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Northern Jiangsu and Shanghai
From the late nineteenth century, many migrants came to Shanghai from 苏北, the poorer north of Jiangsu province, often fleeing floods and famine. They took much of the city's hardest work — rickshaw pulling, dock labor, the night-soil trade — and lived in its poorest districts. Historians have written about the prejudice they met. People from Jiangnan, the south of the province and Zhejiang, often looked down on them, and "Jiangbei" could be an insult; their speech was mocked, and it shaped marriages, jobs and neighborhoods. Over the decades of the People's Republic, as people mixed in schools, factories and lanes, those lines faded, though older people still remember them. 顾阿婆's way through — a year of listening, then speaking Shanghainese — was a common one, and the documentary lets her tell it in her own words.