Temporary Couples? A Chinese Migrant's Dream Narrative

Abstract

This piece presents a narration of a dream by a rural migrant, Yang Cui, who works in the city of Shantou in China. It reveals her inner struggles to end an affair with another migrant worker, Lao Bo. This piece is written as a part of an ethnographic book project on rural–urban migration in China, in which I experiment with different genres of writing in an attempt to address migrants' bewildering existential multiplicity of interior experience, among which some are presented more analytically, some more subjectively, and some more imaginatively. Understanding the human condition in terms of the limits of knowing others and ourselves requires anthropologists to seek creative forms of ethnographic narrative to give shape and voice to existential struggles, ambivalence, and uncertainty of everyday life. This piece attempts to use Yang Cui's narration of her dream as an evocative form of describing her inner struggles being with Lao Bo as a so-called linshi fuqi (“temporary couple”), through which her self-knowledge unfolds, reflection takes place, and consciousness finds expression.