How a little brown book can keep China’s lovers worlds apart
T he way Lai Jie sees it, there are two kinds of relationships. There is romance. And there is marriage. They are not always the same, and in a city such as Shanghai, the deciding factor on who to wed can have little to do with personality, interest or chemistry. It comes down, instead, to a little brown book, the hukou (pronounced hoo-koh ) document, part of a household-registration system that creates distinctions between urban haves and have-nots that influence salaries, education and, it turns out, love lives for huge numbers of migrants. hukou household registration documents , shows journalists her mother’s hukou in the bedroom they share in Beijing on March 10, 2015. The documents decide what services Chinese people can access, from home-ownership rights to public school enrolment, based on their families’ place of origin." /> Li Xue, 21, who does not have hukou household registration documents , shows journalists her mother’s hukou in the bedroom they share i...