Once in a while I think about how, over time, the life goes out of certain words. The Chinese term ‘huodongjia’, or ‘activist’, for example, is dead. Occasionally, accompanied by somber music, it’s uttered at a quarter of the speed of normal speech when a state news presenter announces a dignified memorial service at Babaoshan cemetery for one of the last Communist revolutionaries. These individuals may or may not have been spirited, shrewd, stubborn, or have had a wicked sense of humor – but they are remembered only canonically, as awe-inspiringly ‘great’. You no longer hear a living man or woman being called a huodongjia. This genre of person still exists – advocates, organizers, activists – but they are called by other names. Unlike their predecessors who rest in glory at Babaoshan, they don’t usually star in the orthodox storyline.

In 2017, a similarly fossilized term, ‘workers’ literature’, was suddenly revived in the Chinese popular imagination, after a plain-spoken essay by a forty-four-year-old nanny in Beijing went viral. Titled ‘I’m Fan Yusu’, it tells the story of the author’s childhood in the Hubei countryside, her wayward youth as a runaway, and how she made a living in the capital by taking care of the love-child of a business magnate and his mistress. The hardest part of the job was not what she had to do but what she was kept away from. Fan had left an abusive marriage and was raising two daughters on her own. Each night she spent tending to her employer’s infant was a night stolen from her own daughters, who huddled together in a rented room at a workers’ colony called Picun just outside Beijing proper. Fan, a tiny woman just shy of five feet tall, who wore bangs and had a faraway look, abruptly became the face of the country’s migrant workers, a population approaching 300 million. Migrant workers – or New Workers, as some of them prefer to be called – leave their rural hometowns in search of employment and better prospects in urban areas. Many of them have ‘left behind children’ or long-distance spouses. In their host cities, they live without residence status. A remnant of the planned economy, the difficulty of navigating China’s mandatory residential registration system has been compared to securing an immigrant visa to the US. Without this status, migrant workers are deprived of basic rights and social benefits such as healthcare and the ability to enroll their children in local public schools. Fan’s stardom transformed one such bardo zone into a pilgrimage site of sorts. Picun drew in reporters, professors, documentary makers, and vaguely lefty bookish types. At the heart of Picun was a small creative universe: a theater, a grass-roots museum dedicated to China’s migrant laborers, and a ‘New Workers’ Literature Group’, where dozens of members like Fan had been reading and writing together since 2014. A movement was born.

One Saturday morning last fall, after years of reading about the cohort, I caught an outbound No. 989 in Beijing, one of two commuter bus routes that share a stop outside the main entrance to Picun. As we drove, the trees lining the streets became sparser; apartment complexes gave way to older, low-rise buildings. The number of Audis and Teslas thinned; trucks, concrete mixers, and men and women braving the cold on e-bikes took over. At my destination, a number of these e-bikes were parked haphazardly by the side of the road, each of them with a quilted shield installed at the front. One of them belonged to the poet Xiao Hai, who greeted me. He wore a black baseball cap backwards, and walked with such a bounce in his step that he almost seemed to trot. The e-bikes are popular, he explained, because you don’t need a license to ride one. ‘These are called windbreaker quilts.’ He pointed to the shields at the front. We had exchanged messages for a while before my visit. I knew that working on an assembly line had made him feel like ‘a screw’, and that he loved Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. In person, he was unreserved in talking about bitter experiences and emotions, yet this manner was balanced by a chirpy lightness. We walked toward the gate to Picun, a grayish stately minimalist arch befitting an open-air art center. This oddly placed structure was erected a couple of years after the literature group turned the neighborhood into a cultural attraction. The gate reads, in English, welcome to picun. ‘It’s very magical realism,’ Xiao Hai said. ‘It must have cost them millions of yuan.’ Inside was a typical ‘urban village’, a lively but underdeveloped area where migrant workers lived in close quarters. The main street was packed with modest establishments that served the some 20,000 people living here: liquor stores, grocers, pharmacies. Eateries selling piping hot rice noodles, lamb skewers or roasted ducks opened early and closed late. Their customers often worked shifts far away but preferred to eat here whenever they could, to stretch their paychecks a little further.

Xiao Hai recounted his employment history. It was long, especially considering that he was in his mid-thirties. Growing up in Henan Province, when he wasn’t in class, he helped his family in the wheat fields. He left home at fifteen – since then he had lost count of the jobs he had held in delivery, sales, electronics factories and garment mills. He likes to say he survived these days on Dylan’s songs and Hai Zi’s poems. In 2016, he worked at a kitchen appliance manufacturing plant in Zhejiang Province. As he plugged motors and buzzers onto circuit boards, he thought about how to escape. That summer, he arrived in the capital ‘in search of art’. Art was elusive, but he did find cheap lodging – for less than thirty yuan, or about four dollars, he could sleep in a bathhouse overnight – and a string of odd jobs. The next spring, he started working at a community second-hand clothing store in Picun. As he negotiated the alleyways, I realized I was being given a tour of Picun through Xiao Hai’s imagery. We were not far from the Capital International Airport, and passenger planes frequently passed overhead. Most of Xiao Hai’s peers had never used the country’s high-speed Gaotie trains, let alone boarded an airplane. ‘People in those planes up there are coming to do big business, but down here we’re trying as hard as we can to scrape out a living,’ he said.

We arrived at an open patch of deserted land. Two lonesome trees stood in the middle. ‘Do you see that apricot tree?’ Xiao Hai gestured toward one of them. ‘That’s where our museum and theater used to be.’ A few months ago, buildings in this area – including some of the gathering spaces the New Workers had used for more than a decade – were destroyed. Colonies like Picun offer migrant workers affordable rental housing and a sense of neighborliness, but to the authorities, these areas, with their run-down facilities and crowding of the so-called ‘mobile population’ of migrants, are stubborn impediments to development. In recent years, similar neighborhoods on the outskirts of the capital had been demolished one after another. The New Workers braced themselves for what seemed an inevitability.

There had been premonitions of a coming change. For a decade, crackdowns on groups of citizens, including labor activists, has been coupled with a tightening control of speech. In late spring, Xiao Hai and the rest of Picun were confronted by giant red characters that read demolish on the walls. ‘The low-tech and the low-skilled are on their way out,’ Xiao Hai said. I thought of a few pricking lines he had posted on WeChat: ‘Picun, with its surroundings demolished / is like a centipede whose legs are broken / its shivering body wiggles in the directionless frigid wind.’