Book Forum: Suvi Rautio on Intimacy as a Lens in Work and Migration
Jingyu Mao’s Intimacy as a Lens in Work and Migration carries a lot of intriguing parallels with my own research. Like Jingyu’s interlocutors, I was reminded that ethnic authenticity is always somewhere other than here. Her interlocutors often advised her that if she wants to study a trope of authentic ethnicity, she should leave the city and go to the mountains. I was that person doing research on ethnic minorities in the mountains, but I too was frequently encountered with similar advice – ‘go further up the mountains if you really want to understand China’s ethnic minorities!’.
China’s boom in the tourist and service industry has redefined ethnicity as a consumer item that can be performed and profited from, and the Chinese population are increasingly aware that authenticity is being misplaced in the process. But what processes are involved in misplacing ethnicity? Jingyu Mao’s book offers insight into this enquiry through deep analysis drawing on first-hand experience working in the service industry in Yunnan’s ethnic minority restaurants. The restaurants she worked in and conducted fieldwork in does not represent the full ethnic diversity of the area but instead, as Jingyu describes, staff are trained to affiliate with an ethnic minority group which they may not belong to or maybe even feel ambivalent towards.
What I enjoyed most about Jingyu Mao’s work is her commitment to feminist theory that tells us the personal is always political. Individual experiences are deeply intertwined with social and political processes. To understand these processes, Jingyu places labour central to her analysis on ethnic performances. This allows her to enter wider conversations around labour that are fundamental to understanding the wider context of China today. Jingyu engages with these discussions through the lens of emotion. Ethnic work is full of emotion. The boundaries between work and rural migrants’ social lives are constantly blurred, which Jingyu experienced first-hand.
Jingyu Mao draws parallels with ethnic minority restaurants in Yunnan to China’s service industry that is contingent on outsourcing labour to low-skilled, low-paid migrant workers. In her book, she cites a 2019 survey done on China’s abundant population of delivery workers that revealed that the primary concern for delivery drivers in urban China is the lack of gratitude they receive from customers. Many go through their days delivering goods and services without hearing a single ‘thank you’ expressing recognition for their hard labour. Jingyu talks about this in her book, too. Nobody thanked her or her colleagues, and she experienced this lack of gratitude while working at Yunnan’s ethnic restaurants. I wonder how these personal ambivalences have evolved over the many years that Jingyu has committed to this research project. This might give us more insight on what happens when a population that are already heavily marginalised and neglected do not get the gratitude they deserve? Do these feelings diminish? Multiply? Or perhaps evolve to become something new?
Dr Suvi Rautio is an anthropologist specialising on China at the City University of New York and the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include collective memory, cultural heritage and ethnographies of encounter in contemporary China. She is the author of ‘The Invention of Tradition: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade’ (Palgrave).