Welcome back to part two of our series on Chinese migrant work of poetry. If you haven't listened to part one yet, I suggest you go back. I listened to that one first.
You got twenty ladders, Shobo can Dolos, Young Dollar Dods.
Before we get started, just a quick reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our Patreon supporters. Our supports fund our work and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, add three episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise, and other content. For example, our Patroon supporters can listen to all three parts of this series now, as well as an exclusive Patreon only bonus episode that goes into more detail about the migrant work at home.
Some of the writers that we discuss and their influences join us or find out more at patreon dot com slash working class history link in the show notes A quick content note that this episode includes some mention of suicide and self harm. You might remember that this series is being produced and presented with the help of friend of the podcast, Jack Franco, so at this point we'll hand back over to him.
One Zone Maka.
In our first episode, we discussed some of the difficulties in classifying Chinese migrant worker poetry as writing that balances personal history with political activism and social critique. In this episode, we'll talk about how poetry in China is a social practice and what that means, looking at a number of migrant worker poets, including the life and work of shuley Jo,
one of the most significant in recent years. We'll also take a trip to the Migrant Workers Home, a self organized space run by in four migrant work is living in the urban village of Piezsun on the outskirts of Beijing. All of this relates to how poetry is an art form has been historically conceived in China, which Migheil Vancravelle, professor of Chinese literature at Biden University in the Netherlands, explains.
Yeah, what can we expect of a Chinese poet through the ages? That's a fantastic question you on the importance of poetry in Chinese culture and society, and so, you know, my first very cheeky answer would be, we can expect
everything from them. Why is this because poetry as a social practice in China was basically, especially in an antiquity and sort of you know, the Imperial time set up to the twentieth century, but continuing today in fact, is a very occasional art, right, And this is not in any sense a pejorative thing, to say, parting with a friend, I'm going to write a poem, you know, visiting a far away friend, I'm going to write a poem. Getting
a new job, I might write a poem. My daughter graduating from high school, I might write a poem, and so on and so forth. And so this is a way of perhaps indicating how ubiquitous poetry is in Chinese society. It's entirely normal for Chinese children, and yes we're talking about a cultural elite, but are fairly large also in percentage numbers cultural elite for their children to learn by heart several hundreds of famous poems from the Imperial era.
Magill is clear the poetry plays a far wider role in Chinese society than we might be used to in other countries. But China's poetic tradition also goes far beyond just being an occasional art.
You know, poetry is an industry. Poetry is a sort of very thriving, bubbly thing in China. Culturally hugely important, and then the notion of industry and sort of appropriating that to reflect on migrant worker poetry, even though it holds for the larger picture. That is a very instructive way of looking at it. Now, going back to the more set of culturally specific Chinese situation, what can we expect of a Chinese poet if I'm going to try and be less universal about that, I might say things
like speaking truth to power. I might say things like lament for the suffering of the common folk, to which the poet very definitely doesn't belong because they're part of
a cultural elite. So, you know, some of China's most famous poets, Douful among them, are famous for just that right, are famous for their ability to write about the horrors of war, even as or perhaps especially as they found themselves in a relatively privileged position in that they survived, in that they had the wherewithal to survive, to move around when that was necessary, et cetera, speaking truth to power.
So were, as an age old tradition, probably going back to the person who's commonly seen as seat of the first archetypal.
Chinese poet, the poet Mcgil mentioned dufour is perhaps China's most important classical poet during the Golden Age of the Tungu dynasty in the eighth century. He was a civil servant, as was expected of his social class, but spent much of his life on the road unsettled by war. But China's poetic tradition was just as rich in the twentieth century.
Then you've got People's Republic of China, orthodox high socialist poets like Ujinshu, who wrote the Song of Lei Fung, which is basically a totally utopian Maoist ideal of the new Chinese person who consists mostly of self sacrifice, you know.
But then you might also find people in Guiyang and in Beijing in the late seventies, when underground literature were sort of about to surface after the Cultural Revolution, posting their poetry, pasting it actually literally the Guyang Troop in nineteen seventy eight, just after you know, when the mausoleam for Maltzadum was being erected in the same Tieneman Square that we've seen rica in Chinese history, pasting their poetry
on the walls of the building site there. A couple of months later, the group in Beijing, pasting their poetry on you know, city walls in various places in Beijing. So that is still a very political undertaking, even as these people were saying, we are reclaiming poetry to be an individual thing, to be a cultural thing, to not
just be politics. Then you could move on to Yindi Twan and the Lower Body Poetry group around the year two thousand, totally irreverent, fearless, you know, not interested in politics, writing about heroin junkies in Beijing, right, sex workers, that sort of thing, crashing through all kinds of taboos on the cultural scene, being hated and misunderstood by everybody and their brother. And then you could turn to migrant worker poetry and still talk about poetry as a social practice
in China. So that really drives it home. Right, You see this, the muchness of it, the complexity of it, the diversity of it. And that's why I'm not ashamed of that metaphor of poetry being part of the cultural DNA of China.
This idea of poetry that speaks truth to power, that depicts experiences of exploitation and justice are themes that link today's migrant work is to China's poetic tradition, such as the Book of Songs, whose earliest works are as much as three thousand years old.
Now, if you're going to situate this migrant work of poetry going back into Chinese cultural history, then I've seen people and people that I respect who will claim with some justification that there is in fact, very direct linkage to the Book of Songs, the Book of Odes, this collection, this anthology of songs that are allegedly come from the common folk. Of course, you need to sort of think about, well,
how exactly did they come from the common folk? If the common folk at that particular time probably was illiterate, right, so how did that happen? And then very interestingly we find the notion of poem gatherers who were officials at the court, who would go sort of among the people to gather these texts, to find out what people were talking about, and perhaps also to actually gather these folk songs.
And then you know, this linkage is established between that poetry of the common folk lamenting the horrors of war, lamenting the horrors of you know, famished existence, the lamenting poverty, sadness, sorrow, impotence in the face of greater powers than yourself, be they political, be they natural, be they whatever. And I
can see why. And at the same time, what I see is that that linkage is being romanticized, right so great here today we have an incarnation of something that is part and parcel of our culture and that now speaks back to us about the post socialist era. Well, yes, it's debatable, to say the least, but I can see the connection, and yeah, I think it is justified. But it comes with a couple of question marks.
What mcguil mentions here in relation to famished existences, sorrow and impotence in the face of greater powers is evident in the lives of many migrant worker poets and migrant workers more generally. Shuli Ju is one such poet who dealt with these themes. Like Juan Xiao, cheng Chu was also a worker from a rural family who went to work on the assembly lines. Conditions at Fox Gone in Shunjun, where she worked, were so grueling that they led to a space of suicides in the twenty tens, with a
dozen workers dying by suicide in twenty ten alone. In twenty fourteen, just a few days after he had signed a new fox gone contract, Schu would join them, taking his own life by jumping off a building. Here Magueil reads his translation of I speak of blood by shulido, I.
Speak of blood. I speak of blood, for I have no choice. I preferred to chat about the wind, the flowers, the snow, the moon, about dynasties of old and the classical poetry found in spirits. But reality means I can
only speak of blood. Blood with its source in rented rooms like matchboxes, narrow, cramped, sunless, the year round, squeezing in the battler boys and battler girls, wives gone astray, and husbands far from home, Guys from Setuan hawking spicy soup, old people from Hunan selling trinkets on street side, blankets, and then me toiling all day to survive and opening my eyes to write poetry. I speak to you of
these people. I speak of us, ants struggling through the swamp of life, one by one, drops of blood walking the battler's road, one by one, blood chased away by city guards or wrung out by machines, scattering, insomnia, disease, job loss, suicide along the way, words exploding one by one in the pearl river delta in the belly of the Motherland, dissected by reams of paperwork like sebuku blades. I speak of all this to you, and even as my voice grows hoarse and my tongue breaks off, I
will tear through the silence of this era. I speak of blood, and the sky will shadder. I speak of blood, and my mouth turns bright red.
Truly do explicitly links and to China's literary heritage. But in contrast to the scholars that mcgil mentioned earlier who link migrant worker poets to their classical predecessors, Choo's reality means he is unable to speak in the terms of that poetry. He would prefer to draw more classical motifs of wind flowers in the moon, but as he says, he has no choice. He can only speak of blood, which itself symbolizes the struggles of migrant work of life.
Not to mention that blood is not even just symbolic, but also a literal part of the violence they experience.
So I'm sort of trying to play a trick on you here, because what I'm about to say about Hugh Leeds really somehow doesn't totally match this poem. What is this poem? This poem is an angry poem. It's a political poem. Not politically sensitive in the sense of saying, you know, I rise up and revolt and let's overthrow the government whatever, none of that. But it's political in the description of shall we call them asymmetrical power relations?
Shall we call it inequality? That sort of thing. It's heartrending, it's angry, right, And the reason that I didn't want to read it, even though I have a picture of this poet she leads that is a bit more complex than a straightforward kind of you know, mapping of the experience onto the poetry, onto the literary representation is the way that he has been read, you know, the image of she leaves it has been taken by many people
as a straightforward miniature for the story of migrant worker literature, migrant worker poetry in China, and I think that is just a little too easy. But I get it. I understand how this has happened, and for that, we need to look at his life, and we need to look at what people like to read about and good his life.
We see a young man in Guangdong Province, So actually in the Pearl River Delta well more or less, you know, in that same province, already growing up in a rural area, being a kid that loved going to school from a very young age. His elder brother at one point said, you know, something to the effect of, she leads to really not being suited to rural life, to growing up as a farmer, trying to make his way to the city,
having to make his way to the city. He completed high school, but then you know, needed to go out and sort of get out there and start making money, but also seeing this as an opportunity because what he
wanted was a job in a library. What he wanted was to be a writer, was to you know, somehow have a connection with literature, a bookstore perhaps, But what he got was an assembly line job at Foxcn, which is, you know, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company, Taiwanese headquartered with most of its plan manufacturing plants in mainland China, and fox Conn has become sort of the epitome of the cruel labor regime that comes with that kind of organization,
including the well known fox Conn suicides. And this is when, especially in the twenty tens, employees at fox Conn started killing themselves in large enough numbers to be noticed, and doing this in ways that were noticed as embodied protest, if you will. That's a very academic way of putting it. Basically, sort of jumping off of a high building in order to make a point, right, even if that's the end
of your life, and shooting true. Jumped off of the ledge, the ledge of a seventeenth floor window in a high rise close to the Fox Kong plant where he was employed at the tender age of twenty four. So he lived from nineteen ninety to twenty fourteen and that was it. And when he did this, there was this explosion of publicity. It was unimaginable. First in China, so the Sinton Evening News had a full page on this, otherwise totally nondescript,
you know, regular run of the mill, powerless person. And yes, this was because he was a poet. The world over, in China, no different than anywhere else, people have been fascinated by the death of the capital p poet right or the artist capital a artist, preferably by their own hand, and preferably at a young age. Right. There's a romantic, romantic ideal that is incredibly powerful, that has not gone away.
That that just makes us, and I mean a very diverse and varied audience, including you know, totally untrained readers, highly professional readers, and everything else, you know, get really excited about the death of the poet or the death
of the artist. And I think in this case what happened because we've seen hullabaloo about the death of the poet in China in other cases, but this was way bigger also internationally, and that's because there was a third element that came in, and that is, we have a suicide, we have a poet slash artist, but we also have this figure of the migrant worker, of the subaltern subject, of the precarious worker, of the person who's at the
very bottom of the global capitalist food chain. Of the romanticizable but also sort of scarily feel good image of these people wearing yellow helmets and they look like ants because the picture is one of a building site that is the size of you know, two railway stations, or these people again quote unquote shackled but actually sometimes almost physically shackled to the assembly line, wearing these uniformizing sterile suits, right, the anti dust stuff because the iPhones and the iPads
that you're putting together in the fox confactory, we kind of any dust in there, so that the workshop's probably been conditioned, etc. And so these three things together, A suicide by a young person who was a poet or artist. He had a blog, right, he publishes poetry on a blog, wasn't widely recognized during his lifetime. And then third, this increasingly visible person, increasingly visible in China but also in the world at large, of the migrant worker.
Mcgeil sees his poem as a challenge to the mainstream image that has been created of Shuleja after his death in twenty fourteen. That goes beyond both the romantic ideal of the suffering poet or a simple look into the life of three hundred million migrant workers.
What I find noteworthy and in a way tragic, is that, you know, his story has been turned into this straightforward miniature of the migrant worker story. But actually, if you read the collected works right, which were put together after his death, if he hadn't killed them, this wouldn't have happened. Right.
It's not a cynical comment, it's just an observation. So you know, I read the collected works, what about two hundred and fifty pages of poetry a young man, and you see that there is a very large component in this poetry that is not at all to do with socio political issues, That is not to do with activism, not to do with anger over the way society treats the migrant workers. But that is pretty straightforward, you know,
good clean, existential angst. He has a poem about self harm that is totally grueling, and the external forces, so to speak, that we might want to mobilize to explain his bit of fate. And nowhere in sight in this poem, whereas in the poem by johnsil Chool or in this poem I speak of blood by Sue leads to himself. Yes, they are insight, these things are visible. We can see that this is about power relations in society, that it's
about inequality. And that makes it a bit hard for me to accept that shoe leavesa has become this sort of token, this emblem of the migrant workers' story, because I think it doesn't do him justice as a poet or as a human being, and it risks kind of homogenizing that picture to the point where it doesn't really teaches anything, and it actually essentializes these people.
Despite the intrinsically isolating nature of precarious migrant labor and their risky legal status, migrant workers are still able to self organize and forge networks of solidarity. Jung Siau Chong dedicated a poem to a twenty sixteen protest when one hundred migrant workers camped out in Abaging underpass to demand unpaid wages. You can find a mini documentary about the protest with a reading of Jung's poem Needing Workers demanding their pay in the show notes. In the poem, Jung
writes about the workers. They're constantly put together arranged into an electronics factory ants nest, a toy factory honeycluon the existence of these high concentrations of work is in these ants Nest and honeyclumbs also creates a possibility for bonds of solidarity. Migrant workers are far from passive victims, and one example of this resistance is that migrant work is home in Pizson Beiching.
If we're looking at migrant worker poetry and at the community building that happens around it, then the migrant worker home in Piton, which is a village on the outskirts of Beijing to the northeast. It's actually an example of this quote unquote village in the city phenomenon where people started living because the rents were affordable and they could
commute into the city to do their work. And the population in a small number of years grew from something like two thousand to thirty thousand or thereabouts, so you know, a factor ten or fifteen something like that. Now, the Migrant Workers' Home in Pieton is an NGO that makes it its business to emancipate precarious workers, many of them migrant workers, but it also includes people who sort of
you know, were laid off from state factories whatever. It's not necessarily just migrant workers, but many of them are
migrant workers. And it was founded by a small number of people who were actually migrant workers that came to Beijing in the late nineteen nineties with high hopes of making it as artists, as musicians, as stand up comedians in the Chinese variety of a Chinese variety of that particular art form, and like many other people, they found their hopes frustrated and they didn't quite make it as artists and entertainers and found themselves doing precarious labor, but
stuck together and ended up working together through connections with a bunch of people sometimes referred to as the new Lets, especially academics and other authors who have a particular political positions. So now we're talking about, you know, two decades ago, when China was more or less clearly heading in the direction of a much more capitalist and open vision of
the world than it has today under Shijimping. So these new left intellectuals kind of teamed up with these migrant workers and with other organizations that were emerging, for example, for the protection of the rights of female migrant workers at the time, and founded this ango. And the thing that distinguishes them from many other organizations that work for the emancipation of precarious workers and sometimes specifically migrant workers is that they try to do this through what they
call cultural education. Are you in Chinese? And that is actually clear in the background of its founding members, who were musicians and comedians.
The Migrant Workers Home provides concrete material helped to its population, such as free libraries, workers rights classes, or schooling for the children of migrant workers who as we mentioned in part one, aren't allowed to attend local state schools as they don't have the correct urban household registration status. But its main mission is developing a rich cultural life for migrant workers. As it says in the Homes mission statement, Without our culture, we have no history. Without a history,
we have no future. So, for instance, the intro song you've been hearing in this series is why the Migrant Work at Homes New Labor Art Troupe far from being a Blairite tribute band, its members are all former migrant workers, like the singer Lulan, who came from Shandong Province to work in the coal mines. You can find a link to a short documentary about the art troup on the web page for this episode. The link is in the
show notes. In twenty fourteen, the Migrant Workers' Home set up the Pizzon Literature Group and began publishing its own literary journal.
How this group works is one of the you know, core people at the home. The manager called Chalfour or for cho Un. She realized that people wanted this, that people were interested in literature and wanted to try and write themselves, and just you know, wanted to learn. Basically wanted some sort of education to happen in that particular realm. So she advertised this on social media, and you know,
people got in touch with her. One person in particular, Dan Hui You, an academic who's now professor at Peaking University, who started going to Piton once weekly, I think, basically to lecture on literature, on culture, on anything that these people wanted to know about. And to combine this actually with a work shop type of approach. And this is something that happens in other places as well, writing workshops as part of a social movement, as part of political movements,
and so on and so forth. It's not necessarily a political movement here. I'm quite ready to say that it was not, because people work careful of the red lines and you know, have to tread carefully because of censorship and political sensitivity. How this group works and it's been ongoing, it's almost a decade. Can you imagine that roughly once
a week an academic or a cultural official. You know, it's going to include people representing the Communist Party to talk about the party congress and what was the most important message that we need to work on. It could include practitioners like famous writers and you know, movie makers.
Perhaps it should also be pointed out, however, that the relationship the Migrant Works Home has with local government is far from straightforward.
These people are expert at working with the municipal government with whom they're going to have to work because the municipal government is going to be in charge of that area.
And there have been very sort of precarious moments where the village was about to be bulldozed didn't happen, you know, over the last decade or so, and just recently, for example, one of the cultural places of pride in that community that was the Museum of Migrant Worker or really Battler Literature and Art that they had set up on a shoe string budget in twenty oh eight and that was there for fifteen years and is an incredibly impressive a
moving place. Well, it's been shut down because the city is expanding and there was no more room for the museum, and so they're thinking about, you know, rebuilding the exhibition farther away from Beijing in other places where they are active. But you know, that is the sort of environment that you're working in.
Mcguil has worked extensively with and on the Pizsun Literature Group and one of its poets, Siauhai. Siaohai is a moderately successful poet who has received official scholarships and recognition. In Miguil's essay I and We in Pizsun, which you can find linked in the show notes, mcguil quotes Siao, who claims that in Pizsun he had finally found proof that a your revolutionary era of friendship still exists. Solidarity of material stability created by cultural education and exchange for
free and for their own sake. Literature is seen as salvation, but not as an escape from work, as a way of making sense of life as a migrant worker and reclaiming affirming their personal identity by putting their work at the center of their poetry. Some of these themes are present in Siao's twenty and eighteen poem When I Watched the World Cup? What Did I See? Translated and read by mcgiw so.
Here is a poem by Shahai called When I Watched the World Cup? What did I See? When I watched the World Cup? What did I See? The first time I stayed up to watch the World Cup? It was Columbia against England. Truth be told, I don't even know where Colombia is on this earth, but I do know that in don guin Holmann, in the England football outfit factory, my workmates work year round, day shifts and night shifts, racing to make those jerseys. A couple millions for every batch.
They make em by the hundreds, thousands, millions, and before they know it, they've been at it for many, many years. As for the Columbia jerseys, I've made those two in Sudor Wadul. But the Pearl River Delta and the Yanzi Delta as the work shop of the world. I only heard about that a couple years ago. Wonder and Adidas and Coca Cola and their million dollar moving ads on the pitch have nothing to do with me. Youth slipped away is the only thing that's mine. I looked up
and out the window. Two breakfast stalls had set up shop. As darkness lifted, A sleepless bachelor was on a treasure hunt near the trash. The losing team left the pitch, the winners kept doing Victor three laps. All that was left was the workers making those jerseys year upon year, day upon day, silent and voiceless, slogging on with no breaks.
Like in all Sia's poem Sundress, which we discussed in the previous episode, Siao's poem here brings together the consumer's experience of the product, in this case, the multi billion dollars a year football industry, and the workers who make it possible. The poem tells a story of Siao's first experience of anticipation for a World Cup game, Yet he can't avoid seeing in the victory laps and TV ads a thing he knows intimately, the football shirts Chinese migrant
workers make themselves. His poem puts his workers back on football's biggest stage. For Seao, the shirts are a work mates above all, no longer Colombian or English. When the ninety minutes are over, the losing team left the pitch, the winners kept doing victory laps. All that was left was the workers making those jerseys. Upon year, day up, one day, silent and voiceless, slogging on with no breaks.
The feeling of friendship and solidarity see how found in Pizzu and Magi argues can help us read and support working class literature more generally across languages and traditions.
This is really what came home to me, I guess the most powerfully, you know, like a ton of bricks in this research over the years, what has come out to me is that this is about identification. It is it is a way to secure your place in the sun, even if that's just two minutes a day. It is a way to be a person that is identifiable with other persons in different ways than being the next person
in line on the assembly line. Yeah, it is a way of identifying actively and sharing that and exchanging that, also connecting, if only in spirit, and sometimes actually very practically using translation software whatnot. With other movements across the border write other poetry movements set up out of social movements. What they have in common these poetry right, social concern and social aspiration. So it's not just identification per sae,
full stop. It is identification that comes with social concern on issues that you see in front of your eyes in the society that you're a part of, and with the aspiration of emancipating marginal wised groups, vulnerable groups, subaltern groups.
That's all we have time for in today's episode. Join us in part three, where we'll look at the underground world of China's unofficial poetry journals, questions of censorship, and the work of another Chinese microworker poet, Would Sell, whose work asks questions about who gets to be included within
the field of working class literature and who doesn't. We also have a bonus episode where we go into more detail about some of the topics we discussed in the main episode, like the relationship between market worker poetry and the Chinese state, the new labor art troup whose music we're using for these episodes, and the international reception of Chinese mirgant worker poets like Chiungshao Chong and shule Jur. That bonus episode will be available soon exclusively for our
supporters on Patreon. It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts, So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon dot com slash working Class History link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch and more. And if you can't
spare the cash, absolutely no problem. Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five star review on your favorite podcast apps. If you'd like to learn more about Markerot Worker poetry in China, then check out the web page for this series, where you'll find images,
a full list of sources, further reading, and more. We've also got a great selection of books available about Chinese history in our online store, and you can get ten percent off them and anything else using the discount code wh podcast link in the show notes. Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks go to Jameson D. Saltzman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda,
and Jeremy Kuzimano. Our theme tune for these episodes is a young Man from the Village by the New Labor Art Troup from the Migrant Worker Home on the outskirts of Beijing. Thanks to them for letting us use it. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes. This episode was edited by Jesse French. Anyway, that's it for today and I hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks for listening.
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Young listener ching bingbos Ya.
Jing Jing Kool galayin you on the comn to do the a cold do