When I spoke with my Korean student about the book that I wrote about, Delivering Food: The World of a Female Rider and China’s vast internal migration from countryside to city, our conversation drifted to something global, about migration across the U.S. southern border—about people leaving Central and South America in search of work and a better life. The systems differ. But the underlying force often feels the same.
As the Chinese saying goes, 人往高处走，水往低处流 — “People move toward higher places just as water flows downhill.” It captures something basic and human. Water does not go against gravity; it follows. Likewise, when opportunities concentrate in cities, people follow.
In this sense, this is not just Wang Wan’s story. It is a pattern.
Like millions of others in China, Wang left a small rural town for a big city. In the United States, migrants cross national borders. Different histories, different systems—but the same pull of urban promise and the same push of rural limitation. Cities glitter; villages are in poverty.
Wang Wan was born in Guancheng Town in Shandong Province. In her account, migration there is not exceptional—it is tradition. From childhood, leaving was treated almost as destiny. No one taught the young how to remain; they learned instead how to go outside the village. The “outside world,” especially Beijing, shimmered with the possibility of status and good income.
The desire to leave stretches back generations. In the 1950s or 60s, her grandfather pushed a wooden cart all the way to Beijing with his family in search of survival. An accident forced them to return, but the impulse never vanished. Village after village continues to send people outward—across provinces, sometimes overseas—for work, study, or marriage.
Economic pressure intensifies this movement. Illness, funerals, weddings—especially the cost of securing marriages for sons—all require money. In Wang’s village, men leave for years to finance their children’s futures. Some return only for harvest before heading back out again. Leaving becomes not just personal ambition but family obligation.
For Wang herself, the pressure to leave was also deeply personal. As a divorced woman in a small rural community, she felt suffocated by gossip and judgment. She writes that staying would mean being swallowed by whispers. Her father regarded her divorce as humiliation and avoided social contact out of shame. When she later became a food-delivery rider, he felt further disgraced, as though her work were morally suspect.
For her, leaving was not only about income. It was about space, peace of mind and anonymity in big cities. It was about reclaiming dignity.
And perhaps that is what we often miss. When we look at migrants—whether in Beijing or at the U.S. border—we tend to see crisis, politics, or statistics. But beneath all that lies something simpler: the human instinct to move toward survival, toward place of hope, toward a wider horizon.
In my next essay, I will turn to what happens after the leaving—what it means to live inside the system that pulls so many in.
2/11/2026