Introduction
When we arrived, it was after lunch, so the sun was quite hot. Their house was on a small hill beside the main road. It was a small, ground-level house where about three families were living together. In that house, Zhang Wei and his family, including his wife and children, his father, his younger brother, and his aunt and her husband, all lived together. So there were an estimated 11 people.
The house was on a hill, so the wind blew and, because it was beside the main road, we could hear the sound of cars. I guessed that it must be quite cold during the cold season. He and his father were smoking cigarettes while talking to us. Even though the wind was cool, the sun's heat was scorching.
The small house is located in Lincang Municipality, one of the counties in Yunnan Province in southwest China. The economy is based on agriculture and cross-border trade with neighbouring Myanmar. It has long connections with the mountainous and isolated area over the border in Shan State. The flow of migrant workers from Myanmar into Yunnan began in the 1990s onwards in the context of a massive rural-urban migration that was happening inside China at that time.
"My wife and I have five children. The eldest daughter is 13 years old, and the youngest is five. In this house, my family, my father and my brother live together. My father's cousin and his wife also live here with us. My mother lives in Myanmar. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, my mother came here once and stayed for a while. I have four siblings. Two of them live in Myanmar. Because of the 2015 war [in the Kokang region in Myanmar], my father and my brother, my wife, and two of our children came to this side together with me," said 36 year-old Zhang Wei, telling us about his family.
Inside the house, there were many partitions, so even without his explanation, we could guess that more than one family lived in the ground-level house. Also, because of the children's clothes hanging out to dry, we could assume it was a family with many children. They didn't come here without a reason. They were displaced and forced to migrate here because of war.
