Chapter 55 May 4. Immigrants from Chongming

Chongming Island received the first batch of immigrants from the Three Gorges, and it is also one of the counties that received the most immigrants from the Three Gorges.The Chinese government believes that immigration is the key to the Three Gorges Project, and the success or failure of the Three Gorges Project is also immigration. This makes Chongming, a place that has nothing to do with the Three Gorges Project, a landmark for observing the Three Gorges.Located at the gate of the Yangtze River Estuary, Chongming Island is shaped like a spring silkworm, long from east to west, and narrow from north to south. It is the third largest island in China after Hainan and Taiwan, and is under the jurisdiction of Shanghai.However, you need to transfer to a ferry from downtown Shanghai to Chongming.Because of its beautiful scenery, Chongming Island has always been a tourist attraction. On August 13, 2000, the first batch of migrants moved from Nanxi Town, Yunyang County, Chongqing to Chongming Island, Shanghai. The place is Shanghai.The media said that such an arrangement is more or less symbolic: from the deep mountains and valleys of Chongqing in the southwest to the materially developed suburbs of Shanghai, the migration path of immigrants is full of hope.It is also the first time since the founding of the People's Republic of China that the government has come forward to organize the resettlement of migrants.

When the siren sounded, Huang Wanping knew that they would never go back. The boat departed from the wharf of Yunyang County, Chongqing, along the Yangtze River, carrying the 24-year-old young woman away from the place where she was born, and sailed to another strange city.The boat was bustling with more than 600 people from Yunyang, and they talked in Chongqing dialect.The waterway is not rough, and it is far from the turbulent waves in the heart.A news report at the time said that before departure, "immigrants stood side by side with tears streaming down their faces." The journey will last a full five days.

A meeting at the end of the last century had already decided the fate of their migration. On April 3, 1992, the Fifth Session of the Seventh National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China passed the "Resolution on the Construction of the Three Gorges Project on the Yangtze River" with 1,767 votes in favor, 177 votes against, 664 abstentions, and 25 people who failed to vote. , politically put an end to a water conservancy project debate that lasted for nearly a century, and also became the beginning of the Three Gorges Project. This project will be the largest water conservancy project since the "Dayu Controlled the Water" recorded in the Chinese historical book "Historical Records".The fate of countless people will be changed because of the Three Gorges Project. The most direct one is Huang Wanping who had to be relocated from the Three Gorges reservoir area.Figures released by the government show that the reservoir will inundate 277 townships in 20 districts and counties in Hubei and Chongqing. Among them, 8 counties will be completely submerged, 1 county will be submerged in most areas, and 4 counties and urban areas will be submerged. partially submerged.The county where most of the area will be submerged is Huang Wanping's hometown, Yunxiang County, Chongqing.The total number of people forced to relocate because of this project will exceed 1.1 million.

On this boat were also her future husband Ding Fangcheng, Ding Fangcheng's two cousins ​​Ding Fangyuan and Ding Fangyin, her uncle's family, including uncle and aunt and their two sons and daughter-in-law.Their goal is Shanghai, the most prosperous city in China. They will become new members of this prosperous city, although they are in the surrounding area - because of China's household registration system, at the same time, many Chinese college students are desperately competing to obtain the household registration of this city , a headache, and another way to obtain a Shanghai hukou is to buy a house in the city with the highest housing prices in mainland China.

After 5 days of sailing, they finally arrived at Chongming Island under the jurisdiction of Shanghai.Unlike Yunyang, which has "seven mountains, one water and three parts of the field", Chongming Island has few mountains even though it faces water on three sides.It is the third largest island in China formed by the impact of sea water and river water. It positions itself as an ecological island with a developed tourism industry. There are two KFCs on Bayi Road, the most prosperous Nanmen Town. The housing prices in this area It can be bought for 4,000 yuan per square meter, and 1,600 human-powered three-wheeled taxis surround it looking for business.Yunyang, on the other hand, is a purely agricultural county, with 92% of the population being farmers.Whether they like it or not, brothers Huang Wanping and Ding Fangcheng must leave this agricultural county.Because the flood will inevitably submerge the farmlands they used to work, their homes and rivers they played in.

Not long after arriving in Jiedong Village, Jianshe Town, Chongming, Huang Wanping officially married Ding Fangcheng, who was 10 years older than him, although Ding Fangcheng was remarried and brought a 10-year-old son with him.This new home guarantees them a house of 40 square meters per person, one mu of land per person, and a subsidy of 38.75 yuan per person per month.Ding Fangcheng's ability has successfully kept the family running and made them a social center.On their wedding day, nearly every government official in town attended their banquet.In September last year, Ding Fangcheng and Huang Wanping refurbished the house built for them by the government and added a new one-story house to the original one-story house.There are beds in every room of this building.Huang Wanping smiled embarrassedly and explained that it was because several people often gathered at their house and stayed overnight. At most, there would be seven or eight people staying overnight.

But Ding Fangcheng was not able to spend every night at home with his second wife.His occupation determines that he spends most of his time outside.He bought a van and made a living by hauling goods for businesses and individuals.He has another residence in another town on Chongming Island, where his clients are concentrated.The compensation is that he can have an income of more than 5,000 yuan per month.Even among Chongming locals, this income is relatively high. For Ding Fangyin, it was like a scam. "When we came to Chongming to see places in December of that year, we felt that we might not be used to it." Ding Fangyin said.The reason is simple, because it was very cold at that time.It is also for this reason that Ding Fangyin's parents did not immigrate to Chongming Island with him and his elder brother Ding Fangyuan, but chose to stay in Yunyang with his other two sons.

But at the beginning, everything seemed to be going well.Ding Fangyin also went through the process of building a family similar to his cousin Ding Fangcheng.He also married a girl from the same country who was 10 years younger than him after immigrating, and not long after he arrived, he set up five tables of banquets in his home to entertain his local neighbors. Six years later, all the novelty has turned into the hostility of strangeness.And his own bad luck has made the young man in his early 30s cynical.After a few short-lived jobs—including a two-month job at Wusong Wharf in Shanghai—he could only stay at home with nothing to do, smoking two yuan a pack of Daqianmen to relieve his worries.Just a month ago, he and his young wife completed the divorce procedures.To use his cynical words to describe it, this is because the young wife works outside and has contact with many people, so she "learned so hard that her brain is broken".And that's just another way of saying a working girl became open-minded.

He began to recall the mountain roads and rivers in Yunyang’s hometown, recalling those days when he lived on the water. He was a very good boatman, and he could also serve as a boatman in shallow water. The sun burned his body in only a pair of shorts to black, Like a ghost".The concrete roads built to the door of every house in Chongming Island and his increasingly fair skin could not calm his complaints.He wondered when such a life would see a turn for the better.He complained desperately about his poverty and hopelessness, but sadly no one ever really listened. The biggest difficulty is that they can't find work because they are foreigners, so the government violated its promise and gave jobs to local people.Huang Wanping and Ding Fangyin repeated the above words respectively.Those jobs, like street cleaners in the village, like laundrymen.Reasons for rejecting them may be age, education and gender.Only once, Huang Wanping was at a loss when he was rejected: "They said, the reason is that we can't understand what you said."

The local government here is especially bad for the Three Gorges immigrants in Daxin Town.Although the zoning reform a few years ago merged Daxin Town into Shuxin Town, the immigrants still stubbornly pointed their finger at the town government of Daxin Town. From Shuxin Town to Daxin Market, it takes 20 minutes to take another Chongming taxi battery car.On a long street is a farmer's market. Vendors use rectangular wooden planks to simply build temporary storage places for goods under the canopy. On this long street, there are clear divisions, the south side is the stalls of the locals, while immigrants from the Three Gorges occupy half of the stalls on the north side, and all of them are selling pork.They are the second batch of immigrants from Yunyang.

They surrounded the reporters from Beijing, each complaining of their own grievances.Among them, they do not know all the information in the town, and this unequal information makes them miss many "good things", such as good jobs and so on.The reason is that the radio in the town uses Chongming dialect, and understanding this Shanghainese dialect is a challenge for most people across the country.Jobs are the most difficult to find, and the government seems to be deliberately making things difficult. For example, the river was cleaned up a while ago. In other towns, each immigrant household has a quota for this job with a monthly salary of 700 yuan, but the immigrants in Daxin Town There is simply no one who can get the job. Even selling meat here now may be difficult to maintain.Because the town government is trying to regulate these vendors.They are building an indoor vegetable market, but every stall in this vegetable market has to be auctioned, and each stall costs about 200,000 yuan.At this point, Wang Zhengying raised her voice, and the shrill female voice pierced people's eardrums. The taciturn Liu Yuanqing once tried to find a local rural credit union, hoping to get a loan to buy a crop harvester. In this way, relying on harvesting rice for local farmers, he could earn more than 10,000 yuan in busy seasons, but even with his own However, he was also rejected.So, he had no choice but to sell meat here. Li Yuanfu, 62, stubbornly speaks Chongqing dialect instead of trying to communicate in broken Mandarin like his fellow countrymen.He said that people who are too smart will not immigrate, they have other ways out, and those who are too stupid and timid will not immigrate, because they are afraid that they will not be able to adapt to the new environment, and those who can immigrate are only talent, courage and financial resources They are all Yunyang people of the middle class. As such, they lacked their own elite to look out for their interests.The reporter asked them if they could elect representatives of immigrants to become officials in the government. They all laughed at this naive question, saying that the government refused to do even a job of sweeping the floor for immigrants, so how dare they think about becoming officials. They hope that the town government will "take care" of the immigrants, but the image of the town government in their eyes is getting worse day by day.They kept making fun of Shen Xingping, the mayor in charge of immigration, because some of them went to the deputy mayor of Shuxin Town, but they were pushed away. The reporter tried to call Shen Xingping and told him that he wanted to interview migrants, but the mayor said on the phone, no, it said that migrants are not allowed to be interviewed.Even though he had obtained the consent of the Propaganda Department of the county party committee, he still insisted that it was not possible unless he could obtain permission from the immigration office. There are also so-called successful people among these immigrants.They gain a foothold locally through business. "I'm just asking for a living." Liu Qiang, 28, lit a cigarette, took two puffs, and said.Except for a Three Gorges immigrant who secretly sold pirated DVDs in Jianshe Town and a butcher in Daxin Town, it is not without commercial success among the immigrants.According to the standards of immigrants, Liu Qiang is a successful person.His Chuanfu hotpot restaurant is located in the Chongming Cultural Palace, which is not far from Bayi Road, Nanmen Town, the most prosperous commercial street in Chongming.He also has another branch in Xinhe Township, Chongming.Of the 80 employees in the two stores, 80% are immigrants from the Three Gorges. But he is not a government immigrant.He is from Gongjie who is adjacent to Yunyang.Before graduating from junior high school, he followed his friends to play around, including visiting Chongming with his friends from Yunyang. When Gongjie also needed to emigrate, his two older brothers immigrated to Jiangsu, and he chose to go to Chongming Island in Shanghai.Because instead of adapting to a new environment, it is better to choose a place that you are already familiar with.After experiencing the hesitation of having nothing to do at first, a few friends decided to open a Sichuan hot pot restaurant. The reason is very simple. Here, Sichuanese and Chongqing people need a place to eat. Compared with his friends, Liu Qiang admitted that luck favored him.But in the conversation, he always pushes and procrastinates in every possible way, and then he is habitually silent.He said that his friends are the ones who can truly represent the lives of immigrants. "Some of them farm land, some do transportation, and some do small businesses. Although it is difficult, they are real." In any case, they did not give up. "My two daughters both went to the best schools in Chongming." Liu Tao said proudly. Liu Tao, in his early 40s, owns a stall on the second floor of Qingcheng Vegetable Market in Nanmen Town. His "Three Gorges Meat Shop" sells all kinds of pork products.He left the houses and fields prepared by the Chongming government in Xinhe Township for immigrants, and came to Nanmen Town to find a place to live, and then made a living by selling meat. Although his family also immigrated from Yunyang to Jiangsu, he chose to come to Shanghai.The reason is simple, that is, to consider for the next generation. Every morning at five o'clock, his Sanxia meat recipes start business, and around his meat recipes, there are four other meat recipes also run by immigrants from the Three Gorges.With all smiles on their faces, they asked everyone who passed by if they wanted meat. For these immigrants, the next generation became all hope. "The adaptability of the dolls is always better than ours," Liu Yuanqing said.Although at the beginning of school, the teacher's Shanghai dialect made the Chongqing children unable to do anything, but soon they learned the Shanghai dialect and had more local friends than their parents. Ding Fangcheng always carries his son Ding Liang's phone number with him every time he goes out in a sports car - it is written in a small notebook instead of being stored in a handbook as usual.This son was originally awarded by the court to his ex-wife to take care of him, but Ding Fangcheng discovered that his ex-wife did not care about Ding Liang.So, he still took his son with him, including immigrating to Chongming. But now, 16-year-old Ding Liang has to leave his loving father.Because he was going to Shanghai, a 40-minute flight from Chongming Nanmen Wharf, to study in a vocational technical school. That day, Huang Wanping watched Ding Fangcheng take Ding Liang and 3,000 yuan to Shanghai by ferry, "But after returning, there was no money left. It turned out that the registration fee was 2,000 yuan." In addition, every month, Ding Liang also needs to pay the school 500 yuan for food.Huang Wanping's monthly salary for working in a local cotton spinning factory is only 6 million. "Even if you are poor, you can't stop your children from studying." Huang Wanping sighed, looking at the ripe rice behind the house.The ears of rice are already heavy, and they hang their heads down to the ground. "In a few days, it's time to harvest." When they first came, they planted a few stubbles of rice because they didn't know how to plant it.