The Long Day of Young Peng
小彭一天的旅途疲惫
I first met Peng few years ago while doing fieldwork in Lingshui, a Ming dynasty village close to China’s hypermodern capital. At the time, Peng was living with his family in their old rural house on the outskirts of Beijing. He had just finished studying at a nearby vocational secondary school, majoring in IT. He was spending the period between the end of his degree and the beginning of a new job with his parents. What the future had in store for him we largely ignored, except that it entailed leaving his native village behind. We later stayed in touch through phone calls and social media. What follows draws from what Peng has been willing to share with me about his life in the village and as a migrant, but also goes beyond it. It draws from material collected through repeated visits to China and other scholarly sources, including works on other parts of the country and insights from different but similarly developing places around the world, to recount the story of the making of contemporary China. All people and places in this game have been given alternative names, but their stories remain those of some of China’s hundred million migrants. This game puts you in Peng’s shoes. It asks you to pay close attention to the various political, economical, legal and, above all, human entanglements constituting the ordinary life of a Chinese migrant today. In this way, you gain insights into how the global forces of modernity, the object of this digital ethnography, affect local Chinese individuals and the choices they make about their lives and relationships.

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