By Jenn Marie Nunes (Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures)
I speak this sharp-edged, oiled language / of cast iron—the language of silent workers / a language of tightened screws . . . / a language like callouses . . . / . . . of severed fingers . . . between the damp steel bars (Zheng 2016). So begins Zheng Xiaoqiong’s “Language,” rich with a dark, painfully embodied expression of migrant worker life in China. Winner of the 2007 Liqun Literature Award for Peoples’ Literature, Zheng is one of 288 million-plus migrant workers who have left rural homes for low-paying jobs in urban centers, making possible China’s “economic miracle” (CLB). Despite efforts to amend the hukou 户口 system, China’s “floating” population[1] remains vulnerable, facing job and housing insecurity, social stigma, and lack of access to resources. Women like Zheng, constituting 35% of the migrant worker population (CLB), face additional pressures related to gender roles and reproductive health (Gaetano 2004). Representation of migrant workers by the Chinese media has aggravated their marginality via a dehumanizing natural disaster discourse: migrant workers are a “wave,” “flood,” or “tide,” bringing prostitution, drugs, disease, and crime. However, a growing group of migrant worker poets, battler poets[2], or dagong poets 打工诗人, have countered this homogenizing discourse by writing and sharing poetry online. In the past fifteen years, their singular voices have garnered significant attention from writers, scholars, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the public, leading to mixed results in terms of improved representation and conditions.
As a poet in the U.S., it feels strange and exciting to see so many people turn to poetry as a mode of expression and to see an audience respond. Poetry does not go viral in the U.S.; it has in China. Poetry is “difficult” here, an elite genre, not a popular form of writing that can be taken up by anyone online to process and express, for instance, sorrow after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, helplessness and frustration during Covid, and the intimate particularities of migrant worker life. In light of this outpouring of poetry from one of China’s most marginalized populations, and as a poet myself, I want to know: what can poetry do? How does it intersect with the material and imaginary aspects of the lives of migrant worker women? How is the “I” that powers much of their poetry constructed out of their daily experiences and in what ways might this literary “I” stretch and transform lived reality for the writers—and readers—that inhabit it? My upcoming Fulbright-Hays funded research on the ground in Taiwan offers me the opportunity to engage with migrant women writers in person about their writing and to experience the material aspects of their lives in order to better understand how poetry makes meaning for them and thus to better understand and translate their writing for a wider audience.
This kind of understanding, however, also requires the ability to look through a wider lens that takes into account the transnational political and economic contexts that inflect, inform, and are in turn potentially impacted by their writing. It is my interest in this wider context that led me to apply for a graduate student fellowship to attend the recent Worlds in Contention conference at OSU. Through my attendance, two things became particularly clear to me: first, that the situation is China and Southeast Asia is eerily similar to that of economic migrants on our side of the globe, indicating the importance of transregional approaches to migration; and secondly, that an interdisciplinary approach, an approach able to cut across the borders of area studies and also to make connections among political, economic, social, and artistic phenomena and accompanying power dynamics, becomes more and more urgent.
In the first case, Inés Valdez’s paper, “The Brown Family and Social Reproduction in U.S. Capitalism,” which focuses on the destruction of the brown family and construction of the brown body as particularly exploitable in service of white social reproduction in the U.S. brought up a number of issues that resonate with the situation faced by internal migrant workers in China. These issues include a racialized[3] logic that in the U.S. marks brown (and black) bodies and in China rural bodies—supposedly already used to strenuous and monotonous labor—as suitable for physical, low-wage work. Gender also intersects with other logics of the body to sort brown and rural women into particular caretaking roles, whether in the form of domestic labor or sex work. There is also a moralizing logic at work in these understandings of the brown family and brown labor, and in China there is the notion of suzhi 素质, translated as quality or character. Migrants have been discursively endowed with naturally low suzhi and must be civilized by the urban environment or urban family, but if they fail to be civilized, it is simply because of the inherently flawed nature of their own character (Sun 2009; Jaguscik 2011). There is also the clear destruction of family and kinship configurations amongst one group of people in order to support these relationships amongst another group. The ways in which migrant workers are separated from their family members and discouraged or hindered in their desire to form new family relationships is an everyday violence that receives little political attention here or in China.
Finally, what most struck me in Valdez’s presentation was the way in which she frames the racialized division of labor and social reproduction in the U.S. not as an accidental or unintended result of capitalism or political unrest—something that can now be targeted and remedied within a capitalist system—but as an integral part of the development and success of modern capitalism in the region. This racialized division of labor has been built into U.S. and Mexican economic and political policies in order to ensure a pool of exploitable labor. Similarly, while the astronomical rise of migrant workers in China is often positioned as a result of rapid economic development following China’s shift away from a planned, agrarian economy, if one looks at the inception and trajectory of the hukou system, it is apparent that China actively created a population that could easily be mobilized without actually being mobile. And it is this population that has been leveraged to support China’s “economic miracle” and the rise of consumer middle and upper classes from which most migrant workers are largely excluded.
But that doesn’t mean the people pushed into the role of migrant worker, or otherwise oppressed, have no interiority, no voice. Artistic expression and resistance also play a role in configurations of race, neoliberalism, and injustice. While we did not hear conference papers directly from the perspective of literature or the arts, I would argue that the importance of aesthetics and rhetoric was felt. Most directly related to my own work, was the moment when Amy Offner’s paper touched on songs of protest originating in the 1980s amongst Afro-Columbian communities affected by a massive dam project in southwest Colombia. Although she is coming from an historical perspective, she is interested in questions similar to my own: how these songs both make meaning and are made to mean—a form of community identity construction, a symbol of Colombian assimilation, a means of voicing resistance—by musicians, Colombian audiences, and activists. The mention by a fellow graduate student of African poets who also use verse to speak out against oppression and violence further suggests that poetry might “do something” in terms of political and affective intervention. Beyond these examples of creative expression, presentations touched on the visual rhetoric of advertisements for “conflict free” diamonds (Macaskill), images of extraction and the landscapes it affects (Riofrancos), and the design of a political float during carnival in Germany (Slobodian). The notion of an aesthetics of fascism and/or the neoliberal subject was also hinted at in discussion of the attachment of Germany’s far right party to gold, which is also a colonial object (Slobodian), Mexican anti-obesity campaigns (Gálvez), and the stories and spaces created by different groups mourning the victims of the Sewŏl ferry disaster in South Korea (Park).
These glimpses of the role artistic expression and aesthetics play both in upholding and sustaining neoliberal capitalist structures and in resisting and distorting them has me looking forward to future conversations and to reading my fellow graduate students’ responses to this conference, a number of whom are also in the arts and humanities. In other words, like any good conference, this one left me ready for more.
[1] “Floating” because China’s hukou or household registration system ties citizenship rights and social services, including healthcare, education, pensions, etc., to place of origin rather than place of residence.
[2] “Battler’s Poetry” is based on an Australian colloquialism, and as Maghiel Van Crevel (2017) puts it: “‘Battler’ might just be the closest we are going to get to saying ‘precariat’ without saying ‘precariat’—that is, to a register and connotations that are in sync with those of the Chinese term: colloquial, concise, pejorative yet proud” (246).
[3] While in China “ethnicity” or regionality rather than “race” are the dominant internal categories of difference, categories that do not necessarily map neatly onto migrant vs. nonmigrant workers, the way in which the technology of race intersects with the control of certain bodies resonates. Growing urban centers do also tend to be located along the coasts and there is a strong awareness of regional insider/outsider-ness, particularly attached to accent and customs.