I and We in Picun: The Making of Chinese Poet Xiao Hai

Abstract

Xiao Hai left home at age fifteen as one of roughly three hundred million domestic migrant workers whose labor has contributed to China's rise since the 1980s. He was a factory worker in a string of cities for a good dozen years: think assembly line, overtime, exploitation, alienation. To counter the pressures of this life, he wrote poetry. In 2016 he settled in Picun, a village on the outskirts of Beijing made famous by an NGO called the Migrant Workers Home. The Home aims to advance migrant workers’ social identification through cultural education. To this end, the migrant worker community works with academic and cultural professionals, media professionals, and members of the state's cultural apparatus. This interaction takes shape in a “shared space” (in Dai Jinhua's words) of cultural production and experience that blurs distinctions of official and unofficial culture and their easy association with political power and resistance, respectively. As a member of the Picun Literature Group who expertly navigates this space, Xiao Hai has become a representative of the Picun “brand,” building a mediagenic public persona in the process. Who is Xiao Hai? What does his writing say? What other actors and factors shape his persona? What can we learn from all this about the nexus of precarious labor and cultural production? The stories of Picun, Xiao Hai, and migrant worker literature subvert simple oppositions of grassroots versus state discourse and unofficial versus official culture. Instead, they foreground the complexity of relations between the individual, community, and the state in China today.

Prologue: A Poster Boy for a Poster Village

“Even if hailstones batter the earth to a pulp / a worker's honesty and ideals will help me through / as I brave the raging storms to go to Picun.”¹ These lines are taken from a poem by Xiao Hai 小海 (2019a). They are the first thing he says in a short film published by the China Daily in August 2019 (Yang 2019). Shots of Xiao Hai, both as a regular-guy worker and as the archetypal artist-as-lonely-seeker, are interwoven with street scenes and interviews with people who are close to him. All this is framed in an upbeat perspective on the outlook of the Chinese worker in the twenty-first century. Thus the story of Xiao Hai is threaded through that of Picun, a migrant worker village on the outskirts of Beijing.

Born in 1987 and a native of Henan Province, Xiao Hai left home at age fifteen; one of roughly three hundred million domestic migrant workers whose labor has contributed to China's economic rise since the 1980s. He was a factory worker in a string of cities for a good dozen years, mostly in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze Delta: think assembly line, overtime, exploitation, alienation. To counter the pressures of this life, he started writing poetry. Listening to music was another way to fight drudgery and depression, and his oeuvre contains many poems that are like song texts. In the mid-2010s he tried to connect with rock stars on social media by sending them his poetry. In what would turn out to be a life-changing moment, singer Zhang Chu 张楚 responded and put him in touch with Xu Duo 许多. A musician himself, Xu Duo is a founding member of the Migrant Workers Home (Gongyou zhi jia 工友之家), an NGO that is based in Picun, the destination of the speaker in the poem cited above (see the introduction to this special issue)—and Xiao Hai's new hometown, after Xu Duo invited him to come north.

Established in 2002, the Migrant Workers Home is one of the largest and most influential NGOs working on labor in China. Its mission is the advancement of New Worker culture. Meant to impart self-empowerment, the notion of the New Worker (xin gongren 新工人) is the Home's counterbid to designations of migrant workers such as “peasant worker” (nongmingong 农民工), widely felt to be pejorative, and “battler” (dagongzhe 打工者 or dagongren 打工人; related terms include dagongmei 打工妹 [battler lass] and dagongzai 打工仔 [battler lad]). I will use battler throughout this article, as its Chinese source terms remain the most commonly used and can reflect not just precariousness but also pride in the face of adversity, especially in the context of cultural production (see van Crevel 2017b, para. 99).

The Home has pursued its mission through grassroots activism such as the establishment of a school for migrant worker children and by advancing social identification through cultural education. Media for such education include a folk-rock band, a migrant worker museum, a theater, various literary activities, shadow editions of the nationally televised Spring Festival Gala, and more. In these various settings the migrant worker community has sought collaboration with academic and cultural professionals, media professionals, and members of the state's cultural apparatus, all the while maintaining cordial relations with local government. This makes the configuration of which the Home partakes a “shared space” (gongyong kongjian 共用空间) par excellence, in Dai Jinhua's 戴锦华 (1999: 25–35) terminology; or, in full, a “Chinese-style cultural shared space.” That is, a space of cultural production and experience that blurs distinctions of official and unofficial culture and questions their easy association with political power and resistance, respectively. Instead, Dai points to the confluence and interaction of different players, interests, ideologies, and infrastructures, using the 1990s entwinement of commercial TV and independent documentary as an example.

Even if the shared space of which the Home partakes does not foreground the forces of commercialization as much as does Dai's original case study, the image gains new relevance when considered in the context of migrant worker culture in the early twenty-first century. This is evident from the discursive power the Home derives from its balancing act amid the interests and affordances of the migrant worker community and those of the other parties involved. Expanding its activities and networks over the years, it has attracted the attention of labor activists, media, and scholars in China and elsewhere. This has been facilitated by its deft management of public relations, turning “Picun” into a brand name for migrant worker culture.

Xiao Hai, in his turn, represents the Picun brand. After coming to Picun in 2016, he found work in one of the Home's thrift stores and as the custodian of its reading room, and joined the Picun Literature Group. Expertly navigating the shared space of which the Home partakes, he has since built a mediagenic public persona to accompany his writing. He is now a poster boy for a poster village, with a signature backward baseball cap tagging him in scores of photos and video clips (fig. 1). But Xiao Hai's singular presence is very much part of a plural presence as well. In the China Daily portrait Xu Duo explains that Xiao Hai is one of many battlers who have come to Picun from all over the country and “changed from a series of I's into a collective We.”

Who is Xiao Hai? What does his writing say? What other actors and factors shape his persona? What can we learn from all this about the nexus of precarious labor and cultural production, and about relations between the individual, community, and the state in China today?

Prose Recollections

Two of the more elaborate pieces in Xiao Hai's autobiographical short prose are “I Write Poetry inside the Factory Workshop” (“Wo zai gongchang chejian li xie shi” 我在工厂车间里写诗 [Xiao Hai 2019b]) and “Confessions of an Overage, Failed Young Man” (Yi ge daling shibai nan qingnian de zibai 一个大龄失败男青年的自白 [Xiao Hai 2019c]). For addressing the questions raised above, these texts are as important as his poetry. I will discuss them with attention to three key topics.

The Battler's Ordeal

The first topic is a precarious migrant worker's physical, material, and mental ordeal, containing many elements of “standard” personal histories of this kind that have appeared in Chinese and foreign media. Rather than what-where-when, I will summarize the impact of the experience as this is presented by Xiao Hai in what amounts to a cruel coming-of-age story. No schooling beyond junior high and a course at a sewing school that taught him little in return for fees his family could ill afford. A grueling, unhinging journey to Shenzhen, into a corrupt job placement scheme. A long list of menial, low-paid jobs in Shenzhen, Dongguan, Ningbo, Suzhou, Shanghai, Zhengzhou, like a journey “from one ruin to another” (Xiao Hai 2019b). First as factory worker: assembly worker, lathe operator, sewer. Then, in an attempt to leave factory life: courier, waiter, call center employee, property salesperson, cargo unloader, and unskilled assistant on a construction site. But he didn't manage, and in the end it was back to the workshop and the sewing machine. Physical exhaustion of a body that “no longer belonged to him” (Xiao Hai 2019b). A dozen years in three stages he sums up as “disorientation and confusion,” “loneliness and helplessness,” and “desperation and collapse.” Anxiety because his labor seemed to create “not value but trash” (Xiao Hai 2019c: 129–31). The loss of faith and ideals, the sense of having been robbed of his youth. Seeing no way out.

Writing

The second key topic in Xiao Hai's recollections is not standard fare in migrant worker life stories. This is his urge to write, further stimulated by a love of rock music. His drive as an aspiring artist keeps him alive inside a deadening, mechanical mode of subsistence, captured by the image of the assembly line. Xiao Hai's individuality shows when he fulminates that money wasted on the lottery tickets known for eating up migrant worker wages could have bought a dictionary to help him write something “to astonish the world”—and adds that he did in fact buy a dictionary (pirated and hence cheap for its size) and read it “word by word and line by line, several times. . . . This was my first self-education during my time as a factory worker” (Xiao Hai 2019c: 130).

Starting from the early 2010s, having first tried his hand at classical forms, Xiao Hai wrote hundreds of poems in free verse. His writing practice consisted of jotting down bits and pieces even as he partook in the fast-paced workshop routine. This would get him in trouble, such as when his foreman caught him scribbling away behind a pile of unfinished work, tore up his notes, and threw them in the trash, before stomping off to register a fine to be subtracted from his wages. Xiao Hai fished out the pieces, folded them and, in a description of fitting detail, “squeezed them into [his] dust-free shoes,” one of the workshop paraphernalia that populate his writing (Xiao Hai 2019b). After work, he would go to an internet café and input his drafts on the computer (surrounded by other battlers who were there for their daily dose of gaming), to archive his writing on Q-Zone and for fear that he would be unable to decipher it later on.

But if for Xiao Hai writing was therapeutic at this point, it was also driven by the desire to be an artist, or minimally to connect with an artist's world. Even if that world was far away, as in the case of Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and Allen Ginsberg, whom he cites as early influences (in Chinese translation). This figure of the budding artist is propped up by a romanticism of the solitary creative-genius type. Strikingly, it is simultaneously anchored in a class-conscious quest for social justice, as it articulates a demand for the restoration of dignity in people trapped in dehumanizing environments such as the endless industrial districts of the Pearl River Delta. Thus, individualist romanticism (sometimes of the self-aggrandizing kind) and social advocacy jointly generate the urge to write. The combination is well known. For modern Chinese poetry, Guo Moruo 郭沫若 and the early Bei Dao 北岛 are two of the many other examples—overwhelmingly male—that come to mind, each in their own historical setting, just like Xiao Hai.

In the following passage, individualist romanticism and social advocacy are aligned in a deceptively seamless manner. The subject is entitled to being Special ( = I, artist, expecting contempt) and being Normal ( = We, worker, expecting respect) in the same breath:

Xiao Hai (2019b) recalls how his fellow workers at a Suzhou plant failed to understand why he wanted to go see Wang Feng 汪峰 in concert—while for himself, life in the workshop had created the need to let the event “bring his soul back to life.” Nor did they understand his fascination for poetry. He would read Li Bai 李白, the great Tang poet, to them, and Haizi 海子, his favorite contemporary Chinese poet, and Ginsberg, whose Howl is a classic in China. But they would “shake their heads and say that however good the writing might be, it had nothing to do with our lives—so what was the point?” “This,” Xiao Hai (2019c: 131) writes, “forced me to think again and I started looking up the singers I admired, online, and sending them my stuff.”

Notably, Xiao Hai portrays his writing practice during his battler years not only as a reinvigorating force and indeed a condition for survival, but also as an obsession, something that made him an outsider, and the cause of his failure to improve his socioeconomic situation:

And so Xiao Hai ends up calling himself a failure as the poet's “dream” keeps him from getting his act together in socioeconomic terms. From the opening words of “Confessions”:

The “confessions” genre is paradoxical in that it offers up the author's mistakes, sins, or crimes from a position of discursive strength. Thus, Xiao Hai calls himself a failure as part of an utterance that is in fact fully confident, written from the vantage point of one who looks back on a past ordeal from which he has escaped and does not intend to “pour out his woes.” In the closing paragraph of “Confessions” he repeats his opening words, but with a different focus: “I am Hu Xiao Hai, with fifteen years of the battler life behind me, and I am a failed, overage young man. To make our society better, to make our life better, I choose to speak up for myself!” (Xiao Hai 2019c: 133)

Picun as Salvation

What happens between the opening and closing paragraphs of “Confessions,” especially in the essay's last two pages, takes us to a third key topic in Xiao Hai's prose recollections: the portrayal of Picun as a place of salvation. This salvation happens through literature but also transcends literature, toward social identification and newfound self-esteem.

In 2016, after he has been in touch with Xu Duo for a month, Xiao Hai moves to Picun. He is stunned by what he finds there, most of all the migrant worker museum, the Literature Group, and the New Worker Art Troupe, the folk-rock band that is the Migrant Workers Home's calling card—and by the fact that these and other facilities and activities are available to the migrant workers at no cost. He contrasts this with his experience at “China's largest electronics factory” (Foxconn, widely seen as the migrant worker's nightmare) and “its largest clothing manufacturing group,” where “the unions were truly no more than an empty shell” (Xiao Hai 2019c: 132).

Xiao Hai writes that soon after arriving in Picun, he started feeling that if there was one village in China that might become “hot,” it would be Picun (Xiao Hai 2019c: 132). As evidence he first mentions the Museum of Battler Culture and Art (Dagong wenhua yishu bowuguan 打工文化艺术博物馆). The way he refers to the museum shows its potential as a site of identification, where a migrant worker might “find themselves,” in his own words as cited above (on the museum, see van Crevel 2019a; Qian and Florence 2020). He also recalls the explosion of publicity on Picun after Fan Yusu's 范雨素essay “I Am Fan Yusu” went viral in April 2017 and she became a battler celebrity—not unlike the poet Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼, if not quite at Zheng's level of cultural capital, sustained visibility, and professional development (see Sun Wanning's article in this issue).

As another Picun signpost, Xiao Hai mentions the New Worker Art Troupe (Xin gongren yishutuan 新工人艺术团, since renamed more than once; see Zhong Yurou's article in this issue). During Xiao Hai's journey through China's factory districts, his writing shows a love of foreign music and of a type of Chinese rock that mostly qualifies as elitist (even if counterculturally so), as measured by the musicians’ background and the music itself. But toward the end of “Confessions,” when reflecting on his newfound home in Picun, he reaffirms the power of local, class-based identification through cultural production when he writes, “I now mostly listen to the songs of the New Worker Art Troupe, because I feel what they sing is closely connected with our lives” (Xiao Hai 2019c: 132).

In the same passage, Xiao Hai outlines the contours of the Picun Literature Group (Picun wenxue xiaozu 皮村文学小组). The Group was first convened in 2014 by Migrant Workers Home manager Fu Qiuyun 付秋云 (aka Xiao Fu 小付), and she remains its primary organizer today. Its core activity consists of regular lecture sessions in the Home's office space, offered by volunteers. Zhang Huiyu 张慧瑜 of Peking University is the ur-lecturer, joined over the years by other locally based and occasionally foreign-based academics (including several contributors to this special issue, yours truly among them) and cultural practitioners. The Group publishes a series called the Migrant Workers Home Picun Literature Group Collections (Gongyou zhi jia Picun wenxue xiaozu zuopinji 工友之家皮村文学小组作品集; the first two volumes were simply called Picun Literature: Volume One [Picun wenxue: Di yi ji 皮村文学：第一辑] and Picun Literature: Volume Two [Picun wenxue: Di er ji 皮村文学：第二辑]). Launched in 2015, this series includes multiple- and single-author anthologies, for a total of a good dozen volumes to date. In addition, since 2019, it has published the bimonthly New Worker Literature (Xin gongren wenxue 新工人文学). Whereas the series volumes are dedicated to writing by Group members, New Worker Literature also solicits contributions from outside the Home. The Collections series and New Worker Literature have a precursor in the New Worker (Xin gongren 新工人), published from 2008 to the early 2010s in tabloid and quarterly format by the United Workmates Literary Society (Tongxin gongyou wenxueshe 同心工友文学社), with the Home's founding members as members of its editorial board. All three titles are unofficial publications and as such part of a formidable DIY tradition in Chinese literature (see van Crevel 2017b, paras. 30–71).⁴

In discussing his experience as a member of the Literature Group, Xiao Hai reiterates his surprise at the fact that something like this could be available to migrant workers for free. He gratefully notes that the Collections series includes a volume of his poetry called Howl in the Factory (Gongchang de haojiao 工厂的嚎叫) (Xiao Hai 2017).⁵ He places his own work in a tradition of migrant worker cultural production by mentioning Qin Xiaoyu 秦晓宇 and Wu Feiyue's 吴飞跃 My Poetry project (Wo de shipian 我的诗篇) (Qin 2015; Qin and Wu 2015), a landmark anthology and documentary film on battler poetry, known outside China as Iron Moon (Qin 2016). When he observes that “literature came to my rescue in the barren fields of reality and I believe many of us will have their soul reborn in literature,” this verbalizes the sense of salvation that runs through his account of settling down in Picun (Xiao Hai 2019c: 133).

The sense of salvation is not just about literature “in itself.” Generalities on the relation of text and context aside, it is fair to say that for migrant worker cultural production, it is difficult and perhaps unwise to leave the context and its implications unsaid, for practitioners and commentators alike. If this writing appears overdetermined by the social experience of its authors, that is not a drawback and arguably a valid point of entry instead. Thus, it is hardly surprising that Xiao Hai's writing shows no dividing line between his journey through literature and the workings of the world around it. Rather, the question becomes how that world appears in his work.

“Confessions” offers clues. Xiao Hai (2019c: 132) writes, for instance, that in the Literature Group “pure revolutionary-era friendship still exists.” And, toward the essay's end:

The image of revolutionary-era friendship hearkens back to high-socialist discourse. It portrays the Literature Group as holding out against the sea change that has repositioned China's workers from the proletariat to the precariat in recent decades, swelled by the influx of rural-to-urban migrants. Notably, it is this sea change that has spawned the very phenomenon of migrant worker villages such as Picun—most of which, needless to say, do not have a Migrant Workers Home.

The closing paragraphs of “Confessions” contain another high-socialist image, that of the screw in the revolutionary machine. Tiny yet indispensable for collective advancement, the screw symbolizes the worker's selfless contributions, from a position of social security and dignity as a class-based political subject. Strikingly, the image appears side by side with language that points to starkly different labor relations, in a postsocialist China where social class is a “sensitive” notion and has been erased from official discourse. With the iron rice bowl of social security long gone, the individual is expected, in Xiao Hai's words, to “find a way out” from suffering “through their own efforts,” implying that precarious labor is not a systemic condition but a set of circumstances that can be overcome.

Stoicism, perseverance, self-improvement, and the physical use of the self (youth, sweat) are compatible with both the high-socialist and the postsocialist narratives, as is commitment to strengthening the motherland. Thus entangled, both narratives unfold within the overarching frame of the Chinese Dream, Xi Jinping's 习近平 vision for the People's Republic. Likewise, Xiao Hai's mention of the “New Era” echoes the current administration's ideological line, Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era—and Xiao Hai portrays the New Worker as embodying the New Era. This thread, when pulled, will make the fabric unravel. The New Worker label is certainly intended as a badge of pride (see Meng 2017; Zhang H. 2018), but it was born of the need to resist the precarization of labor and the denigration of the (migrant) worker that have come with the government's socioeconomic policy of the last four decades. To be sure, the Reform era has brought not just hardship but also opportunity for many, individuals and groups from the migrant worker community among them. But while the Migrant Workers Home's promotion of their vision of the New Worker is locally successful, it is not a magic wand that will dispel the specter of growing inequality in postsocialist China.

My reading of “Confessions” is not intended to examine Xiao Hai's writing as if it were sociopolitical theory, assess its credentials as grassroots discourse, or question the motivation or the consistency of its author's ideological position. Rather, the tensions contained in “Confessions” are part of the puzzle called Xiao Hai, and in order to piece this together we should also take into account the essay's history. As it turns out, Xiao Hai (pers. comm., April 7, 2020) originally wrote it for I Am an Orator (Wo shi yanshuojia 我是演说家), a reality TV show for public speaking in which his participation was canceled. (I surmise the cancelation may have been because of the essay's grim depiction of precarious labor.) This helps explain the essay's neat alignment with official discourse in its closing words.

Yet, we should not be too quick in assuming that in the grand finale of “Confessions,” Xiao Hai is just going through the motions. Xiao Hai's and other battler authors’ alignment with an official discourse of opportunity, self-reliance, and hope in certain settings is by no means incompatible with their articulation of hardship, inequality, and disillusionment in other settings, such as their poetry. I will return to this point below.

Poetry

There are often good grounds for equating speakers and protagonists in battler poetry with the historical person of the author, if not for exact biographical detail then minimally as regards the contours of their experience. In addition, many of Xiao Hai's poems come with postscript references to dates, places, and settings that link them to his personal history. It comes as no surprise that the story his poetry tells overlaps with the prose recollections. Below I will outline how his poetry has evolved over the years. My selection of texts highlights the versatility of his writing, which I believe contributes to his prominence in the Picun Literature Group.

Xiao Hai's early poetry is often unconstrained and in message mode. It is unconstrained in that it pays scant attention to form beyond the insistent use of repetition (mostly anaphora) and the language does not appear to have been carefully processed: long poems made up of (irregularly) long lines, whose composition and dynamic are not especially balanced. When there is attention to form, this is often because the writing is song-like, with chorus lines and repeated interjections like “Hey” and “Oh.” By message mode I mean a choice of words that leaves the reader with little room to get to work themselves. The poet tells us where it is at. Perhaps Xiao Hai's move to Picun, his membership in the Literature Group, and the opportunities for consciously developing his poethood help explain that in recent years, he has written a number of poems that have fewer and shorter lines and appear more focused than his early work.

My description of Xiao Hai's early work implies no value judgment. Battler poetry is often anything but “polished.” The intense presence of historical context in this poetry codetermines how one reads, and unconstrainedness and message mode have not put this reader off, in Xiao Hai or in other authors. On the contrary, I have sat up straight when I felt battler writing chipping away at my reading habits and helping me understand something I might have said I knew already: to wit, the wide range of ways in which poetry can be realized.

Recurrent themes in Xiao Hai's poetry include love of the motherland, occasionally coupled with inequality as seen from China as the workshop of the world; displacement, alienation, loss, and failure; and unrequited romantic love. The emotions associated with these themes include indignation and anger; disappointment, disillusionment, desperation, and bitterness; contempt for the self and guilt.

“Chinese Workers” (“Zhongguo gongren” 中国工人), postscripted as written in 2013 “in the Suzhou Wuzhong District clothing factory workshop,” displays typical features of Xiao Hai's early work (2017: 43–45). Well suited to advancing the cause of the New Worker, it is probably his best-known poem. It features in We 2s: The Labor Exchange Market (Women 2s: Laodong jiaoliu shichang 我们2s:劳动交流市场), a play loosely based on Xiao Hai's life story in which he had one of the lead roles (Qiujun 2020). The poem is an indictment of global capitalism, with the Chinese worker on the receiving end. It finishes with an enumeration of images that reassert the dignity of the Chinese nation, starting with the image of the Great Wall. In terms of style it recalls the state-sanctioned political lyricism (zhengzhi shuqing shi 政治抒情诗) of the Mao era: grandiose, exalted, and sometimes breathless.

In translating Xiao Hai's poetry, I have stayed close to the word order and punctuation of the source text, which requires taking liberties in other dimensions. The sheer size of many of his poems makes them more excerptable than others. In the interests of space I use virgules instead of line breaks. Here's an excerpt from “Chinese Workers”:

Perhaps the most iconic image in battler poetry is that of the assembly line. It was made famous by authors such as Zheng Xiaoqiong and Xu Lizhi 许立志, symbolizing industrial labor as dehumanizing and eating up the migrant workers’ youth (on Xu, see van Crevel 2019b). In Xiao Hai's oeuvre, too, the assembly line is a central image and it is linked to the loss of youth. This is from “Youth on the Assembly Line” (Liushuixian shang de qingchun 流水线上的青春), written in 2017 (Xiao Hai 2017: 404–5):

Here, the screw operates as metonymy for the battler's physical environment of industrial machinery, sending a different message from the closing words of Xiao Hai's “Confessions,” where it stands for the figurative machine of revolution. These contrasting readings of the screw exemplify an important difference between Xiao Hai's poetry and his prose recollections. His prose offers descriptions of hardship but ultimately speaks from an outside, commentarial point of view. By contrast, his poetry speaks hardship from the inside and hits the reader harder. Of course this reflects generic differences of poetry and commentarial prose. Poetry cannot be truly commentarial even if it tries. But Xiao Hai's writing is part of a wider-ranging discourse on precarious labor, and as such his poetry sends a much less optimistic message than his prose recollections.

“But I Didn't” (“Danshi wo mei you” 但是 我没有) (Xiao Hai 2017: 302–4), written in 2016, makes no reference to the battler life, but the social experience of its author makes itself felt if we read it as part of Xiao Hai's oeuvre as a whole. The poem exudes a sense of failure and inferiority, one of Xiao Hai's recurring themes. My other reason for citing this bleak text is that it shows his habit of stringing together clichéd idioms, in fixed four-character phrases and otherwise (I have italicized some examples below). Thus, much of this poetry appears to be about identifying subject matter that moves the speaker, for which standard expressions work well; and only secondarily, if at all, about original or defamiliarizing ways of verbalizing the experience. This dichotomy is a bone of contention in the debate on battler poetry at large, to which I return at the end of this article.

“When I Watched the World Cup What Did I See” (“Dang wo kan shijiebei de shihou wo kandao le shenme” 当我看世界杯的时候我看到了什么), written in 2018, exemplifies the change in Xiao Hai's more recent work. “When I Watched” points at global capitalism as a driver of Chinese precarious labor, just like “Chinese Workers.” But while the speaker in “Chinese Workers” remains an abstraction and employs the solemn tone of a manifesto, in “When I Watched” the speaker comes alive. And while both texts articulate indignation, “When I Watched” does not bring political lyricism to mind. There is also a hint of irony, in the long, quasi-naive title of the poem and the speaker's puzzled gaze at the mad ways of the world. Here is an excerpt:

Concentrated inside the speaker's line of vision and contrasting his surroundings with the spectacle on TV, the poem foregrounds the individual speaker's physical experience and subjectivity. But it keeps the picture of his workmates in full view: “Slogging on with no breaks.” I and We.

Xiao Hai's Persona

Xiao Hai's public persona emerges after he settles in Picun. How does this happen, what does his persona look like, and what does it signify? How does it tell us to read a story I have summarized as ordeal + writing + salvation—and from there, to read the Picun brand as this manifests in literature?

First of all, Xiao Hai's persona reflects the mediagenicity of battler poetry as a genre. Iconic scenes of migrant labor (face-masked workers shackled to the assembly line, etc.) lend themselves to romanticization, with the underdog's hardship boosting the authenticity of their experience. This effect is amplified when the battler turns out to write poetry, as exemplified by Xu Lizhi (van Crevel 2019b: 88). Xiao Hai's story fits the bill. Also, his story makes poetry a force for the good, as he is displaced and exploited but determined and eventually rewarded. Writing poetry is instrumental in his quest to find a spiritual home and enter the social order with a dignity that life in the workshop denied him. In November 2017, when large numbers of migrant workers in Beijing were abruptly evicted, a Global Times headline says Xiao Hai “use[s] poetry and rock-n-roll to uplift spirits amid evictions,” after a DV recording in which he leads the recitation of a protest poem by Yu Xiuhua 余秀华 went viral (Xu 2017; NN 2017). In “The Book I Love Best” (“Wo zui xihuan de yi ben shu” 我最喜欢的一本书), a series of filmed interviews commissioned by One Way Space, he recalls his despair at life in the factory and says he wrote to “comfort himself” (Shen 2018). In Roaming Picun (Liulang Picun 流浪皮村), a short film on several prominent Picun-ers directed by Chen Wei 陈玮 (2019) and published on Weibo/Kuran, he says that for him, poetry has meant “redemption.” The title of the China Daily portrait sums things up: “I Make Poetry of the Assembly Line.”

Second, the mediagenicity of the genre is reinforced by the style of the individual called Xiao Hai: gregarious, entertaining, and infectious, whether on paper, on-screen, or in person. For all the sorrow in his poetry, Xiao Hai comes across as celebrating life. Again, Roaming Picun and the China Daily portrait are cases in point. Filmed while sorting and selling clothes, reminiscing and leafing through a dog-eared collection of Haizi's work, playing the guitar, rehearsing for We 2s, Xiao Hai exudes energy, enthusiasm, and optimism as he regales his story in what appear to be spontaneous words, even as they inevitably repeat anecdotes and turns of phrase he has used before. Tellingly, the China Daily portrait is the first episode in a series called “Live Your Dream” (“Zhui meng rensheng” 追梦人生). In sum, Xiao Hai remains comfortably relatable at the same time as painfully reminding the viewer/reader of socioeconomic inequality. Indeed, his private life goes on display, not unlike reality TV. A poignant example is his hope of finding a partner. In the China Daily portrait, sitting next to Xiao Hai in the Picun reading room, Fan Yusu half-jokingly says everyone knows he needs a wife (Yang 2019). In Code PEK (Daihao PEK 代号PEK), a documentary on Picun by Wang Shenqi 王神奇 and Zhao Badou 赵八斗 (2019), volunteer Liang Chenyi 梁晨依 cracks up as, speaking to the camera, she implores women all over China to consider marrying Xiao Hai.⁶ The film's title refers to the IATA code for Beijing Capital International Airport. Picun is close to the airport and the airplanes that fly overhead every few minutes have become a signature image associated with the village.

Third, Xiao Hai is recognized across the board as highly talented. Prior to his media exposure, this is demonstrated by the number of pages devoted to his work in the Literature Group's publications. Fellow Group member Li Ruo 李若 (2018) admiringly calls him a “dark horse.” In a scholarly article on Xiao Hai and Li Ruo—she and Xiao Hai are perhaps the Group's best-known members after Fan Yusu—Zhang Huiyu (2018: 39) praises his dedication to writing and his ability to draw on Haizi as well as Western rock music to “give expression to the worker's life.” In an empathetic article on the Group, Zhang Yuyao 张玉瑶 (2017) of the Beijing Evening News (Beijing wanbao 北京晚报) describes him as “in a league of his own.”

And fourth, in a process that is catalyzed if not triggered by the Fan Yusu craze, it is the community factor that makes Xiao Hai visible to the outside world. By this I mean the very existence of the Migrant Workers Home and the Literature Group, whose media appearances and publications signal solidarity, and the emergence of the Picun brand. The brand is visible in signature images of Picun such as the emblem of the Migrant Workers Home (a worker striking a gong [fig. 2]), often accompanied by slogans that say “Migrant Workers throughout the Land Are All One Family” (Tianxia dagong shi yi jia 天下打工是一家) and “Labor Is Glorious” (Laodong zui guangrong 劳动最光荣); the archway of the more public of the Home's two yards, with the museum and the theater; but also the airplanes flying overhead, frequently with the Chinese flag or the red star atop the theater entrance in the line of vision.

Thus, the narrative that emanates from Xiao Hai's persona in the media is overwhelmingly one of gratitude, patriotism, and positive energy (a notion enthusiastically adopted by state-ideological discourse in recent years), not of protest or resistance. As noted above, this is by no means incompatible with the articulation of hardship, inequality, and disillusionment by the same author, and this observation extends to battler literature at large. When the battler's writing enables them to enter the literary field (as distinct from, say, remaining “hidden” in their diary), this adds to the complexity of their social experience and can render this experience contradictory—not to mention Sun Wanning's (2014: 209) characterization of “the formation of a subaltern consciousness” as an “uneven, local, partial, and patchy process” across migrant worker communities to begin with. In addition, Chinese media are strictly regulated and censored. If a battler poet (or any other author or interviewee) and the relevant editors and producers play by the rules, this does not automatically mean they are “taking sides” or “selling out” or not saying what they think. And overall, battler literature has consistently contained multitudes along the range from cynicism and despair to idealism and jubilation, within the author community (see, for instance, Li Shengge's 李笙歌 poetry in Qin Xiaoyu's [2015] landmark anthology, and then Xu Lizhi's) and within the work of individual authors such as Xiao Hai. This need not surprise us if we recall that the battler experience flows directly from a precarious balance of real but elusive opportunity, on the one hand, and equally real and devastating hardship, on the other.

Thus, Xiao Hai's media persona is representative of battler literature at large in that it subverts black-and-white oppositions of grassroots versus state discourse and unofficial (minjian 民间) versus official (guanfang 官方) culture. While it lays out the hardship associated with precarious labor, it presents this as something from the past (at least for Xiao Hai), blames no one, and even contains moments of self-reproach. As the key to success, it identifies initiative, perseverance, faith in the future, and the supportive companionship of fellow workers rather than systemic social change. It does not portray the battler's hardship as an injustice, except for scattered moments that identify foreign consumers as driving overtime and underpay (as if, incidentally, the workshop of the world has no domestic clientele and its bosses are not beholden to domestic governance). Inequality in Chinese society and domestic aspects of its structural causes remain implicit, shielded from view by loyalty to the motherland, in a cultural but also a political sense. If Xiao Hai's journey is occasionally associated with anger, this is chalked up to the artist's Sturm und Drang as much as to the battler's ordeal. And when Han Yi 韩逸 (2019) avers that now that he has left the assembly line behind, he “cannot muster up his anger any more,” he is one of several observers who suggest the Picun experience has calmed him (see also Zhang Z. 2019: 321–22).

So, has Xiao Hai been defanged and his raw power been domesticated? Might one cite as further evidence that in March 2019, he was invited to a two-week intensive course on poetry writing at the state-sponsored Beijing Lao She Institute for Literature, taught by a stellar lineup of established academics and professional authors? Does this signal a wider-ranging mechanism whereby the grassroots cultural practice epitomized by Picun literature is neutralized and co-opted by the state? But questions like these equate grassroots cultural practice in China with resistance vis-à-vis a state whose culture can only ever be propaganda that aims to perpetuate the oppression of the individual subject. The realities on the ground are richer, messier, and more dynamic.

We should not lose sight of state power in China over literature and art. The Lao She Institute is one of many items in a toolbox whose contents include far-reaching censorship of every kind, with suffocating effects. Many of my fieldwork interviews confirm that this holds for battler literature just as much as it does for other types of discourse in the public realm. Poets and editors know to steer clear, for instance, of unfiltered representations of the horrors inside “black” factories that make a mockery of anything resembling legal labor relations. Still, the narrative of gratitude, patriotism, and positive energy in Xiao Hai and Picun literature at large does not look like a gimmick or reduce them to an alternative mouthpiece for the Communist Party. Rather, it reaffirms the need to revisit relations between the individual, community, and the state in cultural production in China when we consider the motivation, orientation, and merits of battler literature.

How Does Picun Literature Work?

Here is what Xiao Hai (pers. comm., April 7, 2020) had to say about his stint at the Lao She Institute: “I got a lot out of it. It was the first time I could concentrate and wholeheartedly devote myself to studying and really learn more about poetry. The key thing was you didn't have to worry about food and drink. . . . In seventeen years of the battler life, this is the memory I cherish the most. It was a truly pure time.” Aside from the possibility that the System's involvement in Xiao Hai's writing career might be a good thing, I cite this passage as a stepping stone to discussing what I will call the lucky break in Xiao Hai's story and that of other well-known battler authors. I mean events that enable an author to enter the literary field with some chance of success, often occasioned by personal patronage, and that can start a snowball effect in their accumulation of cultural capital. For understanding their careers, the lucky break can usefully complement the notions of structure (social class, gender, education, employment) and agency (talent, dedication). I have sketched trajectories such as this for Zheng Xiaoqiong, Guo Jinniu 郭金牛, Yu Xiuhua (not generally classified as a battler poet but a key name in the debate on subaltern [diceng 底层] writing), and the posthumous Xu Lizhi (van Crevel 2017a: 255–57, 277–8; 2017b, para. 109; 2021). In the Picun context, Fan Yusu's lucky break came with Zhang Huiyu's mentorship, and Xiao Hai's came when Zhang Chu responded to his Weibo message and put him in touch with Xu Duo.

Schematically speaking, structure tends to work against you as a battler poet, agency is essential, and then you need a lucky break. And while artists of every description need a lucky break (and not just in China), battler poets need it more than most. Additionally, their interaction with those who are in a position to give them a break—cultural officials, established authors, academics—is stimulated by the power of poetry as a meme in Chinese cultural tradition that remains operational today (van Crevel 2017b, para. 41). Among other things, it plays out in the phenomenon of poetry as a social practice that can cross over between social and professional groups.

This sort of boundary-crossing through cultural production clearly happens in and around the Picun Literature Group, involving various types of actors from across the shared space of which the Migrant Workers Home partakes. First, the cultural activists who run the Home: for example, founding members Sun Heng 孙恒, Xu Duo, and Wang Dezhi 王德志, and manager Xiao Fu. Second, the migrant workers or “workmates” (gongyou 工友), whose interest in literature prompted Xiao Fu to start her work as the Literature Group's convener. Third, academics and cultural professionals: for example, Zhang Huiyu and the many others who have lectured in the Group over the years. This Group includes scholars based at universities and research institutes but also from the Central Party School, sometimes on topics that qualify as ideological instruction, such as a session taught by Liu Chen 刘忱 on the study of the Spirit of the Nineteenth Party Congress in 2017; and it also includes “specialist” (zhuanye 专业) literary authors and editors such as Shi Libin, vice editor of Beijing Literature (Beijing wenxue 北京文学). As the dynamic expands beyond the inner circle, other actors come into view. These include media professionals such as the makers of the China Daily film on Xiao Hai, and representatives of the state cultural apparatus such as the Lao She Institute—which invited Xiao Hai on Shi Libin's recommendation.

Within the shared space that contains Picun literature and battler literature at large, one way of approaching the complexity of this literature is to ask how it works. What does it do and mean, and to whom? I see four perspectives that overlap and impact one another, and our understanding of this literature hinges on viewing them as such. In tentative order of importance: (1) social identification, fulfillment, and the restoration of dignity in the precarious worker as a writing and reading subject; (2) testimony and advocacy, for the advancement of social justice; (3) aesthetic value; (4) the author's socioeconomic betterment. Each can involve various actors in addition to the author: anonymous online “workmate” readers, labor activists, literary critics, cultural officials operating on the full range from sponsorship to censorship, media professionals and scholars based in China and elsewhere, and so on.

The relative importance of the first of these four perspectives is reflected in the literature itself, in scholarship, and in the media. Xiao Hai's repeated use of the image of “finding himself” is a case in point. Chen Wei's (2019) film captures the words of scholar Meng Dengying 孟登迎, teaching in the Literature Group: “It is in order to improve our entire spiritual life that we engage in creative work. . . . You really need introspection on the actuality of your own life.” Liu Nan 刘楠 (2018: 63) reads the concept of the New Worker as “embodying the battler community's cultural pursuit of their own subjectivity, their creativity, and their proper rights and interests.” The Beijing Evening News notes that Zhang Huiyu is deeply moved by the realization that the usefulness of writing is straightforward for the battlers because they express directly what things are like in their lives (shenghuo 生活) and in Life (shengming 生命)—to which Zhang adds mischievously that the middle class has much to learn from this (Zhang Y. 2017).

As a project, a process, and a product, Picun literature appears to be locally successful for its authors and readers. If relatively few “workmates” actively participate in building New Worker culture (Meng 2017: 52), this does not make Picun literature less significant for the individuals and groups that contribute to it and benefit from it, its authors most of all. And while Picun literature gains in visibility from the Migrant Workers Home's larger campaign to build New Worker culture, there are other hot spots of battler literature elsewhere in China, such as in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze Delta. Wang Hongzhe 王洪喆 (2017: 22) notes that this literature rarely offers its individual authors an escape from the battler life—but he also insists that it must continue to advocate for social justice for all.

It is hard to assess the reach of Picun literature in terms of outside readers. Will there be more moments like the Fan Yusu craze? Has the Fan Yusu craze improved the situation of China's domestic workers? After attending We 2s, the play based on Xiao Hai's story, an anonymous person called Youth C had this to say: “This play is not just about reflection on your dreams but also about reflection on many aspects of society. But like many other plays with this sort of subject matter, in the end it's just asking a bunch of hard questions on stage. The solutions to those social problems are really just so difficult to find” (Long 2020: 137).

Finally, the truism that any aesthetic evaluation is codetermined by social and ideological context bears reiteration. Literary and educational canons tend to be marked by inertia. In the case of battler poetry, they often operate at a great distance from the texts and contexts in question, not just in the physical sense. Calling out the zero-sum thinking that stipulates an inverse relation between aesthetic value and the advancement of social justice is a start. If is also a reminder of the need to ask ourselves what we want from this poetry and on whose terms we are reading and responding—something I have struggled with in installments, in my publications on battler poetry to date—because fundamentally different motivations for writing poetry yield fundamentally different texts. Recognizing this will advance our understanding of battler poetry and help us reconsider consensual or hegemonic definitions of poetry rather than concluding that battler poetry lies outside their scope. The challenge comes with the next step, as researchers, teachers, and translators ask themselves how they want to position this poetry for their interlocutors. This article has tried to address that challenge.

I am grateful to our peer reviewers and to Paola Iovene and the other contributors to this special issue for their feedback on my work. In addition to the works cited, I draw on fieldwork conducted in 2017 and 2019 and follow-up personal communication with several of the individuals involved. This article borrows the occasional turn of phrase from my other work on battler poetry.

Notes

References