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This article examines how a group of martial arts students in China make sense of their futures and how their hopes toward a “feel-good” future reveal and affect their perceived class identities. Twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Dengfeng, a county-level city in central China. Dengfeng was home to 48 registered martial arts schools and more than 70,000 full-time students in 2012. By uncovering the hopes, aspirations, and perceived class identities of people in martial arts schools, this article argues that the process of class-making for these martial arts students results in constantly reorienting their hopes. These hopes often reflect social comparisons with familiar others like parents, friends, and acquaintances.

Migrant children are an unintended consequence of the widened rural-urban gap in China. In Dengfeng, a county-level city in central China, many of the 70,000 full-time martial arts students were rural-to-urban migrant children ‘floating’ with their parents from one place to another. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper explores why these migrant children ‘migrated’ to martial arts schools for educational purposes and how they and their parents seek to establish a new value system within which different forms of capital can be accumulated, disseminated, and transformed as society expects. This paper argues that the (imaginary) transition between and flow of economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital construct a path to an aspirational future used by both these martial arts students and their parents.

This article examines how martial arts students retell their stories about being left behind and how they have experienced, viewed, and struggled with the invisible violence. Popularly known as the “hometown of Chinese martial arts,” Dengfeng is home to 48 registered martial arts schools and more than 70,000 full-time students. Drawing on 12-month-long fieldwork, this article highlights how martial arts students have (re)constructed the meaning of home(lessness) through bridging their past as left-behind children and the present as martial arts students. This article argues that such redefining of home(lessness) is resulted not only from the practice of invisible violence but also from how martial arts students engage with the structural, symbolic, and normalized violence.

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