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>> 63 2 “My First Big Urban Purchase” Mobile Technologies and Modern Subjectivity None of my friends from my village are still at home. Everyone has gone out to work. At home there is nothing. Beijing is developed. Here I can learn something, but at home there is just farming, and I’m not good at that. —Cui Yiping, Beijing, January 20, 2007 In the fall of 2006, I traveled each week to Changping, a suburb in the northwest of Beijing, to visit a group of thirty-two young women enrolled in a three-month computer course at the Practical Skills Training Center for Rural Women. The school is overseen by the Beijing Cultural Development Center for Rural Women and was designed to provide various types of training —computer literacy, hairstyling, waitressing—for rural women from poor provinces who were recruited by local Women’s Federation cadres.1 At the time of my weekly journey to the school—via bike, subway, and bus—Beijing was in a frantic whirl of preparations for the 2008 Summer Olympics. All around the city as migrant laborers toiled on construction sites, the “fuwas” (or friendlies), the official mascots of the games, graced everything from billboards to water bottles. While the young women I knew at the school learned to input Chinese characters and to navigate Microsoft Office, schoolchildren 64 > 65 discussing their experience in the city,4 yet we know less about the myriad ways in which such discourses have become articulated to new media technologies . However, as much as access to a technological artifact such as a mobile phone is a spatial manifestation of a nation’s technological progress (and equitable diffusion of technology), it also shapes individual desire and subjectivity. As one student, Gu Xia, told me in 2006, “It wasn’t until I left my village that I saw a mobile phone. We didn’t have them there. My home had a landline. I’ve seen those, but it wasn’t until later when I left that I saw a mobile phone.”5 Her classmate added, “You see other people using a mobile phone and you feel envious. I see it and feel like I want one now. As soon as I earn some money I want to buy a mobile phone.”6 Among other migrant women I knew in Beijing in 2006 and 2007, mobile phones existed in their home villages, but the city offered the opportunity to have the means to afford one. In 2010, this was often still the case even as mobile telephony had increasingly spread to more remote rural areas and more and more rural teens and young adults were owning cell phones.7 How do young rural women’s understanding and usage of mobile phones intersect with China’s discourses of development and modernity? How do gendered practices of self-transformation, which have been documented in earlier accounts of migrant women’s lives, coalesce around mobile technologies? What desires and emotions are articulated to mobile phones that are constitutive of diverse expressions of modernity? Can acquisition of a mobile phone be configured as a particular form of citizenship? To return to James Carey’s metaphor of communication as transmission and ritual, one could say that as grand symbols of and for reality, mobile phones are constitutive of a world of technological advancement, of information that flows within “timeless time” and the “space of flows.”8 In this chapter, however, I turn my attention to the ways in which cell phones as ritual have become part of the “symbolic order” and as such are articulated to young migrant women’s self-formation in the city, which results in what could be called a hybrid rural-urban subjectivity. This subjectivity is infused with gender, class, age, and place-based meanings that are differentially mapped onto rural and urban bodies, and it is hybrid because it is characterized by a liminality that resists yet does not displace socially constructed binaries of rural-urban (the young women I knew unanimously asserted that they would never be “Beijing people”).9 My choice of “modernity” as a frame for this discussion is certainly not to reinscribe a binary in which the rural (and its inhabitants) is “primitive” and 66 > 67 back. I had 110 yuan [about US $14] and bought a train ticket to Beijing. It was twenty-two hours and I had a hard seat, but since I had never traveled by train before I didn’t know I had a...

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