Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong's Women Migrant Workers (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) 9781498580632, 9781498580649, 1498580637

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Migrant Ecologies

Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch, METI Advisory Board: Sinan Akilli, Cappadocia University, Turkey; Bruce Allen, Seisen University, Japan; Zélia Bora, Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil; Izabel Brandão, Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil; Byron Caminero-Santangelo, University of Kansas, USA; Chia-ju Chang, Brooklyn College, The City College of New York, USA; H. Louise Davis, Miami University, USA; Simão Farias Almeida, Federal University of Roraima, Brazil; George Handley, Brigham Young University, USA; Steven Hartman, Mälardalen University, Sweden; Isabel Hoving, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Idom Thomas Inyabri, University of Calabar, Nigeria; Serenella Iovino, University of Turin, Italy; Daniela Kato, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan; Petr Kopecký, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic; Julia Kuznetski, Tallinn University, Estonia; Bei Liu, Shandong Normal University, People’s Republic of China; Serpil Oppermann, Cappadocia University, Turkey; John Ryan, University of New England, Australia; Christian Schmitt-Kilb, University of Rostock, Germany; Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada; Heike Schwarz, University of Augsburg, Germany; Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Pondicherry University, India; Scott Slovic, University of Idaho, USA; Heather Sullivan, Trinity University, USA; David Taylor, Stony Brook University, USA; J. Etienne Terblanche, North-West University, South Africa; Cheng Xiangzhan, Shandong University, China; Hubert Zapf, University of Augsburg, Germany Ecocritical Theory and Practice highlights innovative scholarship at the interface of literary/cultural studies and the environment, seeking to foster an ongoing dialogue between academics and environmental activists.

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Migrant Ecologies Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers

Zhou Xiaojing

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 by The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Copyright © 2012 by Guangdong Flower City Publishing House, China (中国广东花城出版社) All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zhou, Xiaojing, 1952– author, translator. Title: Migrant ecologies : Zheng Xiaoqiong’s women migrant workers / Zhou Xiaojing. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2020] | Series: Ecocritical theory and practice | Includes poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong translated by Zhou Xiaojing. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Migrant Ecologies investigates how Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry exposes the entanglements of migrant ecologies with local and global networks of capital and labor and the challenges faced by women migrant workers”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020005980 (print) | LCCN 2020005981 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498580632 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498580649 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Zheng, Xiaoqiong, 1980—Criticism and interpretation. | Migrant labor in literature. | Women migrant labor—China. | Migration, Internal—Economic aspects—China. | Migration, Internal—Social aspects—China. | Labor and globalization. Classification: LCC PL2977.5.E6436 Z98 2020 (print) | LCC PL2977.5.E6436 (ebook) | DDC 895.11/6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005980 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005981 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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To all migrant workers

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Migrant Ecologies as a Site of Critical Inquiry

1

1 Vignettes of Material Memoirs: Toxic Environment and Women Migrant Workers’ Industrial Diseases

21

2 “Carceral Capitalism”: Factory Cities and Villages-in-the-City

49

3 The “Other Scene” of Globalization: “Hollow Villages” and Migrant Workers’ Families

81

Conclusion: A Politics of Migrant Ecologies

101

Works Cited

113

Index 119 About the Author and Translator

125

vii

List of Figures

Figure 0.1 Huangma Ling in the 1980s Figure 0.2 Fudong Electronics Co., Ltd, an Apple Accessory Manufacturing Factory Located in Huangma Ling, 2009 Figure 1.1 “Bird Mobile, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005. The largest mobile-phone manufacturer in China when this photo was shot, Bird Mobile has since been overtaken. Here, workers complete a manual-assembly portion of the phone-production process” (www.edwardburtynsky.com) Figure 1.2 Workers Taking One of the Allowed Two Ten-Minute Breaks a Day in a Workshop at an Electronics Factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, May 21, 2010 Figure 1.3 Workers Taking One of the Allowed Two Ten-Minute Breaks in a Locker Room at an Electronics Factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, January 5, 2011 Figure 2.1 Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, 2005 Figure 2.2 A Village-in-the-City in Dongguan, April 30, 2011 Figure 2.3 A Corner of a Village-in-the-City in Dongguan, December 19, 2018

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Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the insights, dedications, collaborations, and support of many individuals. I am grateful to Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, whose project of a critical anthology, Ecocriticism of the Global South, inspired me to pursue a new line of inquiry that led to the discovery of migrant worker literature in China, particularly Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry. The panel on “Global South” organized by Scott and Vidya at the eleventh biennial conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment in 2015 gave me the opportunity to present my study of urbanization and environmental justice in Zheng’s writings about migrant workers in China. The invigorating conversations I had with Scott (Vidya was unable to make it to the conference) and the audience attending the panel helped me further develop the conceptual scope and ecocritical approaches to migrant worker literature, especially Zheng’s poetry. In fact, it was Scott who suggested a book project on Zheng’s work, and introduced me to two prominent scholars of ecocriticism, Serpil Oppermann from Turkey and Serenella Iovino from Italy. My encounters with both scholars resulted in a fruitful collaboration in coediting a cluster of essays on “Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)bordered World,” which appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. The intellectual rigor and placebased historical perspectives in Serpil and Serenella’s respective analyses of socio-ecological changes helped broaden and deepen my understanding of the local and global entanglements of globalization and rural migration in China. I am also indebted to other scholars. Lu Jie, my colleague at University of the Pacific, called my attention to Gong Haomin’s chapter, “Toward a New Leftist Ecocriticism in Postsocialist China: Reading the ‘Poetry of Migrant Workers’ as Ecopoetry,” included in China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions, which Lu Jie coedited with Ban Wang. I have xi

xii

Acknowledgments

benefited from Gong’s chapter, which provided a larger context for Zheng’s work. Zhang Qinghua’s insightful essay on Zheng’s unique poetics was invaluable to my understanding of the uniqueness and significance of Zheng’s poetry. When I felt compelled to introduce Zheng’s poems to readers in English through translation, Jonathan Stalling’s translations of Zheng’s poems enabled me to see new possibilities of translations as a form of activism, and as a way of creative interpretation of the poet’s original work. I am also grateful to Jonathan for the opportunities to collaborate in bringing Zheng to our respective campuses to give talks and readings. My heartfelt thanks go to other colleagues and journal editors and reviewers. Jeffrey Hole included my translations of Zheng’s poems as required readings in his English and general education classes, and Daniel Wadhwani used my translations in his business classes. They helped affirm my commitment to interdisciplinary and transnational ecocritical studies through both scholarship and translation. I cherish the innovative teamwork of Martin Camps in organizing a multilingual poetry reading of Zheng’s poems on our campus, which enhanced the audience’s, as well as our own, experience of the power of poetry in addressing social and environmental justice. I deeply appreciate the editors and reviewers of several journals, such as Verge: Studies in Global Asias; The Bitter Oleander; Chinese Literature Today; Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing; World Literature Today, and the fiftieth Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, who gave me the opportunities to further my understanding of Zheng’s poetry through translation. I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to show my translations of Zheng’s poems to superb poets and to receive their helpful feedback and encouragement. I was particularly touched by Li-Young Lee’s generosity with his time in going over particular lines with me in discussing variations of rhythm, cadence, syntax, and meaning. I am deeply grateful to Claudia Rankine for sharing with me her insights in the art of poetry, particularly the significance of music in the language and structure of poetry. Camille Norton, my colleague and an award-winning poet, also offered constructive comments and suggestions, which helped improve my translations. My special thanks go to Zheng Xiaoqiong, whose generosity, dedication, and patience are awe-inspiring. My sincere thanks to Zheng’s hospital colleagues and fellow poets as well. I have benefited from their numerous works and animating conversations, which gave me a better perspective on the dynamic nature of contemporary Chinese poetry, especially migrant-worker poetry and its vast audience. I dedicate this book to them and all migrant workers. This book would have remained an unfulfilled aspiration without the unconditional support of my family, especially my husband. Always understanding and considerate, my family buoyed me with their faith, love, and devotion.

Acknowledgments

xiii

Generous research grants from University of the Pacific and College of the Pacific also helped make this book possible. I am grateful for the grant committees’ support, which enabled me to conduct field and archival research in China, and to obtain photographs included. I am thankful to the reviewer and editors of my manuscript. The reviewer’s insightful comments and detailed constructive suggestions helped clarify my thinking and improved my writing. It has been a pleasure working with the editorial team of Lexington Books. I particularly appreciate the professionalism of Michael Gibson, senior acquisitions editor, Mikayla Mislak and Megan Murray, assistant editors, and Arun Rajakumar, project manager. I gratefully acknowledge the following authors and photographers for their respective permissions to use excerpts or photos in this book: 郑小琼/Zheng Xiaoiong, 《穿过工业区》“Passing through the Industrial Zone” from《黄麻岭》/ Huangma Ling, pp. 95–96; 《村庄史志》/ “Village Chronicles” from Selected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqion, 节译， excerpts from pp. 136, 142–43; “Age of Industry” parts of it from (《散落在机台上的诗》/Poems Scattered on the Machine, pp. 57–58; and an excerpt from 《毛织厂》/“The Woolen Mill” from October/Shiyue (十月), no. 4, 2015. 周柏/Zhou Bo (pen name, 方舟Fang Zhou/), 《制鞋少女》/ “Shoe-Making Girls,” 节译, an excerpt. Shivaji Das, email letter to the author, November 20, 2018. An excerpt. Frederik Bous, Letter to Zheng Xiaoqiong, November 9, 2017 (excerpts); “Introduction to Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems,” January 19, 2018. (Unpublished written explanation about the significance of Zheng’s poems to the University Choir and Orchestra of Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.) 于淼淼/Yu Miaomiao, 于淼淼 2018 年，4月1 日 给郑小琼的信. (Yu Miaomiao’s letter to Zheng Xiaoqiong, April 1, 2018.) 谢茂春/Xie Maochun, photo of Huangma Ling in the 1980s. 陈玉宝/Chen Yubao, photo of Fudong Electronics Co., Ltd, an Apple accessory manufacturing factory located in Huangma Ling, 2009. Photo of Bird Mobile, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005; photo of Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, 2005. © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg and Bryce Wolkowitz Galleries, New York / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

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Acknowledgments

占有兵/Zhan Yubing, Photo of workers taking a break in a workshop at an electronics factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, May 21, 2010 (电子厂工人在车间工休十分钟，广东省，东莞市); photo of workers taking a ten-minute break in a locker room at an electronics factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, January 5, 2011 (电子厂工人在更衣室工休十分钟，广东省，东莞市); photo of a villagein-the-city, Dongguan, April 30, 2011 (东莞城中村); and photo of a corner of a village-in-the-city, Dongguan, December 19, 2018 (东莞城中村一角). Slightly different versions of the following poems I had translated appeared in these journals: 《凉山童工》/ “A Child Migrant Worker from the Cold Mountain”；《旭容》 / “Xurong”；《胡志敏》 / “Hu Zhimin”；《中年妓女》/ “Middle-Aged Prostitutes” on the web of the fiftieth Poetry International Festival Rotterdam, 2019. 《周阳春》 / “Zhou Yangchun,” 《旭容》 / “Xurong,” 《胡志敏》 / “Hu Zhimin” in Empty Mirror: A Literary Magazine, January 25, 2019 (online). 《疯女》/ “An Insane Girl” in Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing, vol. 15, no. 1, Spring 2018. 《工业时代》/“Age of Industry”; 《女工：被固定在卡座上的青春》/ “A Female Migrant Worker: Youth Confined in a Seat on the Assembly Line”:《穿过工业区》/ “Passing Through the Industrial Zone” in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016, published by University of Minnesota Press. 《凉山童工》/ “A Child Migrant Worker from the Cold Mountain” in The Bitter Oleander vol. 20, no. 2 (Autumn 2014): 81–83.

Introduction

Migrant Ecologies as a Site of Critical Inquiry

Passing through the Industrial Zone Tall factory workshops are gigantic wheels of the times. Vibrating in the landscape of our epoch, are songs of the urban leopards, iron and steel swiftly turning into circles, squares, or tiny crystals that burn and smell a vigorous atmosphere of our era. They will soon one by one, enter train stations, harbors, cargo carriers, ocean-going vessels arriving in North America, South Africa, Europe or Tokyo Our century’s iron, copper, gold, plastic, cloth . . . are here to be cast, inlaid, melt, cut, tailored . . . set into muscles of everyday necessity, taunt and powerful along with the bodily temperatures of this village and its subtropical wisdom to be baptized on lathes, planers, molds, plastic-injection molding machines, sewing machines to be sheared, molded, every inch inspected multiple times under bright light Turned into wheels, screws, film, glass mirrors, garments . . . they are on an endless search to be assembled, completed, to become inseparable like couples brothers, fathers and sons, cars, computers, fashionable clothes, and shoes Labeled “MADE IN CHINA,” they depart along the Silk Road or Zheng He’s oceanic routes, carrying the delicacy of porcelain, the softness of silk the passion of a coastal village, leaving assembly lines and machines with the warmth of women migrant workers’ youth, the heat of a porter’s sweat, the sunshine and rain of Huangma Ling, arriving in Paris, London St. Petersburg, Florence or New York, Chicago, reaching Yellow people White people, Black people, providing them with daily necessities and entertainments 1

2

Introduction

passing through industrial zones, subtropical forests, brightness and happiness, through grass, plants and flowers, machines and furnaces, generators and high-voltage cables through women migrant workers’ gossips and songs, through workers in overalls and business men in suits, through my green homesickness, through labor and contemplation. A bit of sunlight is shining on words above the industrial zone “Young people, quick! Run toward the world.” (《黄麻岭》/ Huangma Ling 95–96)

With subtle yet scathing irony, Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poem “Passing through the Industrial Zone” simultaneously echoes and critiques economic globalization as a sign of progress.1 Its ending statement—“Young people, quick! Run toward the world”—alludes to rural migration to “factories of the world” in China, and evokes a Chinese hegemonic ideology underlying slogans such as “search for modernity,” “quest for globality,” or yu quanqiu jiegu (“setting China on the track of globalization”), which mark the opening of China to “global capital” and “market mechanisms,” as sociologist Pun Ngai observes (4). Based on an eight-month field research in an electronics factory in Guangdong, Ngai’s ethnographic study Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005) focuses on women migrant workers, a.k.a. dagongmei (factory girls; see Leslie Chang). For Ngai, women migrant workers in China are “a newly embodied social identity emerging in contemporary China to meet and resist the changing socioeconomic relations of the country and the needs of capital” (19). While my inquiry in migrant ecologies resonates with Ngai’s study of the emergent identity, subjectivity, and agency of women migrant workers shaped by global capitalism and Chinese government policies, my focus is broader and engages with complex issues beyond the factories. As the title Migrant Ecologies indicates, this study seeks to uncover the intricacies of movements of capital, labor, materials, and products and their social and environmental impact, as depicted in Zheng’s poems. “Passing through the Industrial Zone,” for example, indirectly invites the reader to consider what has been supplanted by “factory workshops”—the “gigantic wheels of the times,” which dominate “the landscape of our epoch” where the “songs of the urban leopards” vibrate as they devour “iron and steel” and turn them into products. Underlying the industrialization and urbanization, which define “the landscape of our epoch,” are environmental transformation and ecological degradation. Migrant workers, a.k.a. peasant workers, or rural workers, in China are at once a product and an engine of globalization. Spurred by global capitalism, rapid industrialization in China has transformed countless rural villages into industrial zones or “hollow villages,” and urban sprawl has displaced rural populations, producing a new mobile workforce and subsequent new identities and subjectivity as embodied by women migrant workers in China.2

Migrant Ecologies as a Site of Critical Inquiry

3

Zheng highlights these intricate connections between the local and the global in “Passing through the Industrial Zone.” As the poem develops with the movements of materials and products through the industrial zone of Huangma Ling Village in Dongguan, Guangzhou Province, to countries and cities around the world, it links the products to local “subtropical forests” and other places, the “warmth of women migrant workers’ youth,” and migrant workers’ homesickness to consumers on different continents. The poet strategically highlights “Huangma Ling”—an industrialized rural village in Dongguan—as a place where young people from rural China become migrant workers and from where products are shipped to different countries around the world. Figures 0.1 and 0.2 illustrate the drastic transformation of Huangma Ling into a manufacturing center.3 The altered landscape entails altered lives, communities, ecosystems, and the disappearance of habitats for nonhuman lives. Embedded in the transnational movements of capital, materials, products, and their global networks are “the intimacies of four continents.” I borrow this term from Lisa Low, who investigates in her book The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) “the often obscured connections between the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (1). The interrelated global capital accumulation, ideologies of modernity and progress, raced and gendered labor exploration, and movements of materials and commodities around the world evoke “the intimacies of four continents” produced by global systems of colonialism. Moreover, Zheng’s poems point to other urgent problems such as environmental degradation and large-scale rural migration and subsequent detriments to the rural population in China, which are intricately related to the intertwined local economic development and global capitalism. Zheng interweaves heterogeneous local and global assemblages into a web of obvious and invisible interconnections with unsettling implications, including local environmental destruction and the subjugation of vulnerable local populations as cheap labor. By showing inequality in the entanglements of the local and the global, Zheng’s work expands on the ethics and politics of an ecological view of the world. Drawing on the perspective of ecological science, which “holds that all life forms are interconnected,” Timothy Morton argues for an ecological view of “inter-connected life-forms as a whole,” which “is a mesh, a curious, radically open form without center or edge” (22). He notes that the concept of “mesh” entails “even more deeply interwoven than biocentric ideas such as the web of life imply, because it does away with boundaries between living and nonliving forms.” For this concept “gives rise to an ethics and politics based on (1) the utter singularity and uniqueness of every life-form and (2) the lack of fixed identity anywhere in the system of

4

Introduction

life forms” (ibid). Most relevant to my investigation of migrant ecologies in Zheng’s poems is the relationship of different life forms as a mesh, which Morton summarizes: “Though they seem radically different, (1) and (2) actually entail each other” (ibid.). In other words, in the mesh of the local-global entanglements, the utter uniqueness of each migrant worker, though reduced to an apparently faceless homogenous pool of cheap labor, constitutes the conditions of drastically different lives—those in the Global North. The interconnectedness of lives in the Global South and Global North can serve as a site of critical investigation into structurally produced poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. Environmental activist Vandana Shiva has noted: “Globalization of the local is responsible for destroying the environment which supports the subjugated local peoples” (“The Greening of the Global Reach” 151). Zheng’s poem “Passing through the Industrial Zone” demonstrates the entangled, transformative, and unequal relations between the global and the local, and their beneficial or detrimental impact on different places and populations. Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers investigates the ways in which Zheng’s poetry exposes often obscured and disavowed entanglements of migrant ecologies underlying intertwined local and global networks of capital and labor. I contend that women migrant workers, as portrayed in Zheng’s poems, are vectors of interconnections between the so-called factories of the world and slum villages-in-the-city, between urban development and rural decline, and between the local environmental degradation and the global market. By adopting an ecological approach to Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China, I explore what Donna Haraway, a feminist scholar in the field of science and technology studies, calls “webbed ecologies” (49). I use “ecologies” to enhance not only the layered, complex interconnections underlying women migrant workers’ plight and environmental degradation in China, but also the emergence and transformations of migrant spaces, subjects, activism, and networks resulting in part from globalization. As indicated in Zheng’s poem “Passing through the Industrial Zone,” migrant ecologies underlie the movements of materials, labor, and products through the industrial zone in Huangma Ling in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, to markets around the world. The transformation of Dongguan, where hundreds of rural villages used to be, into an export manufacturing center and a prefecture-level city, established in 1988, is one example of the intertwined relations and effects of migrant ecologies. Not only are different countries, cities, and peoples around the world intimately connected to migrant workers in China through commodities on the global market; they are also implicated in the drastic changes of rural landscape and communities by industry, and in the plight and elusive dreams of migrant workers in China. Hidden in these

Migrant Ecologies as a Site of Critical Inquiry

5

local and global connections invoked in Zheng’s poem are often overlooked inequitable symbiotic relationships, which produce interrelated migrations of labor, capital, raw materials, products, and their entanglements in environmental destruction, and sociocultural transformations. These transformations entail both individual and collective becomings. Zheng’s becoming a migrant worker, a poet, and activist after leaving her rural hometown suggests one of the unexpected effects of unpredictable encounters in migration. These invisible, disavowed, and understudied entanglements of migrant ecologies are what I explore through the lives and from the perspectives of women migrant workers in China as depicted in Zheng’s poems included in her tenth collection of poetry, Women Migrant Workers (2012). A critical inquiry into migrant ecologies that are at once the effects and causes of capitalism, patriarchy, and empires can help extend the conceptual, geographical, and critical frameworks of ecocriticism, environmental studies, and studies in globalization, mass migration, and gendered labor exploitation.4 SCHOLARSHIP ON CLIMATE CHANGE AND LABOR MIGRATIONS In recent years, mass migrations related to climate change have become a prominent global phenomenon, whose urgent crisis renders some complex ecological degradation and migrant problems less visible. For example, between May 3 and October 25, 2016, The New York Times published a series on “Carbon’s Casualties” which consists of five articles: “Americans Displaced by Climate Change,” “A Remote Pacific Nation, Threatened by Rising Seas,” “Climate Change Claims a Lake, and an Identity,” “Living in China’s Expanding Deserts,” and “Resettling China’s ‘Ecological Migrants.’” In his book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019), David Wallace-Wells, columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine, further elaborates on the magnitude of the impending climate migrations. As he states, “According to the U.N. IOM, climate change may unleash as many as a billion migrants on the world by 2050” (133). The subsequent catastrophes of climate mass migrations have become a central concern in scholarly studies as well, with critical attention to anthropocentricism as a leading cause of the disasters. Literary critic Serpil Oppermann in her 2016 introduction to a special cluster of essays on “Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World” in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment states: “The world in which we live today is a world of migrations.” These migrations entail the movements of goods, viruses, and various species, including human beings who are driven away from their homelands by socio-ecological collapse. Thus, Oppermann contends: “A close look at what is going on in the

6

Introduction

world of what we call ‘migrant ecologies’ would reveal that what basically precipitates the displacement of common people—especially those who are the most ‘economically, environmentally and socially vulnerable’ (Vigil 44)—are the negative impacts of anthropogenic climate change” (243). The conditions leading to wars and economic refugees are often intertwined with those of “climate” or “environmental refugees: people displaced by rising seas, more-destructive storms, expanding deserts, water shortages, and dangerously high levels of toxic pollutants in the local environment” (Oppermann 243). One example Oppermann cites is from a special report, “The Ominous Story of Syria’s Climate Refugees” (2015), by John Wendle. Severe droughts in Syria forced “1.5 million Syrian farmers” to the cities, and their displacement and “bad government politics” resulted in social turmoil that led to civil war. Subsequently, “the collapse of already deteriorating urban infrastructures” and “social violence” drove “millions of Syrians to seek refuge in Turkey” and Europe, posing challenges to democracies there (244). The “migrant ecologies” underlying these interrelated situations highlight “a growing global problem,” resulting from many more millions of refugees displaced by “worsening droughts, floods, wildfires, and rising seas . . . all around the world” (“Mexico’s Climate Migrants” qtd. in Oppermann 244). Migrant ecologies as such that are dominated by climate-related disasters obscure the more complex migrant ecologies, which are not simply the consequences, but also the operative economies of local and global systems and networks, as embedded in Zheng’s poems. I would argue that rural migration to cities and manufacturing centers in China, though it is unlike climate migration, is intricately related to the latter, contributing to global warming and climate-related migrations. Yet scholarship on the crises of migrations often focuses on climate change as the cause. Confronting similar problems of climate change and social unrest, anthropologist Marcelo Suárez-Orozco alerts us to “catastrophic migrations” on a global scale. In his “Introduction: Catastrophic Migrations” to the anthology Humanitarianism and Mass Migration: Confronting the World Crisis (2019), Suárez-Orozco states: “In the twenty-first century, mass migration is the human face of globalization—the sounds, colors, and aromas of a miniaturized, interconnected, and ever-fragile world” (1). According to a 2016 report by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), “in 2015 there were approximately 244 million international migrants . . . and upward of 760 million internal migrants.” Most of the internal migrants are in Asia: “By 2015, China had an estimated 280 million internal migrant workers (China Labor Bulletin 2017), and in India well over 320 million people—more than a quarter of the country’s population—were internal migrants between 2007 and 2008 (UNICEF 2016)” (Suárez-Orozco 1). However, no chapter in this anthology examines internal migrations in China or India, perhaps because these migrations do not seem to be clearly

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related to climate change, or are not considered “catastrophic.” One chapter, “Unchecked Climate Change, Mass Migration, and Sustainability: A Probabilistic Case for Urgent Action,” by Fonna Forman and Veerabhadran Ramanathan, included in the anthology, calls readers’ attention to the fact that climate change has displaced communities, causing “floods, droughts, fires, heat waves, and sea rise,” and resulting in “civil conflict and political unrest.” They note, according to estimated reports, the number of “climate change migrants” could reach one billion by 2050 (43). The other chapters mostly investigate problems related to transnational migrations to Europe and the Americas, with a focus on the plights of displaced children and youth on the move or in refugee camps. Hence, the conditions leading to internal mass migrations in China or elsewhere, and subsequent problems remain invisible or marginal in discourses on catastrophic exoduses across national borders resulting from wars or climate change. Studies that focus on crisis-oriented catastrophic mass migrations overlook other mass migrations mobilized not by disasters, but rather by urbanization, industrialization, global capitalism, and the legacies of colonialism. Anju Mary Paul’s study Multinational Maids: Stepwise Migration in a Global Labor Market (2017) intervenes in this oversight by focusing on mass migrations of multinational domestic workers in Asia. The study shows “there are more than 330,000 migrant domestic workers employed” in Hong Kong. Most of these workers are from the Philippines and Indonesia. The domestic workers’ countries of origin highlight the legacy of colonialism which underlies the global labor market. As Paul observes: In Italy, there are between 500,000 and 800,000 domestic workers in the country and almost 80 percent of them are foreigners. There are over 1.2 million migrant domestic workers currently in Saudi Arabia, while the Middle East including Israel has a tremendous appetite for foreign domestic workers. Both Taiwan and Singapore host more than 200,000 migrant domestic workers each, with most of these workers coming from either the Philippines or Indonesia. (15)

Other countries where “foreign domestic workers” come from include those in Africa and South as well as Southeast Asia (Paul 17). A complex world system polices this global migrant domestic worker market “by recruitment/ placement agencies and sending/receiving governments that control entry into each country market” (Paul 19). It must be noted that the operations of this world system of labor help create perpetual migration and subjugation of foreign female domestic workers as disposable labor, thus producing a migrant ecology that helps sustain the exploitation of raced and gendered labor. Invariably called “caregivers,” “domestic helpers,” or “maids,” and forbidden to become citizens of their

8

Introduction

host countries by law, these transnational domestic workers are forced or coerced to move from country to country as desirable “servants” with experience required by policies of several countries (Paul 17–18; 101–102). This global market of migrant domestic workers has also shaped the workers’ demographics over the past fifteen years. For example, most of the migrant domestic workers in Singapore used to come from the Philippines. “Now there are an estimated 125,000 Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore and, in comparison, only 70,000 Filipinos” (Tan 2015). A similar change in the demographics of migrant domestic workers has also taken place in Hong Kong due to the “willingness” of Indonesian workers “to accept lower wages and their reputation as significantly more submissive and docile” than workers from the Philippines. The rest of domestic workers in Singapore are from Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and India (Paul 102). According to reports by the Singapore Ministry of Manpower, “there were just over 237,000 foreign domestic workers living in this island of 5.6 million people, one for every five households, in June 2016” (Paul 102). These phenomena suggest a global migrant ecology of interconnections of exploitation and subjugation produced by gendered, raced hierarchies, and by what David Harvey calls “global capitalism” in which “a ‘new’ imperialism might be playing” a role (The New Imperialism 1). Such implicit connections between “a new imperialism” and global capitalism produce the intimacies of four continents, or rather migrant ecologies in which the plights of transnational women migrant workers is enmeshed. My reading of Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China seeks to foreground the hidden or unapparent global-local webs of connections and gendered exploitation of labor in migrant ecologies. Another example of what I mean by migrant ecologies marked by unequal symbiotic relationships between the rich and the poor, between the Global North and Global South, can be found in Aimee Bahng’s study, Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (2018). In contrast to the policed migration of foreign domestic workers to Singapore, the Singaporean government aggressively recruited “foreign professors and researchers to add to its ‘store of expertise,’” which led to the dispossession and displacement of locally unwelcome populations (128–129). In fact, the majority of multinational migrant domestic workers in Singapore is, to a significant extent, associated with the presence of “foreign professionals” and new white-collar citizens (Bahng 129). In order to reinvent itself as “an international hub of financial speculation, engineering, and biotechnology” and an ideal site for testing “new ideas and solutions in the areas of urban living,” among other things, the Singapore city-state pursues “international institutional collaborations with Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” by offering foreign students “high-paying jobs and fast-track permanent residency status” (Bahng 129). Bahng points out, “Singapore’s investments

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in cosmopolitanism depend on carefully state-controlled movements of migrant laborers from other countries around Southeast Asia, including the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.” At the same time, the presence of foreign professionals in Singapore further “marginalizes its ethnic Malaysian population, whose members on average make only half the monthly income of Chinese Singaporeans and constitute only 2 percent of the nation’s university graduates” (Bahng 129). While Bahng rightly emphasizes the international “fissure along national, ethnic, and class lines” reiterated in “Singapore’s investments in cosmopolitanism,” the underlying migrant ecologies of interconnections and unequal symbiotic relationships therein need to be highlighted and further examined in broader, more complex webs. CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers builds on and extends existing scholarship on migrations of labor and climate refugees. My reading of Zheng’s poems draws on ecocritical theories and methodologies, including material ecofeminism, such as those Stacy Alaimo advocates in her essay “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature” (2008) and in her book Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010). By “trans-corporeality,” Alaimo refers to “the time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’” (“Trans-Corporeal Feminisms” 239). In articulating a theory of material feminism, Alaimo emphasizes “the movement across bodies,” noting that “trans-corporeality” opens up a new critical space “that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (2). By tracing the movements of toxicity through the bodies of humans and more-than-humans in different spaces, and from production to consumption, Alaimo reveals not only global networks of capital and labor but also “social injustice” and “environmental degradation” (Bodily Natures 15). Material feminist critical perspectives such as these help open up new possibilities for my reading of Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers, whose bodies are contaminated by toxins in the factories. The conceptual framework I employ is also informed by theories of postcolonial and global ecologies, such as those in Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley; and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities edited by DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan. These critical perspectives which intervene in what Rob Nixon calls “‘superpower parochialism’ in the framing of environmental concerns that often reflects the perceptions

10

Introduction

and preoccupations of the privileged and the Global North” are especially pertinent to my examination of toxic environment and environmental destruction from women migrant workers’ perspectives (DeLoughrey, Didur, and Carrigan, “Introduction,” Global Ecologies 7). In their “Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Earth,” DeLoughrey and Handley contend that “postcolonial ecology must engage the complexity of global environmental knowledges, traditions, and histories in a way that moves far beyond the discourses of modernization theory on the one hand, which relegates the global south to a place without agency, bereft of complicity or resistance” (Postcolonial Ecologies 19). Their emphasis on engaging the complexity of global environmental histories help shed light on the transformation of rural and urban environments and rural women migrant workers’ lives as part of complex environmental histories in the making. Their attention to the agency of the Global South also helps to highlight the agency of Zheng’s poetry as a form of social activism, including environmental activism. In a similar vein, DeLoughrey and her coeditors of Global Ecologies investigate a wide range of environmental problems entangled with capitalism and militarism on the global scale. They note that “literary scholars have expanded the geographical and historical contours of ecocriticism by exploring how writers from postcolonial, settler colonial, and decolonial regions have” provided “vital perspectives on how ecological transformation is entangled with colonial expansion, capitalist industry, and globalization” (“Introduction” 3). Their coedited anthology builds on and expand focuses on “the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about catastrophic and long-term environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, resource extraction, and pollution and management of the global commons, pertocapitalism, and the commodification and capitalization of nature” (“Introduction” 2). Their work “foregrounds the complex histories of empire while recognize that current forms of globalization cannot be reduced to a simple extension of earlier practices of imperialism” (“Introduction” 9–10). Drawing on these critical perspectives, I argue that underlying migrant ecologies is a new form of empire—imperial capitalism of transnational, multinational corporations—and its impact on cities, rural China, and migrant women workers’ subjugation and resistant agency. I contend that Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers provide a new perspective on the socio-ecological impact of globalization. Moreover, theories about marginalized or invisible forms of violence such as those Nixon expounds in his study Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) and Jackie Wang advances in her book Carceral Capitalism (2018) provide important conceptual and critical tools in my analysis of Zheng’s poems. The hidden violence of capitalism, sexism,

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and socio-ecological degradation intertwined with migrant workers’ lives, families, and rural home villages are central concerns of my inquiry. In addition, my investigation in migrant ecologies draws on Elizabeth Grosz’s ecological theory on the dynamic, transformative possibilities of movements of things and people, which sheds light on overlooked politics of migrant ecologies. In Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections of Life, Politics, and Art (2011), Grosz argues that “[e]very thing, every process, every event or encounter is itself a mode of becoming that has its own time, its own movements, its own force. These multiple becomings both make and unmake” (2). Movements leading to new encounters and assemblages can be transformative in the sense that they “enable life to erupt from certain mixtures of chemicals to complicate and enable materiality to undergo becomings, and to generate living beings of all kinds . . . through engagement with dynamic environments.” Destablizing movements, transformative interactions, processes of becomings can “also enable others of social organization (both animal and human) to emerge from certain forms of life that transform those forms and that are themselves the sites of further becomings, becomings that function through the generation of a kind of politics, a complex interaction of populations, collectives, groups” (Becoming Undone 2). Grosz’s theory on the politics of open-ended processes of unexpected, interrelated constitutive transformations suggest new possibilities for my inquiry in the formation of migrant subjectivity, and the emergence of migrant workers’ activism and transnational networks, as well as collective and individual transformations. By situating Chinese women migrant workers’ plight in unequal symbiotic relationships between the global and local, between the urban and rural, and by highlighting the politics of migrant ecologies, I intend to also expand on existing scholarship in studies of migrant workers in China and Chinese migrant-worker literature. SCHOLARSHIP ON MIGRANT WORKERS, MIGRANT WORKER POETRY, AND ZHENG XIAOQIONG Since Dorothy Solinger’s groundbreaking book Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (1999), studies on rural migration in China have devoted more attention to rural women migrant workers.5 Those who investigate women migrant workers’ individual experience and collective status in China are predominantly scholars in the social sciences. Based on fieldwork and research in multiple regions in China, On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China (2004), edited by Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, situates rural women’s experience, migration patterns, and social networks

12

Introduction

in the economic, cultural, and sociopolitical contexts. The essays included offer insightful analyses of the impact of rural migration on migrant women’s identity, worldviews, and social positions. As already noted earlier, Ngai in her study, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005), examines the “formation of the new worker-subject, dagomei.” She considers this gendered worker-subject as “a newly embodied social identity emerging in China to meet and resist the changing socioeconomic relations of the country and the needs of capital” (19). With a focus on rural women living in Beijing, Tamara Jacka’s ethnographic study, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (2006), offers in-depth analyses of the experience of rural women who left their homes for urban centers at the end of twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries (4–5). Based on investigative journalism, Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2009) provides detailed information about rural young women’s experience in factories of multinational corporations. Breaking away from ethnography, Wanning Sun’s recent study Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices (2014) broadens the sociological framework by highlighting the cultural politics with regard to migrant workers’ cultural productions. Considering “the figure of the rural migrant” as a most important embodiment of “subalternity,” Sun investigates the ways in which “rural migrants as a group invent new genres and media forms and appropriate existing—even hegemonic—media and cultural forms and practices” (10). Sun contends that “the revolution in the realm of culture” in China has begun, though its “course” is unpredictable. Although Sun identifies Zheng Xiaoqiong as “the most respected female dagong [migrant worker] poet,” her examination of Zheng’s work is only a fraction of her broad survey of migrant workers’ cultural productions. Migrant Ecologies builds on and extends these studies by analyzing Zheng’s poems with an ecocritical approach. Scholars in the humanities have further expanded on the representations of migrant workers through the workers’ own literary writings, including Zheng’s poems. The anthology Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry (2016) edited by Xiayu Qin and translated by Eleanor Goodman introduces an important body of cultural productions to English readers. It includes fourteen poems by Zheng, which are not exclusively about women migrant workers. As the title Iron Moon suggests, the major themes of the poems, including those by Zheng, Qin notes, are dehumanization, alienation, and an emergent sense of social injustice, particularly among a younger generation of migrant workers (28–30). Informative and provocative, Maghiel van Crevel’s 2018 overview of Chinese migrant-worker literature “The Cultural Translation of Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige),” in Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, calls critical attention to the agency of literature by

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Chinese migrant workers. Van Crevel observes that “in terms of cultural production,” “battlers [migrant workers] literature had become Dongguan’s claim to fame” (256). He contends the fact that migrant workers literature has become a significant part of the desirable cultural identity of Dongguan, a major manufacturing center known as “factory of the world” and a so-called mega-city of migrant workers, testifies to the transformative agency of literature by migrant workers, of whom Zheng Xiaoqiong has been recognized as the most prominent representative. De Crevel further notes that Zheng’s poetry “conjoins an original, effectively insistent literary style with an activist agenda, particularly on behalf of female (migrant) workers. Her talent was soon recognized, first by fellow battler poets and then by professional critics” (255–256). Amy Dooling in her 2017 article “Representing Dagongmei (Female Migrant Workers) in Contemporary China” in the journal Frontiers of Literary Studies in China also singles out Zheng’s poetry as a salient example of a new literary phenomenon. She observes that “the massive movement of female peasants from the fields into the factories” has “given rise to new modes of imagining and representing women as workers in contemporary literary and visual culture” (135). These works highlight the importance of migrant worker poetry, especially Zheng’s, in contemporary Chinese culture and literature. My study adds to the depth and breadth of growing scholarship on Zheng’s work, by engaging with the local-global and socio-ecological aspects of rural migration and women migrant workers’ predicament. Recent critical studies of Zheng’s poetry have also extended the thematic scope and conceptual framework for reading Chinese migrant-worker literature. “Ecopoetics in the Dagong Poetry in Postsocialist China: Nature, Politics, and Gender in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems” (2018) by Gong Haomin, and “‘Slow Violence’ in Migrant Landscapes: ‘Hollow Villages’ and Tourist River Towns in China” (2017) by Zhou Xiaojing, both published in ISLE, read Zheng’s work through the lens of ecocritical theories. In addition, Zhou’s chapter “Scenes from the Global South China: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetic Agency for Labor and Environmental Justice” included in Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015) edited by Vidya Sarveswaran, Swarnalatha R., and Scott Slovic, helps expand the study of Chinese migrant worker literature, particularly Zheng’s poetry, beyond national borders.6 Moving beyond both national borders and disciplinary boundaries of ecopoetics, my reading of Zheng’s poems in Migrant Ecologies engages with the layered entanglements of migrant ecologies. With interdisciplinary critical theories and global perspectives of environmental humanities, Migrant Ecologies seeks to advance critical studies of migration and Zheng’s poetry with a focus on gendered labor exploitation, rural migration to factories and cities, the local-global connections, and women migrant workers’ plight and agency. In their introduction to the emergence of environmental humanities

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Introduction

as a new field of studies, Robert Emmett and David Nye write that the development of environmental humanities is directly linked to new scholarly inquiries in the intricate connections between “the environment and humanity.” Therefore it has become “imperative to abandon narrow disciplinary traditions in order to grasp these interconnections” (4). They emphasize that the “global environmental crisis demands new ways of thinking” and the “planetary crisis can best be addressed through an interdisciplinary approach to environmental change that include the humanities” (7). Thus, the “critical agenda of environmental humanities emerged in response to a multi-pronged crisis of ecology, economy, politics, and epistemology” (8). DeLoughrey and her coeditors of Global Ecologies “define the environmental humanities as a field whose core role is to offer a culturally differentiated, historically nuanced understanding of human-environmental relations, and which is self-reflexive about the limitations of any single methodological approach or philosophical standpoint” (“Introduction” 9). These concepts and approaches are characteristics of the ecocritical theories and scholarship I draw on in my reading of Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China. A critical inquiry in the migrant ecologies embedded in women migrant workers’ lives indicate that large-scale rural migrations in China are not unrelated to migrations elsewhere resulting from climate change. WOMEN MIGRANT WORKERS AND ZHENG XIAOQIONG Migrant Ecologies breaks away from traditional literary studies in terms of approach and content. In order to foreground the voices and perspectives of Chinese women migrant workers, and to make Zheng’s poems about them available to readers in English, this study includes the authors’ translations of 23 poems from Women Migrant Workers (《女工记》2012), which consists of 100 poems, 14 field notes and an afterword in prose. All but eight of the poems are entitled with the name of a woman migrant worker. By giving the workers’ names to the poems about them, Zheng seeks to reclaim the individuality and humanity of individual workers who are typically identified by their work numbers or positions on the assembly line. Having experienced the dehumanization and erasure of individuality in factories, Zheng asserts that “every name signifies an individual’s dignity,” and behind every name is a unique individual and experience erased by statistics, effaced as faceless, disposable labor (Women Migrant Workers 257). She wants to restore in the poems the dignity of the workers, expose the exploitation of gendered labor, reveal the invisible toxins in the workshops, and give voice to the workers’ protests.

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Reclaiming women migrant workers’ individual dignity and agency through creative writing, for Zheng, is an ethical commitment, as well as an aesthetically challenging project. She observes that media reports on migrant workers overwhelmingly focus on success stories, which render invisible other stories about the majority of rural migrant workers’ struggles (“On Women Migrant Workers” October 3, 2015). Her experience with reporters eager to publicize her success after she won some literary awards helped her realize what she needed to focus on in writings about her fellow migrant workers. She wants to call public attention to the “little people” in society, who are “holders of the world.” Underlying her determination to write about marginalized migrant workers is a compelling sense of resistance to the crushing violence of exploitation and oppression. She says, “I hope these women migrant workers won’t be reduced to numb tools or instruments, or become perpetrators of cruel violence against others. . . . I am deeply concerned about the accumulating violence at the bottom of society, I worry about the violence resulting from oppression, and what kind of force it might have, and how it would distort our country!” (Women Migrant Workers 260). She spent seven years writing about the lives of women workers, conducting hundreds of interviews and spending countless hours with the workers, including former colleagues, old friends, and strangers. Even after she became a professional poet and an editor at the prestigious literary magazine Works (《作品》) in Guangzhou in 2008, Zheng kept going back to Dongguan to carry on her fieldwork. She rented a room in Dalang, Dongguan, and took the bullet train there every Friday evening to be with the workers, returning to work every Monday morning, shuttling between the industrial zone and the metropolis, between production lines and office buildings, as she continued working on the project. While she had gathered abundant firsthand materials about the workers, she found herself facing a dilemma in choosing the appropriate form for recording those lives. How to capture each of the workers’ lives on paper? In poetry, prose, or as documentary? After experimenting with a serial form approach, Zheng abandoned it, realizing it was not appropriate for achieving the effect she envisioned (Zheng, “On Women Migrant Workers,” October 2, 2015). Ultimately, it was journalistic reports on migrant workers in the media that helped Zheng realize what genre and form would best suit what she was seeking to capture in her writings about women migrant workers. She noticed that reporters only chose what they wanted for their preconceived purposes. The stories they selected to tell were limited and exclusive, yet they were portrayed as representative of the collective situation of migrant workers. More often than not, the reports use the plural “they.” When her own literary fame attracted more and more media attention, the reports presented her as a typical success story of how women migrant workers had developed their

16

Introduction

talents and realized their potentials. Subsequently, Zheng pointed out, too many individual workers’ drastically different experiences were ignored and disappeared into the partial, reductive representation of the collective “they.” She realized that she must depict individual women in her writing to reclaim the individuality and complexity of each worker (Women Migrant Workers 252–253). Titling each poem with the name of a woman migrant worker highlights the significance of each woman’s life portrayed and enhances the ways in which individual workers’ dreams and tribulations are interwoven with local and global networks. Lyric poetry allows Zheng to reveal individual workers’ interiority and agency through each one’s voice, gaze, and thoughts, and to situate each worker’s experience in a larger context that links the factory, the city, and the village to the world. Two poems she wrote in serial form eventually found their way into Women Migrant Workers, placed respectively at the beginning and end of the collection, providing an overarching theme and context for the other ninety-six poems, or lives, in the collection. The opening poem, “Woman Migrant Worker: Youth Stuck at a Station on the Assembly Line,” depicts the loss of youth and health of a young female worker through her own observations. Repeating the same action on the production line where she has been working for ten years, the worker watches her “pale youth running from an inland village / to a coastal factory all the way to a store shelf in the USA.” At the same time, she finds her dreams broken on the assembly line, and her body diseased by the toxins in the factory. She also notes the felled lychee trees near the factory, implying environmental destruction by industry (Women Migrant Workers 3). Through the gaze of the worker, Zheng links rural migration to economic globalization, environmental degradation, gendered labor exploitation, and industrial diseases. Thus, the poem has the agency of testimony to social injustice, bearing witness to a woman migrant worker’s plight and to the slow violence of industrialization and global capitalism. It properly provides an overarching context for the rest of the poems in the collection. The concluding poem, “Women Migrant Workers: Rural China’s Heart of Forbearance,” highlights the strengths, significance, and persistent plight of rural women migrant workers living on the margins of society, exiled from the cities where they remain outsiders. The poem simultaneously sings the exploited and marginalized lives, exposes their deplorable condition, and critiques environmental destruction and gendered labor exploitation through portrayals of polluted rivers and the women migrant workers’ toxin-sickened bodies, calling into question the apparent prosperity and progress supposedly brought about by industries and globalization. In her poems, Zheng situates the workers’ lives, including the lives of sex workers, in the context of social and cultural changes, rapid urbanization,

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rural migrations, ecological degradation, and environmental pollution, along with the development of a market economy in China and the impact of globalization. In fact, Women Migrant Workers captures the profound changes taking place in China through vignettes of women migrant workers’ material memoirs. These vignettes transmit the individual workers’ distinctive voices, perspectives, experiences as testimonies, exposing what Nixon calls “slow violence” against marginalized individuals, communities, and the environment hidden behind spectacular prosperity and modernization. OVERVIEW OF CHAPTERS Migrant Ecologies consists of three chapters, not including the Introduction or Conclusion. A number of poems translated by the author from Zheng’s collection are placed at the end of each chapter according to their respective subject matters and thematic concerns. In addition, two poems from the same collection by Zheng, also translated by the author, are integrated in the Conclusion. Chapter 1, “Vignettes of Material Memoirs: Toxic Environment and Women Migrant Workers’ Industrial Diseases,” examines the pervasive “slow violence” against workers and the environment in China concealed under made-in-China products shipped to the rest of the world. Drawing on Nixon’s and Alaimo’s respective ecocritical theories, I argue that the mobility of trans-corporeality reveals that environmental pollution, workers’ vocational diseases, and ecological crises are locally and globally interconnected. So too are local and global “social injustice, lax regulations, and environmental degradation” (Alaimo 15). Following Zheng’s depiction of the workers’ movement from inland villages to factories in the coastal cities, chapter 2, “‘Carceral Capitalism’: Factory Cities and Villages-in-the-City,” examines migrant workers’ lives in two migrant spaces—factory cities and villages-in-the-city produced by global capitalism and urbanization. Apart from examining the impact of labor management in gigantic city-size factories on the workers, including the workers’ suicides at Foxconn industrial parks, I discuss the emergence and functions of another migrant space—slum urban villages where migrant workers live and where a “grey economy” including underground prostitution emerged. Jackie Wong’s notion of “carceral capitalism” informs my analysis of Zheng’s portrayals of the hopeless cycles of poverty among women migrant workers stuck in spaces of gendered migrant labor such as factory cities, villages-inthe-city, and massage parlors, which are interconnected by global capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization in China. Pursuing further even less visible, but no less important, entanglements of migrant ecologies, chapter 3, “The ‘Other Scene’ of Globalization: ‘Hollow

18

Introduction

Villages’ and Migrant Workers’ Families,” examines the impact of globalization on migrant workers’ home villages through women migrant workers’ lives. In contrast to the factory cities with armies of young migrant workers, many rural migrant villages become so-called “hollow” villages whose predominant populations are the aging grandparents and left-behind children of migrant workers. These hollow migrant villages in China remain invisible or marginal in the dominant media and discourses on migrations, urbanization, and globalization. Engaging with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique of the limitations of studying globalization in terms of urbanization, I seek to call critical attention to migrant workers’ families and home villages—the “other scene of globalization” as Spivak would call them (74). My examination also draws on Doreen Massey’s contention that globalization has created some “new spaces” and destroyed others—such as those where “small-scale agriculture” was the livelihood (120). In addition, I highlight the impact of the disintegration of migrant workers’ families and the decline of their rural communities on migrant workers’ children as another form of invisible, attritional slow violence, another impact of carceral capitalism, at once the effect and cause of unequal symbiotic relationships embedded in migrant ecologies. Shifting from a focus on the exploitation and subjugation of women migrant workers to their agency of resistance and intervention, the “Conclusion: A Politics of Migrant Ecologies” highlights migrant workers’ activism beyond local and national boundaries. Borrowing Grosz’s ecological theory concerning entangled generative, transformative processes of becoming mobilized by movements and differences, I highlight the transnational activist networks of migrant workers built through strikes and cultural activities. The interactions and collaborations between Walmart workers in China and in the United States, the influence of Zheng’s poetry on the migrant workers’ poetry readings in Singapore and Malaysia, and Zheng’s role in the 2018 Global Migrant Festival in Singapore are salient examples of the shared self-empowerment of migrant workers and communities. These dynamics generate the emergence of new migrant subjectivity and new cultural productions, including migrant literatures. The impact of migrant workers’ resistance to subjugation and agency for self-determination is not limited to themselves or their communities. The facts that Zheng’s poetry has been translated into more than a dozen languages, that she has been invited to give readings in dozens of countries around the world, and that her poems about women migrant workers have been performed in musical interpretations at concert halls in Germany and the United States demonstrate another aspect of globalization. These unexpected transnational networks and cultural activities generated by migrant workers’ activism and literature reveal a politics of migrant ecologies that defies confinement within national borders.

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NOTES 1. Huangma Ling is an industrialized rural village of Donguan, an export manufacturing center, in Guangdong Province. A different version of this translation by the author appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 2016), 102–103, published by University of Minnesota Press. All the translations of poems, prose, and interviews by Zheng Xiaoqiong included in this book are translated by the author. 2. Because of the hukou system, a population residential registry system in China, those who work and live in the cities still maintain their rural residential status. This policy creates unequal access to resources since government funds for cities are usually allocated according the number of urban residents. Thus the term “migrant worker” in China refers to factory workers from rural China, whose status in the city are marginalized and who do not have long-term security in their employment. Many of them switch from factory to factory within a short period of time. For more information on migrant workers’ social status, see Pun Ngai, Eric Florence, Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, Michelle Dammon Loyalka, and China Labour Bulletin. 3. I am grateful to 曾海津/Zeng Haijin, a literary critic and friend of Zheng Xiaoqiong, for obtaining both photos of past and contemporary Huangma Ling, an industrialized village, where Zheng was a migrant worker for a couple of years. 4. The term and concept of “migrant ecologies” emerged during the process of my collaboration with Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino in putting together a special cluster of articles under the title “Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)bordered World” for ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 24.2 (Spring 2017), of which I am a contributing editor. Since then, I have further developed my understanding of migrant ecologies, as my discussions of existing scholarship on migrations in this Introduction suggest. 5. I critique the portrayals of migrant workers’ success stories in Factory Girl and other workers on rural migration in China. See Zhou, “Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems on the Global Connection to Urbanization and the Plight of Migrant Workers in China.” 6. Zheng’s poems, especially those from Women Migrant Workers, have been translated into many languages, including French, Japanese, Malay, German, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Zheng has given readings at several poetry festivals abroad, the most recent one being the 2019 International Poetry Festival Rotterdam.

Chapter 1

Vignettes of Material Memoirs Toxic Environment and Women Migrant Workers’ Industrial Diseases

Globalization has produced unprecedented complex entanglements between peoples, countries, consumers, and workers separated by vast distances, economic disparities, and structural inequalities of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Yet, these entanglements are often invisible, especially to those living in rich, powerful countries, whose privilege and comfort are in part sustained by the movements of transnational capital and disposable labor. In his 2016 The New York Times article, “What San Francisco Says about America,” Thomas Fuller, the San Francisco bureau chief for The New York Times, made some insightful observations about the phenomenon of economic globalization. After living for “more than 27 years abroad, mostly as a foreign correspondent in Asia,” Fuller gained a broader perspective on the connections between Asia and the United States. Although “Asia feels very far away” in his life back in the United States, he “had an odd flash of connection with” that continent when he was in Walmart. He notes: It struck me that the ordered rows in Walmart didn’t look that dissimilar to the factories in Asia where most of these products came from. It was as if there was a symmetry across the Pacific between the producers and the consumers, between the factory and the cash register. I stood in the checkout line and watched milk-fed Americans unloading their carts onto the conveyor belt. My mind flashed back to the diminutive workers in a factory I visited in Tianjin, China, who for a few hundred dollars a month stitched leather boots and who giggled when they thought about the giant feet that would one day fill them.

Even though Fuller’s observations highlight the disparity between factory workers in China and consumers in the United States, the dehumanization of factory workers on the assembly line and the detrimental impact of 21

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multinational manufacturing industries on women migrant workers’ health and on the environment in China remain out of sight to consumers in the United States and many other countries around the world. This invisibleness distances American consumers from Chinese migrant workers, whose cheap labor at once reflects and sustains the former’s structurally produced comfortable way of life. While some reportage on women migrant workers provides abundant detailed information about their working and living environments against the background of large-scale manufacturing in China, the damage done by transnational capital to the workers’ health or the environment remains obscure. In her book, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2009), Leslie Chang sheds light on the kind of labor that goes into the making of running shoes in China for the world market. “It takes two hundred pairs of hands to make a running shoe” (98). This many hands are involved because the production operates on an assembly line. It begins with the work of cutters, followed by stitchers who sew the cut pieces together “into the shoe upper, attaching other things—a plastic logo, shoelace eyelets—as they go. After that, sole-workers use infrared ovens to heat pieces of the sole and glue them together” (98). And then, assemblers—typically men, as the work requires greater strength—stretch the upper over a plastic mode, or last, shaped like a human foot. They lace the upper tightly, brush glue on the sole, and press the upper and the sole together. A machine applies ninety pounds of pressure to each shoe. Finishers remove the lasts, check each shoe for flaws, and place matched pairs in cardboard boxes. The boxes are put in crates, ten boxes to a crate, and shipped to the world within three days. Every shoe has a label on its tongue: MADE IN CHINA. (Ibid)

This detailed description of the production process of a running shoe reveals how the two hundred pairs of hands involved in the making of one shoe work smoothly and efficiently alongside the machine that presses each shoe. In fact, each pair of hands has become part of the machine. So, too, has each worker on the assembly line. Yet, Chang’s observation of the workflow on the assembly line and the reportage style are insufficient to fully expose what is hidden under such apparently efficient production conditions. Associated with the made-in-China products is a pervasive “slow violence” against the workers, the environment, and rural communities in China. In his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon defines “slow violence” as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). In confronting the erasure and marginalization of slow violence as such, Nixon

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raises provocative questions that urge us to think about interventional possibilities of strategic representations. As he asks: In an age when the media venerate the spectacular . . . , how can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation driven technologies of our imageworld? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical changes of our time? (3)

Contemporary poets in China, including migrant worker poets, especially Zheng, enact the agency of literature to disrupt the invisibility and silence about “attritional violence” that is veiled by the focus on national GDPs, trade deficits, and the loss of American jobs in the media and political rhetoric in the United States. It is also rendered unapparent by government policies driven for modernization and progress equated with industrialization, urbanization, and the global market economy in China. The impact of long hours of labor and toxic working environments on migrant workers’ health is a major concern in poems by migrant workers. “Medicine Bags in a Corner of a Factory Workshop” by Zhang Guoliang (张国良) included in Selected Best Poems about Migrant Labor in China, 2008, is a salient example. Zhang describes the piles of medicine bags, which his coworkers left by a water fountain in the workshop as “small mountains” weighing down on his heart that “aches for” them. The speaker says, we young workers who labor “like old oxen / live like ants,” are surrounded by “visible dusts and invisible viruses” that “Penetrate gradually our underprivileged bodies / Invading our impoverished lungs” (215). Zhang ends the poem by comparing the medicine bags, or rather the workers’ diseased bodies, hidden in the factory to “a dull pain without cure” of the “industrial age” (215). While Zhang’s poem exposes the covert environmental injustice in the factory, the speaker’s concluding statement seems to suggest that the workers’ vocational diseases are inevitable of an industrial era. Nevertheless, Zhang significantly links the workers’ illness to the problems of industrialization in China. Other poets, especially Zheng Xiaoqiong, make even broader connections in confronting the plight of Chinese migrant workers. The poem “ShoeMaking Girls” by Fang Zhou (方舟) calls the reader’s attention to a hidden reality in a shoe factory, in which consumers outside of China are indirectly implicated. It begins by highlighting “an unknown gas” that “permeates the workshop of a shoe factory” in contrast to the stirring spring breeze that has

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become irrelevant to the factory girls’ bodies reduced to machines and products, corroded by invisible toxins (26). Fang compares the young women’s bodies to “crates after crates of uniformly coded work clothes and shoe billets” (26). “Just as the managers of the factory’s human resources can’t tell their names, / the factory girls can’t tell the many secrets of the shoe factory in the industrial zone” (27). As the poem develops with the gas that infuses the workshop, passing through the bodies of the young women, leaving evidence of its toxic corrosion on their hands, Fang links the workers to consumers, including those in the United States. He juxtaposes the invisible gas and its impact on the female workers with the image of a pair of enlarged shoes in advertisements on the television screens, and with “the display of fine shoes in boutique stores on the Time Square” (27). This juxtaposition highlights what Nixon calls “ecologies of looking” in his analysis of “game reserves” and “native reserves” in South Africa, where racially segregated spaces are “inextricably bound” to “visibility and invisibility,” “looking and looking away” which are mutually constituted (“Stranger in the Eco-Village” 160). The logic and effects of the ecologies of looking help produce and maintain the invisibility of the damage on the workers’ health by toxic materials in the shoe factory. The eye-catching sight of an enlarged shoe in ubiquitous advertisements, and the aesthetically arranged exhibition of expensive shoes in boutique stores on a most popular space—the Time Square—reinforces the unseen “slow violence” against the polluted young women workers’ bodies, whose latency helps sustain the hidden connections between the local and the global, between the workers and consumers. The effects of the ecologies of looking are part of the entanglements in migrant ecologies that entail the movements of capital, labor, and products within and across national borders. In Fang’s poem, the news broadcast, resonating with the dispersal of the toxic gas in the shoe factory, spreads the news that a girl who had left the factory and returned home to the poor countryside has fallen, “her industrial career was a piece of suspicious medical history.” Moreover, “A group of shoe-making girls / in the speechforbidden workshop are imagining spring” (27). Meanwhile, “One pair, one thousand pairs, countless pairs of shoes / are running alongside us,” sounding “forward,” echoing the idea of progress equated with industrialization and globalization (Fang Zhou 27–28). The juxtaposition of the fallen young woman in the countryside with the girls in the shoe factory in the city hint at another aspect of migrant ecologies—the rural migration of young people to urban manufacturing centers in China to provide cheap, disposable labor for transnational capital and the world market. Their movements from the countryside to the city as a mobile labor force are intertwined with the movements of products from factories in China to other countries on

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different continents. According to Chang, “one-third of the world’s shoes are made in Guangdong Province.” And 70,000 people—“the entire population of Santa Fe, New Mexico, under the age of thirty”—work at the factory of the transnational Yue Yuen company of athletic shoes in Dongguan (99). The mobilizing power of capital distributes the benefits and costs unevenly between the rural and urban populations, and between the Global South and the Global North. Although contemporary Chinese poems such as Zhang and Fang’s discussed earlier and those collected in Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry (2016) confront the toxic working environment and its effects on migrant workers, they do not address the impact of transnational capitalism on the environment in China. Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poems collected in Women Migrant Workers spotlight the obscured slow violence resulting from entangled networks of the global market, industrialization, and urbanization in China. Zheng weaves these inextricable connections between the deterioration of migrant workers’ health and the degradation of the environment, between the global market and rural migration in China from the perspectives of the workers. Moreover, Zheng’s depiction of individual women migrant workers’ experience highlights the importance of each worker’s life, while exposing gendered labor exploitation and slow violence against female workers’ bodies and the earth. In the opening poem, “Woman Migrant Worker: Youth Stuck at a Station on the Assembly Line,” of Women Migrant Workers, Zheng links the fatigue and illness of a worker, who has spent ten years on the assembly line, to economic globalization and environmental degradation. She employs the poetic device of enjambment to highlight these intertwinements, connecting the machine and industrial materials to the worker’s bodily disorder, interlacing the movement of the worker from her home village to the factory with the movement of products from China to store shelves in the United States. The enjambment also links the commodities in the American stores to the worker’s fatigue and vocational illness, to the industrial district and the felled lychee trees, and then back to the moving products on the assembly line. At the same time, Zheng employs caesuras between phrases within the lines to emphasize the meanings of certain phrases, and to foreground the contrasts and parallels, as the following lines illustrate:              She sits at her station on the assembly line as moving products intertwine with time devouring her So fast has she aged ten years flown by like running water. . . . Immense fatigue drifts in her mind. . . . For so many years she’s been keeping company with screws one two turn left right fixing her dreams and youth on a product watching

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her paled girlhood running all the way from an inland village to a coastal factory all the way to a store shelf in the U.S.A. Exhaustion and industrial disease accumulate in her lungs stuck in her throat her menstruation no longer regular her coughing convulsive In the development zone beyond the factory green lychee trees are felled the machines by her side tremble. . . . She rubs her red swollen eyes and places herself among the moving products on the assembly line. (Women Migrant Workers 1–2)

Through deft literary strategies, Zheng situates a woman migrant worker’s ten-year life on the assembly line and her physical ailment in a socio-ecological web that links U.S. consumers to migrant labor, deforestation, and economic development in China. In so doing, she renders visible the unapparent connections of migrant ecologies, implicating American consumers, among others, in the worker’s industrial illness and environmental destruction in China. Zheng exposes global networks of social injustice and environmental destruction through resonance, analogies, and juxtapositions. She arranges the lines of the poems in such a way that the movement of products on the assembly line resonates with the movement of a woman migrant worker from an inland village to a coastal factory. These movements converge on a store shelf in the United States, carrying the migrant worker’s lost youth and dreams. Zheng also juxtaposes the images of the fatigued, sick migrant worker in the factory with felled lychee trees in the development zone, foregrounding the interrelated emergence of a new kind of labor for the world market and disappearance of trees, forests, and cropland. In ironic contrast to these movements, the woman migrant worker is trapped in the factory, confined to a fixed station on the assembly line, reduced to machine-like labor. As the opening poem of her collection “Woman Migrant Worker” establishes an overarching context for the rest of the poems about women migrant workers, whose lives are bound up in the web of movements and intertwinements of the local and the global, the socio-ecological and the corporeal. Figure 1.1, the photography of the largest mobile-phone manufacturer in China taken by Edward Burtynsky in 2005, illustrates effectively the confining station for each worker on the endless, interconnected assembly lines1 (see figure 1.1). The individual and collective experiences of women migrant workers in China are salient examples of the uncontainable “trans-corporeality” which Stacy Alaimo theorizes as a site that “may incite inquiry into global networks” (Bodily Natures 16). In her book Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Alaimo “explores the interconnections, interchanges, and

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transits between human bodies and nonhuman natures” (2). Particularly pertinent to my investigation of migrant ecologies embedded in Zheng’s poems is Alaimo’s emphasis on “the movement across bodies” and “different sites,” which “opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (Bodily Natures 2). The mobility of trans-corporeality reals that environmental pollution, workers’ vocational diseases, and ecological crises are locally and globally interconnected. As Alaimo contends: Matters of environmental concern and wonder are always “here,” as well as “there,” simultaneously local and global, personal and political, practical and philosophical. Although trans-corporeality as the transit between body and environment is exceedingly local, tracing a toxic substance from production to consumption often reveals global networks of social injustice, lax regulations, and environmental degradation. (Bodily Natures 15)

The concept of “trans-corporeality” calls our attention to the ways in which Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers’ industrial diseases urge us to trace “toxic substance from production” in China “to consumption” around the world through global networks of not only capital, labor, and materials but also “social injustice, lax regulations, and environmental degradation.” Herein lies the crux of environmental ethics in migrant ecologies. Placed at the beginning of the poetry collection, and with a generic identity, “A Woman Migrant Worker: Youth Stuck at a Station on the Assembly Line” encompasses the characteristics of the collective experience of women migrant workers and situates their plight in the larger contexts of globalization and rural migration. The links it makes between the factory and the village and between the worker’s industrial illnesses and the products on the global market provide a framework of the local-global networks for reading the rest of the poems about women migrant workers. A large number of the poems in Women Migrant Workers could be read as vignettes of what Alaimo calls “material memoirs” or “trans-corporeal” biographies which “insist that the self is constituted by material agencies that are simultaneously biological, political, and economic” (Bodily Natures 87). These trans-corporeal vignettes of women migrant workers lives are poetic testimonies of our “damaged planet” of migrations of capital, labor, materials, and commodities on an unprecedented scale, bearing witness to social and environmental injustice.2 Zheng emphasizes the intermeshing between the workers’ gendered, subjugated, exploited body and the working environment in poems such as “Lan Aiqun” (兰爱群), “Liu Lequn” (刘乐群), “Wu

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Chun Lan” (伍春兰), “Dong Weipin” (董卫平), and “Xu Rong” (旭容). Having worked at different factories, Lan Aiqun suffers from a variety of toxins accumulated in her body: Coughing nauseous . . . she finds the lubes in her lungs filled with sandy dust stuffed with lint from the woolen-mill iron rust from the hardware factory gelatin from the plastic plant . . . entangled in her chest like her depressive life stuck in her veins Clogged lungs the dark shadow of her life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . She at 42 has worked for six years at a woolen-mill four years in a hardware factory three years at a plastic plant two years   in an electronics factory Her veins are full of dust and pain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (Women Migrant Workers 32)

At once corporeal and social, personal and collective, the woman migrant worker’s body depicted in this and other poems by Zheng is reconstituted by its changing social, material, and cultural environments. More than the “proletarian lung” marked by the difference of class, these women migrant workers’ exploited and diseased bodies are what Alaimo calls “corporeal manifestations of race, class, and gender” (Bodily Natures 22). While their racial identity may not be a factor in shaping their social status in China, they have become part of the cheap labor of the Global South where peoples and countries still suffer from the legacies of colonialism and its racialized labor force. Displaced by urbanization and driven to cities by economic forces and familial obligations, women from the rural areas are part of the organized efficient cheap labor pool for regional, national, and transnational manufacturing corporations. Their gendered and subjugated bodies are particularly vulnerable to the toxic environment of factories, as their obligations to their families have changed from domestic duties to those of bread earners who provide for their families at the expense of their health. Globalization and industrialization have altered the traditional gendered divisions of labor in the villages. While some women have taken up the work of tending the fields that used to be men’s responsibilities, others have joined the rural labor migrations. Rachel Murphy provides specific examples of different changing patterns of gendered divisions of labor in her chapter, “The Impact of Labor Migration on the Well-Being and Agency of Rural Chinese Women: Cultural and Economic Contexts and the Life Course,” included in On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China. Her study reveals that “migration patterns are formed through interaction

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between the existing gendered divisions of labor that characterize each village, existing informal rules, and gender norms determining the intrahousehold allocation of resources as well as the gendered nature of urban labor demands” (246). In one village, about “15 percent of couples migrate together; in a further 35 percent of households the husband migrates alone, with his wife shuttling to varying degrees.” Whereas in another village, “around 50 percent of couples have left the village on a long-term basis” (248). Traditional women of the Hakka subethnic group of the Han in Jiaocun village of south Jiangxi Province “performed heavy farming tasks, such as plowing, and also traded in the local marketplace.” As a result of “decollectivization and economic reforms, Hakka women assumed responsibility for all tasks on the farm, leaving men free to use their transportable skills to find work in the cities.” This gendered division of labor in the village is changing due to migration. “In recent years some Jiaocun women have found work on assembly lines and they now account for nearly one third of migrants from the village. Most are single women or younger married women without children, though some leave their children with grandparents” (Murphy 249). Thus, labor migration also changed the cultural norms, particularly gendered roles in the patriarchal family structure, where rural women usually assumed the responsibility of taking care of young children and the elderly in the family by staying home even though they work in the fields as well. However, even when married rural women with children have left home to become migrant workers in factories, they still carry with them the responsibilities for their families, often continuing to play the role of the nurturing, self-less mother. Lan Aiqun, portrayed in the poem discussed earlier, is a salient example. After fifteen years of labor as a migrant worker in Guangdong, she returned home sick and old. But she “smiled” as she thought of how the money she had earned helped put her two children through college, and made it possible for her family to build a new house. Her only wish for herself is she could be buried under the orange tree behind the house when she dies (Women Migrant Workers 32–33). Her selfless sense of duty for her children and her willingness to sacrifice her health for the prosperity of her family seem to be an accepted norm by herself and her family. At the same time, the factories or the owners of the factories are rarely held accountable for the impact of the toxic working environment on the health of their workers. The temporary nature of migrant workers’ employment and the multiplicity of factories where they have worked make it very difficult for them to prove which factory is responsible for their illness. Thus, the apparent freedom of movement of migrant workers from factory to factory makes them more vulnerable, and the environmental and labor justice regarding migrant workers more challenging to uphold.

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Moreover, believed to have “nimble fingers,” rural women became an attractive labor, particularly to bosses of electronics factories. According to Murphy, “Since the early 1990s, when chain migration contracts were initially established with urban factories,” women of Qifeng, another village in South Jiangxi, “have availed themselves of this exit opportunity from the countryside” (250). Zheng, a migrant worker herself, provides firsthand knowledge of how women migrant workers are reduced to tools for industry as she reflects on her experience: Many times at job interviews, I am asked to show my hands for the interviewers to inspect. They ask me to move my fingers in various ways in order to see if I can do the particular kind of job in their factories. When I enter the workshop, the first thing the manager for thread-pulling, asks me to do is showing her my hands. She examines them closely and repeatedly before assigning me a position in the workshop. Assembling tiny springs requires slender fingers; thicker fingers can install steel shafts; bigger palms with nimble fingers can put together larger spare parts. (毛织厂/“The Woolen Mill” 112)

With “nimble fingers,” women migrant workers are more susceptible to toxins in electronic factories. In her study based on firsthand experience in a factory, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005), Pun Ngai reveals: “The electronics industry is particularly notorious for using toxic chemicals that damage the health of its workers.” Symptoms such as “headache, sore throat, flu and cough, stomach problems, backache, nausea, eye strain, dizziness and weakness, and aggravated menstrual pain” were common among women migrant workers in the electronic factory where she worked while doing research for her book (169–170). These symptoms of trans-corporal toxic contamination are produced by the typical operation of the electronic factory. As Ngai’s description makes clear: Nearly every operation and thus every job along the electronics production line involved a complex series of chemical processes. Cleaning, the first job of semiconductor assembly, uses the majority of the chemical agents, such as solvents, acids, or alkalis for degreasing, rinsing, etching, oxidizing, and buffing the electronic chips. These solvents can be highly toxic and are known to have long term effects on human health (Gassart 1985). (170)

Workers, especially those “involved in the assembly of printed circuit boards and semiconductors were routinely exposed to these toxic cleaning agents.” Of these chemical agents, the organic ones “such as alcohol and the aliphatic, aromatic, or chlorinated hydrocarbons were the most common (and probably the most poisonous) chemicals used in the workplace” (Ngai 170). The

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cleaning room filled with a pervasive, potent, and foul smell is a most dreaded place in the factory (ibid.). Figures 1.2 and 1.3, taken by Zhan Youbing (占有兵) of scenes in an electronics factory in Dongguan, show exhausted workers taking their allowed ten-minute break, in head-to-toes uniforms. The workers are allowed two ten-minute breaks, one in the morning, and the other in the afternoon3 (see figures 1.2 and 1.3). While the uniforms seem to suggest the workers are protected from the toxins in the workshop, Zheng’s poems reveal otherwise. Zheng exposes through cases of individual workers the fact that normalized unequal gender roles and their obligations put women migrant workers at greater risks of toxic contamination. In the poem “刘乐群/Liu Lequn,” the woman migrant worker, who is a dutiful mother, applies for transfer to another work position in the factory, where she will be in direct contact with solvents, for the sake of earning more money for her children. She feels fatigue from long, tedious hours of work on the assembly line, and she is aware of the damage of the cleaning chemicals on the body, but she still wants to be transferred:          She applied for transfer to a position that pays ¥100 more a month due to contact with solvents. The acidic, alkaline, greasy stuff needs to be bleach-washed, etched oxidized. These alcohols lipid compounds aromatics chlorinated hydrocarbons . . . blend into a stench pouring over her body. At thirty-five, a mother of two children, pressured by family responsibilities, she needs overtime, a job that pays a higher wage. She keeps comforting herself, “I’ll get used to all this after a while.” She has headaches drowsiness her pale face puffier. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .        toxic compounds penetrate and suffuse her body. If an instrument could measure, not only temperature, hardness, or glossiness, but also the degree of bodily pains, what level would the red needle point at? How would it calculate dizziness sore throat cough abdominal distension nausea eyes gradually blurry body heavier menstruation irregular? . . . (Women Migrant Workers 36–37)

The speaker’s question about what instruments could measure the pains and bodily ailments of this woman migrant worker indicates that this worker, a mother of two children, seems less important than the products whose qualities are constantly measured for defects and perfection. While “Liu Lequn” focuses on one worker, it addresses the plight of countless women migrant workers, whose health suffers to varied degrees from the toxicities in their working

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environments. Zheng strategically includes other workers in the poem through their voices and Liu Lequn’s remarks about them, as well as the speaker’s comments:    Here, pain can be relayed. She knows a worker before her, who after three years in this position went home sick and died within half a year. Yet she prefers to say “That was because she had bad luck, her physique couldn’t handle it. . . .”      She sighs about her co-worker who returned home to die: “So young only a little over twenty . . . .” She falls silent and puts her hands into the cleansing liquids. (Women Migrant Workers (37)

The fact that Liu Lequn chose to be transferred to a more hazardous position despite her awareness of the damage the cleaning chemicals can have on the body further spotlights her self-sacrifice as a dutiful mother. In a patriarchal society, self-sacrifice is an inculcated virtue of being a good woman, daughter, wife, and mother. Such a virtue in part serves to hide the slow violence against women and puts them at greater risk in factories, especially electronics factories whose majority labor force is made up of women who are supposed to have “nimble fingers.” The vignettes of women migrant workers’ material biographies or memoirs in Zheng’s collection call the reader’s attention to the cycle of slow violence produced by intricate socio-ecological networks entangled with local industrialization and economic globalization. In the poem entitled “Wu Chun Lan” (伍春兰), Zheng draws on her own experience and integrates her aunt’s voice into the narrative to highlight the fact that toxic working environment affects generations of women migrant workers’ health in a woolen mill. Wu Chun Lan, a senior worker, was Zheng’s mentor at the woolen mill where Zheng’s aunt also worked. Zhen deploys metaphors in such a way in order to situate Wu Chun Lan’s polluted, diseased body in a larger environment beyond the woolen mill: Years are like the lint in the woolen mill that flies into her body, taking root in her lungs, giving her inflammation, diarrhea, and   tightness in the chest. She’s used to the roaring noise in the workshop, the pig-blood soup   at every meal. “The fishy, thick, dark pig blood will take away the accumulated   wool lint in the lungs,” says she for years. She feels her lungs stuffed with more and more wool lint, . . . like the river by the village full of plastic bags, ashes of coal, and garbage. . . . She’s accustomed to the factory meals of winter gourd, potatoes,

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pig-blood soup . . . . She ladles half a bowl of the soup for me, saying “You are still young, eat more of this soup. It’ll cleanse your lungs. Don’t let the wool lint stick there.” . . . That was in 2001, I was learning wool knitting from her at a factory in Da Lang. She was a fellow worker of my aunt. (Women Migrant Workers 34–35)

Like the river by the village that has become part of a manufacturing district, the woman migrant worker’s body is exploited, polluted, and forgotten. As Lan Aiqun and Liu Lequn did, Wu Chunlan left her home village and her family to work in a factory, not as an escape from familial obligations, or for individual freedom and independence, but for the prosperity of her family: “From 1995 to 2008 she worked at / a disc knitting machine of the woolen mill in Da Lang, knitting out, with wool threads / a two-storied house for her family and a wife for her son, her back bended further, / her lungs stuffed with wool lint smothering her” (Women Migrant Workers 35). Having worked at the woolen mill for thirteen years, Wu Chunlan died of cancer. But the dying of women migrant workers, like the dying of the river, from industrial pollution continues. Precisely because human corporeality is in part socially and environmentally constituted, the gendered and classed body of women migrant workers as portrayed in Zheng’s poems exposes what is rendered invisible and disturbs celebratory, spectacular representations of China’s modernity and economic success. As stated in the poem, the woolen mill where Wu Chunlan, Zheng Xiaoqiong, and her aunt worked is in Dalang, a county of Dongguan which is a center of manufacturing industries in Guangdong Province. With a registered local population of 67,000 and a “floating population” of about 320,000, Dalang is a typical migrant town.4 The town’s administrative website boasts its large number of private enterprises, particularly in textile. In 2014, Dalang had more than 3,000 textile enterprises, now it has more than 6,000, including textile and other private industrial and commercial businesses. The textile industries have more than 40,000 computerized machines, which have replaced human labor.5 Such large numbers are characteristic of the celebratory rhetoric for promoting modernization through spectacular industrialization equated with progress. Before its transformation by industries, Dalang used to be rural and was known as “the land of lychee” in China. Recently, the Association of Textile Industry of China and the Association China Electronic Chamber of Commerce renamed it as “China’s Famed Town of Woolen Sweaters” and “Renown Town of Electronic Information Industry of China.”6 Zheng captures the remnants of rural Dalang and its transformation into an industrial district dominated by textile industry in her prose piece “The Woolen Mill,” through her own experience as a migrant worker there.7 In the voice of the narrator, Zheng observes that as she rides the bicycle through

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town, she notices some village houses and ancestral temples not demolished in time for relocation. Local residents who used to work in the fields tell her about the past of this place. Their stories depict a serene agricultural town with lotus and fish ponds, lychee orchards, running streams, fields of crops. Her landlady, who refuses to move with her children to one of the new commercial apartment buildings, lives in a bungalow with a courtyard and rents the empty rooms of her house to migrant workers, a.k.a. “peasant workers,” from other provinces. This phenomenon offers a glimpse into a new urban environment where remnants of a past rural village or town has become a “village in the city” surrounded by new high rises of urban development. Zheng has written poems and proses about life in the village-in-the-city, which I will discuss in the next chapter. The major concerns of both “The Woolen Mill” and “Wu Chunlan” are the impact of toxic working environments on women migrant workers’ health. Given the prose capaciousness, “The Woolen Mill” provides more details of both the living and working environment of women migrant workers, and situates it in a larger context of Dalang’s transformation, which reflects the socio-ecological and environmental transformations of China resulting from industrialization and urbanization intertwined with globalization. Zheng’s depiction exposes slow violence against both people and the environment as peasants are turned into machine-like workers, and villages are transformed into factories. These changes are part of the migrant ecologies, which call critical attention to invisible or marginalized damages hidden under the surface of economic prosperity. Zheng’s description of the workshop at the woolen mill exposes “the hidden reality of the small town” through “smells of liquid detergents from the woolen knitwear” mixed with the “sweaty smells of rural bodies” and “thick chemical smells of industry,” which are blended with the smells of “commercial clothing and knitwear of refined and elegant taste” (“The Woolen Mill” 111). Invisible yet undeniably present, these transcorporeal smells of labor and invasive smells of toxic chemicals render apparent the exploitation of labor and pollution of the workers’ bodies that haunt the finished products of “refined and elegant taste” transported to distant lands. Thus, Zheng links rural migration, labor exploitation, environmental pollution to the global market, situating the workers’ plight in both local and global entanglements. Embedded in Zheng’s narrative about women workers’ industrial diseases are webs of entangled changes in rural and urban communities of Dalang and beyond. Zheng alludes to the magnitude of rural migrations mobilized by the demand of labor for industries. The women migrant workers who “crowd together” in the workshop of the woolen mill are from Hubei, Hunan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Jiangxi, and other provinces. Working among them, Zheng feels “like a piece of wool thread, turning thinner and thinner, being pulled by the town, by the shuttles, by time, and by dreams into the machines to be

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turned around, around, back and forth into fabric” (“The Woolen Mill” 110). Her body imbued with the smell of strong chemical dye that has penetrated her clothes, hair, and skin into her “flesh and bones” accumulating continuously with minute wool dust. The woolen mill’s chemical smells are as persistent as the sound of the textile machines enveloping the industrialized town. Parallel to the transformation of rural areas like Dalang are profound changes of rural women into migrant workers for industries. With a “floating population” of more than four times the local residents, Dalang is a migrant town whose economic engines are driven by migrant workers from various parts of China. These migrant workers’ identities and social statuses are altered after leaving their villages to become cheap labor in the factories and remain outsiders in the cities. Women migrant workers’ subjectivities as mothers, wives, and daughters are reshaped by their changed identities from caregivers to bread earners. Zheng’s mentor in the woolen mill, Wu Chunlan, used to be a peasant in Hubei Province. Having worked at the mill for eight years, “she has earned the status of a mother, wife, and filial daughter with a profession. She has woven her life tightly into the fabrics, which are transported to far-away places, changed into old or new paper money sent from Dongguan to the distant countryside in Hubei” (“The Woolen Mill” 112). The irony in Zheng’s remarks about Wu Chunlan’s new identity and “earned” status at once evokes and critiques the patriarchal ideology of gendered virtue and filial obligations that coerce women migrant workers such as Wu Chunlan, Lan Aiqun, and Liu Lequn to sacrifice their lives and health for their families. The subjugation of women by patriarchy is exacerbated by capitalism and toxic working environment, resulting from industrialization and lack of regulations regarding labor and environmental justice. In her other poems about women migrant workers, Zheng not only indicates that women migrant workers’ plight is rendered invisible by spectacles of success and prosperity celebrated in the media. She highlights the mutually constituted invisibility and spectacle by juxtaposing the diseased body of a young woman migrant worker, Dong Weiping, with what is displayed on the television:    As she watches on TV the jubilation over China winning gold at the Olympics, or as she reads in the newspaper propaganda about her country’s development . . . she is so excited that she coughs convulsively. . . . A rotten rusty taste of iron surges in her delicate chest. (Women Migrant Workers 112–113)

The “iron rust” that is corroding the body of Dong Weiping and other migrant workers is a recurrent image in Zheng’s poems, evoking industrialization

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and its detrimental consequences. In his insightful essay “Who Touches the Iron of the Age: On Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry,” Zhang Qinghau points out the effect of Zheng’s unique diction and imagery, which not only reveal the marginalized lives at the lower strata of society but also capture the characteristics of the contemporary era through a “new aesthetics of iron”: “Iron” 铁, the word with a primitive root itself, is the symbol and center of her poetry, as this Chinese character appears frequently throughout Zheng’s poems. As a symbol of cold, hard, industrialized existence, as a metaphor of mass production assembly lines, as an alien power in sharp contrast to our vulnerable human bodies and nature, iron expresses “the aesthetics of [the] industrial era” and can be said to have an irreplaceable significance. Iron is the darkness and order as well as the soul and destiny of the age. It rules over this world as the humble life of flesh and blood appears powerless to resist it. If Zheng’s poetry has a unique aesthetic importance, its most salient metaphoric extension would be the way she offers to our age the cold, hard, new aesthetics of iron. (35)

While Zhang focuses on the aesthetic significance of Zheng’s poetry in confronting the vulnerability of humans in the industrial age, my reading seeks to highlight the ecological ethics of Zheng’s aesthetics as a form of labor and environmental activism. Her ecopoetics engages with what Nixon calls “the long dying—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological” which “are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory” (Slow Violence 2–3). Read as vignettes of material memoirs, Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers’ industrial illness address the central concerns Nixon raises for intervening in slow violence. Nixon argues, “In an age when the media venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need, a central question is strategic and representational” (Slow Violence 2). The “aesthetics of iron” in Zheng’s poetry is a representational strategy that does not simply reflect the apparently inevitable domination of industries over the world, as the poems of trans-corporeal toxicity discussed earlier demonstrate. “Animals,” a poem included in Zheng’s collection Liangge cunzhuang (《两个村庄》/Two Villages 67), is another salient example that shows the extent of ecological degradation intertwined with industrialization.8 It lists twenty-seven different animals, which have disappeared along with signs of traditional Chinese culture from the rural southern China: “Boats wooden ships of the Ming Dynasty, fishing nets of Qing Dynasty, lake dams, and seines.” The poem ends with the statement: “Ah, all these, I no longer see, except waste iron scraps of the chemical factory, / soupy muddy water, cold and grey plains holding poisonous liquids” (Liangge cunzhuang / Two Villages 67). Zheng strategically employs the method of cataloging the disappeared animals by their names through enjambment, which enhances the sense of scale of species

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distinction as part of the consequences of environmental degradation resulting from industrialization. Paradoxically, the naming of each disappeared animals in the poem makes their disappearance present, allowing their absence to haunt the landscape transformed by industries. Thus, Zheng’s ecopoetics enacts both protest against ecological violence and a form of mourning the irrecoverable losses, which refuses to erase the losses from either the landscape or memories. “Animals” is another testimony of the effects of trans-corporeal toxins. It urges us “to imagine ourselves in constant interchange with the environment and, paradoxically perhaps, to imagine an epistemological space that allows for both the unpredictable becomings of other creatures and the limits of human knowledge,” as Alaimo contends in arguing for the ethical implications of “toxic bodies” understood as “trans-corporeal space” (Bodily Natures 22). The “waste toxic iron scraps of the chemical factory” that pollute the water and soil and destroy the habitats of animals evoke the chemical toxins in the factories, which have invaded the bodies of women migrant workers, who are dying from industrial illness. Yet, their sufferings and deaths from toxicities in the factories, like those of the disappeared animals, are absent in the media saturated with spectacle of prosperity and wonders of science and technology. For example, proudly displayed in the exhibition of the municipal museum of Dongguan are the impressive figures of manufacturing products: “One out of every five televisions in the world is produced in Dongguan,” and “one out of every five woolen sweaters is made in Dongguan.”9 Also, a 2017 article appeared in the Dongguan Daily (Dongguan ribao) celebrated the metamorphosis of Dongguan from “a factory of the world” to “a manufacturing capital of artificial intelligence.” It gave a laudatory report on the amazing successes of iPhone enterprises in Dongguan, stating that in 2016 the quantity of iPhones produced by three Chinese companies, Huawei, OPPO, and Vivo in Dongguan, joined the ranks of the top five iPhone enterprises in the world, placed third to Samsung and Apple.10 “In other words,” the report says, “one out of five smart phones in the world was produced in Dongguan” (Huang Rui /黄锐, November 11, 2017). Moreover, “This is only the tip of the iceberg,” boasts the report. “There are many other manufacturing enterprises in our great Dongguan. At least half of the iPad touch panels are made in Dongguan. One of ten pairs of athletic shoes in the world are made in Dongguan. In addition, Dongguan produces about one-seventh of China’s exports of baby products.” The article concludes that as Guangdong Province aspires to become the “Silicon Valley” of China, “Dongguan is the backbone of this innovative urban belt” (Huang Rui /黄锐, November 11, 2017). These technology and GDP-driven spectacular claims in the media eclipses the slow violence against the environment and migrant workers. Situated in both the material and cultural contexts of the postmodern industrial age of globalization, Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers

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as vignettes of material memoirs offer some examples for meeting the challenges Nixon points out: How can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are show moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and that scar nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical changes of our time? (Slow Violence 2)

Zheng’s counter-spectacle narratives and images break the silence about gendered exploitation and environmental injustice though her dramatization of the women migrant workers’ lives might not galvanize the public into actions that lead to political intervention. The individual and collective experiences of women migrant workers in Zheng’s poems as vignettes of material memoirs are testimonies, bearing witness to the attritional disasters and slow violence eclipsed by the spectacular in the media. Moreover, Zheng’s poems not only depict the toxic bodies as an ethical and epistemological trans-corporeal space, revealing the entangled webs of the natural economy, the societal economy, and the market economy. They also call into question idealized economic prospect through industrialization at the expenses of the environment and migrant workers’ lives, and critiques ecological injustice. In “Xu Rong” (旭容), Zheng exposes the injustice in the migrant ecologies in which the peasant workers’ migrations from the village to the city and back to the village are marked by neglect of migrant workers’ health and by exploitation of migrant labor that helps build the industries and produce national and urban prosperities. Interlacing the individual and collective experiences of women migrant workers through the speaker, Zheng shows that the corrosive impact of industrialization on the workers is both physical and spiritual. As the speaker says: I read the fates of these women and mine Our bodies and souls eaten hollow by industry, undone by reality Only illness, broken fingers, wounds, fragmented memories of the times remain. (Women Migrant Workers 114–115)

While foregrounding the losses and pains inflicted on the rural populations by industries and the indifference of the public preoccupied with prosperity, Zheng illustrates that the workers’ often futile fight for proper medical

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treatment results from bureaucracy and social ills. As Xu Rong’s experience demonstrates: You drag your ailing body from the factory to the Occupational Disease Assessment Center the Environmental Protection Center, and the Department of Labor. You endure torture by social and bodily illnesses. (Women Migrant Workers 115)

The depiction of the fatigued, diseased, aging woman migrant workers in this poem further testifies to what Alaimo calls “the penetrating physiological effects of class . . . oppression, demonstrating that the biological and the social cannot be considered separate spheres” (Bodily Natures 28), Zheng exposes and critiques the material impact of ideologies and structural social neglect on women migrant workers. Zheng’s vignettes of material memoirs produce a counter-spectacle discourse, which exposes what Nixon calls “the long dying—the . . . discounted casualties, both human and ecological that . . .—are underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory” (Slow Violence 2–3). Situated in the globalized market economy, urban development, and industrialization, Zheng’s depiction of Chinese women migrant workers and their industrial diseases compels critical studies of literature, the environment, and globalization to engage in the politics of invisibility and amnesia that produce and sustain complex slow violence against systemically disenfranchised populations and discounted environmental ruination. Its embedded entanglements of movements, migrations, and their underlying systemic operations and consequences reveal a migrant ecology that opens up new possibilities for critical investigation.

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SIX POEMS BY ZHENG XIAOQIONG 女工被固定在卡座上的青春 / Woman Migrant Worker: Youth Stuck at a Station on the Assembly Line Time opens its gigantic mouth the moon rusts on the machine It’s haggard hazy opaque The ominous peril in her mind turbulent the cliffs of her body are collapsing dirt and gravel broken pieces of time filling up the ferocious river of the female body Confused tides no longer fluctuate according to season She sits in her seat     on the assembly line as moving products intertwine with time devouring her So fast has she aged ten years flown by like running water . . . immense fatigue drifting in her mind. . . . For so many years she’s been keeping company these screws one two turn left right fixing her dreams and youth on a product watching her paled youth running all the way from an inland village to a coastal factory all the way to a store shelf in the U.S.A. Exhaustion and industrial disease accumulate in her lungs stuck in her throat menstruation no longer regular her coughing convulsive In the development zone beyond the factory green lychee trees are felled the machines by her side tremble. . . . She rubs her red swollen eyes and places herself among the moving products on the assembly line. (Women Migrant Workers 1–2)

Translator’s note: A slightly different version of this translation appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016, p. 98. This journal is published by University of Minnesota Press.

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兰爱群/Lan Aiqun Coughing, nauseous . . . she finds her lungs burdened with sandy dust, stuffed with lint from the woolen-mill, iron rust from the hardware factory, gelatin from the plastic plant . . . entangled in her chest, as if her dull life is stuck in her veins and clogged lungs, the shadows of her life. She feels her lungs two withering trees rooted in her body, as her breathing declines. She, at 42, has worked for six years at a woolen-mill four years in a hardware factory, three years in a plastic plant, two years at an   electronics workshop, her veins are full of dust and pain. Dragging her diseased body, she gets on a bus heading home, a smile appears on her pale haggard face. She left home in 1994, returned in 2009. She thinks about where her 15 years of life in Guangdong have gone— two children graduated from college, the family’s new storied house is built, leaving her with an ailing body to come home old and feeble. When she dies, she’d like to be buried under the orange tree behind the house. (Women Migrant Workers 32–33)

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刘乐群/Liu Lequn Her simple daily life is like a repeated dream—the assembly-line seat monotonous action, overtime fatigue, no conversations no expressions, only slings screws cassettes of tape . . . . The body is a shell sucked empty, like driftwood floating among familiar faces. She applies for transfer to a position which pays ¥100 more a month due to contact with solvents. The acidic, alkaline, greasy stuff needs to be bleach-washed, etched oxidized. These alcohols lipid compounds aromatics chlorinated hydrocarbons . . . blend into a stench pouring over her body. At thirty-five a mother of two children, pressured by family responsibilities, she needs overtime, a job that pays a higher wage. She keeps comforting herself, “I’ll get used to all this after a while.” She has headaches drowsiness her pale face puffier. The smothering cleaning room “smells worse than a hospital,” said a new worker. So did another. They all decided to leave. She smiles “Young women can’t endure much hardship.” She needs her monthly pay to be higher, toxic compounds penetrate and suffuse her body. If an instrument could measure, not only temperature, hardness, or glossiness but also the degree of bodily pains, what level would the red indicator point at? How would it calculate dizziness, sore throat cough, abdominal distension, nausea, eyes gradually blurry, body heavier, menstruation irregular? The engine of her body has stopped running somewhere, chemicals are damaging her nerves muscles bones and her tired veins. Incurable pain plagues her. Here, pain can be relayed. She knows a worker before her after three years in this position went home sick and died within half a year. Yet she tends to say “That was because she had bad luck, her physique couldn’t handle it. People eat all kinds of grains, who can escape illness or death . . . .” She sighs about her co-worker who returned home to die: “So young, only a little over twenty . . . .” She falls silent and puts her hands into the cleansing liquids. (Women Migrant Workers (36–37)

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伍春兰/Wu Chun Lan Years are like the lint in the woolen mill that flies into her body, taking root in her lungs, giving her inflammation, diarrhea, and tightness in the chest. She’s used to the roaring noise in the workshop, the pig-blood soup at every meal. “The fishy, thick, dark pig blood will cleanse the accumulated wool lint in the lungs,” says she for years. She feels her lungs stuffed with more and more wool lint, she coughs, like the river by her village full of plastic bags, ashes of coal, and garbage. I see her sit at the knitting machine, one hand pressing her chest, then she pauses to go to the washroom, and returns nonchalant to continue disc stitching. She’s accustomed to the woolen mill’s meals of winter gourd, potatoes, pig-blood soup . . . . She ladles half a bowl of the soup for me, saying “You are still young, have more of this soup. It’ll clear your lungs. Don’t let the wool lint stick there.” Her hands, callous, their knuckles big, shake with the rhythms of the knitting machines. Thin and small, her body stoops, her stomach spasms. She’s used to overtime, she doesn’t complain, unlike younger workers. That was in 2001, I was learning wool knitting from her at a factory in Da Lang. She was a fellow worker of my aunt. Like my short and small aunt, she had spent six years at the woolen mill. They were used to the tin-roofed house, darkness, and tightness in the chest. They stooped lower and lower, pressed by oppressive living, as wool lint in their lungs got thicker, one layer after another . . . . Unable to become used to the fishy thick pinkish pig-blood soup, or to the dark stools after eating the soup, or to fever and coughing, I finally left the factory. In the past few years, I’ve returned to visit my aunt and my past knitting teacher Wu Chunlan, who’d talk about her family’s newly built house in the countryside of  Sichuan, and her grown-up son . . . . Her stooped body grew thinner and stooped lower, bending toward the ground. From 1995 to 2008 she worked at a disc knitting machine of the woolen mill in Da Lan, knitting out, with wool threads a two-storied house for her family and a wife for her son, her back bending further, her lungs stuffed with wool lint smothering her. “Wu Chunlan died of cancer. Such a good person. Who’d expect her to be gone like that. Her good life had just begun . . . ,” said my aunt on the phone. (Women Migrant Workers 34–35)

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董卫平/ Dong Weiping Her health poor, she falls ill constantly and suffers from pain. Her feverish red face looks vulnerable. In sickness she receives some compassion: “She’s ill, you take care of her,” says the manager quietly to another worker. A bit sympathy gives her a sense of warmth in a strange town. She coughs, her breath smells of rusty iron, she looks fatigued and lethargic, but her gaze still retains a village girl’s gentleness. Shy, she bends her head, smiles, and avoids men—her fellow workers on the guy-wire assembly line. She uses an iron to solder tin wire. Amidst the gloss of wafers, she talks about Yunnan, its trees and mountains, fruits and flowers. Her co-workers teach her life’s compass, she remains silent, frugal, and modest. Many times when she is scolded by the group leader, I see her turning around to wipe her tears. She likes reading books, magazines, and novels by Guo Jingming. She feels inferior, timid. She tells me she has painful menstrual periods during which, her face is red with pain. She dares not ask for sick leave, saying her guy-wire group leader wouldn’t approve. She endures the smells of soldering and the infliction of menstruation colic. She says she was not used to soldering at the beginning, it made her nauseous. Now accustomed to it, she endures quietly the strange smell, overtime. . . . When she receives her wages, she sends money home in Yunnan with delight. As she watches on TV the jubilation over China winning gold at the Olympics, or as she reads in the newspaper propaganda about her country’s development . . . she is so excited that she coughs convulsively. . . . A rotten rusty taste of iron surges in her delicate chest. (Women Migrant Workers 112–113)

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旭容/Xu Rong Out of its futility life breads countless illusions Even in the face of death and depressing failures I’m full of resplendent respect for life It is life that allows me to witness the strangest scenes on earth I read the fate of these women or mine Our bodies and souls eaten hollow by industry we have lost ourselves too soon being dissolved by reality only illness  broken fingers wounds retain remnants of our era’s memories As I write down these lines  your pale face reveals your frailty  dizziness palpitations your breathing labored You’ve gradually gotten used to what the industrial age brings diseases pains glues benzene . . . entangled in the veins Bodily pains are not as frightening as the sickness of society Countless women who share your fate don’t know the root cause of their illnesses They leave others’ cities to return to their home villages suffering ailments dying in silence becoming part of the voiceless Industry is still displaying its own vainglorious landscape in its own way society still intoxicated with inexplicable prosperity You drag your ailing body from the factory to the Occupational Disease Assessment Center the Environmental Protection Center and the Department of Labor You endure torture by both social and bodily illnesses The medicine flowing in your blood strangles the throat of your sickness for the time being Social malady continues to corrode one canker after another making you see more clearly the truths of life True these outrageous ailments are too real to speak of but you must find their root cause I see in your lonely gaze the glint of honesty There’s too much pain we mustn’t continue to endure its infliction blindly “So many people died without their occupational    illnesses appraised” It’s more difficult than “the arduous paths to Shu” We are both from Shu,    experiencing the tortuous cliffhangers of our fate from “off the docket” to “thoracotomy for lung    examination” I am filled with uncontrollable pain and rage. . . . (Women Migrant Workers 114–115)

Translator’s note 1: This phrase—“the arduous paths to Shu” /“蜀道难”—is from a poem “Shudao nan” / (“Difficulty Paths to Shu”) by the Tang poet Libai. It refers to the extremely arduous paths from the ancient city Changan (present-day Xian) in Shanxi Province to Shu (the alias of Xichan Province). Translator’s note 2: “Thoracotomy for lung examination” (“开胸验肺” alludes to the extreme difficulties migrant workers encounter in having their

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occupational diseases assessed. The speaker refers to a widely publicized case of a migrant worker from Henan, Zhang Haizhao, whose pneumoconiosis was diagnosed by several hospitals. However, because those hospitals were not officially established by law as occupational disease assessment institutions, the diagnosis was “useless.” And Zhang’s factory refused to provide him with documents of evidence for his disease. Eventually Zhang requested to have “thoracotomy” to prove his case. This incident is commonly referred to as “thoracotomy for lung examination.” See https​://ba​ike. b​aidu.​com/i​tem/%​E5%BC​%80%E​8%83%​B8%E9​%AA%8​C%E8%​82%BA​ %E4%B​A%8B%​E4%BB​%B6/8​95144​4?fro​mtitl​e=%E5​%BC%8​0%E8%​ 83%B8​%E9%A​A%8C%​E8%82​%BA&f​romid​=8356​806&f​r=ala​ddin.​ Translator’s note 3: The English translation of this poem by the author was published on the 2019 Poetry International Festival Rotterdam website.

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NOTES 1. I am grateful to Keith Axline, for calling my attention to this photography published in his article, “Endless Assembly Lines and Giant Cafeterias: Inside China’s Vast Factories.” Science, June 25, 2007. https​://ww​w.wir​ed.co​m/200​7/06/​endle​ss-as​ sembl​y-lin​es-an​d-gia​nt-ca​feter​ias-i​nside​-chin​as-va​st-fa​ctori​es/. Permission to use this photo was granted by the photographer, Edward Burtynsky. 2. I borrow the phrase “damaged planet” from Arts of Living on A Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 3. 《毛织厂》/“The Woolen Mill” was published in the literary magazine October/Shiyue (十月), no. 4, 2015. It won the magazineinemagazineagazine17.s Bubandtbandt and Nils Bubandt this prose piece by the author appeared in Chinese Literature Today, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, pp. 110–113. 4. Note: This figure is from the 2013 census. See “Dalang Town,” /大朗镇 Baidu, https​://ba​ike.b​aidu.​com/i​tem/%​E5%A4​%A7%E​6%9C%​97%E9​%95%8​7/330​7461?​ fr=al​addin​#5. 5. See “Dalang Town,” /大朗镇 Baidu, https​://ba​ike.b​aidu.​com/i​tem/%​E5%A4​ %A7%E​6%9C%​97%E9​%95%8​7/330​7461?​fr=al​addin​#5. 6. See 陈明伟/ Chen Mingwei, blog, posted on December 7, 2010. https​://zh​idao.​ baidu​.com/​quest​ion/2​04048​731.h​tml. 7. “The Woolen Mill” was published in the literary magazine Shiyue (October / 《十月》), no. 4, 2015. It won the magazine’s 2015 award for best prose. Its English translation by the author appeared in Chinese Literature Today, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, pp. 110–113. 8. “Animals” translated by the author was published in CTL: Chinese Literature Today. 9. These information were on prominent display with pictures in the exhibition of the municipal museum of Dongguang when I visited the museum on May 24, 2016. 10. Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is a Chinese multinational networking and telecommunications equipment and services company headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong. Launched in 2004, with its headquarters in Dongguan, OPPO Electronics Corp. is a Chinese consumer electronics firm. Its major product lines include smartphones, Blu-ray players, and other electronic devices. Founded in 2009 in Dongguan, Vivo Communication Technology Co. Ltd. is a Chinese technology company owned by BBK Electronics, a Chinese multinational firm specializing in electronics such as television sets, MP3 players, digital cameras, and cell phones.

Chapter 2

“Carceral Capitalism” Factory Cities and Villages-in-the-City

Unprecedented large-scale urbanization and rural migration, resulting in part from a globalized market economy, have transformed the landscapes of China, producing new migrant spaces and subjects, which embody some new socio-ecological interconnections. One of these migrant spaces is the factory city, exemplified by the gigantic manufacturing plant, known as “Foxconn City” in Shenzhen, which has “15 multi-storey manufacturing buildings, each dedicated to one customer.” Foxconn is a subsidiary of Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, the world’s largest contract manufacturer, which makes products for Apple and other electronics companies such as Dell, HP, Nintendo, and Sony.1 According to a 2012 report by Mimi Lau, which appeared in South China Morning Post /华南早报, Foxconn employs about 800,000 workers in 12 factories dotted across 9 cities on the mainland. In 2 of its major Shenzhen plants, there are about 500,000 workers. The company is planning factories in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, Wuhan in Hubei and Zhengzhou in Henan” (“Struggle for Foxconn girl who wanted to die”). In Shenzhen the “Foxconn City,” a.k.a. Longhua Science and Technology Park, which covers about 1.16 square miles, is a walled campus with fifteen factories, dormitory buildings for the workers, a swimming pool, a fire brigade, its own television network (Foxconn TV), and a city center with a grocery store, bank, restaurants, bookstore, and hospital. About a quarter of the employees live in the dormitories, and many of them work up to twelve hours a day, six days a week. These armies of cheap migrant labor concentrated in factory cities represent more than the power of global capitalism; they reflect profound social and environmental transformations in China, the emergence of a new under-class, and the production of a form of spatially contained, closely managed and disciplined migrant labor. Figure 2.1, the photograph of an appliances factory in Cankun, southern China, taken by Burtynsky in 49

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2005, aptly illustrates the production of space by social relations and the scale of spatially enclosed migrant labor within a “factory city” (see figure 2.1). FACTORY CITIES AND “CARCERAL CAPITALISM” The migrant geography of factory cities—manufacturing centers for multitransnational corporations—evinces spatialized operations of global capitalism and management of migrant labor. This migrant geography evokes what Jackie Wang calls “carceral capitalism.” Wang’s critique of the effects of “predatory lending” on the poor and people of color, especially African Americans trapped in urban ghettoes, sheds light on the operations and impact of global capitalism on migrant workers and socio-ecological environments in China. By keeping people in a cycle of debt, Wang explains, predatory lending “uses the extension of credit as a method of dispossession.” “As predatory lending systematically prevents mostly poor black Americans from accumulating wealth or private property, it is a form of social exclusion that operates via the inclusion of marginalized populations as borrowers” (Carceral Capitalism, The New Inquiry https​://th​enewi​nquir​y.com​/carc​eral-​capit​ alism​/). In an interview with M. Buna, Wang further notes that “late capitalism produces difference, insofar as the most extreme methods of dispossession and extraction first require the subject to be rendered lootable (devalued on the level of subjectivity)” (“Carceral Capitalism: A Conversation with Jackie Wang” Interview with M. Buna. LARB May 13, 2018). The plight of rural migrant workers in China, including their cycle of poverty, devalued labor, and marginal social status in the city, can be understood as produced in part by global “carceral capitalism.” As Wang has noted, “extraction and looting are the lifeblood of global capitalism” (Carceral Capitalism 76). Marginalized as a “floating population” in the metropolis, dehumanized on the assembly lines, and confined to factory cities or villages-within-thecity, migrant workers displaced by urbanization are “rendered lootable” by systemic exploitation and inclusive exclusion. Although they are included in economic development statistics as a major component of the workforce, their low social status as disposable labor and their being denied urban residential registration, rural migrant workers remain “outsiders” in the city. Zheng’s depiction of the experience of migrant workers in her poems captures the impact of systemic “dispossession,” exploitation, and social marginalization on the subjectivity of an economically and socially disenfranchised population, whose future is hopeless. In portraying women migrant workers who have spent decades on assembly lines in factories, or in the underground sex industry, Zheng shows the ways in which global “carceral capitalism” produces a new category of gendered “lootable subjects” (Wang’s phrases).

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Factory cities in China demonstrate a spatial technique for efficient labor management, a form of “extraction and looting” of land and labor resources of vulnerable rural populations in China by global capitalism. According to James Pomfret and Kelvin Soh’s interviews with workers at a Foxconn factory, the management uses strict rules for policing the workers in order to extract more productivity and maximize profit. “Workers are barred from talking to one another while on the production line and stand for long hours carrying out the same tasks. Toilet breaks are also restricted to once every two hours” (“Special Report,” Reuters, July 4, 2010). The operations of these factory cities were little known to the outside world until the media exposed multiple suicides by workers at Foxconn’s labor-camp factory city.2 Between 2009 and 2012, eighteen Foxconn workers attempted suicide, resulting in fourteen deaths.3 Numerous news reports on workers’ suicides have called public attention to the plight of migrant workers in China. Of the Foxconn workers who took their own lives, Xu Lizhi, who jumped to his death on September 30, 2014 in Shenzhen, at the age of twenty-four, became the most well known because he had written poignant, unsettling poems that expose the dehumanizing work and hopeless situations migrant workers face. The sensational characteristics of workers’ suicides contributed to the exposure of Xu’s poems about deplorable working conditions in “the factory of the world” to an international readership. But other forms of slow violence against migrant workers remain largely invisible. Articles such as “The Haunting Poetry of a Chinese Factory Worker Who Committed Suicide” by Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post, “The Poet Who Died For Your Phone” by Emily Rauhala in Time, and “Poetry of a Former Foxconn Worker Vividly Evokes Alienation of Factory Life” by Christina Larson in Bloomberg have included excerpts from Xu’s poems. In addition, the Nao project has posted online English translations of Xu’s poems from 2011 to 2014, making available to English readers, not only the excellent poetry of one migrant worker but also “the harsh conditions, struggles and aspirations of Chinese migrant workers” (“The Poetry and Brief Life of a Foxconn Worker: Xu Lizhi (1990–2014),” libcom.org, Nao project web. October 29, 2014). Xu’s poem “Terracota Army on the Assembly Line” captures both the scale of labor exploitation and the regimental management of labor, by evoking the armies of terracotta warriors buried in the tomb of China’s first emperor. It lists the names of the workers standing along the production line, followed by descriptions of their factory uniforms. Like the emperor’s army, this army on the assembly is “silently sweating their orders” (Trans. Eleanor Goodman, Iron Moon 196). The image of countless dehumanized workers in uniform toiling day and night on the assembly line sheds light on the “looting” of migrant workers

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by global capitalism in the factory city, where labor can be managed more efficiently to keep production going around the clock. Such efficiency for productivity and profit reduces workers to parts of machines, whose functions on the production line are indispensable, yet whose significance as individuals is negligible. Xu’s poem “A Screw Plunges to the Ground” indicates that when “a screw plunges to the ground / working overtime at night” it “draws no one’s attention,” much as when a worker committed suicide by jumping from a dorm building of a Foxconn factory (Trans. Eleanor Goodman, Iron Moon 197). While Xu’s suicide and those of others at Foxconn have attracted much attention from the media, the deaths of numerous workers from other work-related causes are hardly noticed by the media or the public, drawing “no one’s attention” as the workers continued “working overtime at night.” Zheng Xiaoqiong highlights the unreported unnatural deaths and invisible violence against migrant workers in her poems and prose. In “Field Notes No. 11: Unnatural Deaths of Female Migrant Workers” in Women Migrant Workers, Zheng calls readers’ attention to women migrant workers’ wounded bodies and the high rate of “unnatural death” among them. She herself was injured while working in a hardware factory when a machine tore the nail from her index finger. Since then she has been terrified of machines, and the excruciating pain remains visceral. When she read a newspaper report saying that annually the broken fingers of workers in the Pearl River Delta region in Guangdong alone exceeds 40,000, she felt compelled to break the silence about the high rate of “unnatural death” among migrant workers. She notes that between 1996 and 2006, nine migrant workers from the impoverished River Mouth Village /Hecou cun in Hunan Province died unnaturally. In total, 80 percent of the village’s relatively small population of 1,300 are migrant workers, who were young and healthy when they left. Hence River Mouth Village is also known as “Migrant Workers’ Village,” one of countless such villages in China (Women Migrant Workers 179). Zheng indicates that it is impossible to know the actual number of unnatural deaths of workers because many were not reported. Not even all the suicides at Foxconn factories were reported. Zheng notes, when “more than ten Foxconn suicides happened within a year, they attracted a lot of media attention,” but only for a while. She adds, “I know suicide incidents continued at a Foxconn factory after that. Yet those workers disappeared from the news into oblivion in this country. Such suicides in this age do not make ‘news’ anymore. The dead are eventually digested completely in the stomach of our era” (Women Migrant Workers 180). The unnatural deaths of women migrant workers at small factories, including deaths from accidents, over-exhaustion, or diseases from toxic contamination, received even less media attention.

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These deaths and diseases among migrant workers are a form of “slow violence” in migrant spaces of carceral capitalism. In her summary of responses to interviews following a series of workers’ suicides at Foxconn, Zheng points out a number of issues that oppress migrant workers and deprive them of their future. For instance, she observes even though according to the Chinese Labor Law workers are not supposed to have more than “36 hours of overtime a month, few factories abide by the law.” More often than not migrant workers have to do “more than 80 hours overtime a month. Used like overworked machines, they are exhausted physically and mentally” (“Zheng Xiaoqiong: On Peasant Workers and Foxconn” June 2, 2010). Underpaid and fatigued year after year, the workers lose hope for a better future, their dreams broken on the assembly line. They end up living “a sorrowful life without future or dreams.” Yet, as one of the Fortune 500 enterprises in the world, Foxconn pays its workers low wages even by local standards (Zheng, Interview with Huang Yongmei, “Zheng Xiaoqiong: They Cannot Find a Future to Look Forward to,” April 1, 2012). Among the numerous problems, migrant workers face, including the disintegration of their families, not least are social marginalization and exclusion in the city. Zheng points out that rural migrant workers find it difficult to be accepted as equal citizens in the cities where they have worked and lived for decades. Having left their homes in the countryside for the city, migrant workers remain “peasant workers” living at the margins of society though their labor was indispensable for their country’s economic development.4 This exclusion creates a sense of alienation and hopelessness (“On Peasant Workers and Foxconn,” June 2, 2010). Moreover, Zheng further notes that while Foxconn suicides have attracted a lot of media attention, many migrants are more interested in discussing the strike at Nanhai Honda Auto Parts Factory, where workers were successful in collectively demanding a raise in their wages through negotiations with management (“On Peasant Workers and Foxconn,” June 2, 2010). In his report “Auto Industry Strikes in China,” Lance Carter provides a detailed account and analysis of a series of strikes at mostly Japanese-owned auto parts plants that spread throughout China’s coastal regions between May and July 2010. According to Carter, “the strike wave of May, June, and July,” on the whole, “was an overwhelming success. Despite minimal concessions awarded to Honda Lock and Toyota Gosei, all other factories for which there is information won considerable pay increases. Not only that but pay increases increasingly rose from the ¥500 won at Nanhai Honda, to the ¥800–¥900 won at Denso, to the high of ¥980–¥1420 awarded to Atsumitec workers.” Designed to maximize productivity and reduce cost, Carter notes, the Honda auto plants’ assembly system makes it vulnerable to disruption by strikes in its supply chain. This vulnerability enhanced the workers’ “bargaining power” (December 20, 2010).

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Apart from migrant workers’ unnatural deaths and the slow violence of protracted ill-health, organized resistance rendered possible by the spatial concentration of labor is part of migrant ecologies. Although the suicides of individual workers were acts of hopelessness and silent protests against unfair treatment by Foxconn, some workers used suicide as a strategy for demanding fairness and rights. On January 2, 2012, when the Foxconn managers decided to move 600 workers to a new production line for making computer cases for Acer, a Taiwanese computer company, a group of 150 workers threatened to commit suicide by jumping from the top of their three-floor plant in Wuhan, a city in Southern China. “We were put to work without any training, and paid piecemeal,” said one of the protesting workers, who asked not to be named. He added: “The assembly line ran very fast and after just one morning we all had blisters and the skin on our hands was black. The factory was also really choked with dust and no one could bear it” (Moore “‘Mass Suicide’ Protest”). According to Malcolm Moore, a reporter for The Telegraph stationed in Shanghai, Foxconn factories are run in such a “‘military’ fashion that many workers cannot cope. At Foxconn’s flagship plant in Longhua, five percent of its workers, or 24,000 people, quit every month” (“‘Mass Suicide’ Protest”). The instability of Foxconn’s workforce and “Foxconn suicides” in China reflect more than the dehumanizing working conditions and living environments for those who are reduced to machine-like cheap labor. They demonstrate workers’ resistance to subjugation and exploitation by a new form of empire emerging from a postcolonial, postmodern world system of transnational corporations in the age of economic globalization.5 Nevertheless, the Foxconn workers are still trapped in the factories operated by global capitalism. Global Studies scholar Jonathan Bach points out that globalization “has separated political and economic space and spread both production and capital accumulation across the world.” He adds that “the value of materials and goods” can rise and fall as they move across borders. Thus “it becomes cheaper to make a single computer with parts designed, sourced, made, assembled, and packaged in a half-dozen countries by dozens of companies than to locate these processes all within one country” (“Shenzhen: From Exception to Rule” 28). Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher in their 2012 article “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work” offer a specific example of how Apple’s iPhones are produced across multiple national borders through a world system: Though components differ between versions, all iPhones contain hundreds of parts, an estimated 90 percent of which are manufactured abroad. Advanced semiconductors have come from Germany and Taiwan, memory from Korea and Japan, display panels and circuitry from Korea and Taiwan, chipsets from

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Europe and rare metals from Africa and Asia. And all of it is put together in China. (January 21, 2012)

Such transnational operations of global capital that organizes labor and extracts resources across national boundaries underlies the production and dwelling spaces of factory cities in China. These migrant spaces of capital, labor, production, and dwelling reveal migrant ecologies of interrelated, mutually transformative and sustaining systems of “carceral” global capitalism with unequal distribution of benefits and costs. Numerous rural villages have been transformed into areas of manufacturing, or replaced by urban sprawl and expressways. Located in the Pearl River Delta, Dongguan, formerly an agricultural county known as “the land of fish and rice,” now “consists of 32 industrial zones, encompassing more than 600 rural villages, which have become part of a new urban area, with respective manufacturing specializations, from computer components to soft drinks, from garments to household appliances” (Liu, “Village-in-the-City” 4). Signs of agriculture in this area—rice paddies, vegetable fields, fish and lotus ponds—have almost completely disappeared over the course of three decades. The poem “Running into a Small Rice Paddy in Dongguan” by Yang Ke, a poet from Guangdong, highlights the replacement of agriculture by industry in the area. From the perspective of a vanishing rice seedling, the poet articulates protest against industrial ecocide in rural areas. From “the cracks of factories’ toes” a rice stalk “is desperately holding on to some last soil,” its exhausted roots are like a hand trying with rage “to dig out / from muddy water the singing of birds and insects” (qtd. in Liu, “Village-in-the City” 4).6 The disappearance of soil takes with it not only agriculture and rural communities but also streams and ponds on which insects, birds, lotus, fish, and other aquatic life depend in their respective habitats. This disappearance is an invisible impact of local and global extractive capitalism, an integral part of factory cities, and an aspect of migrant ecologies. Zheng’s poem “Animals,” collected in Liangge cunzhuang (Two Villages), emphasizes the loss of biodiversity by naming more than twenty different kinds of animals that have vanished along with local traditional cultures and ways of life. Industries and urbanization have destroyed habitats in rural areas and eroded cultural and social fabrics, as the poem’s final statement indicates: “Ah, all these, I no longer see, except waste iron scraps of the chemical factory, / soupy muddy water, cold and grey plains holding poisonous liquids” (67). A material memory of rich regional biodiversity, this poem by Zheng is also an elegy for the loss of it. The replacement of numerous rural villages by factories and the disappearance of entire species of animals in the region are another ecological impact of the “extraction and looting” of global capitalism that exploits local

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resources and labor, polluting local environments and altering local socioecological communities. But ecological damage resulting from industrialization and urbanization mobilized by global capitalism are often rendered invisible by the spectacle of economic growth, and marginalized by news reports of disasters related to climate change. Although a 2017 New York Times article “Rising Waters Threaten China’s Rising Cities” by Michael Kimmelman shows the ways in which rapid industrialization and urbanization in China have led to unexpected environmental disasters, its emphasis is on the impact of climate change and problematic urban design. The report states: The city of Dongguan, a manufacturing center here in the world’s most dynamic industrial region, was hit especially hard by the downpour in May 2014. . . . Next door in Guangzhou, an ancient, mammoth port city of 13 million, helicopters and a fleet of 80 boats had to be sent to rescue trapped residents. Tens of thousands lost their homes, and 53 square miles of nearby farmland were ruined. . . . A generation ago, this was mostly farmland. Three vital rivers leading to the South China Sea, along with a spider’s web of crisscrossing tributaries, made the low-lying delta a fertile plain, famous for rice. Guangzhou, formerly Canton, had more than a million people. (“Rising Waters” April 7, 2017)

But “today, the region is a goliath of industry with a population exceeding 42 million.” “Rushing to catch up after decades of stagnation, China built a gargantuan collection of cities the size of nations with barely a pause to consider their toll on the environment, much less the future impact of global warming.” In addition, Kimmelman emphasizes that “climate change not only poses a menace to those who live and work here, or to the immense concentration of wealth and investment. It is also a threat to a world that has grown dependent on everything produced in the area’s factories.” Attention to these spectacular phenomena of economic development and environmental catastrophes conceal the attritional damage to ecosystems and human health, especially that of migrant workers who are most vulnerable to toxic working environment. Thus the impact of globalization on the local environments and vulnerable populations in China remains under examined. Zheng’s anti-spectacle representation of marginalized women migrant workers exposes and critiques the impact of globalization on rural migrant workers, including their illness, alienation, and unnatural deaths. In “Dong Zhilan” (董芝兰), Zheng highlights a migrant worker’s poverty despite years of long hours of work and overtime. In fact, poverty, dehumanized labor, and deteriorating health have become a hopeless cycle for the worker. After five years working in a factory in Dongguan, Dong Zhilan feels her body hollowed by regimented labor. “She begins to complain about her body like a machine fallen apart / Burnt out. Aching all over, she feels exhausted” (Women Migrant

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Workers 171). The relentless hours and scolding by the manager make her want to escape, to return to the countryside in Jiangxi. Yet poverty obliges her to stay and work overtime until she collapses and dies on the workshop floor: Fatigue is all she’s left with. It suffuses her body like a flood, her legs and feet too weak to support her. She nudges a bit then nudges again before finally collapsing. She has fallen for good, lying on the cement floor, her exhausted legs no longer need to prop up her increasingly heavy body. (Women Migrant Workers 171–172)

Apart from testifying to the impact of slow violence of labor exploitation on women migrant workers, the death of Dong Zhilan indicates the isolation and alienation of workers in the migrant space of global capitalism. Dong’s suffering from pain, illness, and fatigue alone, and her dread of the factory meetings and her supervisor’s scolding suggest that her relationships with her coworkers and their manager are shaped by capitalism, driven by the goal for efficiency and profit. Such experiences and relationships resonate throughout Women Migrant Workers, suggesting that global capitalism has produced gendered “proletarian” bodies and subjects, which help sustain the global operations of multinational and transnational corporations. Zheng reveals the lack of empathy of supervisors, who play the role of “foremen” on the workshop floor. As one worker observes in “A Child Migrant Worker from Cold Mountain” about a fourteen-year-old female migrant worker: Why do machines shatter any compassion on the production line Her lagging behind half a beat often incurs The group leader’s curses but her tears do not fall They brim and quiver in her eyes “I’m a grown-up I won’t cry” she solemnly declares. . . (Women Migrant Workers 51)

This fourteen-year-old worker’s remarks, moreover, reveal not only alienation and labor exploitation in the workshop, but also sexual exploitation of young female workers by their male coworkers and supervisors: Sometimes her dark face Shows contempt for a coworker As she points at another girl thinner and more delicate than she, saying “She may be younger than I but she has to sleep with men at night.” (Women Migrant Workers 52)

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The labor-concentrated working and living spaces of factories make young women migrant workers particularly vulnerable to sexual exploitation. Subjugated as cheap, disposable labor and far from home, unprotected by their families and beyond the watchful gaze of traditional rural communities, young women in factories where workers live and work in a plantation-like space of mechanized labor suffer multiple forms of abuse. Women migrant workers’ displacement, isolation, and alienation in the factory and the city have led to their unaccounted-for disappearances and unnatural deaths. In “The Girl from Guizhou” (贵州女孩), a thirteen-yearold migrant worker is lost in a factory of more than ten thousand workers. Her slender body “is like a duckweed on a vast ocean. In its turbulence / her life is puny as a drop of water trickling down from a tree branch, / disappearing without a sound into the flowing rapids” (Women Migrant Workers 49). In “Xi Mao” (细毛), the twenty-one-year-old woman migrant worker from Shanxi Province feels exiled in the city, overwhelmed by loneliness that devours her like a flood. Her body seems hollowed by industry, disintegrating like a broken machine. Because of unrequited love, she goes insane and commits suicide in the electronic factory where she has worked for two years (Women Migrant Workers 169–170). Another young woman migrant worker who goes insane becomes a vagabond lost in the industrial “iron gray” city (74). Zheng captures her utterly isolated, homeless condition in the poem, “An Insane Girl” (疯女) by juxtaposing the girl’s situation with that of a bird: The bird taking shelter in the rain is waiting to return to its nest. The girl trying to stay out of the rain doesn’t know where her home is. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rain stops. The bird flies away. The insane girl resumes walking somewhere. I don’t know why she has gone mad. I don’t know her family. I can only see on her light blue work uniform These words—“Flourishing Era Stereo.” (Women Migrant Workers 74–75)

Although the speaker does not know why this girl has gone mad, Zheng embeds the reasons in the girl’s working and living conditions by spotlighting the company’s name on her uniform. In ironic contrast to the homeless, impoverished insane girl walking barefoot in the rain, who evidently is a former migrant worker, the company’s name—“Flourishing Era”—evokes the age of industry and global capitalism which are an overarching context of the poems collected in Women Migrant Workers.

Figure 0.1  Huangma Ling in the 1980s. Courtesy of the photographer, Xie Maochun (谢茂春 摄).

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Figure 0.2  Fudong Electronics Co., Ltd, an Apple Accessory Manufacturing Factory Located in Huangma Ling, 2009. Courtesy of the photographer, Chen Yubao (陈玉宝 摄).

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Figure 1.1  “Bird Mobile, Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, 2005. The largest mobile-phone manufacturer in China when this photo was shot, Bird Mobile has since been overtaken. Here, workers complete a manual-assembly portion of the phone-production process” (www.edwardburtynsky.com). © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg and Bryce Wolkowitz Galleries, New York / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

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Figure 1.2  Workers Taking One of the Allowed Two Ten-Minute Breaks a Day in a Workshop at an Electronics Factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, May 21, 2010. Courtesy of the photographer, Zhan Youbing (占有兵 摄).

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Figure 1.3  Workers Taking One of the Allowed Two Ten-Minute Breaks in a Locker Room at an Electronics Factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, January 5, 2011. Courtesy of the photographer, Zhan Youbing (占有兵 摄).

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Figure 2.1  Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, 2005. © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Howard Greenberg and Bryce Wolkowitz Galleries, New York / Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.

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Figure 2.2  A Village-in-the-City in Dongguan, April 30, 2011. Courtesy of the photographer, Zhan Youbing (占有兵 摄).

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Figure 2.3  A Corner of a Village-in-the-City in Dongguan, December 19, 2018. Courtesy of the photographer, Zhan Youbing (占有兵 摄).

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Global and local carceral capitalism has not only exacerbated gendered oppression and exploitation, it has also produced new gendered “lootable subjects” and new forms of violence against women. Zheng’s vignettes of material memoirs of women migrant workers repeatedly show that patriarchal oppression and sexism continue to haunt rural women who have left their villages for the city to escape abuses by their husbands. Several poems collected in Women Migrant Workers are about rural women who have disappeared without a trace due to unnatural death, illness, or shame and fear. Zheng’s “Field Note no. 4: A Missing Female Migrant Worker and a Mother Looking for Her Daughter,” included in Women Migrant Workers, effectively portrays migrant workers’ disintegrated or altered family structures. The opening statement situates the disappearance of a woman migrant worker, and her mother searching for her in the migrant geography of Dongguan through the narrator’s, or rather Zheng’s, observations: “I’ve seen countless mothers come to this area. Some arrived in this strange place to help take care of their grandchildren, some to look for work themselves. Two of them are unforgettable; one is a mother seeking fairness for her son wounded at work, the other looking for her daughter” (83). The mother looking for her daughter was holding a signboard with a picture of her daughter, about twenty years old. She asks every passerby “Have you seen this person?” Written on the signboard are words for passersby to pass on to her daughter in case they see her: “Ma Hongying, your mother has arrived in Chang Ping, Dongguan. When you see this, please look for mama, your mama’s phone number” (83). A crowd gathers around her when she stands at an intersection. She tells onlookers that her daughter is “very smart, has a college education and very strong self-respect.” She takes an envelope out of her pocket, saying her daughter wrote her three months ago, telling her she worked in a factory and asking her not to worry (83). But the envelope does not bear the address of the sender. The mother finds out that her daughter is in Chang Ping, Dongguan, from the postmark in red ink. An onlooker tells her “it would be very hard to find her daughter, for Chang Ping is very big, with several thousand factories and hundreds of thousands of people” (84). But the mother says she plans on looking for her daughter one place a day, and pleads with the onlookers to call her if they run into her. When the narrator suggests that the mother post a search on the internet, the mother tells her she cannot do it because folks in her home village would find out and it would bring shame to her daughter. The mother again emphasizes her daughter’s strong sense of self-esteem, and states that if her daughter finds out her family is searching for her as a missing person on the internet, she would be so humiliated that she would commit suicide. In fact, the mother confesses to the narrator, “I didn’t dare to tell people back home I came to look for my daughter. I told them I was going to Guangdong to visit my daughter” (84). Even though the narrator promises to

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help the mother by posting locally missing-person search notices, she knows that “this way of looking for missing persons is like fishing for a needle in the ocean.” Zheng ends this prose narrative by pointing out that migrants in Dongguan include mothers of migrant workers: “Over the years, I have met numerous mothers who have come far from home. They are all over 50, have been living in rural villages, and never traveled far for work. . . . Seeing them, I am reminded of my own mother” (84). Significantly, this prose narrative highlights another aspect of migrant ecologies that entail migrant workers’ broken families living in separation, scattered in altered landscapes. VILLAGES-IN-THE-CITY Parallel to factory cities, another migrant space resulting from globalization and urbanization is the so-called “village-in-the-city”—a new urban neighborhood transformed from remnants of rural villages or old urban neighborhoods, where some local residents operate small businesses, and rent housing to migrant workers. In other words, villages-in-the city where migrant workers gather are a counterpart to factory cities in terms of their spatial containment of migrant labor. Tom Miller in his book China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History (2012) calls neighborhoods like these “urban slum villages,” which used to be “home to farmers or working-class urbanites,” and now “house anywhere between one-quarter and one-half of China’s migrant workers” (19). Some women migrant workers who have left factories end up working as underground sex workers in villages-in-the city. Figure 2.2, Zhan Youbing’s photography of a village-in-the-city in Dongguan taken on April 30, 2011, illustrates well a new migrant geography produced by local and translational capital and rural migrations of labor (see figure 2.2).7 While these neighborhoods could be considered a form of urban ghetto in China, studies by scholars of globalization and by sociologists show that these urban ghettoes, where a “grey economy” operates, are unique spaces for the residents’ social networking and claiming belonging. In her essay “Laying Siege to the Villages: The Vernacular Geography of Shenzhen,” anthropologist Mary Ann O’Donnell observes that in Shenzhen, “urban villages have been the architectural form through which migrants and low-status citizens have claimed rights to the city” (110).8 While she uses “villages in the city” and “urban villages” alternately in referring to the same emergent neighborhoods in cities in China, I prefer “villages in the city” for the sake of avoiding confusing “urban villages” with urban residential neighborhoods, some of which are called “villages.” Besides, “villages in the city” seems closer to the Chinese term “城中村” (chengzhong cun). She adds that “these densely

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inhabited settlements also provided the physical infrastructure that has sustained the city’s extensive grey economy, including piecework manufacturing, spas and massage parlors, and cheap consumer goods” (110). Given the ways in which urban sprawl spreads to rural areas, “Shenzhen urban villages are not located at the edge of the city but are distributed throughout the entire city, and many urban villages occupy prime real estate. Consequently, Shenzhen’s urban villages have been integrated into the city’s infrastructure grid and receive water and electricity and also have access to cheap and convenient public transportation.” In addition, migrants have access to other social services such as “schools and medical clinics” since “Shenzhen has liberalized its hukou laws”—residential registration that prevented rural populations from receiving social services available to urban populations (O’Donnell 111). However, O’Donnell notes that the migrant workers’ “lack of a formal legal status” “has allowed the municipality to ignore residents’ rights to the city via the convenience of a centrally located low-income neighborhoods” (ibid.). Figure 2.3, a photography by Zhan Youbing, provides a closer look into the lives in a new urban ghetto in China (figure 2.3). Villages-in-the city, then, spatially reinforce social marginalization and the exclusion of new urban poor and low-income migrant workers, while providing affordable housing and a space of belonging for migrant workers as “outsiders” and cheap labor. Thus “villages-in-the-city,” like factory cities, can operate as what Wang calls “an instrument of capitalist accumulation,” a “carceral technique.” Wang argues that “expropriative credit instruments are also carceral instruments, insofar as the creditor owns the future of the debtor.” She considers debt “a form of unfreedom that is unequally distributed” as a result of unequal assess to credit because of the difference of race, gender, and class. Thus, she contends, “to label the use of credit as an instrument of capitalist accumulation a ‘carceral technique’ is not merely metaphorical” (“Carceral Capitalism: A Conversation with Jackie Wang,” May 13, 2018). Spatialized segregation of race and class, Wang adds, renders those living in urban ghettoes a “target” of the “debt regime” (Carceral Capitalism 78). In fact, Brandon Terry, a scholar of African and African American Studies and Social Studies, has pointed out that “parasitic” profit-making creates conditions which are “constitutive of . . . ghettoization—precarious employment, inherited and cumulative disadvantages in wealth, inferior education, information asymmetries rooted in discrimination and social marginalization, and lack of mobility and access to commerce” (qtd. in Wang, Carceral Capitalism 79). At once the products and instruments of social, political, and economic power, urban ghettoes, slums, or villages-in-the-city are spatial forms of social marginalization, lack of mobility and access to resources and economic or political participation.

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I draw on Wang’s concept of “a form of unfreedom” created by “carceral capitalism” that traps migrant workers in the cycle of subjugation, exploitation, and poverty, in my examination of how villages-in-the city, like factory cities, operate as an instrument of capitalist patriarchal exploitation of women migrant workers, including illegal sex workers. News reports on the sex industry in Dongguan reveal a particular aspect of migrant ecologies underlying the sexual exploitation of migrant workers and the spread of HIV/AIDS. In his 2014 report “China in Rare Crackdown on Sex Industry in Southern Vice Hub,” James Pomfret states, “China outlawed prostitution after the Communist revolution in 1949, but it returned with a vengeance following landmark economic reforms three decades ago, and has helped fuel a rise in HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases” (February 10, 2014). Significantly, Pomfret’s statement indicates a connection between capitalism and sex industry in Dongguan. Other news reports indicate a connection between the large migrant population and the scale of underground prostitution in Dongguan. A CNN (Cable News Network) report by Peter Shadbolt says, “Dongguan—with a large and shifting migrant population from across China—could have as many as 300,000 working in the illegal industry, despite harsh penalties for involvement” (February 17, 2014). While a link between capitalism and the sex industry in Dongguan is embedded in a 2013 report entitled “Inside Dongguan, China’s Sin City” by Tom Phillips, this report highlights the large number of women migrant workers in the sex industry in the city. With socially and historically decontextualized sensational figure and language, the report paints Dongguan as a lawless, immoral “sin city”: This is Dongguan, a sprawling factory boomtown in the Pearl River Delta that boasts a population of around seven million people and a reputation as the Chinese capital of sex. For a price here, anything goes. Between 500,000 and 800,000 people—some 10 per cent of Dongguan’s migrant population—are in some way employed in the world’s oldest profession, according to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. A staggering 300,000 sex workers—known locally as “technicians”—are thought to ply their trade in thousands of side-street massage parlours, exclusive hotels, spas and neon-lit karaoke bars. (May 1, 2013)

These thousands of underground sex businesses directly or indirectly are the result from sexism and global carceral capitalism. The statements of a few sex workers in Phillips’s report reveal the interconnections between two different migrant spaces—factories on the one hand, and side-street massage parlors, exclusive hotels, spas, and karaoke bars, where migrant workers are employed and exploited, on the other. “A girl from Jiangxi province who

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gave her name as Tong said a friend had tricked her into swapping a job at a nearby shoe-factory for the KTV bar.” Another girl named Ling Ling came to Dongguan from a village in Guizhou, China’s poorest province, to work at a toy factory. But before long “she decided she could make a better living out of the massage parlour.” She explained that she had “no choice” because she had to support her family. Still another sex worker told the reporter “she had been forced into prostitution after her shoe factory boss eloped with the workers’ wages.” However, she preferred “working in a shoe factory.” Because she said, “At least there I can earn a living with my hands. Here, I have to do it with my body” (Phillips, “Inside Dongguan,” The Telegraph, May 1, 2013). It is worth noting that these sex workers are from the countryside and came to the city to be factory workers. Although they might be making more money in the sex industry, their movement from the rural villages to the factories and then the massage parlors are no evidence of economic or social upward mobility, but rather foreground gendered subjugation and exploitation of rural women migrant workers, who are rendered “lootable” by sexism and carceral capitalism. Wong’s contention that “gendered expropriation” through the “extraction” of particular categories of labor by women “is enabled by the enforcement of a rigid gender binary[,]” sheds light on the women sex workers’ internalized view of their commodified bodies, and their willingness to sell their bodies to fulfill their responsibilities for their families (Carceral Capitalism 119). In portraying the lives of women sex workers in her poems, Zheng indicates that these workers’ commodified, diseased bodies are parallel to the fatigued, contaminated bodies of female migrant workers in the factories. They are produced by and constitutive of migrant ecologies, resulting from urbanization, industrialization, and migrations of capital and labor, as well as subsequent social, cultural, and environmental transformations. Zheng’s prose piece “Field Notes No. 8: Memories of Nanpu Village” (129–131) included in Women Migrant Workers provides some insights into the underground operations of the sex business in Nanpu Village, a village-in-the-city. Her description of the location of Nanpu Village sheds light on the underground operations of sexual exploitation in a migrant space: “In 2007 I lived in a rental room at a village-in-the-city called Nanpu behind the Rainbow Mall in Changping. Nearby was a general market adjacent to the wide spread of a village-in-the-city. Living in this village were many girls who sold their bodies. Some of them were about twenty; some were younger, sixteen or seventeen” (129). When Zheng returned to Nanpu Village from the factory in the evening, she could see from her rental room upstairs the girls downstairs standing in shadows under streetlights at night, trying to attract customers. “Not far away, young men were watching them. Some of the young men

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were stripped to the waist, their arms, chests, and backs tattooed. Newspaper reports referred to them as an evil underworld force” (129). Zheng found out that “most of the money the girls made were spent by these young men behind them,” who protect the girls from being beaten or robbed by their customers. These young men also control the girls’ lives as pimps do and claim most of their income. For many women, becoming sex workers is an unexpected result of migration from the countryside to the city. According to Zheng’s investigation, most of the girls used to work in factories, including electronics and toy factories. They left the factories for various reasons, and mostly these young women intended to give up this “profession” after they had made enough money for them to return home to get married or to start a business (130). But their dreams elude them year after year. Zheng overheard their conversations about “the ups and downs of their businesses.” They often talked with envy about someone who had left to work as a receptionist at a big hotel and became a favorite mistress of a rich man from Hong Kong, who provided her living expenses and gave her a car that cost ¥200K. Their remarks reveal how remote their dream of freedom is, bound up with elusive economic upward mobility: “In our line of business, we can’t make that much money even in years” (131). Like migrant workers who are stuck on the assembly line in factory cities, these young women sex workers are stuck in their underground marginal business in a village-in-the city, where they remain marginal—an included exclusion—like the migrant space they inhabit in the city. For Zheng, Nanpu Village, like other villages-in-the-city, embodies the social and psychological statuses of migrant workers, where they cannot claim belonging with equal rights or social position as urbanites. She emphasizes that migrant workers, or rather “peasant workers,” are not the same as urban workers. Migrant workers from the countryside “are rootless wanderers, they cannot take root in the city. This condition of their reality will inevitably cast a shadow on their poetry” (qtd. in Wang Hongjun, February 25, 2017). Zheng notes in an interview that the feelings and status of exile are inherent for the second generation of migrant workers. Most of them belong to the countless “left-behind children” of migrant workers, who “grew up with their grandparents or relatives while their parents worked in the cities. Usually the time they spent with their parents was no more than one month a year.” Unlike their parents, the second-generation migrant workers have not worked in the fields in the countryside, thus they do not share their parents’ sense of connectedness to their rural home villages. They are rootless in both the village and the city (Zheng, Interview with Huang Yongmei, April 1, 2012). Alienation and exile in the city, and being away from families and familiar communities, have contributed to the sexual exploitation of women

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migrant workers in villages-in-the-city, especially in the new industrial city of Dongguan. The stigmatized and marginalized migrant space of the village-in-thecity became a site for Zheng to keep close connections to migrant workers after she became an editor of the literary magazine Works, of Guangdong Province, and moved to live in Guangzhou, the provincial capital. For years, Zheng kept going on Fridays to a village-in-the-city in Dongguan, where she rented a room, and returning to work in Guangzhou on Mondays (Zheng Interview with Huang Yongmei, April 1, 2012). Her interactions and interviews with women migrant workers helped her recognize more deeply the cultural transformations, particularly the changes in traditional values and morality, taking place as part of the environmental transformations resulting from local and global capitalisms. These changes are embedded in the speaker’s attitude toward a young sex worker, and in the transformation of a young woman migrant worker from the countryside, who became a prostitute in a village-in-the-city, as portrayed in the poem, “Xiao Qing” (小青): This bare-foot girl of 17 is like a drop of dew on a leaf of rice stalk Or the bright moon above the bamboo grove behind the house, clear, fresh, lonely Fallen into endless high-rise complexes of the city, her life Is full of rural poverty and urban desires Curved and barely covered bodies in a hair salon at a village-in-the-city . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The tumor-like swelling in her private parts mirrors our society Cankerous and debased, bright-colored and opulent Full of seductions. (Women Migrant Workers 53–54)

This girl from the countryside once had dreams for her life, but now her future and body have “sunk into the abyss” in a “massage parlor,” and a “sauna room” in a village-in-the-city (ibid. 54). Although the speaker, conditioned by received notions of morality and nobility “in black and white,” is contemptuous of this young sex worker, she significantly compares her diseased body to the corrupt and prosperous society, thus calling attention to gendered exploitation, and the impact of capitalism on both individuals and the society. In her other poems about women sex workers, Zheng highlights the contrasts between these impoverished women and their prosperous nation, between the slums and the flourishing cities, and between struggling villages and booming metropolises. Embedded in these contrasts are their intertwining, mutually constitutive and transformative relations, which women migrant workers and the villages-in-the-city they inhabit embody. In the poem “Young Prostitutes” (年轻妓女), Zheng juxtaposes young women sex

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workers wearing makeup and dressed in seductive clothing with the flourishing city and nation decked out with “high rises”: their pale powdered faces alluring like the city or the nation decked out with high rises, their anemia and weakness underneath the rouge impossible to detect. Their gaudy clothes hide their diseased bodies and souls. For years, I’ve passed by the center of administration facing its surrounding prosperity, behind it are a slum and its struggling residents. (Women Migrant Workers 127–128)

Through these juxtapositions Zheng urges the reader to consider the implications in the parallels between the young female prostitutes and the city or the nation, and the contrasts between the apparently affluent city and its slums and impoverished residents. In doing so, Zheng not only critiques gendered social inequality but also exposes hidden social ills produced by sexism and capitalism. In her other poems, such as “He Na” (何娜), Zheng foregrounds the intertwined changes in the village and the city through the life of a woman migrant worker who followed in the footsteps of many women from rural villages to the assembly line and the massage parlor. This movement marks a turning point in the lives of He Na and other women migrant workers like her, showing changes in migrant workers’ home villages as being entangled with those in the society as a whole: From a rural village to the city, for so many years, you feel life is a gigantic bulldozer, pushing down the old town in your heart, and remaking it with a new look. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .     In the past ten years, the morals and traditions of the village have undergone an aeon of changes. You still maintain the sensitivity of the last century. Admiration has replaced past verbal abuse. (Women Migrant Workers 125)

Despite the fact that the changes in the villagers’ values seem to endorse He Na’s work in the sex industry, which used to be denounced by the villagers as immoral, Zheng raises questions about these changes through He Na’s ambivalence and sadness about the “new era” and its impact on both the village and herself. As the speaker says,    Perhaps the details of your village’s struggle between the old and new eras fill you with sadness. That year, when you were sixteen, as the bus left the village,

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your mother cried by the road, reality like a bulldozer pushed down the honors of the old times like a forest. . . . (Women Migrant Workers 125–126)

Underlying the image of “a bulldozer” sinking the “honors” of the past, which once stood tall “like a forest,” is the impact of capitalism and industrialization on the environment and traditional culture. Even though He Na has become “successful,” making enough money to drive “a red sports car,” she still reminisces about her “innocence” lost in her movement “from the assembly line to the sauna room,” repeating “the fate of many rural women in the city, / from Miss to Mami” (Women Migrant Workers 126). Mirroring the transformations of women migrant workers like He Na are the profound changes occurring in their home villages. As the speaker, a fellow migrant worker, in “Her Na” indicates: “What remains of my home town is an illusory landscape” (Women Migrant Workers 126). Villages-in-the-city and their residents embody both the remnants of the past and the often overlooked changes of the “new era”—the full impact of carceral capitalism on migrant workers, especially women migrant workers. The exploitation of women migrant workers, including sex workers, trapped in factories, or sauna rooms and massage parlors demonstrates that “gender is a material relation that . . . bilks women of their futures” (Wang, Carceral Capitalism 120). At the same time, it also shows what Wang identifies as being characteristic of the disenfranchisement of racialized, gendered, and subjugated populations: “While it could be said that disposability is the logic that corresponds to racialized expropriation, gendered subjectivation has as its corollary rapeability” (Wang, Carceral Capitalism 120). Carceral capitalism in a patriarchal society reproduces the difference of gender and class in exploitation, violation, and violence against women migrant workers as disposable labor. The stories of women sex workers as portrayed in Zheng’s poems, including “Hu Zhimin” and “Middle-Aged Prostitutes,” effectively illustrate how the logic of “disposability” corresponds to gendered expropriation and subjectivation, and how its “corollary rapeability” is produced. Hu Zhimin, a twenty-three-year-old sex worker, who used to be the speaker’s coworker at a factory, died of alcohol poisoning. A countryman of hers told the speaker that her family had built a wonderful house with the money she had sent home, and “her brothers used / the money she’d earned with her flesh” to “set up shop in a small town.” Yet, they “didn’t even bring / her ashes home to be buried at their ancestral tomb / because she sold her flesh filthy it would be bad for the family feng shui” (Women Migrant Workers 167–177). The disposability of young women as sex workers and their gendered exploitation that rob them of their futures are also evident in the experience of middle-aged prostitutes, who are coerced to “pay ¥300 a month

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to / a person familiar with their situation Though this ‘fee of protection’ / is ten times a regular business transaction” (Women Migrant Workers 55–56). Significantly, Zheng directs the reader’s attention to where the middle-aged sex workers live and work—“Low tiled houses of a village-in-the-city” where the light is “damp” and “gloomy,” and the sewers are “dirty and moldy” (55). The slum village spatially reflects and reinforces these women’s gendered exploitation and abject marginalization in society. Rather than denouncing them as immoral or “filthy” prostitutes, as Hu Zhimin’s brothers did of their sister, Zheng reclaims their humanity by highlighting the fact that these women are “mothers wives and / daughters” who knit sweaters “for their parents / in distant Sichuan or mail the finished sweaters / to their faraway sons.” Yet, they are living in separation from their families. They “sit at the doors / knitting sweaters chatting sizing up the men coming and going in a hurry” in a “motley village-in-the city.” “They talk about their business of the flesh and customers” (Women Migrant Workers 55). They have become otherwise than mothers, wives, and daughters, living in a slum urban village, “unnoticed and invisible.” Zheng links their situation to that of their country through the speaker’s observation that “their gaze resembles the face of their country / so blurry entirely incomprehensible to the masses” (55–56). The plight of middle-aged sex workers raises questions about the cost of prosperity and progress of their apparently flourishing nation. Moreover, the deplorable condition of these women points to more than the disintegration of migrant families; it reveals larger social problems as embedded in “the motley villagein-the-city” they inhabit (Women Migrant Workers 55). A migrant ecology is embedded in the village-in-the-city, which serves to maintain and reproduce an under-class of migrants as “disposable” labor. The logic of “disposability” and its corollary “rapeability” underlies the stories of women migrant workers’ lives as depicted by Zheng. In her “Field Note 9: Neighbors in a Village-in-the-City” in Women Migrant Workers, Zheng reveals the ways in which the slum village’s denizens—vendors, cobblers, custodians, female sex workers, tricycle peddlers, among others—managed to eke out a living by doing all kinds of precarious low-income jobs without hope of a better future. They were her neighbors, when Zheng rented a room in the village. One vegetable vendor Zheng befriended told her that she had wanted to work in a woolen mill, but because she was unskilled and middleaged, the factory did not want to hire her (149). A widowed sixty-threeyear-old cobbler started a family without marriage with a widowed woman migrant worker, Huang Jialan, who was nine years younger. Huang’s daughter and two sons were all migrant workers in factories in Dongguan. Huang had been in Dongguan for more than ten years, where she began working as a quality inspector in a woolen mill. When her eyesight became poor with age, she switched to work in the kitchen of the factory. Huang was raising

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her youngest son’s two children born out of wedlock. The cobbler helped take care of them while she was working in the factory. The oldest of the two grandchildren was a seven-year-old girl, but she was not in school and said she “doesn’t like it.” Zheng notes that the situation of Huang’s family of three generations of migrants reflects the cycle of poverty, which characterizes countless migrant workers’ lives. Instability in their employment and residence, and their children’s lack of access to standard education, have contributed to rural migrant workers’ systemic, structurally reproduced poverty and all its cumulative disadvantages.9 The plight of rural migrant workers in factory cities, villages-in-the-city, massage parlors, and other migrant spaces is inseparable from the effects of carceral capitalism and uniquely intertwined with global capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization in China.

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TEN POEMS BY ZHENG XIAOQIONG 董芝兰 / Dong Zhilan She begins to complain about her body like a machine fallen apart, burnt out. Aching all over, she feels exhausted. Her period 10 days overdue, her body numb without any stirring desires. She complains about her increasingly sluggish movement, heavier steps, nausea, and tightness in the chest. She wants to sleep. It’s been five years since she came from Jiangxi to Dongguan. She feels herself continuously hollowed out, the crevices in her body, which hold the ebb and flow of pain and happiness, are drying up. Her body’s biological clock is worn out incrementally by overtime and labor. In the past years she’s been sapped like repeatedly decocted bitter herbal medicine. Life itself is the root cause of her sickness, work is her prescription. Oftentimes the heavier doses she needs is overtime. This bitter medicine has the side effects of fatigue, exhaustion, and illness, incurring fines, the opposite results of her overtime labor. In the ceramics factory, her body is filled with the dust of polymer clay, powders, verbal abuse, albany slip glaze, and role-calls at early-morning meetings.... She wants to escape, to return to the countryside in Jiangxi to plant and harvest crops. Yet, suffering from the illness of poverty, She has to take stronger and bitterer medicine— overtime all night, unbearable scolding at meetings early in the morning. Fatigue is all she’s left with. It suffuses her body like a flood, her legs and feet too weak to support her. She nudges a bit then nudges again before finally collapsing. She has fallen for good, lying on the cement floor, her exhausted legs no longer need to prop up her increasingly heavy body. All the scolding of the manager has become nothingness, leaving her forever. Her body on the floor tells the factory that refused her resignation: I am tired. I need a good sleep.... (Women Migrant Workers 171–172)

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凉山童工/ “A Child Migrant Worker from Cold Mountain” Life is baffling our epoch is becoming Blind A fourteen-year-old girl has to work with us On the assembly line that carries the fatigue of our era Sometimes she wishes she had returned to the countryside in Sichuan To cut firewood and grass to gather wild berries and flowers Her young delicate gaze reveals desolation I don’t know What words can describe her except Child labor or sighs as thin as paper Her gaze can always crush a soft heart Why do machines shatter any compassion on the production line Her lagging behind half a beat often incurs The group leader’s curses Her tears do not fall They brim her eyes “I’m a grown-up I won’t cry” she solemnly declares How bewildering her childhood home has become Reminiscence She speaks of the mountains, their slopes The blue lake the snakes and oxen Perhaps life means finding a path out of confusion Back to life itself Sometimes her dark face Shows contempt for a fellow worker As she points at another girl thinner and more delicate than herself, saying “She may be younger than I but she has to sleep with men at night.” (Women Migrant Workers 81–83)

*Note: This is a revised version of the original translation published in the poetry journal The Bitter Oleander vol. 20, no. 2, Autumn 2014, pp. 81–83. This English translation by the author was published on the website of the 50th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam in June 2019.

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贵州女孩 / A Girl from Guizhou In a factory of more than ten thousand workers, she, slim and tiny, is like a duckweed on a vast ocean. In its turbulence her life is puny as a drop of water trickling down from a tree branch, disappearing without a sound into the flowing rapids. She and I met in a moment full of uncertainty.* Her fingers are slender, her innocent gaze. tender and almost translucent. Humanity and life like the slings and screws in her hands, are tightly fastened on the machines of the times. Laws are clamped in the chopsticks of bureaucrats hidden between the breasts of their mistresses, leaving bitter compassion inadequate for persuading these endlessly running assembly lines. She’s like a drop of water fallen into the industrial age. For her, the production line is her life and survival. At thirteen (or younger) she can’t comprehend fate, life, existence, except the practical monthly meager wage that brings her hope and joy. Life for her is reduced to mere existence, busy fingers, moving parts of products. Amidst black cassettes and white spindles, comedies and tragedies unfold like the development of industry, which promotes to our age comedies of prosperity. Her thin small face shows me a helpless tragedy, vulnerable beauty and misfortune. She is accustomed to her fate, poverty and desolate mountains her only memories of home. “That’s destiny.” She’s taken for granted such heavy words weighing on her naïve face. She feels tired, I feel sad. (Women Migrant Workers 49–50)

*According to Zheng Xiaoqiong, the “uncertainty” refers to the precarious employment situation of underage workers. Employing underage workers is against law in China, and the government’s investigation of this violation has moved to the assembly lines. Officials would ask anyone who looks young to show his or her identification card, and would send underage workers home. (Email to the author, October 23, 2019.)

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细毛 /Xi Mao Dim streetlight at the window muddy as fate, insomniac, she is used to distant darkness, fatigued train of life coughing convulsively. In the dim light of night, between the beams of cars and streetlamps, fates crisscross. Recorded in the dark night, sins and misfortunes, light and darkness, love and hate have set off on the road, the bony moon hanging in icy-cold sky. Pale as the moon is the base color of her fate. The moon in the city no longer huge, crushed by industry, it’s puny and dull writing bone-chilling songs on faces thin as paper. Like streetlights swallowing bitterness at night, moonlight observes indifferently. Moving from Shanxi to Guangdong, moonlight, like her, from hometown to strange town, feels lonesome, telling stories at the window about the caprices of fate. She feels loneliness like a flood washing over her, emptying her out, making her hollow. Life renders everything barren, ideals, dreams, leaving her body an empty shell like a machine corroded by industry. Her body is breaking down, her youth full of sorrow, from top to bottom filled with the curses of her boss, betrayal and love, unhappy life . . . . The moon is telling stories of its gloomy fate . . . turbid life, like a ray of bewildered light shining on her fatigue, tears, and despair. The faint moon is her youth, her body hollowed by industry. She stands at the window, attempting to touch moonlight, searching for impossible love in a strange town, trying to understand curses, meditating on mottled life. In the shadow of moonlight, in the shimmering street light, she is like a train running out of the window. Her life resembles the twilight of a streetlamp stopping in a sinking chapter. I heard from a colleague about her. Before dying, she said the moon was more beautiful in Shanxi. I wrote on a piece of paper: Xi Mao, twenty-one, lost her mind because of unrequited love, jumped to her death from a building. A migrant worker for two years, she died in an electronics factory. (Women Migrant Workers 169–170)

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疯女 / An Insane Girl Rain falls on her bare feet and thin clothes where early winter’s damp chill condenses. She shivers as a bird perched in the tree to avoid the rain shakes its feathers, its chirping doleful, its eyes bright in the cold air. Her face and clothing dirty, her eyes hazy as the rain. She stares at the bird, it tweets towards the distance. Rain beats on the iron gray city, rainwater pouring down from the gloomy sky. She walks along the eaves, her body stooping. The bird’s shriek is chilly as the rain falling on her heart. She stands in the rain. The bird taking shelter from the rain is waiting to return to its nest. The girl trying to stay out of the rain doesn’t know where her home is. She huddles in a corner under an eave. Rain keeps falling, drenching the lost world, soaking her worn-out blue work uniform. Rain stops. The bird flies away. The insane girl resumes walking somewhere. I don’t know why she has gone mad. I don’t know her family. I can only see on her light blue work uniform these words “Stereos of the Flourishing Era.” (Women Migrant Workers 74–75)

*A slightly different English translation by the author was published in the journal Pratik: British Poetry Edition, vol. 25, no. 1, spring 2018, pp. 20–21.

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小青 / Xiaoqing This bare-foot girl of 17 is like a drop of dew on a leaf of rice stalk Or the bright moon above the bamboo grove behind the house, clear, fresh, lonely Fallen into the endless high-rise complexes in the city, her life Is full of rural poverty and urban desires Curved and barely covered bodies in the hairdressers at the village-in-the-city Cheap perfume and rouge, lipstick and eyeshadows Exhausted flesh and spirit. Many a times In passing, I overheard them talking about business Four or five transactions. Older women nearby Speak of depressed business: “Just like fishing Sitting at the door the whole day without a single bite None the less a catch.” They laughed about that For so many years, I am accustomed to notions of morality, nobility, and Sacredness in black and white, which have taken roots in me I feel scorn and disgust toward her With four years of college education in nursing, I believe her shameful body Is full of diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea The tumor-like swelling in her private parts mirrors our society Cankerous and debased, bright-colored and opulent Full of seductions. Life for her remains An elusive metaphor For so many years, she had dreams for her life Yet unable to discover the depths of life She used her flesh to measure the distance between reality and dreams But careless, she sank into the abyss. (Women Migrant Workers 53–54)

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年轻妓女 / Young Prostitutes They sit there cracking sunflower seeds and playing majiang Or stand by vendors of spicy soup, their finger nails painted. They wear jewelry or Buddhist beads, their bare arms Tattooed with butterflies, their black hip-hugger shorts Squeeze out desires from their buttocks. Their gaze of blue-eye shadow Shows nonchalance and bewilderment about the earthly world. Or they sit aimlessly at the door chatting. Sometime as I walk past their doors, I see their powdered pale faces alluring like the city or nation decked out with high rises, their anemia and weakness underneath the rouge impossible to detect. Their gaudy clothes hide their diseased bodies and souls. For years, I’ve passed by the center of administration facing its surrounding prosperity, behind it, a slum and its struggling residents.... These sights make me live with deep anxiety. (Women Migrant Workers 127–128)

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何娜 / He Na From a village to the city, for so many years, you feel life is a gigantic bulldozer, pushing down the old town in your heart, and remaking it with a new look. No longer guided by the old moral compass of the village, you must endure the moralistic gossip and abuse when you return for a visit. The wheels of the times won’t stop for anyone, they won’t move faster for you, either. In the past ten years, the morals and traditions of the village have undergone an aeon of change. You still maintain the sensitivity of the last century. Admirations have replaced past verbal abuse. “Everything demands sacrifice.” You know well reality’s rule of thumb. Everyone, full of hope, is making sacrifices—the order of morality, the cost of the body and soul.... Between the broken inherent orders and the new modes you are surprised by your own decadent transformation. Perhaps the details of your village’s struggle between the old and new eras fill you with sadness. That year, when you were sixteen, as the bus left the village, your mother cried by the road, reality like a bulldozer pushed down the honors of the old times like a forest. You know not whether the past outlook on life or the current system of values is more suitable for practical needs. Losses or sacrifices have collapsed into the flaws of our times. You still reminisce about your lost innocence. From the assembly line to the sauna room, you repeat the fate of many rural women in the city, from Miss to Mami. These years, you feel exhausted, your spirit not yet completely entering the so-called new age, un-dispelled remnants of memories of the village lingering outside the doorway of the era. We chat. Like you, I cannot explain my hesitant wandering spirit, even though what remains of my home town is an illusory landscape. You drive a red sports car, exploring life divided by the times and those broken, scattered selves we all try to escape. (Women Migrant Workers 125–126)

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胡志敏 / Hu Zhimin Over the years, I’ve been immersed in an immense era feeling weak and frail allowing youthful life to be shrouded by gloomy negations and ignorance She died from the wounds of the times with her three brothers and parents who quarreled over her compensation Her corpse no one cares no one mourns no one weeps for only the icy cold figure of her reparation keeps her company Hu Zhimin: twenty-three died of alcohol poisoning I still have vivid memories of her my co-worker who became a prostitute at a hotel her innocent smiles loud voice worldly experience She told me she had seen too many so-called truths of life standing on the threshold of reality such as desires and flesh She was never ashamed of talking about her occupation or her plans for life Many young women from her home village entered this ancient profession the newly married or sisters or aunts and sisters-in-law leave together for Nanjing or Guangdong.... At hair salons in dim rooms she was beautiful At hotels high-end places her face showed Happiness. . . . We seldom saw each other we had the same background yet belonged to two different worlds In this city in this moment two people met by chance in life then parted each going her own way in a hurry not knowing what fate would bring “She is dead!” said a countryman of hers to me and described the scene of her death saying how much money she had sent home how wonderful her family’s newly-built house how her brothers used the money she’d earned with her flesh bought a house and set up shop     in a small town saying after her death her brothers didn’t even bring her ashes home to be buried at their ancestral tomb because she sold her flesh filthy it would be bad for the family feng shui. (Women Migrant Workers 167–177)

Note: A slightly different version of this translation by the author was published on the website of the 50th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam in June 2019. An earlier, somewhat different translation of this poem by the author was also published on the online poetry magazine, Empty Mirror (January 25, 2019).

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中年妓女 / Middle-Aged Prostitutes Low tiled houses of the village-in-the-city gloomy damp light dirty and moldy sewers they sit at the doors knitting sweaters chatting sizing up the men coming and going in a hurry Their eyeshadow and rouge can’t hide their age over thirty or older in the motley village-in-the-city They talk about their business of the flesh and customers ¥30 ¥20 occasionally some customers would give ¥50 They talk about the sweaters in their hands their patterns and colors They knit for their parents in distant Sichuan or mail the finished sweaters to their faraway sons Their actions reveal dexterity Sometimes they talk about a fellow sex worker nearby caught and fined ¥4,000 They say they pay ¥300 a month to a person familiar with their situation Though this “fee for protection” is ten times a regular business transaction they consider themselves being laid ten times by a ghost huge and hollow They feel frustrated When I imagine their lives now in the past and future I find hidden under the sweaters in their hands the hearts of mothers wives and daughters their sighs in darkness and their helpless groans behind closed doors Unnoticed and invisible they are a group of mothers knitting sweaters at the door These middle-aged prostitutes their gaze resembles the face of their country so blurry entirely incomprehensible to the masses. (Women Migrant Workers 55–56)

Note: A slightly different version of this translation by the author was published on the website of the 50th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam in June 2019. A slight variation of this translation by the author was also published on the online poetry magazine Empty Mirror (January 25, 2019).

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NOTES 1. “Light and Death: Suicides at Foxconn.” The Economist, May 27, 2010. Published in Hong Kong. No author identified. https​://ww​w.eco​nomis​t.com​/busi​ness/​ 2010/​05/27​/ligh​t-and​-deat​h. 2. See Fiona Tam, “Foxconn Factories Are Labour Camps: Report.” South China Morning Post, October 11, 2010. .​ 3. See James Pomfret, “Foxconn Worker Plunges to Death at China Plant: Report.” Reuters, November 5, 2010. < https​://ww​w.reu​ters.​com/a​rticl​e/us-​china​-foxc​onn-d​ eath/​foxco​nn-wo​rker-​plung​es-to​-deat​h-at-​china​-plan​t-rep​ort-i​dUSTR​E6A41​M9201​ 01105​>; Malcolm Moore, “Protest at Chinese iPad Maker Foxconn After 11th Suicide Attempt This Year.” The Telegraph, May 25, 2010. https​://ww​w.tel​egrap​h.co.​ uk/fi​nance​/chin​a-bus​iness​/7763​699/P​rotes​t-at-​Chine​se-iP​ad-ma​ker-F​oxcon​n-aft​er-11​ th-su​icide​-atte​mpt-t​his-y​ear.h​tml. 4. For a major shift in the representations of migrant workers in official discourses, see Eric Florence, “How to Be a Shenzhener: Representations of Migrant Labor in Shenzhen’s Second Decade.” Florence offers insightful analysis of a shift in the representations of migrant workers from “a generally homogenizing and threatening” image to one that is positive in modeling “how individual goals contributed to a statelead project of integration into global capitalism” (pp. 89, 94). 5. For more reports on workers’ strikes and protests in China, see Li Jing and Hu Yinan, “Strikes Signal End to Cheap Labor.” China Daily, June 3, 2010, p. 1. https​://we​b.arc​hive.​org/w​eb/20​10060​62232​12/ht​tp://​www.c​hinad​aily.​com.c​n/ cnd​y/201​0-06/​03/co​ntent​_9926​008.h​tm; and Malcolm Moore, “Protest at Chinese iPad Maker Foxconn after 11th Suicide Attempt This Year.” The Telegraph, 25, 2010. https​://ww​w.tel​egrap​h.co.​uk/fi​nance​/chin​a-bus​iness​/7763​699/P​rotes​t-at-​Chine​ se-iP​ad-ma​ker-F​oxcon​n-aft​er-11​th-su​icide​-atte​mpt-t​his-y​ear.h​tml. 6. All the English versions of prose and poems in this chapter are author’s translations from Chinese. 7. While remaining “factory of the world,” Dongguan has reinvented itself. It has been recognized as a green, civilized city, earning titles such as “National Forest City,” and “International Garden City,” and “National Civilized City.” See https:// baike.baidu.com/item/%E4%B8%9C%E8%8E%9E/495865?fr=aladdin 8. In her chapter “Laying Siege to the Villages: The Vernacular Geography of Shenzhen,” Mary Ann O’Donnell offers an informative overview of “villages in the city” emerged along with Shenzhen’s changing landscape (107). 9. K–12 education is mandatory in China. The Compulsory Education Law states that all children must receive nine years of schooling. The law stipulates that “the state, community, schools and families shall . . . safeguard the right of compulsory education of school-age children and adolescents.” However, in reality “not all children receive nine years’ education” and for those who do attend school, “the quality of their education varies tremendously across China, with the divide between major cities and impoverished rural areas being the most startling.” Due to lack of proper parental care and communal support, migrant workers’ children in general receive substandard education. Many are school dropouts (China Labour Bulletin, “Migrant Workers and Their Children” 2018).

Chapter 3

The “Other Scene” of Globalization “Hollow Villages” and Migrant Workers’ Families

Rural migrations resulting from global capitalism, urbanization, and industrialization have produced another new migrant space known as “hollow villages”—the counterpart of factory cities and villages-in-the-city in China. Located in rural areas, hollow villages are even more invisible than villagesin-the-city, which are hidden under the shadows of spectacular urban development as hallmarks of modernization. In her 2010 essay Xiangcun de wange /“Elegy for the Village” (《乡村的挽歌》), Zheng Xiaoqiong laments the impact of rural migration to cities on migrant workers’ home villages, and calls critical attention to the interrelatedness of urban and rural transformations as part of migrant ecologies. She writes, “When the speed of urbanization and industrialization is continuously tearing apart the rural communities, the rural social order and communal atmosphere are fading along with the decline of rural villages.” Reading the poetry collection Nurende cunzhuang / The Village of Women (《女人的村庄》), by Luo Yuping (罗瑜平), reminds her of her own family and home village, which is becoming increasingly estranged to her. Both she and her brother have left in search of work in Guangdong, and so has their father, leaving their mother alone at home. She observes, “My home village, in fact, all the rural villages have been deteriorating with the changes of the times. The young and the strong are pouring into cities, leaving their home villages hollow one after another all over China, only the so-called ‘Six-One and Nine-Nine’ [children and old people] are left to watch over the land.”1 During a visit home, her mother takes Zheng on a tour around the village, pointing out migrant-worker families’ newly built two-story houses, where only grandmas and their grandchildren are living. Several houses were empty; some whole families had left for the city (“Elegy for the Village”). This reality of her own home village and Luo’s portrayal of lives in The Village of Women helped Zheng realize she had neglected the people left 81

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behind in migrant villages and the profound changes that have taken place in the countryside. From the perspectives of migrant workers, she had written many poems about “the strange town I cannot stay in” and “the hometown I cannot return to,” yet she feels that “the hometown she cannot return to in reality is not quite the same as the hometown in her poems.” She also realizes that in writing about the hometown she cannot go back to, she was indulging her own feelings, rather than paying attention to the villagers’ experience. This realization enables her to gain a critical perspective on popular representations of the rural in the entertainment industry. She notes, as audiences continue to enjoy comedies featuring characters in the countryside, people in real life, unlike their beloved television characters, have long left their villages for the city to work in factories or on construction sites. They have become “girls on the assembly line,” “master drivers of tricycles,” while their home villages remain silent, neglected, and “hollow” (“Elegy of the Village”). Migrant villages as such reflect the intertwining of the rural and the urban, the local and the global, showing the ways industrialization, urbanization, and global capitalism have eroded China’s rural communities, families, and agriculture. Yet, these diminishing rural villages remain largely marginal except in writings by migrant workers. Scholarly works on globalization, more often than not, focus on cities and overlook the impact of globalization on the countryside and the mutually constitutive and transformative relationship between the urban and the rural. Although scholars of urban space have devoted rigorous analyses to the impact of globalization on the transformation of cities, the rural remains peripheral in their studies.2 For example, Mike Davis in his 2006 book Planet of Slums alerts the reader to the alarming speed of unprecedented urbanization in the world. “In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population of more than one million; today there are 400, and by 2015 there will be at least 550. . . . Cities, indeed, have absorbed nearly two-thirds of the global population explosion since 1950, and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week” (1–2). While a large part of this urban population explosion is related to late-capitalist industrialization and globalization, 95 percent of the increase will occur in “developing countries, whose populations will double to nearly 4 billion over the next generation” (2). In addition to devastating environmental degradation and myriad other problems, Davis points out that economic globalization and massive migration to urban areas have resulted in the unemployment or underemployment of “one billion workers representing one-third of the world’s labor force, most of them in the South” (Central Intelligence Agency, 80, qtd. in Davis, Planet of Slums 199). Moreover, while “there is no official scenario for the reincorporation of this vast mass of surplus labor into the mainstream of the world economy,” Davis states, the “criminalized segments of the urban poor” in the “‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World—especially their slum

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outskirts—will be the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century” (205). Similarly, Christopher Schliephake in his book Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture (2015) refers to the twenty-first century as “an urban century” whose rapid urbanization is “on a global scale, with more than 75 percent of the world population living in cities” (2). Given the impact “the constant rise of global population rates” on the environment and ecosystems of the planet, Schliephake emphasizes that “urban (eco)systems and patterns of urbanization will prove to be central objects of study in both the natural and the social sciences” (2). Thus, the impact of such large-scale urbanization on the rural ecosystems and social fabrics continue to be overlooked. Mainstream journalistic reporting on transformations taking place in China also focuses on rapid large-scale urbanization and its subsequent displacements of rural populations. Between June and November 2013, The New York Times published a series of four articles by Ian Johnson on the challenges China faces in its urban development unprecedented in human history in its scale and speed. As indicated by the headlines—“Leaving the Land: Part 1, China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities”; “Part 2, Pitfalls Abound in China’s Push From Farm to City”; “Part 3, Picking Death Over Eviction”; “Part 4, New China Cities: Shoddy Homes, Broken Hope.” These articles examine China’s domestic problems related to urbanization, such as creating “a stubborn unemployed underclass,” “a permanent underclass in big Chinese cities and the destruction of a rural culture and religion.” With specific case studies, they offer insightful analyses of the pitfalls of Chinese government’s headlong rush to modernize through urban development. However, they overlook the socio-ecological impact of globalization on urbanization in China, and the connections of China’s urbanization to the world market. Like Johnson, Tom Miller exposes the plight of the uprooted rural population, particularly migrant workers from the countryside, who “lead segregated lives, hidden away in worker dormitories or slum villages” in part because “China’s household registration—or hukou—system legally ties migrant workers to their rural home” (4).3 While Miller in his 2012 book China’s Urban Billion: The Story behind the Biggest Migration in Human History highlights the local-global connections underlying China’s urbanization, the impact of these connections on rural China is under examined. As he observes: By the end of the 1980s, as factories mushroomed along the southeast coast, the number of rural migrants heading for the cities had deepened into a steady stream. In the early 1990s, migrant flows accelerated again. Global manufactures moved into China and set up factories all along the coast. . . . Young farmers flocked from their villages to assemble widgets in export-processing factories, to wait tables in new restaurants, and to lug bricks around building sites. (12)

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These waves of rural migrations to factories and cities have led to urban “slum villages,” which help sustain the social divide between rural migrants and urbanites, showing the spatial formation of a new urban underclass of migrant workers. Even though Miller also notes the impact of labor migrations on rural villages in China, such as migrant workers’ left-behind children’s “psychological trauma” and poor performance at school, and many villages “populated mainly by children and their grandparents,” his focus is on urbanization and cities (21). As he states: “By 2030, when China’s urban population is projected to swell to 1 billion, its cities will be home to one in every eight people on earth. How China’s urban billion live will shape the future of the world” (1). Hollow migrant villages in China remain invisible or marginal in studies on migrations, urbanization, and globalization. Thus, they are what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak might call “the other scene” of globalization, which “still requires archaeology, genealogy” (“Globalicities” 74). In her incisive essay “Globalicities: Terror and Its Consequences,” Spivak points out the limitations of understanding globalization in terms of urbanization. She argues: “Globalization as urbanization is yet another example of assuming the most visible violence to be violence as such, an inability to perceive (or ruse not to perceive) the invisible power lines that make and unmake the visible. . . . The other scene still requires archaeology, genealogy” (74). Doreen Massey in her article “Politicising Space and Place” also calls critical attention to “the other scene” of globalization. She contends that economic globalization has led to “a global spatial reorganisation: a remaking of spaces and of places.” As a result, Massey contends, “new spaces are created (of global trade, of new squatter settlements in Mexico City) while others (the spaces of small-scale agriculture perhaps) are destroyed; some ‘identities’ come under threat (the hybrid-Mayan cultures of Chiapas) while those who already have more strength within this shifting power-geometry can wall themselves more tightly in (I think of Fortress Europe)” (“Politicising Space and Place” 120). Rural migrant villages in China are those spaces where “small-scale agriculture . . . [is] destroyed,” and where rural communities, cultural traditions, and families “come under threat,” while new spaces of “global trade” such as Foxconn factory cities and export manufacturing centers like those in Guangdong dominate the new urban landscape. In his Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (2001), Lawrence Buell urges scholars of literature and environmental studies to put “green” and “brown” landscapes, the landscapes of exurbia and industrialization, in conversation with one other. “In order for ecocriticism to earn its claim to relevance,” he quotes from another ecocritic, “its critical practice must be greatly extended . . . the environmental crisis threatens all landscapes—wild, rural, suburban, and urban. . . . And the causes of poverty in one are the causes of development in the other”4 (qtd. in Buell, Writing 7).

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Buell goes on to argue that “literature and environment studies must reckon more fully with the interdependence between urban and outback landscapes, and the traditions of imaging them, if they are to become something more than a transient fashion” (Writing 8). Zheng Xiaoqiong’s and other migrant-worker poets’ depictions of their home villages not only show the interdependence and mutual transformations of rural and urban areas but also reveal the detrimental consequences of entangled local-global migrant ecologies for rural villages. In her poem “Village Chronicles” /‍《村庄史志》” Zheng interlaces the destruction of “outback” and rural landscapes with the disappearance of agriculture, rural traditional cultures and values eroded by industrialization, urban sprawl, and capitalism from the perspective of a migrant worker: Grey bleak machines, felled lychee groves, fallen trees, rubble burning in courtyards, ruins of the earth, vast land scorched by flames of industry, capital accumulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Broken in no time, traditions thousands of years old have sunk deep into the ground. Excavators extend their gigantic iron teeth into earth’s inner recesses to break the umbilical cord linking me to my ancestors who have retreated into deep darkness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Empty fields, unattended cropland about to be divided and disappear. In weeds spreading like cobwebs, a corn stalk left from last year swings in the wind, staring at the cut-down trees in the gloomy lychee grove, their hacked-off branches scatter around the arms of machines on the land soon to be conquered, the quiet long path to the village is bulldozed.5 (Selected Poems 136, 142–143)

The images and diction Zheng employs in depicting the grotesque transformation of a village convey invisible violence of industry, urban development, and capital accumulation against the land, environment, and traditional cultures and values in rural China. The impact of globalization on the landscape of rural China is well documented by sociologists Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger in the chapter “Globalization and Transformation” of their book Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization (2009), but the subsequent corrosive effects on migrant workers’ families remain under examined. According to Chan, Madsen, and Unger, in 2006 when they “traveled toward Chen Village after an absence of sixteen years,” they found “nothing along the route resembled the former countryside. The rice fields and verdant hills had all disappeared, replaced by a vast agglomeration of grim factories and row upon row of

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workers’ dormitories. . . . Lingering piles of roadside rubble signaled where buildings had recently been demolished for redevelopment” (330). The only way for them to identify the site of Chen Village was “a huge roadside sign announcing ‘Chen Village Industrial Zone No. 3’” (330). Situated close to Shenzhen in Guangdong Province on the border with Hong Kong, Chen Village and its surrounding areas have undergone dramatic change resulting from industrial development and globalization. As the authors observe: Chen Village is today an integral part of an industrial region that stretches all the way from Hong Kong to Canton, and far beyond. The entire region is crisscrossed by modern highways, and hour after hour, drivers speed past an almost unending sequence of factory zones, punctuated by brief flashes of the tiled homes of former villages. The region has become one of the world’s industrial heartlands, feeding foreign department stores, electronics companies, and discount emporiums with much of their merchandise. (331)

They emphasize that this area “is not the only part of China that has been dramatically affected by global demand for inexpensive mass-produced goods.” Along the “east coast” of China, “once-rural districts have filled up with factories churning out export commodities.” Most unsettling of these environmental changes is the disappearance of rural villages: “Chen Village is no longer a typical village— it is no longer a village at all. But it is a typical part of a globalized industrial development that is engulfing ever more space and people in China” (331). Less visible than these extraordinary changes in the landscape is the resulting socio-ecological violence perpetrated against migrant workers’ families, particularly children. In her essay “Elegy of the Village,” Zheng points out the ways in which Luo Yuping depicts the erosion of the rural families and communities by industrialization and capitalism through the metaphor of cancer in his poem, “Left Behind through Children’s Eyes” / Xiaohai yanli de shouwang (《小孩眼里的守望》). Using “cancer” as a metaphor, Luo compares the phenomenon of migrant workers’ “left-behind children” in rural villages with their grandparents as a social problem with an illness that spreads “all over our motherland.” Yet “No cure by folk prescription or doctors could be found” for this social ill (qtd. in Zheng, “Elegy of the Village”). Migrant workers’ left-behind children, like the abandoned agriculture fields and deserted villages, are an integral part of the changing landscapes of urban sprawl, factory cities, and export manufacturing centers. Due to lack of parental care and communal support, these left-behind children face a host of problems, including poor education, undernourishment, abuse, and trauma resulting from feeling abandoned by their parents (China Labour Bulletin, “Migrant Workers and Their Children” 2018). Luo’s poem shows that the plight of migrant workers’ left-behind children is part of much larger social

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problem of the decline of agriculture and the disintegration of rural communities and families embodied by hollow villages. While Luo’s poem emphasizes the phenomenon of the hollow village as a nation-wide problem, Zheng calls the reader’s attention to its connection to globalization. As her reference to Luo indicates: Luo Yuping was one of the “old migrants,” whose rush to the south left him “skin and bones,” “a lost soul in reinforced concrete unable to return home,” becoming “a young man of world rush” (“Elegy of the Village”). Significantly, the phrase “world rush” at once evokes and contrasts the “gold rush” in nineteenth-century United States, highlighting a parallel of large-scale migrations between two drastically different historical periods. The fact that rural Chinese young men joining the “world rush” become lost souls in factory cities, or the factories of the world, links local migrant villages to transnational movement of capital, products, and ideologies of modernization, calling critical attention to the other scene of globalization. In keeping with Luo’s metaphor of cancer, the predicament of hollow villages and left-behind children has serious social ramifications beyond those suffered by migrant families and villages as the number of rural migrant workers continues to rise. A 2017 report on migrant workers by the China National Bureau of Statistics reveals that the total number of rural migrant workers in China’s cities has increased by 4.8 million since 2016, reaching a new high of 286.5 million (“2017 Migrant Workers Monitoring Survey Report” 2018).6 This increase indicates that the socio-ecological consequences of continuous rural migrations in China are deepening and widening. According to a 2017 report by an All-China Women’s Federation research team conducted in 2007, “there were about 58 million children below 18 years of age left behind by parents in the countryside, accounting for 21 percent of all children in China, and 28 percent of all rural children” (qtd. in China Labour Bulletin, “Those Left Behind” 2008). A recent report based on the 2015 National Population Sample Survey conducted by China National Bureau of Statistics shows that the total number of migrant workers’ children has reached 103 million.7 “Out of this total, there were . . . 68.8 million children who remained in their hometown, both in rural and urban areas” (China Labour Bulletin, “Migrant Workers and Their Children” 2018). Although this report seems to show a “relative decline in the number of rural left-behind children,” which may suggest improvement in their situation, the report emphasizes that “many formally rural children now live in newly created small- and medium-sized cities with limited social services and few decent job opportunities. As such, their parents still often have to find work in larger cities and the children still struggle to find decent schools and medical care” (China Labour Bulletin, “Migrant Workers and Their Children” May 2018). Deprived of close contact with their parents and alienated from their living environments, left-behind migrant workers children have developed both

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mental and physical health problems. Most of these children suffer from malnutrition, anxiety, and fear. Research conducted by She Mao reveals that “more than 60 percent of children manifested mild to moderate psychological disorders” (qtd. in China Labour Bulletin, “Those Left Behind” 2008). Many of these children, especially boys, become asocial and tend to exhibit criminal behavior. “In Zhejiang, the police arrested a criminal gang nicknamed ‘The Seven Wolves’ which allegedly engaged in multiple kidnappings, rapes, and cases of theft and extortion. Six of the seven gang members were left-behind children. The oldest was only 16 years old” (China Labour Bulletin, “Those Left Behind” 2008). The prevalence of juvenile delinquency among migrant workers’ children indicates that global capitalism and industrialization have eroded the social fabric of the larger society and severed the familial and communal ties of rural migrant workers. In his “Introduction: Catastrophic Migrations” to the anthology Humanitarianism and Mass Migration: Confronting the World Crisis, anthropologist Marcelo Suárez-Orozco points out: “Catastrophic migrations and violent family separations disrupt the essential developmental functions necessary for children to establish basic trust, feel secure (Erickson 1950), and have a healthy orientation toward the world and the future. Catastrophic migrations tear children from their families and communities” (29). In the case of rural migrant workers’ children in China, their families and communities themselves are torn apart. Migrant workers’ deprivation of family life is integral to the manufactured and manufacturing landscapes of enormous factory complexes in China. Zheng exposes this other scene of globalization by linking the plight of hollow villages and left-behind children to women migrant workers, highlighting another aspect of migrant ecologies. Zheng’s portrayals of married women migrant workers with children in poems such as “陈芳 / Chen Fang,” “杨红/ Yang Hong,” “熊曼/ Xiong Mang,” and “仇容 / Chou Rong” demonstrate that the disintegration of migrant workers’ families leads to generations of migrant labor and poverty. This cycle of migrant labor worsens the decline of rural communities and sustains the cheap labor pool for factories. Both Cheng Fang and her husband are migrant workers, but at different factories and in different cities. Although married and a mother of two children, Chen Fang still lives like a single woman, working on the assembly line where she started nine years ago: Hidden behind her youthful face Is an aged heart older than dotage Lethargic at the worn-out machine Young yet declining, like her soft sighs Her voice quiet, her head bending, her steps sluggish Fatigued and empty. She is from Hubei A mother of two children, twenty-six years

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Old. Her husband is a transporter in a molding factory In another city. He left her last year Nine years ago, she and he crammed into a van To come here from a village in Hubei. . . .            This girl Chen Fang Arriving here in 1998 and in 2007 she still remains On the assembly line. She feels a faint pain In the stomach like the pain the felled trees felt Pressing a hand on her ulcerous stomach she went home Saying she’d return when she got well. She talks about the changes around here, describing The cold river turning smelly, remembering The sound it no longer makes. The pain in her stomach Makes her somewhat apprehensive and sad. (Women Migrant Workers 186–187)

Chen Fang’s condition of being reduced to the status of disposable labor, becoming part of the machine, and deprived of motherhood and family life exposes larger socio-ecological problems beyond labor exploitation. Zheng arranges the lines of the poem in such a way so as to link her extended long hours on the assembly line for years to the pain Chen Fang feels in her stomach, and to connect her pain to that of the felled trees. Zheng further highlights the intertwining of the socio-ecological degradations through Chen Fang’s observation of environmental destruction—the polluted, stagnant river; the bulldozed vegetable fields; the vanished vegetation and trees replaced by factories. By inviting the reader to note the environmental deterioration through the gaze of Chen Fang, Zheng restores this migrant worker’s subjectivity and enacts agency of social exposure and critique. At the same time, Zheng further extends, by interweaving different time-spaces with the deterioration of Chen Fang’s health and the environment, those connections to other locations, such as the molding factory where Chen’s husband works as a transporter, and the village in Hubei, where their children are left behind. By making individual women migrant workers the subject of her poems, Zheng allows them to be witnesses of environmental degradation, social change, and injustice, rather than simply victims of exploitation and oppression. In her poem about another married woman migrant worker, 熊曼/Xiong Mang, Zheng foregrounds not only systemically produced “repeatability” of migrant workers as “lootable” subjects but also their structurally formed affects through the suffering endured by both the mother and child during their separation for more than a decade. She deftly employs the image of rain to connect family members living in separation, and to link the industrial city to the impoverished village in order to suggest the erosion of the rural family by industrialization and global capitalism:

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Rushing around in the rain, against the wind she stumbles, staggers, her heart as a mother is broken. Talking with her eight-year old son on the phone, she feels her hollow heart wrenched hollower by her son’s wailing. “Mama will be home for New Year. You listen to grandpa and grandma.” She talks to her sick old parents about crop fields, rice stalks, people and affairs of the village, mosquitoes and insects in the summer, felled willow trees along the river. Rain is falling from Guangdong to Hunan, its dense threads gentle and light, carrying a mother’s broken heart tortured by separation, day and night, from industrial Guangdong all the way to a poverty-stricken village in Hunan and a child’s gaze at the rain. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .                   She is thirty-two, a grinding worker at a hardware factory. Rain falls on the shiny iron sheets, yearning for loved ones spreads like rust everywhere in the countryside, engulfing her young son and old parents, covering the courtyard of poverty, the dilapidated tile roof, soaking the sobs of her son left behind in the village. (Women Migrant Workers 102–103)

As the poem develops with the extension of rain to different time-spaces and through Xiong Mang’s memories and reflections, Zheng shows the impact of carceral capitalism on three generations of a migrant worker’s family. It has been seventeen years since Xiong Mang left home and her family to work at an electronics factory in Guangdong. Her parents-in-law passed away three years ago, and her son, following his parents, has left the village to become a migrant worker. After eighteen years of migrant labor, Xiong Man will return home, aged and alone. She will die alone. When her son, no longer young and unable to take root in the city, will return home as she did, only to “find rain falling along the old eaves, / where water gathers, like tears, also like severed hearts, / one after another, splashing” (Women Migrant Workers 103). This desolate scene of Xiong Man’s home without family life captures the ruination of the lives, families, and communities of migrant workers. By enacting Xiong Man’s experience, feelings, and memories as a migrant worker, a mother, and a daughter, Zheng exposes the cycle of migrant workers’ poverty and exploitation, and captures the haunting reality of ruined lives in a hollow village. By following the socio-ecological degradation from the village to the factory and vice versa, Zheng revejals broader effects of global networks of social and environmental injustice. In doing so, she highlights the invisible, marginalized lives of migrant workers beyond the immediate production sites and outside the purview of environmental justice discourse that focuses mainly on toxins in factories and their impact on the urban areas. The poem “杨红/Yang Hong” suggests

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that for many rural migrant workers, moving between their rural villages and the city has become a way of life, or rather a necessity for survival. This movement replicates the cycle of poverty and exploitation, and exacerbates the decline of rural communities. A victim of human trafficking in the underground sex industry, Yang Hong was allured away from rural Hunan and forced into prostitution at a hairdresser’s in Guangdong. Later, her relocation from Guangdong to the home village of a migrant worker who loved her seems an escape from a life of humiliation and suffering in the city, until her partner, who is the father of her child, is imprisoned for illegal cutting of trees. Then Yang Hong is forced to return to Guangdong to resume prostitution in order to provide for her daughter. Given her mother’s situation, the daughter is likely to follow in the footstep of her mother in becoming a “lootable subject” caught in the cycle of poverty and exploitation, as their family life continues to deteriorate. Even though Yang Hong “likes to talk about her daughter and the future” (15)—the only pleasure she has in life—the future for her and her daughter looks dismal given the circumstances of their lives confined by carceral capitalism and patriarchy. In the poem “仇容/Chou Rong,” Zheng integrates the effects of toxic working environments on the health of Chou Rong, and portrays the impact of absent parents on her son to demonstrate the cycle of exploitation and poverty resulting in large part from carceral capitalism and globalization. In the electronics factory’s workshop “suffused with the smell of benzene / Toxic liquid in her body erodes her / Increasingly sluggish and stiff limbs” (Women Migrant Workers 109). Sixteen years ago, at twenty-three, Chou Rong and her husband left their one-year-old son behind to come to Guangdong, where they worked at an electronics factory, a hardware factory, a toy factory, and a shoe factory. At thirty-four, she gave birth to a premature baby with birth defects, who died soon after birth because of the high levels of toxins in her body. Having worked at so many different factories, she cannot tell from which one the lethal toxins invaded her body. After thirty-five, she feels her health declining fast. But this is not her only worry. Her son is failing school and listens to no one:          Her fourteen-year-old son left in Jiangxi Goes not to school but the internet bar and listens to no one The only connections Between her and her son are a few bills monthly a brief get-together for the New Year A telephone line At sixteen her son came over and Worked in an electronics factory with his father then left for another job got fired For not obeying the manager switched to another factory . . . . (Women Migrant Workers 110)

Like their parents, Chou Rong’s son and countless other left-behind children of migrant workers follow the pattern of becoming cheap, disposable labor. They have inherited their parents’ poverty and marginal social position, but not their

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sense of home. Unlike their parents, most of them have not worked in the fields as peasants, as Zheng noted in an interview (“They Cannot Find a Future to Look Forward To”). Many of them are migrant children traveling between the village and the city during school vacations year after year. Separated from their parents in their most formative years, and growing up without a close community, this second generation of migrant workers does not have the sense of connectedness to their home villages their parents do. They are, in a very real sense, homeless. The condition of the second generation of migrant workers sheds more light on the hollow villages—another hidden impact of globalization. Zheng refers to the second generation of migrant works as “the rootless generation, who have no intention to return to their home villages even though they know it would be very difficult for them to settle down in the cities. . . . They are wandering on the margins of the times” (“They Cannot Find a Future”). Through her encounters with and research in the second generation of migrant workers who were born after the 1990s, Zheng finds the so-called “post-90s” migrant workers “difficult to manage on the factory assembly line,” mostly due to the environments in which they grew up. “About 35% of them have divorced parents.” As children and teenagers, “the time they spent with their parents was no more than one month a year. Growing up as children of absent migrant workers, they carry indelible marks on them psychologically and otherwise” (Zheng, “They Cannot Find a Future”). Some of the migrant workers’ children grew up with their parents “in urban industrial areas, living on the margins of the city.” They feel emotionally and psychologically connected to the city, rather than to their parents’ home villages “even though where they grew up is far from real city life, and the cities where they live do not recognize their belonging.” For them, integration into the city is an impossible dream, yet they will not return to the village (Zheng, “Bear Witness”). Among the rootless second generation of migrant workers, however, is a new generation of Chinese workforce for the global market, who are assertive and rebellious. Unlike their parents who seem docile and more manageable, the second generation of migrant workers are more vocal and better organized in demanding fairness from the factories or companies. According to a report, “China’s New Migrant Workers Pushing the Line,” by James Pomfret and Kelvin Soh from Reuters, “young rural migrant workers . . . are less accepting than their parents” of what might be considered the norm of factory life— “low pay, grueling hours, and sometimes martial workplace rules.” Pomfret and Soh point out as a salient example the successful strikes by workers at the Honda Lock, a Chinese supplier to Japan’s Honda Motor Co. and other supply chains in 2010. Using social media effectively, the young migrant workers not only organized “the strike at Honda Lock and other Honda parts makers,” they “also have refused to man the factory lines at suppliers to Toyota, Hyundai, Adidas and other foreign companies.” Labor unrest is not new in China, however, as Pomfret and Soh note, the protests “often fizzled

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when disgruntled workers—fragmented and often afraid—gave in.” But this time, the better organized and “more aggressive” workers “are winning significant concessions. Nearly all of the recent strikes resulted in pay hikes. The Honda Lock walkout ended . . . with workers agreeing to a pay rise of 20 percent.” Apart from enabling migrant workers to communicate and organize more effectively, the internet provides a forum for the workers to articulate their grievances and to share information and ideas. The messages posted on the social media reveal workers’ awareness of the exploitation and plunder by global capitalism. As one worker states, “All they [transnational companies] want to do is milk us of all our resources, earn money from our work and then leave nothing for us at all” (qtd. in Pomfret and Soh, “China’s New Migrant Workers”). For Pomfret and Soh, this new generation of migrant workers is “a vast, embryonic and potentially powerful force that has captured the world’s attention by staging a surprise string of strikes recently.” These young rural migrant workers indicate a change in the Chinese workforce for “factories of the world” to be reckoned with by both the local government and the transnational companies (Pomfret and Soh, “China’s New Migrant Workers). All this suggests a new subjectivity of rural migrant workers in China resulting from global capitalism. Nevertheless, the new generation of migrant workers in China continues to feel the hopeless impact of being exploited by transnational carceral capitalism. Despite the successes of the workers’ strikes as reported by Pomfret and Soh, workers still face an uncertain future without much hope of significant social upward mobility. One of the workers they interviewed decided to quit his job at the factory and return home to rest for a while, saying, “After working three years, I’ve only saved several thousand yuan. What’s the point? We have no future, no plans, no answers” (qtd. in Pomfret and Soh, “China’s New Migrant Workers”). Even though the workers’ strikes may have caught the attention of the international media and transnational companies, the plight of migrant workers and the decline of their ancestral villages continue. Zheng insists on addressing the problems of migrant villages, intertwined with the plight of women migrant workers and their families, as integral to the transformations resulting from urban, industrial development and globalization. From the perspective of migrant workers, she calls the meanings of progress and development into question. In a 2013 interview “Bear Witness to Changes of the Times,” Zheng notes that in their reports on migrant workers, foreign reporters usually comment on “the speed and scale of rural migration to cities in China as unprecedented in human history.” But “from the perspective of a woman migrant worker,” she finds migrant workers “have not really entered the city.” Nor does she feel herself accepted “as part of the urban population.” This sense of not belonging in the city is partly the result of a systemic division between urban and rural China, partly due to lack of acceptance in the city, and partly because of their sense of not belonging, most women migrant

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workers are still registered as rural residents. “They know they are bound to return to the countryside when they are old,” having worked for more than ten or twenty years as migrant workers (“Bear Witness”). Their lives reveal a cycle of disposable migrant labor without much hope for a better future. In “Field Notes 6: A Generation of Aging Peasant Workers,” collected in Women Migrant Workers, Zheng notes that like Xiong Man, many first-generation women migrant workers hoped to earn enough money to send their sons to college. They thought that “with a college education, their sons would escape the countryside and find a stable job, and better still, a government job, and then they would become urbanites.” “At least, they hoped, their sons would not become ‘coolie’ laborers like themselves” (Women Migrant Workers 104– 105). So they worked their fingers to the bone to send their sons to college. But things did not turn out as they had hoped. Their children have become migrant workers like their parents. They themselves eventually return to their home villages when they are old to repeat the roles of their own parents by taking care of their grandchildren. Zheng emphasizes that there are countless migrant workers like Xiong Man. They make up “a vast population” whose upward mobility is restricted. Underlying their oppression, exploitation, and marginalization “is an invisible violence that is spreading” (ibid. 105). This “invisible violence” is what Nixon calls “slow violence” that is “incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). Zheng hopes that her writings will, in some way, help intervene in this violence by making it clear that “people living at the bottom of society must have the opportunity of upward mobility; they must have a future to look forward to” (Women Migrant Workers 106). Her poems confront what Nixon refers to as the “long dying—the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological,” which are “underrepresented in strategic planning as well as in human memory” (Slow Violence 2–3). Moreover, Zheng insists on critiquing the exploitation and oppression of women, which is normalized by patriarchy and has become part of invisible “slow violence.” In the concluding poem of her collection, “Women Migrant Workers: Rural China’s Heart of Forbearance,” Zheng links China’s “hidden illness of five thousand years” of patriarchy to industrial illness that plague women migrant workers (Women Migrant Workers 245). By situating this slow violence in the profound socio-ecological and cultural changes mobilized by industrialization, urban development, and global capitalism, Zheng’s vignettes of women migrant workers, as individual and collective material memories, are testimonies to the discounted human and ecological casualties of apparently lucrative economic development and globalization. Even though poetry may not directly bring policy changes or enable tangible improvements, Zheng’s poems bear witness to the invisible slow violence against rural migrant workers and the environment. In doing so, they at once enact and call for intervention.

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FIVE POEMS BY ZHENG XIAOQIONG 陈芳 / Chen Fang Hidden behind her youthful face Is an aged heart, older than dotage Lethargic at the worn-out machine Young yet declining, like her soft sighs Her voice quiet, her head bending, her steps sluggish Fatigued and empty. She is from Hubei A mother of two children, twenty-six years Old. Her husband is a transporter in a molding factory In another city. He left her last year Nine years ago, she and he crammed into a van To come here from a village in Hubei. Four years later They returned home to be married during a fifteen-day vocation Pregnant, then giving birth, she returned home for a year Pregnant again and giving birth, she returned home for another year She remembers the desolate landscape when she first arrived here While taking a walk on a path with her date along a stream She was attacked by robbers hidden the tall grass, who took her earrings Leaving a crack in her ear lopes. The vegetable fields on both sides of the path Were bulldozed, the lychee trees were cut down, the once green earth Is left with yellow sores. On both sides of the stream construction fence poles Stood up. Factories rose like a forest —it has been nine years. She is used to The 15-day shift, installing 20,000 slings a day These tiny catapults helped build the family house in rural Hubei and A saving of over ¥10,000. She is used to her hometown folks’ Praise and admiration, to fatigue, drowsiness, breeze from the sea And going to work without breakfast. This girl Chen Fang Arriving here in 1998 and in 2007 she still remains On the assembly line. She feels a faint pain In the stomach like the pain the felled trees felt Pressing a hand on her ulcerous stomach she went home Saying she’d return when she got well. She talks about the changes around here, describing The cold river turning smelly, remembering The sound it no longer makes. The pain in her stomach Makes her somewhat apprehensive and sad. (Women Migrant Workers 186–187)

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熊曼 / Xiong Man Rushing around in the rain, against the wind she stumbles, staggers, her heart as a mother is broken. Talking with her eight-year old son on the phone, she feels her hollow heart wrenched hollower by her son’s wailing. “Mama will be home for New Year. You listen to grandpa and grandma.” She talks to her sick old parents about crop fields, rice stalks, people and affairs of the village, mosquitoes and insects in the summer, felled willow trees along the river. Rain is falling from Guangdong to Hunan, its dense threads gentle and light, carrying a mother’s broken heart tortured by separation, day and night, from industrial Guangdong all the way to a poverty-stricken village in Hunan and a child’s gaze at the rain. Raindrops in a strange town make ding-dong sound, like the keys of a piano hitting on the grey industrial zone and a faraway village, linking two severed hearts to each other on a foggy rainy day, her son’s sobbing lingers in the rain. She is thirty-two, a grinding worker at a hardware factory. Rain falls on the shiny iron sheets, yearning for loved ones spreads like rust everywhere in the countryside, engulfing her young son and old parents, covering the courtyard of poverty, the dilapidated tile roof, soaking the sobs of her son left behind in the village. Ah, it’s been 17 years, she is aged. Rain’s falling on the roof in Hunan, translucent time is reminiscing. In the gentle rainwater, her youth is collected by a drop of rain, moving across the sky slowly, narrating a muddy path of life. “You two just work hard out there. We’ll take good care of Little Sunshine.” Their son and daughter-in-law work at an electronics factory in Guangdong, leaving the grandson by their side. The two-year old grandson cries on the phone, bawling “Mama.” Her parents passed away three years ago, sleeping forever underground. Only the misty raindrops continue to fall silently, repeating Their cycle of reincarnation. They converse in the sky, like ancient anonymous persons, in the front and back of the house, gossiping about her life, a life of 18 years of migrant labor. When old, she’ll return home. In 18 years, she’ll sleep forever in the ground. Her son will return home . . . to find rain falling along the old eaves, where water gathers, like tears, also like severed hearts, one after another, splashing. (Women Migrant Workers 102–103)

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杨红/Yang Hong At fifteen she has the splinters of life jabbed in her fragile frame like a fishbone stuck in her throat impossible to swallow or spit out. A school dropout abducted to Guangdong from crop fields to a small  hairdresser’s, she has pains in her body numbness in her soul her tiny physique can’t bear the fluffy hair dyed yellow or the red lipstick. Her shoulders tremble as she sobs under men’s lust, her young innocent body defenseless against the invasion of viruses that cloud the gaze of her clear eyes Itching and red swelling are inescapable metaphors the society has given her. The icy cold instruments at the abortion clinic invade her warm body, pain is the only thing in her daily life to which she is sensitive. At eighteen she is dying her body diseased. Thrown out of the hairdresser’s by the human trafficker, she found love from an honest man of forty-two from Yingde. Penniless he moved sand and bricks at a construction site, she rested and recovered in a workers’ shed. At twenty, she gave birth to a girl scrawny as a skinny cat. At twenty-two she followed him to rural Yingde. Poverty drove her man to cut trees in the mountain against the law,   then got into a brawl and sentenced to ten years in prison Taking her daughter with her,   she returned to Hunan where she’d left seven years before Then she returned to Guangdong where she sold her flesh at a hairdresser’s in Dongguan At twenty-four she fell in love with a man from Shaoguan who was later imprisoned for  robbery. At twenty-five she began working at a Dongguan shoe factory, on the assembly line a woman migrant worker in blue uniform. When I ran into her she said in these days she experiences neither sorrow nor joy like the product in her hands expressionless. At twenty-seven her seven-year-old child is in rural Hunan, her status unmarried She likes to talk about her daughter and the future. (Women Migrant Workers 14–15)

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仇容 / Chou Rong An injured finger dreams gauze vocational illness Tears (tortured by pain she sobs) salt-and-pepper hair Callous hands and hunched back numb mind and heart Osteoporosis fatigued muscles in a dim rental room She spreads her damp quilt the chill and musty smell of life Her gaze bewildered Outside the window are dwarf rental houses Spacious industrial zone brightly lit electronics factory Workshops suffused with the smell of benzene Toxic liquid in her body   erodes her Increasingly sluggish and stiff limbs like a shadow Swallowing her a dark tribulation beyond her comprehension Poor lowly no longer youthful or impulsive as her Seventeen-year-old son she’s left with a calm resignation to her fate More often than not she’s like a leaf of grass still green on the ground Like a screw turning in a machine she is already aging worn out Nowadays the sky is getting lower pressing on her body Not knowing the root-cause of her penurious life she blames herself For her diseased body deteriorating eyesight trembling Fingers She’s like a timid mouse observing life From a tiny hole Sixteen years ago she Left her one-year-old son for Guangdong to work at an electronics factory A hardware factory a toy factory a shoe factory to be   with her husband She was twenty-three then At thirty-four she gave birth To a deformed premature baby who died because of too much Toxins in her body from the hardware factory Or the electronics factory or the toy factory.... She’s not sure which She has no way of proving After thirty-five she felt Her health declining wounds in her invisible organs Split open sickness and tears Her 14-year-old son left behind in Jiangxi Goes not to school but the internet bar and listens to no one The only  connections Between her and her son are a meager monthly allowance a brief get-together   for the New Year A telephone line At sixteen her son came over and Worked at an electronics factory with his father then left for another job   got fired For not obeying the manager switched to another factory Her husband   a porter at the electronics factory for six years Works steadily to provide for his family with a paltry pay She doesn’t know the future she can’t look forward to the future Diseases growing in her body she has no more tears except her aging shriveling Hands feet heart muscles eyes blood bones and soul They keep her company in her dying. (Women Migrant Workers 109–110)

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女工:忍耐的中国乡村心 / Women Migrant Workers: Rural China’s Heart of Forbearance The dark oily cold stream is weeping hidden in your veins are Illnesses lead dust in your lungs your once clear gaze Like another poisoned river perplexed and murky Your thin and frail bodies like stars polluted by light in the sky Your bitterness from grinding machines disassembled divided dissolved Your love through meager wages ancient griefs in between your eyebrows Hold five thousand years of illnesses devour the dignity of your lives Your lives shaped by traditions of rustic simplicity You can’t believe in the laws of modernity Rights to protection or lawsuits Are beyond your imagination Behind your fated sighs Family affection love and bodies are hammered into the industrial age Scattered into different corners diseases in the lungs and veins Frailty in the body worn-out machines overtime Wages unpaid or delayed their dark shadows bring you harm All these oblige you to endure with rural China’s heart of forbearance.... (Women Migrant Workers 245)

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NOTES 1. “Six-One” refers to June 1, which is Children’s Day in China. “Nine-Nine” refers to the Double-Ninth Festival (the “Chong Yang Festival”) which is celebrated on the ninth day of the ninth lunar month, thus the Double-Ninth Festival is also referred to as “Old People’s Festival” in China. “Six-One” and “Nine-Nine” refer to the characteristic demographics of migrant workers’ “hollow villages.” 2. See, for example, Linda Krause and Patrice Petro, eds., Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age (2003); Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000); and Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (1991). Scholarly studies such as Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace by Pun Ngai, and a chapter, “Globalization and Transformation,” in Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization (2009) by Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger are exceptions. 3. According to Michelle Dammon Loyalka, “In recent years, China’s leadership has increasing hailed the contributions of the country’s rural migrants. Policies to protect their rights and foster their assimilation into urban life are being created, but in practice improvements have been slow to come.” See Loyalka, Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Front Lines of China’s Great Urban Migration, pp. 3–4. 4. See Lance Newman, “The Politics of Ecocriticism.” Review, 20 (1998): 71 (qtd. in Buell p. 7). 5. This poem has two different titles. It is entitled “Village Chronicles” /《村庄史志》in Collected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong /《郑小琼诗选》(2008). Its title is changed to “Transmogrified Village” /《变异的村庄》, which the poet prefers, in a later collection by Zheng, Poems Scattered on the Machine /《散落在机 台上的诗》(2009). But parts of the original version are deleted in the latter collection. The English translation of the original version of this long poem, “Transmogrified Village,” by the author has been published in the journal International Poetry Exchanges, no. 1, 2018, pp. 27–34. 6. “Rural migrant workers (农民工) are workers with a rural household registration who are employed in an urban workplace and reside in an urban area. They are not necessarily from rural areas. Many grew up or were even born in the city. They consider the city to be home but, because of the inflexibility of the household registration system, they remain classified as rural migrants.” See China Labour Bulletin, “Migrant Workers and Their Children,” updated May 2018. https​://cl​b.org​.hk/c​onten​ t/mig​rant-​worke​rs-an​d-the​ir-ch​ildre​n. 7. The broad categorization of “children of migrant workers” include those who are “17-years-old or younger who are affected by their parents’ migration for work, they include both children who travel with their parents to a town or city and those that remain in their hometown while one or both parents migrate.” See China Labour Bulletin, “Migrant Workers and Their Children,” updated May 2018. https​://cl​b.org​ .hk/c​onten​t/mig​rant-​worke​rs-an​d-the​ir-ch​ildre​n.

Conclusion

A Politics of Migrant Ecologies

On December 15 and 16, 2018, multinational migrant workers in Singapore held the first Global Migrant Festival in the city-state, where migrant domestic workers alone numbered more than 200,000 (Paul 15). This event reveals an important, yet understudied, aspect of migrant ecologies. Embedded in the festival are unintended formations of new communities, productions of new cultures, and the emergence of new forms of social activism, as well as unexpected becomings of migrant subjects, resulting from the movements of migrant workers across regional and national borders. A multinational Migrant Worker Poetry Competition was included among the Global Migrant Festival’s events. According to Shivaji Das, an author and founder of Global Migrant Festival, “We have been running poetry contests among low wage migrants and refugees in Singapore and Malaysia for 5 years. Our friends are running similar events in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and for the first time, in the refugee camps in Kenya this year. We all collaborate and support each other” (Email Letter to the author, November 20, 2018). Elizabeth Grosz’s ecological theory on the dynamic, transformative possibilities inherent in movements of materials, humans, and nonhumans sheds light on a politics of migrant ecologies. In Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections of Life, Politics and Art (2011), Grosz argues that “every process, every event or encounter is itself a mode of becoming that has its own time, its own movements, its own force. These multiple becomings both make and unmake, they do (up) and they undo” (2). Movements are transformative in the sense that they “enable life to erupt from certain mixtures of chemicals to complicate and enable materiality to undergo becomings, and to generate living beings of all kinds . . . through engagement with dynamic environments.” Moreover, these processes and modes of becomings “also enable others of social organization (both animal and human) to emerge from certain forms 101

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of life that transform those forms and that are themselves the sites of further becomings, becomings that function through the generation of a kind of politics, a complex interaction of populations, collectives, groups” (Becoming Undone 2). The 2018 Global Migrant Festival in Singapore demonstrates such becomings and a politics generated by them through complex interactions among different populations. The migrant worker poetry competition, held in the auditorium of Singapore’s National Gallery, involved 120 participants of 7 nationalities, speakers of 8 different languages. This range of diversity testifies to the unexpected, unintended cultural productions and social activism resulting from the movements of peoples, the establishment of new migrant communities, and the contagious dissemination of poetic texts. Zheng Xiaoqiong was an invited keynote speaker at the festival, largely because of her important role in establishing a transnational network of migrant workers. 于淼淼 /Yu Miaomiao, who went to Singapore for her undergraduate studies in 1998 and lived in Singapore ever since, introduced Zheng’s poetry to migrant workers, refugees, and volunteers in Singapore and Malaysia. She is one of the organizers for the first Migrant Worker Poetry Competition in the city-state in 2014, and in Malaysia the following year. Since then the competitions have been held annually in both countries. During the process of organizing these events, Yu contacted Zheng for advice and support, and they have maintained a years-long correspondence between them. Yu has also sent Zheng poems from the migrant workers’ poetry competitions, which Yu and her friends 孙洁 /Sun Jie and林方伟/Lin Fangwei translated into Chinese for wider disseminations. Zheng shared those poems with Chinese migrant worker poets and editors, and helped get them published in literary magazines and journals in China, including Poetry of Migrant Workers. These exchanges helped establish a network of multinational migrant workers across national borders. The subsequent formation of a new community gave rise to a platform for migrant workers and refugees to share their experience and articulate their thoughts and feelings. Their poetry competitions caught the attention of national and international media, whose reports helped make visible the exploitation and social exclusion of refugees and migrant workers in Singapore and Malaysia. In his article “Singapore’s Migrant Worker Poetry, Worker Resistance, and International Solidarity,” Sherwin Mendoza observes that migrant worker poetry competitions have “become an increasingly important part of migrant worker advocacy in the city-state,” and “expressions of international labor solidarity have also emerged from the migrants’ literary activity” despite “the constraints on critical political discourse in Singapore” (1). Yu’s letter to Zheng Xiaoqiong describes the diverse ethnic and national backgrounds of multinational migrant workers and refugees and the difficulties they face:

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There are more than a million migrant workers in Singapore, the largest group of whom are domestic helpers and construction workers. The domestic helpers are usually from the Philippines and Indonesia, some of them are from Burma / Myanmar, India, Nepal, and other countries. The construction workers are mostly Bangladeshis and Indians. They do the most dirty and dangerous work, but often find themselves in a disadvantaged situation, and are sometimes treated unfairly. Because of the government immigration laws, migrant workers have little hope of permanent residence and they have limited opportunity to integrate into the local society. The situation in Malaysia is somewhat different. There is a large group of refugees from Pakistan, Myanmar. Recently Rohingya refugees from Burma / Myanmar have taken refuge here. . . . As refugees, they do not have the right to work in most cases, and their children usually cannot attend regular schools. Exiled and displaced, refugee children suffer from confusion and anxiety. All this is reflected in the migrant workers’ and refugees’ poems. (Letter to Zheng, April 1, 2018. Trans. by the author.)

The exploitation, exile, and social exclusion these migrant workers and refugees experience evoke those as portrayed in Zheng’s and other Chinese migrant worker poets’ writings. In addition, the activities and communities of migrant workers in different countries also show parallels of emergent migrant worker cultural productions, social activism, and migrant subjectivity unbounded by ethnic kinship or national boundaries. Mendoza has noted that migrant workers in Singapore are reduced to “a commodity,” a “flexible” and “disposable” labor pool “bereft of subjectivity as any other commodity” (2). However, poetry enables the migrant workers to assert their resistance to commodification, to protest against social injustice, and to reclaim their subjectivity. Mendoza’s reading of the migrant workers’ poems reveals the workers’ “desire to be viewed as more than the figure of commodified labor,” and an awareness of their shared condition “in a capitalist society.” Thus, he argues that migrant workers’ poems are “part of the broad continuum of working-class poetry” and by “addressing other migrant workers and their allies,” they call for “international solidarity” (2). As Monir Ahmod, a Bangladesh construction worker in Singapore, writes: “In this empire of pleasure / you will live in the dense loveless / forest with your inherited hunger” (qtd. in Mendoza 4). In writing and performing poems about migrant workers’ condition and articulating their desires and protest, migrant workers in Singapore and elsewhere have become political actors on the international stage. Zheng’s prominent presence at the 2018 Global Migrant Festival in Singapore and other poetry festivals around the world, including the 2019 Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, testifies to her becoming otherwise than as part of machines or disposable cheap labor. If European empire building and knowledge

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production through “circumnavigation and mapmaking” “had already given rise to what one might call a European global or planetary subject” in the 1700s, as Mary Louise Pratt argues (29–30), global movements of capital, labor, and products in the twenty-first century have given rise to a non-European global subject of resistance. This global subject of resistance emerged among migrant workers from their networks and workplace as a global space. In her speech at the 2018 Global Migrant Festival in Singapore, Zheng said that “globalization has brought us migrant workers closer to various distant countries” through the commodities produced in factories in China and sold around the world. “Perhaps,” she added, “you have used the products which I assembled on the production line” (Speech, December 14, 2018, Singapore). Zheng told the audience that she had worked in more than a dozen factories, including a toy factory, an electronics factory, a hardware factory, and a shoe factory, whose products were shipped to countries in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Zheng emphasized that her awareness of her connection to the world outside of China began in a tape factory, which received orders from France, Germany, the United States, South Korea, and Japan, among other countries.1 This awareness led to her development of a global perspective on the interconnections between women migrant workers in China and the movements of capital, machines, raw materials, and products around the world. To illustrate how globalization mobilized migrations of labor to factories of the world, Zheng read her poem “Age of Industry” to the audience during her speech: Japanese machines in American-invested factories carry iron produced in Brazilian mines; lathe tools from Germany reshape the coastal lines of France; store shelves in South Korea are filled with Italian labels Belgium is waiting in the corner to be sold; Spain and Singapore are being inspected; Russia has been put into the warehouse by transporters; Africa is standing in the open-air square as natural resources; orders from Chile are narrow & long like its territory; my Sichuan dialect is somewhat old fashioned; Xiangxi dialect is harder to understand; Minnan dialect of Fujian is conversing with Taiwanese Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong is only a half-way station. If I’m willing I could arrange India, Afghanistan, Pakistan in the vicinity of Australia, put Iraq and USA side by side move Israel to the middle of the Caribbean make England and Argentina shake hands, Japan and Mexico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . In this industrial age, I am keeping busy every day for the sake of peacefully arranging the world in a factory.2 (《散落在机台上的诗》/Poems Scattered on the Machine 57–58)

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The speaker in the poem is surrounded by materials, products, and orders from around the world, as well as by fellow migrant workers from all over China, whose different dialects suggest their displacement as a mobile work force for both China and the world. The poetic form enables Zheng to illustrate complex local-global connections through juxtaposition of images and the speaker’s observation, which moves from other parts of the world to the workshop as a global space, where “in this industrial age, I am keeping busy every day / for the sake of peacefully arranging the world in a factory” (Poems Scattered 58). In asserting her role with sarcasm in these intricate transnational movements and operations, the migrant worker speaker emerges as a global subject, who resists the dehumanization on the assembly line in the factory. The poems by Zheng enact a politics of migrant ecologies by bearing witness to the slow violence of globalization even as they testify to her own and other migrant workers’ becoming otherwise. They illustrate the ways in which women migrant workers’ become machine-like cheap, disposable labor in factories or underground sex industry, as one of the consequences of rural migration in China, which is entangled with global movements of capital, labor, products, and raw materials. In doing so, the biographical poems of women migrant workers by Zheng are a form of testimonies, the workers themselves being both victims and witnesses of “slow violence.” However, the role of poetry in bearing witness has been called into question. In her essay, “Against Witness: Paul Celan, Doris Salcedo, and Memory in the Internet Age,” the poet and art critic Cathy Park Hong raises questions about the efficacy of poetry as testimony, as a way of “bearing witness.” She contends that “a poem valorized as” “bearing witness” “is a poem that is testimony to an exceptionally dark period, embalming a moment where there has been visible, collective trauma.” In doing so, Hong asserts, “the poem is about survival; the poem fights against oblivion; the poem calls for hope; and ultimately, the poem remembers.” “But,” she asks, “is it enough that a poem ‘remembers’ when we are now entrenched in an era of total recall?” Thus, she states, “In an era when eyewitness testimonies, photos, and videos are tweeted seconds after a catastrophe, poetry’s power to bear witness now feels outdated and inherently passive.” In the case of police use of lethal force against black male bodies, “witness accounts matter little when prosecutors can mishandle evidence and mislead the jury,” Hong explains, and “the witness seems more powerless than ever.” Bearing witness, however, is not merely a matter of recording or presenting visible evidence of injustice, like a camera or photograph. Zheng’s poems about the plight of women migrant workers in China make the invisible, the erased, appear and give voice to the silenced. Her poems do not merely remember. They disturb. They haunt readers by implicating them in lives that

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might seem irrelevant or other-worldly if presented as memories retrieved like instantaneously available data. Take, for example, the opening poem, “Woman Migrant Worker: Youth Stuck at a Station on the Assembly Line,” of Zheng’s collection Women Migrant Workers. The poem develops with the worker’s memories and observations, which implicate American consumers not only in the worker’s plight, but also in the degradation of the environment, resulting from industrialization and global capitalism. Zheng refuses to reduce the worker to an object of the reader’s gaze, but rather portrays her as a subject who engages the reader in watching “her pale girlhood running from an inland village / to a coastal factory, all the way to a store shelf in the U.S.A.” (1). By implicating readers as consumers in witnessing migrant workers’ fatigue and disease, resulting from dehumanizing labor in the production of commodities for the global marketplace, Zheng creates an ethical proximity between self and other, between “us” and “them.” Emmanuel Levinas contends that the proximity of the other demands our attention, calling for our “non-transferable responsibility” “for the neighbor” (44). This means “I am never absolved with respect to others.” “This responsibility is elicited, brought about by the face of the other person” as a subject, rather than an object “under my power” (44, 40). Zheng’s portrayal of the worker as an individual subject renders such an ethical relationship inescapable. The poem as testimony enacts an encounter, in which the reading “I” cannot absorb the other’s experience as passive knowledge, nor escape the other’s disquieting condition, or the self’s responsibility for the other. In bearing witness, Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China are also protests, enacting the agency of those who seem powerless. Hence Zheng’s poems refuse to be commodified for voyeuristic consumption or “turned into a mantra to ward off difficult engagement with the past” or the present, as Hong says of Paul Celan’s most anthologized poem “Death Fugue.” While Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers have enjoyed wide circulation and distribution, they remain disturbing and haunting. It is perhaps because of their unsettling engagement with the reader and audience in an era of globalization that Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers have been translated into many languages. The statements in a letter to Zheng by the German composer and musician Frederik Bous testify to the power of Zheng’s poems as testimony. “When I came across your poetry, I felt like I could not take anything else seriously, as I felt a large importance on addressing the problems expressed in your poems and a certain triviality of anything else until these issues would be resolved” (Nov. 9, 2017). This disquieting impact of Zheng’s poems urged Bous to compose a cantata for 《周阳春》/ “Zhou Yangchun”—“The Girl from Hunan.” This poem was sung in both Chinese and German in the cantata performed on February 8th and 11th in

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2018, in two cities—Darmstadt and GroB-Umstadt—in Germany. A soprano, Fang Liqiong (方李琼), sang the poem in Chinese, and the choir sang a German translation by Lea Schneider, who has translated Women Migrant Workers into German (Bonus’ Letter to Zheng, November 9, 2017). These performances in two languages about the experience of a migrant worker in China show a unique mode of cultural production generated by the movement of poetic texts and populations across national borders. A politics of migrant ecologies is embedded in the impact of Zheng’s poems on readers of different languages, including German. In explaining to “about 65 instrumentalists and about twice as many in the choir” of the University Choir and Orchestra of Darmstadt University of Technology why he chose the poem about the girl from Hunan, Bous notes that this poem “touched” him and made him feel the weight of its significance (Letter to Zheng, November 9, 2017). He points out in his written explanation to the instrumentalists and the choir that the poem’s topics concern not just China, but also consumers in Western societies: Thanks to globalisation the exploitation of lower social classes was itself exported to places far away, thus giving us the illusion that is does not exist anymore. Buying something in Germany, one does normally not know where the goods come from, who worked for it, for what wages and under what conditions. . . . In addition, . . . we ourselves do not want to know where our goods come from, afraid of the inconvenient truth and the resulting necessity to change our consuming behavior. (“Introduction to Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems,” January 19, 2018)

Zheng’s poems disturb such complacence of the privileged. Bous adds, “I want to give the huge anonymous mass of faceless workers who work somewhere in developing countries for us, a face and using my music to conjure their fate in the concert hall” (ibid.). In addition, Bous finds a form of protest in the scream of the young migrant worker from Hunan. He observes that in her dreams, the worker’s scream “acts as a metaphor for the individual resistance against giving oneself up to be an anonymous part of the factory.” As such, it is “revolt” against invisible oppression (ibid.). Paradoxically, in asserting protest, the scream of this seventeen-year-old worker enhances the dehumanization, exploitation, and isolation of migrant workers. It also calls the reader’s attention to invisible violence of industrialization and hidden labor exploitation of global capitalism: 周阳春 / Zhou Yangchun In the world of her dreams she stands at the ferry without boats or before she can finish the exam

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time is up Most times are defective products bleakness and emptiness In the mountains at midnight she is left alone no one to turn to for help She describes to me these scenes when she screams in her dreams Lamp light brightens her face after her screaming relaxed and open without the sinking silence or daytime tension In her dreams she finds vast desolate wilderness she has to cry out she’s frightened she screams . . . then wakes up to face in a crowded dorm of twelve her bewildered co-workers She apologizes to them saying in her body hides a demon who curls up quietly during the day but tortures her at night Her body is not used to Twelve hours of labor at the electronics factory Fatigue has become her only word of expression On the assembly line her body is stiff and clumsy her joints ache her fingers are heavy like machines In her back legs waist she has lost control of the indescribable pain pressing her body like a rock She must release from her body an open field to allow herself to shout a beast running out of her sleep This 17-year-old girl from Hunan screams as if a boulder oppresses her In her sleep her screams buried deep in her blood burst out shaking the whole dorm Between her breathing and screams I insomniac feel the oppression wrapped in the body of a silent female migrant worker Her screams pierce this hasty industrial age like a shout of protest or the hidden moving matter in her veins We still complain about how her screams broke our beautiful dreams and her innocent body and lost gaze Her screams in her dreams are this industrial epoch’s slow hidden pains accumulating and exploding.3 (Women Migrant Workers 173–174)

The screams of this young woman migrant worker and the plight of other women migrant workers in China and elsewhere haunt citizens of “this industrial epoch” and of the so-called global village. Bearing witness to the injustice and violence that continue and often go unnoticed, Zheng’s searing poems as testimonies are unsettling encounters that prompt readers and the audience to confront their complacency, complicity, and responsibility. Moreover, as spoken language, Zheng’s poems allow the reader to assume the position of the speaking subject, and to identify with the worker or the observer. For example, some migrant workers have used Zheng’s poems to voice their discontent and protest. In the winter of 2014, a group of more than 100 migrant workers from rural Hebei Province camped in an underground walkway near the embassy district of Beijing to demand their wages. They

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staged a peaceful protest against the factory that failed to pay them for their labor, performing reading aloud Zheng’s poem, “Those Who Demand Their Wages on Their Knees.” This protest was filmed and included as the first of ten episodes of the documentary—The Verse of Us—about migrant workers in China and their poetry.4 On June 21, 2015, The Verse of Us received the Golden Grand Prize, the highest award of the Shanghai International Film Festival, from an international jury. Since then a voiceover introduction in English was added to The Verse of Us online to make it accessible to English speakers around the world. Some of the episodes feature migrant workers reading their poems aloud in praise of the honor of labor, articulating their pride as workers. This is an example of how digital media can play an important role in turning migrant labor into “a mantra to ward off difficult engagement with” social injustice (to quote Hong’s words again). Countering the songs in praise of labor, which elide gendered exploitation and environmental injustice, Zheng’s poems expose and protest against the dehumanization of migrant workers by carceral global capitalism and reclaim the humanity and subjectivity of the workers. She achieves these effects by breaking away from conventional poetic form and disrupts syntactic structures, as shown in the following poem: 跪着的讨薪者 / They Who Demand Their Wages on Their Knees They flash by like ghosts at train stations beside machines in industrial zones and dirty rentals Their thin figures are like blades like white paper like hair like air They have cut with their fingers iron film plastic. . . . They are tired and numb looking like ghosts installed into machines overalls assembly lines They are bright-eyed and youthful They rush into the floods made up of themselves the dark waves I can no longer tell them apart just as I’m indistinguishable standing among them only skin limbs movements blurred features One after another those innocent faces are ceaselessly grouped lined up forming ant colonies bee hives of toy factories They are smiling standing running bending curling up then reduced to hands and thighs They’ve become tightly tightened screws cut pieces of iron pressed plastic twisted aluminum wires tailored cloth They have disappointed complacent fatigued happy scatter-brained helpless lonely. . . expressions They are from small towns villages hamlets They are smart clumsy timid weak. . . . Now they’re kneeling on the ground facing huge bright glass doors and windows

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security guards in black uniform shiny cars New Year’s greeneries the golden factory signboard glittering in the sunlight They kneel at the factory gate holding a piece of cardboard with clumsy handwritten words “Give Me Back My Blood & Sweat Wages” They four are fearless kneeling at the factory gate surrounded by onlookers A few days ago they were all country-women co-workers friends or colleagues sitting next to one another   in their workshop stations They look without expressions at the four female workers on their knees They witness four fellow workers being dragged away by security they watch one worker’s shoes fall off they see another worker’s pants torn as she struggles they observe in silence the four female workers on their knees being dragged away Their gaze shows no sorrow or joy . . . they walk into the workshops expressionless Their profound misfortune makes me sad and frustrated. (Women Migrant Workers 107–108)

Both the speaker and workers as onlookers are bearing witness to the protest against gendered exploitation and the suppression of the protest by security. While readers of this poem are also engaged in witnessing the injustice and protest, they are reminded of their roles and responsibilities as consumers of toys and other products made by the workers. In addition, “They Who Demand Their Wages on Their Knees” generates a new kind of politics and enables other migrant workers’ social activism to emerge, as shown by the rural migrant workers’ performance of this poem during their protest in an underground pedestrian pass in Beijing. In fact, exporting manufacturing factories in China as a global space have also become a space of new forms of organized resistance to exploitation. According to a report from China Labour Bulletin, “wage-related protests and strikes add up to 81.86% of the total” of 5,177 collective actions demanding “the payment of wages in arrears, while 303” demanding “wage increases” (China Labour Bulletin, “Converging Demands” August 30, 2018). A prominent characteristic of these migrant labor movements is the fact that a new kind of solidarity has emerged among the workers. The report on this phenomenon identifies the internet and social media as the condition for this new mode of collective actions: “thanks to the popularisation of the internet and mobile devices, Chinese workers today have access to a broad range of online tools for organising collective action. Workers are no longer limited by traditional family or birthplace ties in establishing solidarity in the workplace” (China Labour Bulletin, “The Proliferation,” August 20, 2018). Although the internet plays a significant role in mobilizing well-organized strikes simultaneously in different locations of large domestic and foreign enterprises, the workers initiated and organized the strikes. I contend that the becomings of migrant

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workers in their dynamic environments give rise to a new migrant subjectivity shaped by the differences brought into interactions through movements. A recent report on the labor movement shows that provinces in western and central China, such as Henan and Shaanxi, which have the “fastest growth rates in rural migrant labour” since 2017, “have become major centres of worker activism and unrest, even more so than traditional centres of activism like Guangdong” (China Labor Bulletin, “The State of Labor Relations in China, 2018,” January 1, 2019). A most remarkable social activism generated by the transnational movements of capital, labor, and products is the collaboration between Walmart workers in China and the United States. “In the Spring of 2016, many Walmart workers in China, concerned that a new ‘comprehensive working hours system’ would jeopardise [sic] their working conditions, staged a series of protests across China.” These protests became better organized and expanded abroad when an “estimated more than 20,000 Walmart employees from all over the country joined” the online forum of Walmart Chinese Workers Association (WCWA). A new transnational social activism emerges from the Chinese migrant workers’ interactions across national borders: What distinguished the WCWA from smaller, local networks was its interprovincial nature, organising colleagues from different Walmart stores across China. It is also worth noting the international solidarity created between Walmart workers in China and the United States. The WCWA and the American workers group OURWalmart connected via teleconferencing and discussed the common issues faced by workers in both countries, and came up with joint strategies to fight back. Members of OURWalmart also shared examples of successful industrial action in the United States with their Chinese colleagues. (China Labour Bulletin, “The Proliferation,” August 20, 2018)

This international solidary among Walmart workers in China and the United States suggests that migrant ecologies entail the unexpected emergence of a new subject of resistance and a new politics from encounters resulting from globalization. Like the Global Migrant Festival in Singapore and international dissemination of Zheng’s poetry, the China-U.S. Walmart workers’ solidarity opens a window to the other scene of globalization. From these perspectives, the other scene of globalization reveals more than socio-ecological degradation and slow violence hidden under spectacular economic and technological developments. The ecological concepts of transformative becomings that Grosz advocates offer enabling ways for “addressing the future.” And “in this sense,” Grosz argues that concepts “are the conditions under which a future different from the present—the goal of every radical politics—becomes possible” (Becoming Undone 80). An empowering politics of migrant ecologies

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is embedded in this understanding of concepts as what Grosz calls “modes enacting of new forces,” as “the making of the new” (ibid.) themselves, as “what we need to address the forces of the present and to transform them into new and different forces that act in the future” (Becoming Undone 80). Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers urges the transformation of what Grosz calls “the forces of the present” “into new and different forces that act in the future” (Becoming Undone 80). The becomings of Zheng and other migrant workers, along with other multiple becomings made possible by local and global migrations and movements, can help mobilize “new and different forces” for a future different from the present. Underlying this politics of migrant ecologies are our individual and collective responsibilities for an unpredictable, open-ended future. NOTES 1. Zheng Xiaoqiong, Speech at the 2019 Global Migrant Festival in Singapore, December 14, 2019. (Zheng sent the written version of this speech in Chinese to the author on December 14, 2018.) 2. The original translation of this poem appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 2, no. 1, 2016, p. 97, published by the University of Minnesota Press. 3. The English translation of this poem by the author has been published in the online poetry magazine Empty Mirror (January 25, 2019) and on the website of the 50th Poetry International Festival Rotterdam in June 2019. 4. 我的诗篇 /The Verses of Us is available online: https​://ww​w.iqi​yi.co​m/v_1​ 9rrom​lzck.​html#​vfrm=​3-2-z​ebra-​1.

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Index

“Against Witness: Paul Celan, Doris Salcedo, and Memory in the Internet Age” (Hong), 105 “Age of Industry” (Zheng), 104–5 Ahmod, Monir, 103 Alaimo, Stacy, 9, 17, 26–27, 37 attritional violence, 22–23 Bach, Jonathan, 54 Bahng, Aimee, 8 Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections of Life, Politics, and Art (Grosz), 11, 101–2 Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Alaimo), 9, 26–27 Bous, Frederik, 106–7 Bradsher, Keith, 54 Buell, Lawrence, 84 Burtynsky, Edward, 26 capitalism, 10 carceral capitalism, 17, 49–79; factory cities and, 50–60; as form of unfreedom, 62; migrant worker’s family and, 86–92; village-in-thecity, 60–69 Carceral Capitalism (Wang), 10 Carrigan, Anthony, 9

catastrophic migrations, 6–7 Chan, Anita, 85 Chang, Leslie, 12, 22, 25 “Chen Fang” (Zheng), 88–89, 95 Chen Village, 85–86 Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization (Chan, Madsen, and Unger), 85 “A Child Migrant Worker from Cold Mountain” (Zheng), 57–58, 71 China: factory cities in, 50–60; global capital, 2; industrialization in, 17, 25, 35–39; market mechanisms, 2, 25; migrant workers in, 2–4, 21–23. See also migrant workers; rural migrant villages in, 84–85; sex industry, 62–69; urban ghettoes in, 60–61; urbanization in, 17–18, 25, 55–56, 81–94; village-in-the-city, 60–69; women migrant workers in, 2–3, 4–5, 8–11, 21–39. See also women migrant workers China’s Urban Billion: The Story Behind the Biggest Migration in Human History (Miller), 60, 83 “Chou Rong” (Zheng), 91–94, 98 climate change, scholarship on, 5–9, 56 Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Solinger), 11 119

120

Index

cosmopolitanism, 9 dagongmei. See women migrant workers Dalang, 33–35 Das, Shivaji, 101 Davis, Mike, 82–83 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 9–10 Didur, Jill, 9 Dongguan, 13, 15, 37, 62–65 “Dong Weipin” (Zheng), 35–36, 44 “Dong Zhilan” (Zheng), 56–57, 70 Dooling, Amy, 13 Double-Ninth Festival, 100n1 Duhigg, Charles, 54 Ecocriticism of the Global South, 13 ecologies, 4. See also migrant ecologies economic globalization, 1–4, 21, 25, 32, 82–84 “Ecopoetics in the Dagong Poetry in Postsocialist China: Nature, Politics, and Gender in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems” (Gong), 13 “Elegy of the Village” (Zheng), 86 Emmett, Robert, 14 environmental degradation, 3–4, 9, 16–17, 25–27, 36–37, 82, 89 environmental humanities, 13–14 exploitation, 7–8, 15, 51–60 factory cities, 50–60 Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Chang), 12, 22 Fang Liqiong, 107 Fang Zhou, 23–25 Forman, Fonna, 7 Foxconn City, Shenzhen, 49–55; workers’ suicides, 51–54, 58 Fuller, Thomas, 21 Gaetano, Arianne M., 11 gendered labor exploitation, 13, 16 “A Girl from Guizhou” (Zheng), 58, 72 “The Girl from Hunan,” 106–8 global capitalism, 3, 8, 17, 50–59

Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities, 9–10 global ecology, 9–10 “Globalicities: Terror and Its Consequences” (Spivak), 84 globalization, 2–4, 18, 21, 28, 104; in Asia, 21–22; economic, 1–4, 21, 25, 32, 82–84; and gendered division of labor in village, 29–31; hollow villages and, 2, 18, 81–82, 87–88, 92; left-behind children, migrant workers and, 18, 64, 84, 86–92, 100n7; and local environments, 56; socio-ecological impact of, 83–84; and urbanization, 81–94 Global Migrant Festival, Singapore, 101–3 Gong Haomin, 13 Goodman, Eleanor, 12 Grosz, Elizabeth, 11, 18, 101, 111–12 Hakka women, 29 Handley, George B., 9–10 Haraway, Donna, 4 Harvey, David, 8 “He Na” (Zheng), 66–67, 77 hollow villages, 2, 18, 81–82, 87–88, 92 Hong, Cathy Park, 105 Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, 49 Huangma Ling, Dongguan, 3–4, 13, 19n1 Huang Yongmei, 53 Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, 47n10 Hubei Province, 35 hukou system, 19n2, 61, 83 Humanitarianism and Mass Migration: Confronting the World Crisis (Suárez-Orozco), 6, 88 “Hu Zhimin” (Zheng), 67–68, 78 industrialization in China, 17, 25, 28, 35–39, 55–56, 81–94 “An Insane Girl” (Zheng), 58–59, 74 inter-connected life-forms, 3–4

Index

The Intimacies of Four Continents (Low), 3 Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry, 12, 25 Jacka, Tamara, 11, 12 Johnson, Ian, 83 K–12 education, China, 80n9 Kimmelman, Michael, 56 labor management, 17, 51 labor migrations, scholarship on, 5–9 “Lan Aiqun” (Zheng), 29, 33, 35, 41 Larson, Christina, 51 “Laying Siege to the Villages: The Vernacular Geography of Shenzhen” (O’Donnell), 60 left-behind children, migrant workers, 18, 64, 84, 86–92, 100n7 “Left Behind through Children’s Eyes” (Luo), 86–87 Liangge cunzhuang (Two Villages), 55 life forms, as mesh, 3–4 “Liu Lequn” (Zheng), 27, 31–33, 35, 42 Longhua Science and Technology Park. See Foxconn City, Shenzhen Low, Lisa, 3 Luo Yuping, 81, 86–87 Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Ngai), 2, 12, 30 Madsen, Richard, 85 Massey, Doreen, 18, 84 mass migration, 5–9 material feminism, 9 Mendoza, Sherwin, 102, 103 mesh, life forms as, 3–4 “Middle-Aged Prostitutes” (Zheng), 67–68, 79 migrant ecologies, 4–9, 19n4, 54–55; catastrophic migrations, 6–7; climate change and, 5–9, 56; environmental humanities, 13–14; exploitation,

121

7–8, 15, 51–60; gendered labor exploitation, 13, 16; global capitalism, 3, 8, 50–59; local-global connections, 13–14; politics of, 101–12; rich versus poor, 8–9; rural migration, 13–14, 16; subjugation and, 7–8; women migrant workers, 13–17 “Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World” (Oppermann), 5 Migrant Futures: Decolonizing Speculation in Financial Times (Bahng), 8 migrant workers, 2–4, 6–9, 34; carceral capitalism and, 17, 49–79; dignity, 14–15; exploitation, 15, 51–60, 91; global capitalism and, 50–60; globalization impact on, 18; health concerns, 23–24; left-behind children, 18, 64, 84, 86–92, 100n7; multinational, 102–3; oppression, 15, 57–59; poverty, 56–57, 91; sexual exploitation of, 62–69; slow violence against, 17, 22–25, 32; social injustice, 9, 12, 16–17, 26–27, 103, 109; strikes, 53–54; toxic working environments, 3–4, 9, 16–17, 23–39, 82, 89 militarism, 10 Miller, Tom, 60, 83–84 mobile labor force, 24–25 Moore, Malcolm, 54 Morton, Timothy, 3–4 Multinational Maids: Stepwise Migration in a Global Labor Market (Paul), 7 Murphy, Rachel, 28, 30 Nanhai Honda Auto Parts Factory, 53 Nanpu Village, 63–64 Ngai, Pun, 2, 12, 30 Nixon, Rob, 9–10, 17, 22–23, 38 Nurende cunzhuang/The Village of Women (Luo), 81 Nye, David, 14

122

Index

O’Donnell, Mary Ann, 60 Old People’s Festival, China. See Double-Ninth Festival On the Move: Women in Rural-toUrban Migration in Contemporary China (Murphy), 11–12, 28 Oppermann, Serpil, 5–6 OPPO Electronics Corp., 47n10 “Passing through the Industrial Zone” (Zheng), 1–4 Paul, Anju Mary, 7 peasant workers. See migrant workers Phillips, Tom, 62 Planet of Slums (Davis), 82 Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, 103 Pomfret, James, 51 Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (DeLoughrey and Handley), 9 postcolonial ecology, 9–10 Pratt, Mary Louise, 104 Qifeng, South Jiangxi, 30 Ramanathan, Veerabhadran, 7 Rangarajan, Swarnalatha, 13 Rauhala, Emily, 51 refugees, 102–3 River Mouth Village, 52 “Running into a Small Rice Paddy in Dongguan” (Yang), 55 rural migrant workers, 100n6 rural migrations, 13–14, 16, 34, 60, 81, 84, 87 Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (Jacka), 12 rural workers. See migrant workers Sarveswaran, Vidya, 13 Schliephake, Christopher, 83 Schneider, Lea, 107 self-sacrifice, woman, 32 sex industry, China, 62–69

sex workers, 16–17 Shadbolt, Peter, 62 She Mao, 88 Shenzhen, 60–61 Shiva, Vandana, 4 “Shoe-Making Girls” (Fang), 23 “Six-One,” Children’s Day in China, 100n1 Slovic, Scott, 13 slow violence, against migrant workers, 17, 22–25, 32 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Nixon), 10, 22 “‘Slow Violence’ in Migrant Landscapes: ‘Hollow Villages’ and Tourist River Towns in China” (Zhou), 13 social activism, 101–3, 110–11 social injustice, 9, 12, 16–17, 26–27, 103, 109 social marginalization, 50, 53, 61–62 Soh, Kelvin, 51 Solinger, Dorothy, 11 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 18, 84 strikes, migrant workers, 53–54 Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo, 6, 88 Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices (Sun), 12 subjugation, 7–8 Sun, Wanning, 12 superpower parochialism, 9–10 “Terracota Army on the Assembly Line” (Xu), 51 Terry, Brandon, 61 Tharoor, Ishaan, 51 “They Who Demand Their Wages on Their Knees,” 109–10 “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature” (Alaimo), 9 trans-corporeality, 9, 17, 26–27 Unger, Jonathan, 85 The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Wallace-Wells), 5

Index

123

United States, 21–22 Urban Ecologies: City Space, Material Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture (Schliephake), 83 urban ghettoes, China, 60–61 urbanization: in China, 17–18, 25, 55– 56, 81–94; and globalization, 81–94 urban slum villages, 17, 60, 65–68, 82–84

“Wu Chun Lan” (Zheng), 32–33, 35, 43

van Crevel, Maghiel, 12–13 “Village Chronicles” (Zheng), 85 village-in-the-city, 60–69 Vivo Communication Technology Co. Ltd., 47n10

“Yang Hong” (Zheng), 90–91, 97 Yang Ke, 55 “Young Prostitutes” (Zheng), 65–66, 76 Yue Yuen, athletic shoes company, 25 Yu Miaomiao, 102

Wallace-Wells, David, 5 Wang, Jackie, 10, 50, 61 Wendle, John, 6 “Who Touches the Iron of the Age: On Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry” (Zhang), 36 “Woman Migrant Worker: Youth Stuck at a Station on the Assembly Line” (Zheng), 16, 25, 27, 40–45, 54, 106 women migrant workers: in China, 2–3, 4–5, 8–11, 21–39; dignity, 14–15; in electronic factory, 30–31; exploitation, 7–8, 15, 51–60, 57–59, 91; fatigue and illness, 25; oppression, 15, 57–59; poverty, 56–57, 91; as tools for industry, 30–31; toxic working environments, 3–4, 9, 16–17, 23–39, 82, 89; Zheng Xiaoqiong and, 14–17 “Women Migrant Workers: Rural China’s Heart of Forbearance” (Zheng), 16, 94, 99 Women Migrant Workers (Zheng), 5, 14, 19n6, 27–28, 52, 56–59 women sex workers, 62–69 Wong, Jackie, 17, 63 Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Buell), 84

Zhang Guoliang, 23, 25 Zhang Qinghau, 36 Zhan Youbing, 31, 60–61 Zheng Xiaoqiong, 2, 12–13, 23, 26, 30–31, 102; Age of Industry, 104–5; Chen Fang, 88–89, 95; A Child Migrant Worker from Cold Mountain, 57–58, 71; Chou Rong, 91–94, 98; Dong Weiping, 35–36, 44; Dong Zhilan, 56–57, 70; A Girl from Guizhou, 58, 72; He Na, 66–67, 77; Hu Zhimin, 67–68, 78; An Insane Girl, 58–59, 74; Lan Aiqun, 29, 33, 35, 41; Liu Lequn, 27, 31–33, 35, 42; Middle-Aged Prostitutes, 67–68, 79; Village Chronicles, 85; Woman Migrant Worker: Youth Stuck at a Station on the Assembly Line, 16, 25, 27, 40–45, 54, 106; Women Migrant Workers: Rural China’s Heart of Forbearance, 94, 99; women migrant workers and, 14–17, 21–39; Wu Chun Lan, 32–33, 35, 43; Xiaoqing, 75; Xi Mao, 58, 73; Xiong Mang, 89–90, 96; Xu Rong, 45–46; Yang Hong, 90–91, 97; Young Prostitutes, 65–66, 76 Zhou Xiaojing, 13

“Xiaoqing” (Zheng), 75 Xiayu Qin, 12 “Xi Mao” (Zheng), 58, 73 “Xiong Mang” (Zheng), 89–90, 96 Xu Rong, 39, 45–46, 51; “A Screw Plunges to the Ground,” 52; “Terracota Army on the Assembly Line,” 51

About the Author and Translator

Zheng Xiaoqiong, a critically acclaimed contemporary Chinese poet, has published twelve collections of poetry. Her tenth collection, Women Migrant Workers (《女工记》 Nugong ji), referred to as “the first collection of symphonic poems about women, labor, and capital,” has won a number of prestigious awards. It has been translated into German, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Turkish, and other languages. Zheng has given readings at poetry festivals, such as the Berlin Poetry Festival, Rotterdam International Poetry Festival, Perth Festival Writers Week, Turkey Asian Poetry Festival, Bremen Poetry Festival, and International Migrant Arts Festival in Singapore. Some poems from Women Migrant Workers were performed in the theater and at concert in the United States and Germany. Zhou Xiaojing is professor of English at University of the Pacific. She is the author of Cities of Others: Reimagining Urban Spaces in Asian American Literature; The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry; Elizabeth Bishop: Rebel “In Shades and Shadows and coeditor of Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature. Her English translations of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poems have appeared in journals and magazines, including Verge: Studies in Global Asias; Chinese Literature Today; and World Literature Today. She is also the Chinese translator of Li-Young Lee’s memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, and collection of poetry, The City in Which I Love You.

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