ABSTRACT
Jin xiulin and her son bent behind a rough-hewn wooden handcart and muscled it from the mud. They grimaced as they pushed it and slowly rose from the darkness of their squat, thatched village to the top of a dike where the sunrise blazed the high road to the city. Jin looks back on the dawn journey to Shashi in 1986 as an epochal leap for her farming family from penury to prosperity. By migrating to the Hubei Province city for work, she heeded an irresistible call for self-fulfillment. Jin broke deeply rooted traditions that bound her to the hearth in Baihe, her impoverished village fifty miles down the Yangtze River. Jin is one of from 70 million to 100 million Chinese peasants who are on the road in search of jobs in towns and cities. The migrants are restless forerunners for a vast army of idle laborers among China's 860 million peasants, the world's largest rural population.
