll in local public schools. Though some good private schools recruited migrant students, the tuition fee was too expensive for Xiao Dai’s family. Eventually, his mother used some connections to send Xiao Dai to a private school for migrant children (dagong zidi xuexiao). School for migrant children is a term coined by educational researchers and mass media, referring to those schools that mainly recruit migrant children who cannot enroll in the public schools. However, these schools are usually located in the industrial zones far away from the city. Many of these schools do not have legal status within China’s educational system. Even for those schools with official legal documents, their status can be suddenly lost and the school could be closed because of policy changes. Thus, enrolling in such schools is the last option for many parents. Xiao Dai ended up dropping out. Because Xiao Dai’s mother learned a lesson from the failure of dealing with the household registration policy and her son’s education, Xiao Dai’s parents decided to register their daughter as Xiao Dai’s uncle’s daughter. As his uncle is a successful construction contractor and has successfully transferred his household registration from his hometown to a medium-sized city in Shanxi Province, Xiao Dai’s family also moved to Shanxi when his little sister was born. As of 2013, his little sister studies in the best public school of that medium-sized city. Nonetheless, Xiao Dai is not very happy.

I know it is good for my little sister. I feel it is two families even if my family has a very close relationship with my uncle, and my little sister lives with my parents. Nothing is different from a real family. But registering as a member of my uncle’s household does not feel right. It is like a Samsung mobile phone covered by an iPhone logo. It is still a Samsung. But somehow on some occasions, it is different, like sometimes my parents have to ask a favor from my uncle to do some paper work for my little sister because he is the “official” father.

Although educational policies have changed in recent years requiring public primary and junior middle schools in big cities like Shanghai to admit migrant children, migrant children in these places still cannot attend senior middle school or take the university entrance exam. Moreover, teenagers like Xiao Dai are not lucky to benefit from such new policies. Perhaps because of the instability of the policies, parents like Xiao Dai’s mother do not trust the government and work out their own strategies to solve the problem. Furthermore, in some relatively remote places like Dengfeng, adopting a son or daughter from one’s siblings’ families is common. Before the onset of the one-child policy, such between-kin adoption was used to balance the gendered labor of different family members. A family with few children will adopt a son or a relatively elder daughter from another family to help do the farming and housework. A family with all sons or daughters would adopt a child of the other gender. However, when the government initiated the one-child policy, such adoption became a strategy for escaping state punishment. Usually the adopting family does not have their own child. The purpose of between-kin adoption is to give the child to a reliable family and maintain ties within the extended family (jiazu). Moreover, children’s educational success is often seen as the glory of the extended family, which is rooted in the “educational desire” in contemporary China. By doing fieldwork in Zouping, Shandong Province, Andrew Kipnis depicts a case of a successful pig-raising businessman who finances two of his nephews for education. This businessman said, “. . . I am very proud to be involved in the education of my nephews. If they can get a good job in the city it will be good for the entire family” (Kipnis, 2011, p. 36). Though I did not have chance to talk with Xiao Dai’s parents and uncle, I guess the motive behind the transfer of household registration is similar.

Another form of structural violence stems from land transfers and forced moves during China’s urbanization drive. Born in a village close to Changchun, the capital city of Jilin Province, Jiaqi’s parents went to Zhejiang Province for work when he was 5 years old. Thus, he lived with his uncle’s family, and his parents let his uncle farm their land in return. When the local government decided to build on the uncle’s farm land, the uncle signed documents claiming two apartments as compensation. As soon as Jiaqi’s parents knew, they had several quarrels. When Jiaqi’s parents asked his uncle to give the apartment back, his uncle’s wife said that they had taken care of Jiaqi for years. The apartment should be viewed as compensation for her effort as well. But Jiaqi’s mother attributes her son’s dropping out of school to Jiaqi’s uncle family’s bad supervision. Eventually, this dispute became a law suit. Jiaqi was put in an uneasy position because of this between-families conflict. As he put it,

One side is my parents; the other side is my uncle, who took care of me for 6 years. I have a closer relationship with my uncle. But when it happened, I did not know which side I should stand on. Maybe it is all because of the urbanization. Without it my father and my uncle are still good brothers. But now they do not talk with each other. My father once said if I dare to speak to my uncle, he would not recognize me as his son. It seems that they are enemies now.

As the above example suggests, many left-behind children drop out from school. Although students have diversified reasons for learning martial arts, many attribute this choice to their failure in academic schools; if they did not fail in academic learning, they would not have come to Dengfeng to learn martial arts. Why have so many migrant children dropped out? I begin to answer this question with an examination of the unintended effect of educational policies.

Some students told me that they drop out of school because of the “long distance between home and school.” A student recalled that there was a primary school close to his home village, at 10 minutes walking distance. However, in his fourth year, the school was suddenly closed. His teacher told the students in his class in the last meeting that it was the state’s new policy. All of his classmates had to go to another bigger school by walking about one hour. Though he still did not know what the policy was, he remembered the 2-hour-long round trip was not easy.

Sometimes I was too tired. I had to wake up at five in the morning every day. So sometimes I found a place to sleep instead of going to school. When school was off, I went back home for sleep. I do not know why I was so sleepy at that time.

The new educational policy was initiated by the Ministry of Education in 2006 to improve educational quality. In his analysis of school consolidation in Zouping County in Shandong Province, Kipnis describes four reasons given by the county education bureau for this policy:

first, the large schools are able to afford better equipment; second, the more centralised schools enable the recruitment of better teachers; third, the centralisation of schooling enables a more standardised approach to teaching; and finally, centralised schooling made it easier to manage the students. (Kipnis, 2006a, p. 123)

According to an official report released in 2013 (National Audit Office of the PRC, 2013), 92,600 rural schools have been closed from 2006 to 2011, among which 88,300 are primary schools and 4,300 are secondary schools. For this reason, many rural students, especially those in mountainous areas, have to walk a long distance to go to school. A mother from Gansu Province told me that the reason her son dropped out of school is that he needs to walk for 2 hours simply to reach school. Though the original design of the policy included creating boarding facilities for these children, parents see boarding as extra expenses and some students see the large schools as pressure cookers because they are claustrophobic and competitive and make students “devote every waking moment (15 hours a day seven days a week) to studying” (Kipnis, 2006a, p. 124).

By examining how Mexican migrants redefine home when they leave their children in Mexico, Joanna Dreby argues that

when parents move to the land of opportunity without their children, they purposely divide their families with the idea that doing so is the best economic strategy for the family as a unit. It would be a mistake, however, to consider the family as a discrete unit of analysis during the time parents and children live apart. (Dreby, 2010, p. 29)

Similar to these Mexican migrants in the United States, rural-to-urban migrants like Jiang Qian’s parents go to the cities and industrial zones with the aim of making more money and creating more opportunities for their children. However, as with the Mexican workers, many migrant workers within China cannot share the same residential rights as local citizens because of the household registration system. Their children are also victimized by social exclusion and the unintended policy effects like the long distance between home and school. Whether children remain in rural homes without parents or accompany their parents to the cities, they find it difficult to build a sense of home.

Being Homeless

Symbolic violence aggravates the feelings of being homeless of these children. It is not only because the politics of place and territory shapes social life but also because, as Laurence Ma and Xiang Biao (1998) point out, place-belongingness fosters “peoplehood” and “otherness,” which contributes heavily to interpersonal ties and group solidarity. Such sense of place gradually converts into “a sense of placement,” in Bourdieu’s (2000, p. 184) words, which can be seen as “a practical knowledge that does not know itself, a ‘learned ignorance’ which, as such, may be the victim of that particular form of misrecognition” (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 185). Bourdieu uses James Baldwin’s (1993) description of how a Black child in the United States learns and understands the difference between Whites and Blacks to support his argument of what symbolic violence is and how it works in daily life. He quotes,

Long before the black child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it. . . . He must be “good,” not only to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; on the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother’s or his father’s voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary he does not know what the boundary is, and he can get no explanation of it, which is terrifying enough, but the fear he hears in the voices of his elders is more frightening still. (Baldwin, 1993, p. 26)

Though what these left-behind children have experienced in the urban areas has nothing to do with their skin color, the practice of symbolic violence in their everyday life is similar.

Discrimination not only forms these martial arts students’ first impression of the city but also nurtures a strong sense of being homeless. School is no doubt a major setting where such discrimination happened. Some students told me that they did not have many friends in the previous urban schools because of their accents, clothes, and lack of knowledge about popular Japanese comics. A student from rural Anhui told me that he did not like the city because when he attended the academic school in Guangdong, where Cantonese is the local language, the local students laughed at his accent and bullied him for no reason. The local students once yelled at him, “If you cannot understand Cantonese, go home.” Linguistic competence, as Bourdieu points out, is not “a simple technical ability, but a statutory ability” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 146). Although speaking mandarin is a “statutory ability” in China’s schools as the official teaching language, Cantonese still has dominant power in everyday school life in Guangdong. For migrant students who cannot understand Cantonese, the local hierarchy of languages becomes a trigger point for other forms of hazing and discrimination.

Teachers in urban schools also discriminate. As rural-to-urban migrant students usually have low academic performance, teachers do not want these students to enroll in their classes. Discrimination also occurs because of the micro-politics in schools. Usually if the chief teacher of the class (banzhuren) has relatively senior status, she would have the priority to choose the students for her class. Sometimes it depends on the social status of the students’ families. Sometimes it depends on the students’ academic performance, on which the evaluation of the teachers depends. For most of these migrant children, they have neither of the two. Consequently, teachers see migrant students as extra burdens or even as a consequence of school politics and their relatively low positions within the school hierarchy. In some extreme cases, the teachers do not trust these students. A student once told me that he had a fight with another local student because that student named him with a disrespectful nickname. One day when he went to the on-campus grocery store, the student and several others called him with the nickname and teased him. He yelled back. But during a break, the student and his buddies beat him badly. When this event was described to the chief teacher, the bully said he did not beat anyone and he was sleeping in the classroom. The student who told me this story said, “Can you believe that? The teacher believed him and yelled at me that I should behave well. I still remember what she said. She said, ‘if you do not know how to behave well, learn it from others.’”

Discrimination is not limited to schools but extended to the communities these students lived in. Xiaoye, a senior student who stayed in Dengfeng for 6 years, once told me that when he went to the local grocery store in an industrial zone where his parents worked to buy some snacks, the store owner would pay special attention to him because the owner assumed that he would steal something. Sometimes he stayed a bit longer to decide which snack he would like, the owner would shout to urge him to check out. Such incidents also occurred in the stores close to martial arts schools. In such a store, when some students with martial arts school uniforms came in, I saw the owner would stand in the corridors between shelves to watch whether the students would steal something.

The rural–urban gap also affects crime rates. According to a news report of The Economist, several national surveys reveal that more rural children commit crimes, including both migrants in urban areas and left-behind children. Also, juveniles with rural background are punished more seriously than their urban peers. The news report states, “In Shanghai, juveniles without local household registration were given suspended sentences (or probation) in only 15% of cases in 2010; locally registered young folk went free on suspended sentences 63% of the time” (The Economist, 2013). Such stories echo Zhang Li’s argument about what she calls “the cultural logic of migrant criminality” (Zhang, 2002, pp. 140-143). By doing fieldwork in a migrant enclave in the outskirts of Beijing, Zhang points out that the “crime is viewed as a central expression of migrants’ spatial mobility, displaced rurality, and craze for money” (Zhang, 2002, p. 141). Furthermore, Zhang Li argues that “the dominant discourse that represents migrant communities as dirty, chaotic, and dangerous is itself a form of social ordering and part of the official effort to turn ‘out-of-place’ migrants into controllable subjects” (Zhang, 2002, p. 138). The “cultural logic of migrant criminality” links to another widely used term suzhi (quality), which historically can be seen in Confucian teachings that each individual is malleable, trainable, and obliged to self-cultivate and that all subjects share in responsibility for the fate of the empire (Bakken, 2000, p. 65). Since the reform era in the early 1980s, not only has the state tied population quality to the achievement of the “four modernizations” (sige xiandaihua), ² but ordinary people have also viewed raising personal suzhi as an efficient way for upward mobility.

Notions of suzhi have been increasingly used to argue for all manner of policy and to justify any sort of hierarchy, within which those of “high” suzhi being seen as deserving more income, power and status than those of “low” suzhi. (Kipnis, 2006b, p. 295)

As the opposite of modernity, the term backwardness (luohou) has touched a popular nerve which “is used in both official and nonofficial contexts to denigrate a huge and endlessly shifting variety of behaviours, people, and ethnic/geographic identities” (Kipnis, 2011, p. 18). Not surprisingly, people who lack suzhi are often directed against peasants or other uncultured people, especially those from the “backward” area. For these left-behind children, the practice of suzhi discourse is based on an assumption that if parents have low suzhi, so do their children.

If discrimination leads to left-behind children’s feelings of homelessness, the discourse of sacrifice practiced by parents at home enhances such feelings. Many migrant parents think that they work hard for their children’s good future. They use discourse about their sacrifices as a strategy to discipline their children and to persuade their children to follow their will. Laoma, a 17-year-old boy from Liaoning Province, has struggled with the discourse of sacrifice from his mother for years. When he was 5 years old, his mother went to Shenzhen to work in a hairdressing shop first as an assistant for washing clients’ hair and then as a hairdresser. At the same time, his father was in another place running a cloth business. Laoma barely had opportunities to see his parents. Probably due to the long-term separation, Laoma’s parents each found a new partner, and Laoma could not tell who had the affair first. Such bizarre relationships did not last long. Laoma’s parents divorced when he was 8 years old. Afterward, his mother shouldered the responsibility to take care of him. In Laoma’s words, “taking care of him” meant giving him pocket money and paying school fees. When Laoma talked about his family stories in a drinking gathering, he frequently used the word “sacrifice” to justify his mother’s behaviors. Nonetheless, he does not like his mother to use similar expressions to ask him to do something against his will.

One day during a mid-day break, Laoma lay on the bed using QQ, a type of instant message software, to chat with his mother. After a while, Laoma became very upset. One of his buddies asked what happened. Laoma showed the chatting history to his buddy and me, asking me “what should I do?” The chat history showed that Laoma would like to leave school before getting the graduation certificate as he thought a certificate of martial arts is useless for finding a job. But his mother strongly disagreed because she thought that after all these years and spending a lot of money, a graduation certificate is at least a proof of a successful ending. She would like her son to stay in the school for one more year. As the conversation became tense, Laoma’s mother said “if you leave the school without any graduation certificate, you just come back to collect my body (shoushi).” Laoma did not say anything after his mother said such threatening words. One of his buddies said, “Your mother is always like this, talking about suicide all the time. What do you want to do?” Laoma did not say a word at the moment. Several days later, Laoma’s mother came to Dengfeng to make sure that her son will not drop out without her permission. She is in her late thirties with heavy make-up and long well-maintained hair. From her fashionable knee-length red coat and shinning high-heel black boots, one can hardly tell that she is a 17-year-old boy’s mother. She owns a small beauty salon in a medium-sized city. During the lunch with Laoma’s coach in a relatively expensive restaurant close to the school, Laoma’s mother lectured Laoma again about how hard she worked saving every penny to support Laoma’s study, how tough it was for a single mother like her to shoulder the responsibilities of raising a son, and how easy her life would be if she had given Laoma to his father. During the speech, Laoma’s mother cried and frequently repeated “you never know how much I have sacrificed for you.” It seems the sacrifice-themed speech worked. Laoma cried several times during the lunch and promised that he will stay in the martial arts school till he got his graduation certificate. However, after his mother left, Laoma still struggled with whether he should leave. He told me that he did not like her mother to talk about sacrifice time and time again though he indeed agrees that his mother has done a lot for him. “I would also like to do something for her. That is why I want to leave school to find a job. But my mother does not understand. She never asks what I want to do.”

By examining migrant workers’ lives and how they understand the relationship between visibly sacrificing for the family and their familial happiness, Kipnis (2016, p. 156) argues that “eating bitterness becomes a means of proving one’s devotion to familial reciprocity, though how individual family members define both their ‘family’ and ‘reciprocity’ can be contested.” Rachel Murphy (2014) depicts a cultural logic of such sacrifice and reciprocity between migrant workers and their left-behind children. By examining the left-behind children’s school life in rural Jiangxi, She argues that

the more bitter the parents’ dagong ³ experience, the greater their sacrifice, and the deeper the children’s awareness of their parents’ sacrifice, the greater their obligation to be filial. At the same time, the children’s awareness of the bitterness of dagong fed into a strong desire to escape the drudgery of being a migrant worker, a desire which increased their appreciation of their parents’ sacrifice and intensified an unwillingness to disappoint them. (Murphy, 2014, p. 47)

Laoma’s story is similar to what Kipnis and Murphy depict. As a former left-behind child from a single-parent family, Laoma thought it is his obligation to pay back his “debt” to his mother to practice his filial piety. However, like most of the migrant parents, Laoma’s mother would like to have a certified payback from his son for her sacrifice.

Normalizing Home(lessness)

Murphy’s (2014) study also reveals how left-behind children in rural areas see school as “home.” She describes several reasons why students have the feelings of “at home” in schools. The first is that schools can provide a familiar environment with routine life and peer companionship. The second is that schools provide “reprieve from living with an elderly person who was a generation removed and who in many cases needed help in daily life” (Murphy, 2014, p. 46). The third reason is that school can give students some relief from the monotony of living alone. Similar with Murphy’s study, martial arts schools are boarding schools and these students can also be seen as being left behind in a new place rather than their hometowns. Nonetheless, school life in the kung fu schools is different from academic schools. Not only has the meaning of the system of success/failure been changed from valuing academic achievements to emphasizing bodily capital, but also the peer hierarchies have been reconstructed within the process of learning kung fu. Thus, feelings of staying in martial arts schools are highly diversified. Some see martial arts schools as home while others cannot wait to escape from the school and the enhanced feelings of homelessness.

Compared with academic schools, the different meaning system of success and failure in martial arts schools not only influences students’ attitudes toward staying in martial arts schools but also redefines the dominant-dominated power relations between teacher and student. Many students like martial arts schools because they do not have to study academic courses as hard as they did in academic schools. Many students told me that they go to academic courses just for rest. Though academic teachers and administrative staff do not want students to sleep during class time, most of the students manage to find a way to do so or just sit in the classroom without listening to the teacher. A student once joked that such sitting in the classroom but not listening is “Zen-meditation” (chansi), which is crucial for Shaolin martial arts learners. I also encountered several times that the new academic teachers had informal talks with some senior students in their classes learning the skills of how to manage the class and how to deal with some students’ disrespectful challenges. As a student said, For many of these students, it is the first time that teachers have to learn from them.

Though academic training is inconsequential, martial arts training defines the meaning of success and failure. As the head of Department of Free Boxing said, those who fought frequently and fearlessly before learning free boxing easily succeed as free boxing not only relies on martial skills but also depends on one’s courage and vigor (qishi). Some students have similar ideas with this coach. Junshi, a senior student, said that martial arts schools are places where “bullies survive, good kids die.” Though “survive” and “die” are only metaphors, it provides a lens on how hierarchies are reconstructed in the new measurement system. Thus, the “bullies” who were marginalized in academic schools become the leaders in martial arts schools. The “bullying” that was strictly not allowed in academic schools becomes a way to practice martial arts. Eventually, these students get rid of the label of “bullies” and “youth at risk” and become “excellent students” enjoying the production of success.

As many students share the experiences of being left behind and academic underachievement, some find martial arts school a place where it is easy to make friends. Friendship gives them a strong sense of home-like warmth. A 15-year-old girl once told me that she likes martial arts school because she has several best friends who have never looked down upon her and have taken care of her when she was ill. In her words, it is the first time that she has experienced the warmth of home. She further explained,

Girls are probably more dependable than boys. It is very important to have someone to take care of us, the juniors. We knew nothing at the beginning, but we are so lucky to have someone to take care of us. During night-talks in the dorm, our big sister (dajie) told us how to deal with relationships with coaches, how to sneak out without approval, and where we can buy some cheap things with good quality.

However, martial arts schools are not a sweet home for everybody. Some experience it as a place where their parents dump them. A coach once told me,

After paying the tuition fee, the parents disappeared. They do not come to visit their kids during the school year; some are even not willing to give the kid money for daily expenses. That is why some kids steal other students’ cell phones or other belongings. Once a student had been caught when he stole his roommate’s cell phone, I called his mother and she did not answer the phone. I borrowed another coach’s phone to call her again; she answered and said she could do nothing. She said she had paid the tuition fee and it is the coach’s and the school’s responsibility to teach his son what is the right thing to do.

Probably because of being emotionally left behind, shyness is a common character shared by many martial arts students. Even if I tried to talk with them about what they were doing, they refused to say a word. Some believed that their parents had abandoned them because they had flaws. Weihua is one of these teenagers. During the first month I moved in to his dormitory, he barely spoke until one day I had a casual talk with another student about Christianity and stories in the Bible. He shared his experiences of a Halloween party hosted by a local church in the place he lived. It is obvious that he still enjoyed the memory of the “trick or treat” game. Though he emphasized several times that he is not a Christian, he told me if he was upset, he would find a quiet place and talk to God because only God would listen to him. He was skinny and a relatively poor fighter and other students in the martial arts school humiliated him frequently by calling him “rural pussy” (nongcun niangmen) or “pussy” (niangmen). This is probably why he needed a God to speak with. On another day, when only two of us were in the dormitory, he brought out a book named Duke of Zhou Interprets Dreams (Zhougong jiemeng), a classic handbook for divination in China, and asked my ideas of decoding dreams. He told me two of his dreams. In the first one, he was standing on pedestrian overpass in a heavy rain. The sky and everything were gray. Cars were jammed on the road under the bridge, but there were no people either on the road or in the cars. “It was like a dead city, and I was abandoned by the whole world,” he said. In the second dream, he was in front of a huge plastic cage sitting on a busy road. People passed by but nobody cared about what was in the cage and why it was there. The cage had an unlocked gray door. Weihua went in the cage and found that thousands of birds were in the cage. However, they did not escape but screamed at him when he opened the door. “I would like to set them free, but they did not go. Instead, they screamed and jumped. Then I woke up.” Weihua’s dreams are full of lonely, cold, depressing, and helpless scenarios. By decoding these scenarios, Weihua hopes to find an exit from his depressing situation. These scenarios not only mirror Weihua’s feelings about school life in Dengfeng but also embody the voiceless desire deep in his heart.

Conclusion

This article has described how martial arts students (re)construct the meaning of home(lessness) through bridging their past as left-behind children and their present as martial arts students. Such redefining of home(lessness), I suggest, results from both invisible violence and the students’ engagement with structural, symbolic, and normalized violence. As with other teenagers in both rural and urban places, martial arts students are struggling to make sense of the rapid social changes in China. Being left behind occurs during times of drastic social transformations, as migrant workers flood into cities and industrial zones and rural/urban inequality expands. Although the party state promotes an ambitious initiative of urbanization, changes of educational policies in rural areas and the household registration system have limited the educational opportunities for these children. Many drop out and floating children in the cities are widely seen by the authorities and local communities as an extra burden and potentially risky group. By examining the effects of a new policy in Shanghai, which accepts migrant children into urban public schools at primary and secondary levels since 2008, Pei-Chia Lan argues that the household registration is still “a critical social boundary in educational institutions, shaping uneven distribution of resources and opportunities, as well as hierarchical recognition of differences between urbanites and migrants” (Lan, 2014, p. 243). In addition to the social boundary on paper, suzhi discourse and the cultural logic of attributing criminality to migrants promote the practice of discrimination in urban areas. Many of these students also suffer violence within the family. Discourses of sacrifice add pressure on children to be “good” by following their parents’ will and producing educational success. Though some students do like martial arts schools because of the body-capital-based evaluation system and home-like warm peer relationships, becoming a kung fu learner, for others, is a continuity of being left behind rather than an improvement on previous life experiences.

Home is not a spatial concept. Rather, it is a romantic imagination for psychological and emotional retreat. For these martial arts students, the sense of being homeless is a self-reflective embodiment of displacement. Like Weihua’s dream indicates, for birds that have stayed in the cage for too long, freedom is a threat to their routine. In some sense, being left behind is a routine for these martial arts students. Even those who do not like martial arts schools like Weihua do not know where else they can find a desirable life. Instead, they accept the “reality” (xianshi) of waiting for the next stage of life. Whether they can find a home in the future is an open question.