Beyond tears and laughter gender, migration, and the service sector in china

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON
CHINESE POLITICS AND SOCIETY

Beyond Tears
and Laughter
Gender, Migration, and
the Service Sector in China

Yang Shen


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Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai, China


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Yang Shen

Beyond Tears and
Laughter
Gender, Migration, and the Service Sector in China

Yang Shen
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai, China

New Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society
ISBN 978-981-13-5816-6    ISBN 978-981-13-5817-3 (eBook)
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Preface

I was born in Shanghai seven years after the establishment of the Reform
and Opening-up policy in China. In the year I was born, the country still
operated as a planned economy in which food was rationed and purchased
by food stamps. In the early 1990s, my parents started a small business. My
father resigned from his job at a state-owned enterprise (SOE), which was
an extraordinarily risky and unusual decision to make at that time because
SOE jobs were regarded as an ‘iron rice bowl’ (tie fanwan): a permanent job
with sufficient social benefits (Whyte, 2012). The reform of SOEs commenced in the mid-1990s and as a result, 28.18 million workers were laid
off from 1998 to 2003; by 2003, only 68.76  million workers remained
employed in SOEs (SCIO, 2004). Several years after my father’s resignation,
the factory where he had worked was closed down and all the workers were
laid off; by that time, my father had invested in the Chinese stock market
and become one of the most financially successful people from that factory.
My family benefitted from my father’s risky decision, and we have been
relatively well off ever since. Yet, I could not take my family’s wealth for
granted. Individuals’ life chances can take different turns during the dramatic social transformations in China. By contrast, many of my father’s
former colleagues lost their jobs during the massive layoffs, and they are
living rather difficult lives like millions of city dwellers.
I became aware of the rural-urban disparity thanks to a television documentary and through people I encountered in China. In 2007, I watched
‘The rich and the poor’, a documentary made by the Japanese media group
NHK.  It displayed the drastic differences between the newly rich and
migrant workers in China. I was sentimental to see a middle-aged rich man
v


vi 

PREFACE

decorate his house like a palace, whereas a middle-aged male migrant
worker in Guangdong province searched for the cheapest toy for his child,
who still lived in a rural area, in the hope of taking the toy back to his village during the Spring Festival.1 It echoed a case I came across around
11 pm on a midsummer night in 2010. Some women were waiting by the
roadside in an attempt to make a living by carrying passengers by scooter.
Planning to take the ‘scooter taxi’ home, I agreed upon a price with one of
these women. Before leaving, she spoke to a little girl, three or four years
old, who was sleeping on the cold concrete floor: ‘Mum has to leave for a
while. Please stay here and don’t move around.’ Her child was half awake
and remained lying on the floor. On the way to my home, the woman told
me that local Shanghainese children went to bed earlier, whereas her child
had to be there until late at night. She worked during the day in a supermarket and as a scooter driver during the night, and her husband worked
as a scooter driver full-time. She had to bring the child with her because
there was no one at home. I felt great compassion for them.
The interaction with my roommate Xiuxiu during my M.A. studies
from 2007 to 2010 reinforced my resolution to do something for deprived
people. She came from rural Shanxi province, where coalmine explosions
occurred frequently. During late-night chats, she told me a lot about her
hometown. Although coal mining is risky work, it is more profitable than
farming. As a result, many men choose to be miners. My roommate was
the first person in her village to complete a master’s programme. She
wanted to do something to help her fellow villagers, but as a migrant who
was new to Shanghai, her schedule was dominated by career development,
such as doing internships and searching for a job in order to find a footing
in this metropolis. This did not leave much time and energy for focusing
on the development of her village. She was the first person from rural areas
I have come to know, and meeting her made me realise how different life
trajectories could be. The encounter with Xiuxiu reinforced my belief that
those who do not need to worry about their own financial wellbeing are
more likely to have the ability to help others, so they should take more

social responsibility.
In the summer of 2008, motivated by Xiuxiu’s story, my friends and I
organised a volunteering group to help children in rural Guizhou province.
1
 Spring Festival is the biggest celebration in China. It begins on January 1 of each year
according to the lunar calendar, which is different from the Gregorian calendar. The Chinese
New Year holiday usually lasts for one week. It is a festival in which families gather together,
so millions of migrant workers are on the move during this period.


 PREFACE 

vii

It was the first time I had visited rural China. Through teaching and home
interviewing, I gained a glimpse of life there. I was frustrated to witness
poverty there, but was unable to think of any solutions. During the global
economic recession in 2008, many rural workers went back to their villages,
so this gave me my first opportunity to talk to people who had experienced
migration. As a result, I observed that hukou can help explain the deprived
situation of rural migrants before pursuing my PhD studies.
In summer 2010, a friend and I made a documentary about an 82-year-­
old Shanghainese woman who collected used newspapers in order to sell
them to recyclers. She narrated her life experience of leaving Shanghai to
support the construction of inner China in the Mao era. Her hukou was
transferred from Shanghai to Sichuan province, and she was not able to
transfer it back to Shanghai even after she came back. At that time, living
in Shanghai without Shanghai hukou made it impossible for her to apply
for permission to use gas, a property ownership certificate and even a TV
licence. Seeing how obsessed she was with her hukou status, I came to

realise what it meant to more marginalised people.
After this, the suicides committed by migrant workers in Foxconn made
me decide to focus on migrants. I felt sad about the tragedy, but it also
made me feel that I had a duty to do something to change their situation.
I felt compassion for pupils who lack sufficient educational resources and
for people who are destitute because they were born in rural areas and live
a hard life. The compassion for the less fortunate was one of the motivations for me to carry out this research.
When I was writing about reflexivity, I recalled George Orwell, one of
my favourite writers, who worked as a casual worker in restaurants in Paris
and wrote a book called ‘Down and out in Paris and London’. His vivid
account of working in restaurants and experiencing poverty was a great
inspiration to me.
‘In the face of difficulties, people should maintain their own integrity.
In times of success, they should do favours to the world’, is a famous saying by Mencius (372–289 BC). It is one of my favourite mottos, guiding
and reflecting my principles. Rural/urban disparity, persisting gender
inequality, the growing gap between rich and poor: China has many
­problems waiting to be solved. It is my hope to devote myself to making
China a better country.
Shanghai, China

Yang Shen


viii 

PREFACE

References
SCIO. (2004, April). Zhongguo de jiuye zhuangkuang he zhengce [The current situation of the labour market and its related policies in China]. Retrieved June 10,
2014, from />htm

Whyte, M. K. (2012). China’s post-socialist inequality. Current History, 111(746),
229.


Acknowledgements

The process of carrying out this research and writing this book for me has
been one of constant self-exploration. It has been an interactive process
that has reshaped my intellectual orientation and made me adapt my lifestyle choices. It has been a project that has transcended the book-writing
itself, and may foster some life-long transformations.
I am greatly indebted to my previous teachers and colleagues at the
London School of Economics, especially Professor Diane Perrons. She
provided invaluable critical feedback at every stage in the writing of this
book. I am much indebted to Professor Rachel Murphy, Dr Hyun Shin,
Dr Ye Liu, Dr Ania Polemia, Professor Charles Stafford, Dr Hans
Steinmüller, Dr Bo Hu, Dr Yingqin Zheng for reading earlier drafts of the
book and to Dr Bingqin Li, Dr Kalpana Wilson and Dr Marsha Henry, Dr
Amanda Conroy, Dr Alessandro Ribu and Dr Nicole Shephard for reading
chapters at various stages. All of them provided invaluable comments.
Also, I indebted to my current colleagues at Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
especially Professor Yang Zhong, who encouraged me to keep on revising
the book during the time I was preoccupied with teaching, paper-writing
and extra-academic life. I am also grateful to Dr Yang Hu and anonymous
reviewers for providing constructive feedback for the book proposal. My
gratitude for my partner Dr Fan Yang is combined with a guilty sense of
indulging in romantic love. The emotional and intellectual support he has
provided is beyond my expectation. But without his company the book
could have been published significantly earlier.
Lastly, special thanks to all the fieldwork informants who shared their
bittersweet stories with me. Our encounters have enriched my life. I hope

ix


x 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

that I have presented a responsible and faithful account of their lives, and
it is my humble hope that this work will help provide an impetus for social
change, to create a better society for all.
It is notable that part of Chap. 5 has been published in China Quarterly.
For more details, please see Shen, Y. (2016). Filial Daughters? Agency and
Subjectivity of Rural Migrant Women in Shanghai. The China Quarterly,
vol. 226, pp. 519–537.


Contents

1Introducing Migration, Gender and the Service Sector  1
2Gendered Subjectivities in a Patriarchal China 29
3Working in a Gendered, Feminised and Hierarchical
Workplace 47
4The Short-Lived Jobs: From Beginning to End 73
5Negotiating Intimacy: Obedience, Compromise and
Resistance 95
6Crafting a Modern Person via Consumption? Women and
Men in Leisure Activities127
7Unpacking the Complexity of Gender, Class and Hukou151

Appendix

A: Doing Ethnographic Research from a Feminist
Perspective163

xi


xii 

Contents

Appendix B: List of Informants187
Bibliography193


Abbreviations

AAA
ACFTU
ACWF
GDP
NBS
NGM
NPC
SBS
SCIO
SOE
SRB

American Anthropological Association
All-China Federation of Trade Unions

All-China Women’s Federation
Gross domestic product
National Bureau of Statistics of China
New-generation rural migrant workers
National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China
Shanghai Bureau of Statistics
The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of
China
State-owned enterprise
Sex ratio at birth

xiii


List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Map of Shanghai and Anhui
4
Fig. 1.2 Average annual income of employees in Shanghai: catering
average/Shanghai average (2000–2016)
15
Fig. 1.3 Interior decoration of the Meteor Restaurant
21
Fig. 1.4 Face-scanning
23
Fig. 1.5 Machine for face-scanning
24
Fig. 1.6 (a) Employer-provided dormitory. (b) Employer-provided
dormitory25
Fig. 3.1 Flow chart of the dining procedure

48
Fig. 3.2 Hierarchy in the public area of the Meteor Restaurant
49
Fig. 4.1 Service slogans at the Meteor Restaurant
78
Fig. 6.1 Magazine pages stuck on the wall
134
Fig. 6.2 A shizi xiu piece depicting ‘a harmonious family is the origin of
the prosperity of everything’
137
Fig. 6.3 ‘Lucky Six Crocodile’
140
Fig. 6.4 ‘Forest Ball’
141
Fig. 6.5 ‘Fishing’ (a and b)141
Fig. 6.6 A slot machine decorated with different car brands
144

xv


List of Tables

Table 1.1
Table 3.1
Table A.1

Work schedule for morning-shift table servers and pantry
helpers22
Configuration of the public area of the restaurant

51
Timeline of the primary fieldwork stages
171

xvii


CHAPTER 1

Introducing Migration, Gender
and the Service Sector

A wave of suicides occurred in Foxconn factory plants across China in
2010, during which 14 workers aged 18–25 died (Lau, 2010). The
Foxconn incidents drew my attention to rural migrant workers and motivated me to carry out research on migrant workers. On the theoretical
level, I was interested in finding out everyday operation of gender and
class. On the personal level, I intended to document experiences of the
marginalised groups in Shanghai, the richest city in China.
In this book, rural migrant workers (sometimes abbreviated to migrant
workers) refer to those who hold rural hukou and do non-agricultural
entry-level work in places other than where their hukou is registered.
Hukou refers to the household registration system in China that categorises citizens as either agricultural residents or non-agricultural residents.1
It requires every Chinese citizen to be recorded with the registration
authority at birth.
Prior scholarship has explored migrant women in manufacturing
such as Lee’s (1998) and Pun’s (2005) pioneering work on factory girls
in Guangdong province. In this book, I aim to develop a deeper understanding of rural migrant workers’ lives in the service sector. Despite

1
 The reason why I did not put ‘the’ ahead of ‘hukou’ is that I treat it as a parallel concept

with race, gender and class. I understand that hukou is used in a specific context, but I intend
to ‘normalise’ or generalise the word by not putting ‘the’ before it.

© The Author(s) 2019
Y. Shen, Beyond Tears and Laughter, New Perspectives on Chinese
Politics and Society,
/>
1


2 

Y. SHEN

the fact that 43.5 per cent of workers in China are now working in the
service sector (NBS, 2017a), their life experiences are under-represented.
I began to work as a waitress of a chain restaurant in Shanghai. I met
Yong and Fengyu as soon as I started my work. Yong was born in rural
Anhui province in 1985. After dropping out of junior high school, he
migrated to Shanghai, working as a pantry helper, delivering dishes from
kitchens to dining areas in the Meteor restaurant (pseudonym of the restaurant where I did fieldwork). When I first met him in 2012, he was
27 years old and was extremely eager to find a wife. Twenty-seven might
be an age still too young for a middle-class man in Shanghai to ever consider marriage, whereas it becomes a disadvantage for rural men like Yong
to find a wife. For rural migrant men, age increase is not necessarily in
tandem with the growth of professional experiences and wealth; their
‘marriageability’ probably decreases with age. Each time Yong’s parents
met him, they nagged that he should get married as soon as possible,
which made him very anxious. He worked at Meteor in the hope of finding a wife. Considering women are usually overrepresented in the service
sectors, he believed that his chance to find a waitress to be his wife was
relatively high. However, after more than five years of non-stop searching,

he was still not able to find a wife. To make things worse, waitresses exhibited uncooperative attitudes towards him, which made his work difficult.
He thought about quitting the job many times but had no idea where
to go.
Fengyu was born in rural Anhui as well. She worked at Meteor for
two  years before giving birth to a son. Not long after giving birth, she
resumed her job at Meteor in order to provide financial resources for her
family. She did not think it was a desirable job—a lot of unpleasant incidents occurred when serving local customers. One day a male customer
showed superiority to her: ‘If we hadn’t come to this restaurant, you
would have been planting crops and pasturing cattle.’ She hit back, ‘If we
hadn’t come, you would have been eating shit!’
Fengyu, like many other waitresses—and even pantry helpers themselves—considered being a pantry helper as hopeless and unpromising.
According to Yong, Fengyu’s attitude towards male pantry helpers is
indifferent and hostile. Waitresses are supposed to be taking dishes from
pantry helpers and delivering them to customers as soon as they can. But
Yong told me that, sometimes, waitresses like Fengyu just ignored the
male pantry helpers. They had to stand holding dishes while the waitresses
chatted. The negative perceptions of the pantry helpers led to waitresses’


  INTRODUCING MIGRATION, GENDER AND THE SERVICE SECTOR 

3

uncooperative behaviour at work. Waitresses’ discrimination rendered it
impossible for Yong to find a wife in the restaurant.
* * *
Fengyu and Yong dropped out of middle school and migrated from rural
Anhui Province to Shanghai, following their families. For the past 40 years,
numerous young migrant workers follow this trajectory. By the end of
2017, China had 171.85 million migrant workers holding rural hukou but

doing non-farm work outside their registered hometowns or home villages, accounting for 12.4 per cent of the whole population (NBS, 2018).
Migration results from various intertwined factors, including household registration system reform (Huang & Zhan, 2005; The State Council,
2014), income disparity between urban and rural areas, increased demand
for an expanded labour force in cities, rural land reclassification (Song,
2009; Su, 2007; Yang, 2006; Yang & Shi, 2006), and the changing aspirations of peasants (Gaetano, 2004; Li, 2004; Yan, 2008). Among these
reasons, the income gap is a direct reason that stimulates their migration.
Take Shanghai and Anhui for example, the annual disposable income of
urban households in Shanghai (57,691.7 yuan) was the highest among all
the regions in 2016 (NBS, 2017b), 4.9 times the net income of rural
households (11,720.5 yuan) in Anhui province (NBS, 2017c). More than
50  per  cent of the workers in the Meteor Restaurant came from Anhui
Province, particularly from rural Bengbu, Liu’an and Ma’anshan, as demonstrated in Fig. 1.1. Shanghai is an attractive destination for Anhui rural
workers partly because of the availability of job opportunities and better
earning potentials and partly because of geographical proximity.
China’s strong economic growth over the last four decades has followed a pro-urban developmental model in favour of metropolitans and
urban residents. The rapid growth would not have been possible without
high levels of internal migration from the relatively low-income rural
regions to the booming cities and industrial regions. Migrant workers
from rural areas make a vital contribution to China’s economic growth.
This growth has led to rising prosperity and declining poverty, but also to
rising social and spatial inequality. Rural migrants’ experiences in Shanghai
reflect the social and spatial inequality. The formation of a new urban
underclass is a consequence of the massive scale of migration. In this book,
I aim to illuminate how the shift in location has affected migrants’ lives in


4 

Y. SHEN

Fig. 1.1  Map of Shanghai and Anhui. Source: Mr Wei Yuan made the map for
the book

the transformation of post-reform China. I address a part of the service
sector and highlight both women and men’s experiences in order to analyse the significance of gender alongside social class and hukou status as
markers of social division in China. By studying restaurant workers in
Shanghai, the book aims to show how a group of people who have played
a major role in the transformation of China have experienced this transformation in their own ways.

Intersectionality of Gender, Class and Hukou
The book adopts an intersectional approach to examine social inequality.
Intersectionality emerged in the late 1980s in an attempt to address the
complexity of multiple forms of discrimination and social inequality (Cho,
Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013). Since then it has been adopted across disciplines and has also inspired social movements outside academia.
Intersectionality can refer to ‘the interaction between gender, race, and
other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these


  INTRODUCING MIGRATION, GENDER AND THE SERVICE SECTOR 

5

interactions in terms of power’ (Davis, 2008, p.  68). The question of
whether intersectionality is an epistemology, a theory or a methodology is
still controversial (ibid., p. 69). It may be more fruitful to address ‘what
intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is’ (Cho et  al.,
2013, p. 795). It provides a unique way to think about ‘the problem of
sameness and difference and its relation to power’ (ibid., p. 795).
According to McCall (2005), the categorisation of identities such as
gender, race and class is an inadequate but necessary approach to address

social inequality. It is inadequate in that categorisations simplify social
phenomena, and social inequality may be reinforced through the iteration
of identities/symbols in categories; but it is necessary because categories
are useful to identify social inequality and can be strategically used for
political purposes.
In this book, the intersectional approach assists me in three ways, which
serves as an epistemology and a methodology as well as a theory. First, it
serves to justify the shift from a focus on women to research on disadvantaged people, including disadvantaged men. Davis (2008) considered that
intersectionality is about the ‘the acknowledgement of differences among
women’ (p. 71). While Young (2011) argues that intersectionality needs
to include additional group representation—not only for women, but also
for members of other disadvantaged groups. Although it is important to
address the diversity of women, it would be remiss not to extend this
analysis to men.
Second, intersectionality helps me understand how multiple characteristics such as gender, class, hukou, age and so on affect the production of
knowledge, which especially refers to the conversations between me and
my informants. The intersectionality of these specific characteristics is juxtaposed with reflexivity and positionality, discussed later in Appendix A.
Third, intersectionality functions as a theoretical tool to analyse social
inequality based on gender, class and hukou. The book extends the dimensions of intersectionality beyond the triad of gender, race and class by situating the discussion in the context of China and by including the category
of hukou. Hukou is a crucial component of intersectionality in this book
because it implicates the urban/rural binary which functions as a social
system and is deeply embedded in people’s mentality, impacting on social
status and wellbeing together with social class. Gender, class and hukou
intersect to explain social inequality in Chinese society. The following sections elaborate the intersecting categories of gender, class and hukou.


6 

Y. SHEN

A Critique of Gendered Migration
and the Gendered Service Sector
As evidenced by the cases of Fengyu and Yong, their motivations to work
in the restaurant and their experiences at work are gendered. Migration is
gendered in nature; migrant women and men experience it in different
ways, although they face similar difficulties such as customers’ discriminatory attitudes due to their subordinated situation.
Gendered experience of migration is a primary focus of this book.
Current literature is insufficient in three ways when considering gender,
migration and the service sector. First, despite the fact that there is a small
and growing body of qualitative research in Chinese and in English that
focuses on migration experiences and employment, workers’ experiences
in the manufacturing sector are more likely to be emphasised (Chan,
2002; Chan & Pun, 2010; Chang, 2008; Kim, 2015; Lee, 1998; Pun,
1999, 2005, 2012). Only a few have focused on migrant workers in the
service sector (Gaetano, 2004; He, 2007, 2008; Jacka, 2006; Yan, 2008).
The population of migrant workers in the service sector has been increasing in China, with 42.9 per cent of migrant workers being engaged in the
service sector in 2014, compared to 33.3 per cent in 2009. By contrast,
the number of workers in manufacturing followed a downward trend,
from 39.1 per cent in 2009 to 31.3 per cent in 2014 (NBS, 2010, 2015).
The number of rural workers in the service sector is too significant to be
ignored.
Second, current qualitative research on service workers has a strong
focus on experience at work per se (Hanser, 2008; Lan, 2003; McDowell,
2009; Otis, 2011); and scholars argue that current studies on migrant
men focus on work life, whereas intimate life is missing (Choi & Peng,
2016). While I argue that work and intimate life are interrelated, for
example, the primary motivation for Yong to choose to work at the Meteor
Restaurant is to find a partner. The motivation is also shared by other male
workers. After working with them for a while, I found that family life is a
daily topic among the workers. I realised that their primary identities are

daughters, sons, mothers or fathers, which encourages me to record their
lives beyond work. In this book, I endeavour to provide a holistic approach
to examining three arenas of rural migrant workers’ lives: work, intimacy
and leisure.
Third, the epistemological understanding to view gender as relational is
overlooked in either migration studies or employment studies. Although


  INTRODUCING MIGRATION, GENDER AND THE SERVICE SECTOR 

7

scholars called for a relational and contextualised understanding of gender
in migration studies a decade ago (Donato, Gabaccia, Holdaway,
Manalansan & Pessar, 2006), it is not uncommon to see that scholars
claim to focus on gendered migration and gender differences while in fact
they merely focus on either men or women.
For example, according to some qualitative literature on migration in
China, migration is gendered not only by motivations of migrants and by
the social networks they create in the arrival city, but also by the occupations they take up (Gaetano & Jacka, 2004; Jacka, 2006; Lee & Kleinman,
2003; Pun, 2005). In this literature, migrant women are considered to
have special obligations in the household, such as their roles as filial daughters and responsible wives. Interestingly, if the research on female and
male migrants is compared, these gendered experiences are sometimes not
gendered with regard to the responsibilities both male and female migrants
intend to escape or the filial obligations they have to adopt. For instance,
Lin (2013) claimed that sending remittances home (p.  62) and family
pressure to give birth to a son (p. 68) amounted to the ‘gendered familial
responsibility’ (p. 67) of his male informants. Jacka (2006) noted a filial
obligation to send remittances home among her female informants as well
(p. 179). Furthermore, Jacka argued that the motivations for migrating

were highly gendered. She pointed out that patriarchal relations and
women’s experiences in rural areas were unique motivations for women to
migrate and to choose to prolong their stay in cities (Jacka, 2006, pp. 7,
221). But again, Lin (2013) found that ‘for some men it was a path that
enabled them to escape traditional gender obligations and responsibilities’
(p. 48). This resembles Jacka’s findings on women.
Therefore, gendered differences in the motivation of migration are not
clearly established. I do not deny the existence of gendered motivations
for migration, but my critique focuses on the insufficient evidence of, and
therefore the unconvincing argument in favour of, gendered migration—
It is not sufficient to claim that migrants’ behaviour is gendered if only a
single gender is taken into account.
Apart from the tendency to focus on either women or men, current
literature on gender and migration has a strong focus on women. The
tendency is premised on the presumption that women are disadvantaged
in society, ignoring the fact that women and men can be disadvantaged in
different ways due to structural inequalities of gender and class, among
others. While it is important to focus on women’s experiences and the
production of a workplace of women, 55.7  per  cent (83.7  million) of


8 

Y. SHEN

cross-border immigrant workers are men (International Labour
Organization, 2015, p. xi); while in China, 68.7  per  cent of the rural
migrant workers are men (NBS, 2018). However, migrant men’s subjective experiences are absent in current literature. It is not an issue reserved
for studies in China alone, and can be seen elsewhere (Choi & Peng,
2016).

Men’s studies have a strong focus on masculinity, which is also seen in
the studies on migrant men (Batnitzky, McDowell, & Dyer, 2009; Boehm,
2008; Cohen, 2006; Kilkey, Perrons, & Plomien, 2013; Osella & Osella,
2000). They argue that migrant men’s masculinity can be achieved
through migration, marriage, fatherhood and breadwinner status. In the
literature on Chinese male migrant workers their experiences are appallingly under-addressed, with only a few exceptional cases (Choi & Peng,
2016; Kim, 2015; Lin, 2013; Tian & Deng, 2017). Even less literature
compares migrant women and men’s experiences (Du, 2017; Kim, 2015).
The service sector has been a major economic stimulus in advanced
economies. Scholars pay continuous attention to gender and the service
sector, with an emphasis on women as emotional and aesthetic labour
(Franzway, 2000; Hall, 1993; Hochschild, 1983; Otis, 2008; Williams,
2003) and women’s sexualised and commodified bodies (Brownell, 2001;
McDowell, 2009; Schein, 2000; Zheng, 2006).
China’s prosperous service sector is in accordance with soaring economic growth. Scholars have come to pay attention to workers in the
service industry in China (Hanser, 2008; Lan, 2003; Otis, 2011; Zheng,
2006). Otis (2011) argues that the creation of a service class fundamentally transformed women’s lives. But the fact that women are overrepresented in the service sector does not mean that men do not play an
important role. As shown in the conflicts between Yong and Fengyu,
women and men working together complicates gender and employment
relations. Gender dynamics at work are important venues to explore.
However, most qualitative literature on labour and employment which
claims to have a gender perspective usually only focuses on women.
An increasing number of scholars become focused on men in the service sector. Scholars argue that working class men are disadvantaged at
entry-level service jobs that require obedience (Boehm, 2008; Bourgois,
2002; Leidner, 1993; McDowell, 2009; Nixon, 2009). Hegemonic masculinities require a man to be assertive and confident (Leidner, 1993),
whereas the subordinated masculinity of male service workers is constituted with ‘humiliating interpersonal subordination’, a concept coined by


  INTRODUCING MIGRATION, GENDER AND THE SERVICE SECTOR 

9

Bourgois (2002, p.  141) in which working-class men’s masculinity is
undermined in interpersonal communication.
Male- or female-centred studies are too limited to inform us about gender dynamics and its relation to power relations. Still, key questions
remaining unanswered concern how female and male workers interact
with each other and experience life in different ways. Therefore, the first
overarching question of the book is: how were migrant workers’ life experiences
gendered? One of my aims is to examine the gendered experiences without
ignoring either gender. By focusing on gender differences among the restaurant workers with first-hand empirical materials, I aim to analyse the
significance of gender alongside social class and hukou status as markers of
social division in China, and to point out that the experiences of migrant
women and men differ in various ways.

Nongmingong: The Intersection Between Class
and Hukou
In the risk assessment form that I filled in before starting the fieldwork, I
envisioned potential sexual harassment that I may encounter in the restaurant—perpetrated by male customers—based on the literature which
highlighted the feminised uniforms female workers have to wear (Hall,
1993; Hochschild, 1983; McDowell, 2009; Pun, 2005) and sexual harassment that customers imposed on them (Hughes & Tadic, 1998; Yagil,
2008). But contrary to my expectations, I did not experience customerinitiated sexual harassment myself, nor observe it between female workers
and male clients. In the Meteor Restaurant, the waitresses’ uniform is a
loose black dress attached with an apron, suggesting more of servility than
femininity. Most of the time, customers did not even look at workers when
workers greeted them. Rather, workers encountered verbal discrimination
and physical abuse from customers from time to time. Working as a waitress, I was once scolded by a middle-aged Shanghainese man, who called
me a ‘country bumpkin’ (xiang xia ren) when I served him food. The
socioeconomic status of most diners in the Meteor Restaurant is in sharp
contrast to that of the migrant workers. Class and hukou disparity between
customers and rural workers (nongmingong) are too significant, which

may prevent sexual harassment from occurring.
Nongmingong is a term that especially refers to rural migrant workers.
Nongmin literally means peasants, and gong refers to workers. The term nongmingong suggests the class and hukou identities of rural migrant workers.