Entering The City:the Urban Experience Of Young Migrant Worker

Sociological research is often concerned about the social system and group structure but ignores pepole’s mental world and emotional world in daily life. Following the concern of the sociology of the spiritual world and spiritual order, this study attempts to explore the emotional experience of the individual life course. Since the1990s, the wave of urbanization in China began, urbanization has become an important driving force for China’s economic growth and modernization process.The cites in the crazy growth absorbed a lot of money and labor, millions of rural migrant workers came into the cities to work. The city’s work and lifestyle affect people’s behavior and personality and psychological state.How this change affects mental world and emotional experience of the people from the countryside into the city.The material for analysis in this article came from3months of fieldwork in a four star hotel of Chengdu between2012to2013and nine novels which describe the life of young migrant workers. As the experience related to people’s life course, this study is in the framework of "timing" in the course of their lives,it is "past-present (experience)-reproduce the past and look to the future. The paper tries to understand the impression of the city of young migrant workers, analyze the rural people how to adapt to city life, if their urban life practice chang their opinion about the city, the city people and their hometown-countryside. As a technical device, the city is always shaping the individual. In the city’s production system, career system and norms regulate the body so strict that the body can adapt to the urban labor market. But the young migrant workers can not enter the upscale consumer market. They just only can watch the landscape of the city with their eyes.From the the perspective of the young migrant workers, the city has become an symbol that has infinite attraction, their home and rural areas become the place they want to escape from. The fascination of the city lead the young migrant workers to imitate the behavioral characteristics of the city people. They want to become the city people. But they can not settle down in the city because of their economic conditions and the household registration system(hukou system). The mobility of urban life makes it is difficult to maintain stable social relations. Therefore, young migrant workers in the city experience the loneliness and anxiety. The popular entertainment in urban consumption system relieve the loneliness and anxiety of young migrant workers to some extent, but on the other hand it also makes the individual get lost, ignoring to think about their own destiny.The urban experience of the young migrant workers is the result of construction of a variety of social mechanisms in Chinese modernization process. It is the urban-rural dual system, integration of the rural labor force into the capitalist market in the process of industrialization, and China’s development model in which urbanization is the core power that not only manufacture the rural-urban gap in the material, but also manufacture the rural-urban gap in people’s minds. The gap has become a culture, lead to their pursuit of the city and their dissatisfaction about they hometown. As a rural person, they contempt their rural identity. In this sense, a double isolation is produced. It includes the the exclusion of cities on them, more importantly, the exclusion of their own on them. The fate of their homeless is difficult to change.