China's migrant workers go home

He borrowed money to pay for a grueling 25-hour bus ride home, followed by an all-day hike over quake-damaged mountain roads to the town where he hoped to find 37-year-old Nong Yong.

Sichuan is China's second most populous province and one of its poorest. Its biggest export is migrant workers - 11 million of them, or 13 percent of its 87.5 million population. They provide much of the muscle for China's economic transformation, filling jobs in manufacturing, construction, and coal mines around the country. Now, so many need money to rebuild homes that even more are likely to join the migrant exodus.

Mass migration has become a natural byproduct of the nation's boom, evident on each Chinese New Year holiday as tens of millions of workers head home to celebrate with family.

This time, however, those traveling for hours or days by bus or train from all over this vast country are coming back to tragedy.

Gao was making $100 a month as a housepainter when he left Sichuan eight years ago. His factory job in Huaxi, in Jiangsu province, pays three times as much.

His two older sisters later joined him, landing jobs at a garment factory. The three of them sent money home each month to their widowed mother.

Still, when the call came, Gao couldn't possibly afford to fly, and had to beg his boss for a loan to cover his $70 bus ticket. Frantic queries to the bank where his brother worked yielded the name of a mountain town where Nong Yong had a meeting scheduled.

After the bus ride, "I walked more than 10 hours, but when I got there, I saw nothing but water. That place had been completely flooded. I searched for more than eight hours, but I couldn't see anything," he said.

When Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, a native of Sichuan, promoted the country's economic development in the 1990s during his famous southern tour, the government loosened restrictions on travel, encouraging people from farms and rural areas to move to big cities and coastal areas to work at factories and construction sites.

An estimated 140 million took heed, according to government figures.

Yet ties to the ancestral village remain strong, with many migrants spending years toiling in low-paying, backbreaking jobs in the hopes of saving enough to return home one day, and live more comfortably than the ones who stayed behind. Often, one spouse leaves in search of work while the other stays at home.

Gong Xingzhi, 42 and a migrant worker since he was 19, mines coal in Shanxi province, sending home about $350 a month to his family. When his wife called, it was to say she and their two sons were safe but their house in Beichuan was ruined. Gong came home to see for himself.

"When I saw the town, it was so miserable," he said. "I saw people burying bodies. I saw so many children dead. It was terrible."