Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Barriers leave many outsiders with little sense of belonging in the city
Even though Bao Ruokui from Anhui province has a stable job and lives in her own Shanghai home with her husband and three-year-old son, she still feels little sense of belonging to the city because of barriers ranging from the dialect to government policy.
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Barriers leave many outsiders with little sense of belonging in the city
Lilian Zhang
24 February 2009
Even though Bao Ruokui from Anhui province has a stable job and lives in her own Shanghai home with her husband and three-year-old son, she still feels little sense of belonging to the city because of barriers ranging from the dialect to government policy.
“Shanghai is renowned for its tolerance of various cultures and modern lifestyle, but sometimes it still has [the old] discrimination against outsiders, and protectionism,” said Ms. Bao, 31.
When she came to Shanghai four years ago from her small hometown and landed a job as an office worker, the complex dialect was the first major obstacle that stopped her getting to know people.
“In my company, most people like speaking in the Shanghai dialect, which I really don’t understand,” she said. “And in the service industry, including at shopping malls and on buses, many don’t speak Putonghua until I ask them to repeat things for me.”
As the city unveiled its hukou, or permanent residency, reform in an effort to boost development through adding more non-natives to the population, not all the 6 million members of the city’s floating population were satisfied with it.
Ms. Bao, who has a job and pays regular social insurance, still needs to wait for another seven years to get permanent residency after receiving a temporary permit.
“I always feel rootless without a hukou. Seven years is too long for me.”
More significant, the city’s public education policy places rigid restrictions on school enrolment if a student’s parents do not have Shanghai permanent residency, to the point where non-Shanghai students cannot sit the college entrance examination in the city.
“We have to get a hukou for the sake of my child, rather than merely for ourselves,” she said. “But I still need to send him to a costly private elementary school instead of a public one until we get that pass in seven years.”
However, she said, “outsiders” were usually exceptionally adaptable to life, learning to survive in different environments.
“I’ve learned that when in Rome, do as the Romans do. So it’s much better now,” she said.
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