I spent my LiA summer in Dongguan, China, a city I once hesitantly but now gratefully claim as one of my homes. After spending two years away, my return as a researcher was accompanied by mixed feelings. Most of all, I wondered how to balance my new academic understandings of home and its histories with an eagerness to reinvestigate what I had previously took for granted, rendering what was once familiar unfamiliar. 

My ties to Dongguan are somewhat accidental. I was never supposed to live here. My parents moved here after I graduated high-school in 2020, transitioning from our expatriate bubble and cosmopolitan lifestyle in Shanghai to one more socially and spatially integrated with the local community. We each faced our own adjustments. For the first time in decades, my dad had to give up the relative flexibility afforded by working under foreign companies and accept China’s brutal 996 (9AM - 9PM, 6 days a week) standard work schedule. My mom was isolated from her previous 太太 circles; her daily routines of afternoon tea, calligraphy, Zumba, and parent teacher meetings replaced by solo trips to cafes and new friendships with the owners of neighborhood mom-and-pop shops. Like many other college students during the pandemic, I was confined to virtual learning. Between the twelve hour time difference, added rigor in coursework, and my language barrier (more psychological than real but known to cause performance anxiety), I felt unsettled. 

Concerned about the amount of time I was spending alone in my room, my parents encouraged me to go to nearby coffeeshops and get a yoga membership. I was surprised to discover that many of these establishments were started and owned by young entrepreneurs, many of them migrants and not much older than me. After bonding over our shared dependencies on caffeine and the hilarity of my attempts at the tree pose, we became quick friends. Their stories of migration and entrepreneurship were varied, surprising, and deeply inspiring. Therefore, when given the opportunity and resources to conduct field research this summer, I knew I had to come home. 

Specifically, I decided to study migrant entrepreneurship and collect stories through interviews. For context, Dongguan is a third tier industrial city in the Pearl River Delta known for being the "world's factory". It has the largest migrant population in China and many recent academic articles have been published on the city's adaptive resilience in the face of manufacturing downturn and urban shrinkage. This topic can be situated within a few national trends that I am deeply interested in from a policy perspective.

1. The decreasing influence of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) post-marketization (mainly early 2000s) and the gaps and opportunities it has created. 
2. The consequences of China’s national strategy of “mass entrepreneurship and innovation” that supports its transition from a primarily manufacturing to service economy. 
3. China’s “back to the countryside” policy that encourages rural-to-urban migrants to return to their hometowns to reduce rural-urban disparities and repopulate rural towns.
4. recent liberalization of the hukou household registration system that promises to reduce regional disparities and promote even development and social mobility. 

For my project, I was primarily interested in the lived experiences of migrant entrepreneurs and the ways in which they navigate and affect local economies. My research questions included: what factors cause rural-urban migrants to choose self employment? How does migrant entrepreneurship affect local economies and communities? What are region-specific social and legal dynamics (focusing especially on the hukou system that governs access to public education, healthcare, and housing) affecting migrant entrepreneurs in Dongguan? 

Over the course of four weeks, I had the chance to interview six migrant entrepreneurs: the owner of a yoga studio, co-owner of a pet shop, a freelancer and marketing consultant, owner of an Italian restaurant, founder of Dongguan’s first international school, and owner of a nail salon.