Internal migration, the movement of people from rural, economically depressed areas to better developed cities in their own country, has marked China’s history since the 1990s. China’s 2020 census reported that 376 million people were internal migrants,¹ playing a role in what has been described as the “largest people flow in history.”²

In the area where I live, many internal migrants move relatively short distances from their rural villages to county seats or the provincial capital. Others migrate half a country away to larger cities along China’s eastern coast. Rural areas have seen great improvement in recent years. However, no matter the physical distance, internal migration takes people across a chasm of development from isolated and economically depressed villages to large cities buzzing with people, traffic, and industry.

My first close encounter with internal migration came in the 1990s. I was living in one of China’s large eastern cities where friends introduced a young woman who had arrived in the city a few years before me. Like so many others, Luna had made the long journey from her small and simple home village to an eastern metropolis looking for opportunity. With great determination, she found it, enrolling in college-level English courses and landing a series of jobs that offered salaries three or four times what she would have made at home.

One of my earliest memories of Luna involved a visit on a cold winter day to her rented room. In contrast to official city residents (including me even though I was a foreign guest), Luna lacked the right documentation to work and live in the city. Her unofficial housing was a single room in an uninsulated concrete building with a metal roof. A single bare lightbulb weakly illuminated the space which was about twice the size of her bed. She cooked over a hot plate in one corner and carried water from an outside spigot. The public toilet was down the alley and around the corner.

In those days, an imaginary line divided northern and southern China. People above the line had heat; those below did not. Since we were north of the line, my well-constructed apartment had public heat from November to March, and I often needed to open my windows to release the hot air. Luna’s room, since it was unofficial, was unheated. Its concrete walls and metal roof provided little protection from the freezing temperatures.

On my visit, Luna’s hospitality was warm, but I was not. In spite of multiple layers from a puffy coat on the outside to woolens inside, shivers started deep in my center and radiated out toward my fingers and toes. The cold on that thirty-year-old visit left a mark on my memory.

A couple of years into her migrant work, Luna, having proved herself reliable and hardworking, landed a good job with an international company. A few months later, she moved into new housing provided by her employer. This time her single room came with wooden walls, a tile floor, a large space heater, and an attached kitchen with running water. Although the water was cold and the bathroom was still a short walk away, on moving day, Luna exclaimed, “God must love me more than He loves other people because He gives me so much!”

As I returned to my spacious and overwarm apartment with hot running water in both the bathroom and kitchen, Luna’s words played over in my mind, and I reflected on my sense of gratitude. Since then, as I have migrated back and forth across the ocean, my personal kingdom has continued to expand with places and possessions on both sides. Have I offered thanks to the Giver for all His material blessings regardless of their substance?

Luna’s thirty-year-old words have left a much deeper mark on my memory than the cold did on that first visit. They have come to mind at various points in my life and have led me to this conclusion: To whom much is given, much may seem like little while feeding our greed for more. But when we count our blessing, no matter how big or small, they grow with our gratitude until our storehouses overflow.

1. “China’s Rapid Development has Transformed its Migration Trends” by Heidi Østbø Haugen and Tabitha Speelman, Migration Policy Institute, 2022. ↩︎
2. “The Demography of the Great Migration in China,” by Rufei Guo, Junsen Zhang, and Minghai Zhou in Journal of Development Economics, 2024. ↩︎

Image by Jccsvq.