'My mother always wants to save money - I want to spend it'

Go Jin was born into a family of illiterate peasants. Her daughter, however, became a state engineer. And her granddaughter? She lives in a yuppie flat and works for a Japanese company. Emma Brockes meets three women who tell the story of modern China
Go Jin has lived long enough to observe, without rancour, that it is funny the way things turn out. Who would have thought it? That she, the daughter of peasant farmers sent fleeing by the Japanese army, would have a granddaughter who worked for a Japanese firm? That, without being able to read or write, she would push four of her seven children through university? That a revolution would take place in which she would be classified, by virtue of a few run-down rooms in a back alley of Shanghai, as a landowner? She joggles with laughter at that particular irony. "A landowner!"

The 88-year-old lives there still, in an alley opening on to the North Guangxi Road between a hairdresser's and a bike shop. Entering it is like pushing on a wall and finding a secret and perfectly preserved slice of old China: washing lines span the narrow canyon; rats shuttle across the floor; people hurl buckets of water straight from their front doors, which to ease the overcrowding - "so many, many families" - are always left open. The world beyond it is not one Go Jin likes to brave unaccompanied.

Periodically her family suggests that she move somewhere more comfortable, but she bats the idea away. This is her home: two small rooms leading off a communal kitchen, a table, a few chairs, a lamp with a margarine tub for a lampshade. She sleeps on a piece of plywood balanced on a bed frame where a mattress might otherwise be. On the wall is a framed photo of her late husband, who has been dead for nearly 30 years. Their marriage was arranged. "But we were friendly," she says. Every afternoon she plays Mahjong with her ancient flatmates, or "neighbours" as she calls them, those same people who were forcibly billeted on her 40 years ago by the government. Well, she says, it's company. While we talk, one of them shuffles in brandishing a loo brush, scowls at us and retreats.

Go Jin is one of eight children and the mother of seven. She points to some rice on the stove and says, "I'm taking food to my doctors." I think the interpreter has misheard her, but later she refers to her children as, "my sons and doctors". The interpreter is sure of the phrasing. By doctors, she means holders of degree certificates rather than medics. Go Jin calls the husband of her most educated daughter her "doctor-in-law". In a place where progress is hard won, people make show of its stages: Go Jin's daughter, for example, has a glass cabinet in which obsolete mobile-phone handsets are arranged as ornaments.

Go Jin's own husband owned a small shop selling glassware and she took in washing to make ends meet. It would have been nice, she says, to have had an education. She used to fantasise about being a shop assistant in one of the big stores downtown.

But the only job she took outside the house was during the revolution, when she was allocated work in a factory, packing medicine bottles into boxes. "I got so frustrated. I was always dependent. But I could only survive by having children. Children were a woman's earnings then. We didn't grow rice, we only grew children." The fortunes of her own children have turned almost entirely on how old they were when the revolution began. Those whose schooling was finished or nearly finished did better, ultimately, than those who were interrupted at a crucial stage and made to work for the state.

Tonight, we are going for dinner at the apartment of her eldest daughter, Han Jia Feng. Feng is an engineer and it is her daughter, Lilian, who works at a Japanese import/export firm. Lilian's husband, Richard, has a degree from Birmingham University. We leave the alley and come out opposite the Mener Tea House, where people in suits can be seen through the window sipping tea on leather chairs. The interpreter takes Go Jin by the hand and hauls her through the pedestrian traffic; she flies along the Guangxi Road, smiling in fright. The drive to her daughter's house is a couple of miles long. I ask her if she finds the city hard to comprehend now and she smiles, faintly, and ignores the question. "That was my own house," she says, of the place we just left. "That was my own house."

Han Jia Feng lives in a fifth-floor apartment overlooking the sort of yuppie high-rises that are sprouting up all over Shanghai. It is a modern affair. A big television takes up half the living room and remains on during dinner, which is a vast spread of Shanghai delicacies. Also present at the table: Feng's sister, Han Jia Zhen, her daughter Lilian, and Lilian's husband Richard. Lilian, 31, does yoga every Saturday at an upscale gym in town where the fees are 2,200 RMB (£140) a year. Richard works in management. He can't understand a word his wife's grandmother says: Go Jin speaks only Shanghai dialect; Richard speaks Mandarin. His English is fluent.

Both Lilian's mother and aunt are mechanical engineers, not professions they chose but which were allocated to them by the state. For 33 years, Feng worked in a factory 300km away in Nanjing, where she was posted by the government. She saw her mother and father once or twice a year. When the revolution ended she got a job at Fiat and went to work in Turin for six months, a fact her mother is still boasting to the neighbours about.

Lilian says: "In my mother's day, people didn't have a choice where they worked." She looks at her mother. "Workers for the country!" she says and giggles. Her mother smiles tolerantly. "They never thought about it," says her daughter. "They were taught not to think."

Feng was lucky. She graduated from high school just before the revolution started and was able to go to university immediately. Her brothers and sisters were still at school and their classes were abruptly stopped. After the revolution, Han Jia Zhen was in the first batch to go to university as a mature student, but some of their younger siblings were too disturbed to return to education. One of them, the youngest girl in the family, was sent to work in the country. Lilian says, incredulously: "Plant. They had to plant."

Go Jin, at the head of the table, does a massive belch and spits out half a fish bone. Lilian rolls her eyes and says to me: "The generation gap." Her grandmother beams at her.

Feng was 26 when she married (her husband, Lilian's dad, is an engineer and away working) and they had two children. Lilian was 29 when she married Richard and her parents are prepared for the possibility that she will have no children. In the future, says Lilian, every Chinese young person will be expected to support four to six oldies; she figures that they will have enough on their plates without children, too.

Lilian studied Business English in Nanjing. After graduating she got a temporary job in a factory, then became a reporter on their internal newsletter. Then she worked as a purchaser. Now she is in logistics at a Japanese trading company. "The managers are always guys," she complains. But apart from that, things are good. "Now, in China, people have the chance to choose their jobs. It's not stable, but they have a choice at least. When we were children, my grandmother was always going on about the past. But we think about tomorrow. She talks about her childhood, but we cannot imagine it."

When the three women argue, it tends to go like this: Go Jin thinks her daughter is neglectful of housework; Han Jia Feng thinks her daughter is extravagant with money. "I don't care about money," says Lilian. "I can buy what I want. My mother always wants to save money. But I say, I earn it, I want to spend it."

Go Jin interrupts and, pointing at her daughter, says to me: "She got a scholarship." Lilian rolls her eyes.

Another thing that annoys Feng about her daughter is the way she chops and changes jobs. "My mother said, 'Don't change jobs so many times.' She said, 'Work at one job and stick to it.' But I want to do what I want to do. Their thought was, everything they do should be beneficial for the country. Now we think about being beneficial to ourselves, of being useful to ourselves. Totally. She wants me to work always, work always."

" ... and my grandson got many, many prizes," says Go Jin. "And scholarships."

"She always worked," says Feng of her mother. "Always working. She didn't like to sit. She liked to move. She was the example of someone working, we respected that."

Go Jin retires from the table after eating three times the amount of everyone else in half the time. She settles in front of the television and immediately starts slumbering.

I ask Feng when was she happiest. She knocks twice on the table: "Now. Now. People adapt very quickly. Change happens day by day."

I see the family for the last time at the home of another sibling, Han Jia Oing, the one who, in Lilian's words, was "made to plant". We have dinner and afterwards the women in the family play Mahjong, while Oing's 22-year-old son Mao Run scans for aliens in his bedroom. His walls are plastered with posters of NBA basketball players. He is a medical student. His home computer has a programme on it that analyses data from satellites looking for extra-terrestrials.

We talk about the future. Lilian can't shake the worry that, because so many of China's prosperous young people work for foreign companies, they will be left high and dry if for some reason these companies pull out. She is optimistic, but not entirely certain of her country's future. "My grandmother did not worry about what the world would look like in 50 years' time. She did not look ahead. She just worked. But I worry where I will be when I am 50."

"They wanted just to live," says Lilian, of her elders. "We want to live better."

Go Jin loses to her daughter in Mahjong. "Ah, mama," says Feng. I ask Lilian if she thinks her grandmother would have liked to have done more with her life.

"She brought up seven children," says Lilian. "It is enough."

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