China's Migrant Workers's Return

Peter S. Goodman of Washington Post Foreign Service writes Lunar New Year Allows Migrant Workers to Leave Jobs in Cities for Rural Homes, a report about China's migrant workers's CNY experience. Selected Excerpts are:

On almost every other day, Cai Weilan wakes up hundreds of miles away in a cramped factory dormitory, facing another long shift making sweaters for strangers across the ocean.

On this day, she wakes up at home. She jostles the coals to life on the concrete floor of her otherwise unheated house, then lifts a pair of knitting needles and a ball of green wool to begin making a single sweater for her 2-year-old daughter, still asleep beside her. For one brief stretch -- this week's Chinese Lunar New Year festival -- mother and daughter are reunited.

"Of course I miss her," says Cai, 23, who has been gone for a full year, leaving her daughter behind in the care of her mother-in-law while she endures the factory life for $80 a month. "At home, there is nothing for me to do. My family needs this money."