Like many adults in rural China, Li Xiuying has tried  migrating for work. She toiled at a sock-making factory elsewhere in Yunnan province, but was too anxious to stay for long. 

“I wasn’t used to it. I missed my mother every day,” says Ms Li, who is in her mid-40s. After two years worrying whether her mother was well fed and cared for, she returned home to her village of elaborate wooden houses perched on a steep forest slope, where neighbours cook over wood fires, tend walnut trees and raise black pigs. 

The outside world has not been kind to Ms Li. She dropped out of school after third grade because she had ulcers. Her ID card reads “February daughter” because a careless bureaucrat recorded her nickname rather than her real name. After she returned from the sock factory, she could not afford to buy medicine for her invalid husband, so she sent her sons off to work instead.