Sunday, September 9, 2012

Authors@Google: Michelle Loyalka - Eating Bitterness

Authors@Google: Michelle Loyalka - Eating Bitterness:








Every year over 200 million peasants flock to China's urban centers, providing a profusion of cheap labor that helps fuel the country's staggering economic growth. Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Frontlines of China's Great Urban Migration takes readers into the lives of eight rural migrants who have come to Xi'an in pursuit of the newly-imported American Dream. By day each of them finds opportunity in the bustling High-Tech Zone, but by night their lives play out mainly in the dilapidated old village of Gan Jia Zhai. The book is structured to show in rough progression how successfully these individuals assimilate into city life and how conflicted the relationships between their familiar rural roots and newly-minted urban aspirations become. Each chapter introduces a new story and a new set of social issues that, taken together, present a panorama of what it means to embark on the migrant journey. Eating Bitterness starts with a family of vegetable vendors who would like to return to the countryside but believe only a lifetime of urban labor will open the doors of opportunity for their young daughter. It follows an itinerant knife sharpener who is painfully aware that he represents a rapidly dying breed in the New China; a group of teenaged beauty-industry poster girls who are eager to forget all things old in pursuit of their new material dreams but have no idea how or where to begin; a free-spirited recycler who drifts from job to job just waiting to find an <b>...</b>



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