This article is a self narration about staying behind. July is scorching summer, and summer vacation has arrived. For Left-behind children in China, summer vacation is also the day when they go to the city to meet their parents. Parents leave the countryside to make a living in the city, or move from one town to another, leaving their children in their hometown. Perhaps the last time they met was during the Spring Festival at the beginning of the year. According to the State of China's Children's Population in 2020: Facts and Figures issued by the National Bureau of Statistics, in 2020, there will be 71.09 million migrant children and 66.93 million Left-behind children in China in China. The total number of children affected by population mobility will be 138 million, accounting for 46.4% of China's total child population. And this means that nearly half of the children are directly affected by population mobility. People's perspective on Left-behind children in China has also expanded from the past "Left-behind children in China in rural areas" to "Left-behind children in China in urban areas". There are Left-behind children in China in both rural and urban areas. Staying behind has become an inevitable experience for many children. ▲ Still photo of "The Reading Child" (2012). I am a Left-behind children in China. I don't know when I knew that I was a "Left-behind children in China". Maybe I found this word when I turned to a news report one day in high school. This period is from 2006 to 2009. If it comes to first contact, it's not impossible even earlier. In junior high school, I often went to an old book stall. There were no current magazines to sell in the town, only some expired ones. The new ones were from the early years of the century, while the old ones were from the 1990s. As for their origins, most of them were collected by bosses in this industry in the city, classified according to depreciation and thickness, and then moved to towns. If they couldn't sell them, they were sent to waste stations and turned into waste paper. This is a relatively extensive market, with several magazines or journals of any type and no target audience. Thanks to them, I have learned many interesting urban terms and anecdotes. At the turn of the century, the large-scale rural-urban migration that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s was unprecedented in scale, during which words such as "migrant workers" and "new generation migrant workers" have entered the category of Mass communication. Even if you search for Chinese journal databases, even journal papers with this keyword have started to grow in those years, with some years like 2004 doubling compared to the previous year. According to this situation, there should be more reports and studies on "Left-behind children in China", but in fact, there were few direct discussions on "Left-behind children in China" until 2005, when articles were more about "migrant workers' children". It's not surprising that when people stand in the city, the first thing they pay attention to is the changes in the urban population, which is the emergence of more and more children drifting here with their working parents. If the "children of migrant workers" are observed from a close distance, the "Left-behind children in China" are observed from a distance. From the perspective of the city, whether it is far or near is because reporters and researchers are in the city, and media and research institutions are also in the city. Thinking with the later well-known concept of "Left-behind children in China", there were some at that time, but it was rare. People are more accustomed to it