It’s no secret that the Chinese education system favors students from urban areas over rural regions. Far greater resources are allocated to cities, and children from the underdeveloped countryside have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get into decent universities.

But what happens once they get out of the countryside? For country folk, simply finding a job and settling down in the city can still be a laborious task. Their families also come under great economic pressure since they often work to help finance the big-city dreams of their children.

I met Xiao Fu while I was doing fieldwork in eastern China’s Anhui province. He was the youngest son of my neighbor and the only person with a university degree in the village in which I was staying. He had returned home for a visit from Shanghai, where he had been working in a finance company since college graduation in 2013.

Xiao Fu’s mother glowed when speaking about her son. Getting accepted by a university in Shanghai wasn’t easy. His gaokao scores — China’s national college entrance examination — were unexceptional, and he couldn’t get into the schools he had been aiming for. Borrowing money from his father, he traveled to China’s large cities to try and decide where to study.

He eventually settled on a university in Shanghai, where he majored in finance, accounting, and English. His mother told me that what Xiao Fu was most interested in wasn’t the school, but the city itself. He believed that he would have enough access to opportunities only in large cities. In 2013, Xiao Fu gained his undergraduate degree, and soon after got a job in a financial firm.

Both of his parents are over 60. His older brother married and moved away with his wife in search of work, leaving a young daughter in the care of her grandparents. The family owns a 1.3 acre plot of land, where the father grows rice.

The dad also works part-time at the local rice-processing plant, where a day’s rice milling earns him a flat 100 yuan (about $15). He works around 20 days a month. His boss refuses to turn on the milling machine until after midnight since the government charges cheaper electricity rates at night, forcing Xiao Fu’s father to work in the small hours of the morning.

Xiao Fu’s mother doesn’t work. She mostly stays home, looks after her granddaughter, and keeps careful track of the family finances. As her beloved son attempts to put down roots in Shanghai, she knows he will need money to get married and buy a house.

She totaled up the figures for me: the family’s small plot earns around 10,000 yuan per year, but this pittance is always at risk of vanishing entirely in the wake of a failed harvest. Her husband earns an additional 20,000 yuan per year from the processing plant. After food and daily necessities, the family can save up to 25,000 yuan every year.

Compared to this, Xiao Fu’s annual salary of 60,000 yuan seems like a fortune. Still, he doesn’t look favorably to the future. After all expenses are paid, he saves around 1,000 yuan per month, which is far too little in a city with some of the most expensive housing prices in China.

More importantly, he has not been able to obtain a Shanghai hukou — China’s household registration permit — which would allow any children he might have in the future access to the city’s educational facilities. Since the permit is tied to one’s mother, his future children won’t be registered in Shanghai unless he marries a woman from the city.

His girlfriend is from eastern China’s Zhejiang province. Whenever his mother sighs at the pressures of buying the couple a house — it’s a tradition in China for parents to buy their son a house for his wedding — Xiao Fu gently consoles her by saying that the relationship is still budding, and that marriage isn’t yet on the horizon. Frankly, he doesn’t have enough time to worry about matrimony at the moment. He’s 25 — there will be plenty of time for that later.

Xiao Fu is reluctant to leave Shanghai because of the opportunities the city provides, so he intends to stay in the area and commute from the nearby city of Jiaxing when he finally starts a family. He figures returning to Anhui would be a step back.

Since the rural-urban divide in China is so great, he would be overqualified for any job if he moved back to his hometown. Xiao Fu feels caught between a rock and a hard place, and for now is content floating around in Shanghai.

Xiao Fu’s struggles are faced by countless other rural youths who have decided to stay in the cities for work after they finish university. The government constantly pushes higher education institutions in the cities to expand their quotas for rural students, but one thing policymakers have neglected to consider is the extent to which such students will reasonably be able to properly settle in the cities after they graduate, particularly at a time when urban living costs are rising.

Freedom of mobility in education is an important step toward breaking down divisions between rural and urban centers. But many migrants find that life grinds to a standstill once they have graduated and settled in cities — they are unable to make a decent living and send money home, but are also reluctant to return to their rural hometowns.

This only serves to accelerate the decline of China’s countryside. And as more and more people are leaving rural regions behind in search of a future in the country’s cities, it is unknown when Xiao Fu’s story will be brought to a conclusion.

(A Chinese version of this article first appeared on Groundbreaking.)

(Header image: A man looks up while waiting in line with other subway passengers during morning rush hour at Tiantongyuan North Station in Beijing, May 27, 2014. Jason Lee/Reuters)