For the migrant workers at all levels, the annual Spring Festival holidays offer the only chance each year to connect with family and friends back home, and to show off the results of 12 months' hard work.
Some might have gone home with gifts of imported delicacies the folks back home have never seen before. Others would be showing off a 
fat bank balance in their little account books. Yet others would have driven home in a brand-new motorbike or a car, with a prospective spouse on the passenger seat or riding pillion.
Our nanny has gone home, too, with three huge bags of clothes, shoes and other household necessities that she intends to distribute to her family and village neighbors.
This is the first time in three years she has returned to her village in Henan, and she is going home with her son, a strapping young man who works as a security guard for a Beijing bank.
Our nanny (or ayi) has a specific mission this Spring Festival.
She's looking for a bride for her son, and if she succeeds, he will stay home, get married and work the land they own while she saves enough to build them a house.
Ayi has had a hard life, and her marriage has not been happy, so I understand perfectly why a good wife and a solid union for her son command such priority.
My nanny is illiterate, having grown up in tempestuous times when "culture" meant learning from farmers, soldiers and factory workers. In her rural home, she grew up on the farm with very little education apart from her own innate common sense.
She would have been counted among the "lost generation" of Chinese, but her spunky determination saved her.
When her marriage failed, she left home for Beijing on her own, working as a caregiver in a hospital where her good sense and pleasant disposition made her a popular choice among patients.
We met her when my mother-in-law was hospitalized a few years back, and we offered her a job, her own room and a steady income when the old lady was discharged.
Our belief in her has paid off handsomely, and she is now a valued member of the household who looks after everybody, including our two little French bulldogs. They are the ones visibly pining for her, but they are not the only ones missing her.
To help her get her ideal daughter-in-law, Ayi has been hoarding gold.
In her village, it is the custom to give five pieces of solid gold jewelry to the girl as soon as the marriage date is set, and I have been actively conspiring to help her get the best.
In the past year, each time I visited my mother in Hong Kong, I have bought back gold earrings, a bracelet and a necklace. Three down, two to go, but we will complete the quota when Ayi returns from her Spring Festival leave and tells me whether she has found the ideal girl.
While I would never dream of interfering with my son's choice of a life partner, it is still very much part of the parents' duty in rural China to make sure the children get married off.
Ayi's son seems very phlegmatic about her schemes, and they are probably meeting a series of marital prospects even as you read this.
This is the China that very few foreigners come into contact with, but this is as much a part of the nation as the glistening metropolises with their bright lights and high life.
My nanny is like the backbone of the country. She has all the earthy qualities that make us believe that China can be anything it wants to be, and the sparkle in her eyes－they light up the world brighter than any urban neon installations.
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