Earning a Chinese New Year’s feast  

YUBAI QU, Chongqing Municipality – It was a Chinese stand-off. 

Wang Chen, our 30-something driver from Chongqing, was looking at me anxiously.

I was grappling with not just anxiety (his) but also a mixture of guilt and resentment (mine).

The problem came up when Wang teased us with the prospect of interviewing migrant workers from his wife’s ancestral village about 40 miles outside of the center of Chongqing.   

Adrienne Mong/NBC News

Paying respects during the Lunar New Year.

We were working on a story about how the global economic meltdown is affecting Chinese migrant workers and their hopes for the New Year. For the past couple of days, we had been driving around one small town several hours’ drive away, talking to workers who had returned from the economically blighted coastal areas for the weeks-long Lunar New Year holiday.

But a group of local officials turned up, and in spite of their friendly demeanor, their presence intimidated the villagers. Where earlier the workers had spoken frankly about the difficulties of trying to make ends meet in an economic downturn, they suddenly were limiting their comments to praise for the government. Needless to say, we weren’t entirely satisfied with the quality of the interviews.

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