Just beyond the shadow of neon-lit skyscrapers, Cao Xiuzhen lives in a tiny dark room up a makeshift flight of steps that is more ladder than staircase, under the eaves of a house precariously packed with people just like her: former peasants barelystruggling to scratch a living in the world’s largest economy.
It’s just past dawn on a lowering Shanghai day, and in this impromptu village of migrants — so similar to temporary migrant settlements all over China — a housewife chases a live waterfowl through the clutter of an impossibly narrow lane, until it ducks under a scooter and sets off the vehicle’s earsplitting alarm.
Inches away on the other side of a thin plywood wall, a baby sleeps in a small lean-to room with its parents. Cao’s husband squats nearby, brushing his teeth meticulously at an outdoor tap, while the next-door neighbour sits on her haunches washing clothes in a basin full of suds. Others fetch buckets of water from the communal tap, or load discarded cardboard on to three-wheeled carts, preparing for a day sorting through other people’s rubbish to make a few cents selling it up the recycling chain.