Basement living in China
Sim Chi Yin's "China's Rat Tribe" series is currently on view at United Photo Industries in Brooklyn, N.Y. until June 29, 2013. The show is presented by the Magnum Foundation.
In this photo, Big Rain, 21, a KTV lounge worker, is seen in his basement room beneath Beijing's north Third Ring Road, Beijing, China, May 9, 2011.
Originally from Heilongjiang in China's northeast, he's been in Beijing for the past year. Faced with sky-high property prices, living underground is often the only option for this legion of low-waged migrant workers, who make up one-third of Beijing's estimated 20 million people.
Jiang Ying, a bar waitress, and Li Ying, an office worker, have lived here for one and a half years, making the room their own by adding bright pink wallpaper.
Migrants from other parts of China who are the backbone of the service sector in Beijing typically live in simple houses outside of the city center or in air-raid shelters or basements like this one, paying 300 to 700 yuan ($50-$115) a month in rent.
With property prices skyrocketing in the Chinese capital, they cannot afford any other type of housing. Air raid shelters and basement spaces beneath apartment blocks are partitioned into rooms and rented out. Basement-dwellers, unkindly dubbed the "rat tribe" by the Chinese press, rarely see the sun from their rooms and often put up with mold and mildew on their clothes and bedding in the summer, but many make this space their comfortable home in their time in the capital.
She left her native Chongqing for Beijing straight out of middle school - two years ago - because she "really wanted to experience something new." She says: "From when I was a child, I had an image in my mind - that Beijing is a city of film stars. Well, so far I have seen hardly any on the roads here."
She is currently saving up to train as a beautician. "My dream is to work in a wedding photo studio. I find that very romantic."
Their current home is two floors beneath a posh condominium in east Beijing. Lili says, "The only difference between us and the people who live upstairs is that we can't see the sun here. But we are like them in every other way. And when we have money too, we will also live in apartments."