Peng, an 8-year-old girl with bangs, lives in a remote rural area of southern China, alone with her grandparents—her mother and father are far away at work in different provinces.
It isn’t just the parents who are gone. Peng, who is the only student in her grade, has seen most of the school’s thirty children leave with their families. Now there are just seven children and two elderly teachers left at the Wanjia Elementary School in Hunan Province.
It’s a pattern that is repeated across the country, as rural villages are hollowed out and parents, who can work, migrate to cities. Migrant workers comprise a vast demographic of Chinese rural folk who leave their villages, often in the hinterland, in search of income in the wealthy and affluent cities. There are over 200 million such people, who, because of China’s uniquely draconian household registration system, typically can’t bring their children with them.
