After I published my first monograph on institutional innovations in three Chinese villages (Hou Reference Hou2013), I engaged in a couple of research projects such as on China’s campaign for promoting electric vehicles (Hou and Li Reference Hou and Li2020) and social service organizations (Hou and Chen Reference Hou, Chen, Kim and Miura2021), but none were envisioned as book-length projects. Of course, time became more fragmented for me as a new parent, and being away from home for a long period of time to conduct fieldwork was deemed unrealistic. Even traveling for conferences could bring out feelings of guilt, the social and gender aspects of which sociologists know only too well. It was not until summer 2018, when I started to plan for my yearlong sabbatical in 2019–2020, that I finally felt I was ready to take on another extensive research project. At the time I was considering several potential topics, but watching and reading about the lives of day laborers in Shenzhen, who are called “the great gods of Sanhe,” made me want to learn more. I was finally able to conduct my fieldwork in the fall of 2019; however, the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that I had to cancel my plan to travel back to the field sites in early 2020. Who would know that my sabbatical would be split by the pandemic and that so many things would have changed since?

There have been plenty of studies about various aspects and demographics of rural-to-urban migrant workers in China. However, most of them focus on workers in one industry – such as factory workers, nannies, shop assistants, or construction workers – and it seems that Chinese migrant workers’ identities are inevitably tied with the workplace and the work they do. Day laborers are different. They do not work in any single industry and their off-work identity and life seem to define them as much as, if not more than, their work identity. Their detachment from any specific type of job and their lack of not only formal employment but also stable residence and relationships indicate a new level of atomization; when you compare them with formal workers, their “freedom” of quitting and switching jobs and their “control” over their off-work time and space and over whether and when to work come at the cost of jeopardizing their long-term employability, security, and even the legitimacy of their presence in the city; and collective actions become more difficult as employment and relationships become more transient.

At a time when precarious labor is on the rise on a global scale, this book reveals both the institutional and the individual processes that lead to informal employment and the clustering of day laborers in certain parts of cities such as Shenzhen. Notably the great gods of Sanhe are predominantly male and are mostly born in the 1990s, so this book also explores the gendered and gendering aspects of labor as workers express, negotiate, and claim their masculinities; and it investigates a new generation of migrant workers who are concurrently facing the normalization of migration, the rising costs of living in cities, the slowdown of economic growth, the stagnation of social mobility, the penetration of social media, and the proliferation of a consumerist and sexualized culture. Even though this book seems to focus only on a small fraction of the over three million migrant workers in China – low-skilled male workers who have given up their long-term commitment to factory work or work in general and who survive on meager wages and live a bachelor’s life – their struggles with the meanings of work and life, with family and relationships, with saving and spending, with desires and reality, with various agents of the state and different employers, and so on, have larger implications. The book suggests that in analyzing the precarity of workers in China today it is important to go beyond the binary view of employer versus employee, capital versus labor, and the state versus workers and include the chain of intermediaries. In addition, precarity needs to be understood from different dimensions besides workers’ financial situations and their participation in the labor market.

My sincere gratitude goes first and foremost to all the subjects of my research for their trust, vulnerability, and wisdom. I hope I have managed to reciprocate with a faithful and well-rounded account of their experiences and voices. Special thanks to Glasses. I promised to send him a copy of the book when it comes out. Even though I have lost touch with him in the middle of the pandemic, I hope to still be able to keep that promise.

Many thanks to Li Ping and his family for their hospitality during my fieldwork in Shenzhen. My thanks also go to Shen Yan, Zou Yongliang, and their family for their generosity while I was in Kunshan. I am deeply indebted to Zhang Guoqi, Chen Liang, Xing Panzhou, Zhang Weiyu, and my research assistants Siqi Chen and Bowen Bao for their assistance at different stages of my research.

This project would not be possible without financial support from Skidmore College. The sabbatical enhancement grant and the Dean of Faculty’s ad hoc grant helped cover part of my travel expenses. I am tremendously grateful to my colleagues at Skidmore – Kate Berheide, Amon Emeka, Andrew Lindner, Jenni Mueller, and Rik Scarce – for their interest in my project and their encouragement along the way. Special thanks to John Brueggemann, who regularly asked about the progress of my manuscript and reassured me that it was fine to carve out more time for my writing. Many thanks to Pushi Prasad for giving me the opportunity to present at the Skidmore Zankel Research Colloquium and share my research with the wider campus. Thanks are also due to Jenny Day and Charlotte D’Evelyn for being great writing partners and for reading and offering valuable comments on my draft chapters. It means a lot to me to be able to find a scholarly community at Skidmore.

John Stone, my PhD advisor and mentor, has always been my greatest support. As I was finalizing this book, I learned the devastating news that he had passed away. I still remember the day when I first showed up in the Department of Sociology at Boston University. I was at the time a twenty-year-old international student who had never left her country before; and I was a month late to school because I had not been able to get a student visa on time. He stepped out of his office to welcome me, shoeless, and told me he could already see me succeed in the program because of my persistence in getting the visa in the face of bureaucracy. He supported me at each stage of my career and life ever since, imbuing everything with his British humor. Many thanks to him for reading and editing my draft chapters and always rooting for me. It breaks my heart to think that I will never again be able to share things with him and receive advice from him.

I am extremely fortunate to have the best and most efficient editor at Cambridge University Press, Robert Dreesen; I thank him for believing in the value of my project and for his unreserved support. My thanks also go to Sable Gravesandy, Jessica Norman, Jasintha Jacob Srinivasan and her production team, and my copyeditor, Manuela Tecusan – the book would not be possible without their meticulous work and the talent, labor, and energy they put in this project. I owe a debt of gratitude to Scott Parris for his help with finding a home for my manuscript and to James Cook for his interest in my project. My heartfelt thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and encouraging feedback, as well as to my copanelists and the audience at the Eastern Sociological Society’s annual meeting in Boston in 2022.

Last but not least, my thanks go to my family and friends, who have extended their unconditional love, care, and support. My parents, Xiao Ling and Hou Huiqin, have always been my role models as accomplished scholars and the kindest human beings. My dad in his seventies still writes every day and has been so prolific that I can only envy his productivity and the passion he has for his work. My son, Mars, after witnessing my process of writing, now wants to publish his own books: children’s comic books, of course – much cooler than his mom’s book. I cannot wait to see him become an author soon. Conducting fieldwork and the prolonged writing process means being away from Mars for many weeks and from time to time not being able to give him my full attention. I thank him for his patience and understanding, even though much of it may not be voluntary or a choice of his own. But I know he is proud of me and, as a digital native, he has already learned to Google his mom and is very excited whenever he finds anything about me online. Mars, mom has a new book coming out; don’t forget to Google it!