Where the Mountains Mourne Sweep Down the Sea
Every day there seem to be more of them pouring out of the railway stations, carrying their fragile hopes wrapped up in last year’s fertilizer bags. They arrive from far away, speaking funny dialects looking to make new lives for themselves in Beijing. Migrants are an increasing part of the bustle that is contemporary Beijing. They are the builders of the new landmarks of this Olympic-mad City, though they are rarely thanked for their pains. They are easy to spot, these “weidi ren” (out of towners) and they come in three basic guises. There are the grizzled old men, younger than myself, with weather-beaten faces. They have now exchanged the paddy field for a building site and the hope of using their wages to advance, not their own, but their children’s expectations. These rugged looking men have about themselves a certain maturity and the self-confidence of those who have already successfully negotiated life… But Beijing is not their world and the superficiality of their composure is revealed when they have to ask a mere foreigner where the bus stops. Then there are the young girls, who chatter endlessly to each other in dialect, which utterly undermine their pose of big city sophistication. They wear local versions of yesterday’s hot fashions, but somehow even before they open their mouths they are obviously country girls in the big city. Finally there are the young blades in ill fitting, mismatched suits, who have been snatched from country classrooms by the lure of the bright lights. I fear that the shovel will prove much more boring, long term that the pen ever was. But young bucks on the razzle don’t ask foreign priests for advice during the fleeting moments of solidarity provided by city bus queues.
I don’t know if it is the coincidence of St. Patrick’s Day coming up, but I recognise these women and men, they are my ancestors who fled a harsh rural existence in Ireland to find a future among the building sites of booming America. They too carried their funny accents and flimsy expectations across long distances and struggled to make new lives for themselves in an urban landscape totally unlike the one that shaped them. It is usually told as an optimistic story of adversity bravely borne, but, while true for the Irish as a whole, many were unable to cope and suffered terribly. One gets sanitized hints of their pain preserved in the songs of the period, which evoke the contrasts with life back home and a longing to be there again. My ancestors had a number of advantages in their new environment, including rights to permanent residence, a rule of law and a political system which they manipulated very effectively to their purposes. They also had a Church which sent priests after these bewildered sheep. That Church not only provided sacraments, but built schools and organizations which gave the community the education and collective muscle to make it in the new world. My brothers and sisters from Anhui and Jiangxi provinces don’t have those advantages.
Migrants are an increasing part of our globalized economy, but in the past, my relationship seemed somewhat fleeting. In Beijing, I am somehow forced to face up to the uncomfortable truth that it is their sweat which creates the comfortable life I live here. In London or Dublin I was one remove from that reality and could salve my-not-quite-disturbed conscience with fairly traded coffee. Here, I can see more easily my bourgeois compromises, and the Lenten message coaxes, invites me past condescending pity to a real solidarity in Christ with these women and men “digging for gold” on Beijing streets.