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.’

*

Back in New York, when I told people I know – writers and editors – about Fan Yusu’s viral essay, they often asked me: Did she go on to become, for lack of better words, a real writer? Did her writing save her from a life of drudgery? I fumbled to answer – not exactly because I couldn’t arrange the facts into a kind of response, but because, despite Fan’s vastly different circumstances, she was struggling with these same anxious preoccupations. How do we evaluate an act of writing if its author hasn’t been anointed by a publisher or a reviewer and enough remuneration to live by?

In 2019, when I first connected with Fan on WeChat, it appeared that, off the strength of her essay, she had a book in the works. But she wasn’t certain if her manuscript would end up in print. Last year, a reputable literary imprint in Beijing released Fan’s debut novel, an autofictional story with a fantastical twist called Reunion after a Long Separation. She joined Xiao Hai and me in the migrant children’s library, one of the last remaining footholds of the New Workers in Picun. It was a sun-drenched room where wooden shelves lined the walls. Among the colorful books on display were Andersen’s Fairy Tales, The Little Prince and a youth edition of How the Steel Was Tempered by the Soviet writer of socialist realism, Nikolai Ostrovsky.

Fan was wearing a lilac scarf, creamy-beige booties and a headband that looked like braided hair. One might reasonably expect her to be basking in the triumphant glow of becoming a published author. Book events had brought her to Shanghai three times. She was a guest on the actress Annie Yi’s talk show. (Yi, who’s a few years Fan’s senior, presents agelessly, like a Korean film star. In a tastefully dim tatami room, Yi gushed about the new book: ‘I read it in one sitting and took it to the bathroom when I had to go!’) At the library, however, Fan began a Darwinistic spiel about her career, as if by beating herself down she might prevent some invisible enemy from doing so. ‘Do I fancy myself a famous writer? I ought to fill a basin with water and take a good look at my reflection,’ she said. Survival, after all, was the most important thing. ‘Even the most pedantically delusional people know they have to eat.’ Slightly taken aback by this intense harshness toward herself and her aspirations, I tried to gently challenge her by evoking Zhang Huiyu, the Peking University scholar. For years, Zhang was a committed mentor and editor to the New Workers group in Picun. He commuted there every weekend to host seminars, and prepared teaching materials on his own dime. ‘Given Prof Huiyu’s status, his work is not delusional. It’s meaningful,’ Fan said. ‘For people like Xiao Hai and me, getting distracted from making a living is delusional.’

Fame had left her worse off than she’d been before, in terms of earnings, she said, letting out a laugh. To make more time for writing, Fan gave up working as a nanny, which paid about 7,000 yuan monthly. The more flexible hourly cleaning jobs she took on paid 5,000. ‘I used to be able to save up about 10,000 yuan at the end of each year. Not anymore. When things are hard, I borrow 500 from Xiao Hai.’ Fan’s older daughter landed an office job, but her younger child was still in school and depended on her. Earlier that day, when we were coordinating via message, I’d worked up the courage to ask – in hindsight, insensitively – if we could meet at her place. She politely declined, and suggested the children’s library. She had lived in the same place – a 100-square-foot room – for more than a decade. The rent had gone up from 200 yuan to 500. ‘An apartment with a kitchen and a bathroom costs more than 1,000 now,’ she said. The inconvenience of using shared facilities buys her a little financial freedom. She was really okay with the situation, though, she said. ‘What is 10,000 in savings good for? Not enough to squander on a meal for the rich,’ she said.

Many in the Chinese literary scene were attracted to these unvarnished voices. Wu Qi, editor of the cultural criticism journal One-Way, describes a kind of ‘directness’ in their prose. ‘There is the urgency that “I have to tell you my story and this is how I feel”,’ Wu said. This doesn’t happen as often with professional writers. ‘I read too many pieces that are bound up in theories. They turn writing into something mysterious.’ A few years ago, Wu invited a few Picun writers to contribute short essays to an issue of One-Way themed around the changing capital city and the people in it. Fan Wei, a carpenter from Shandong, wrote about the night he left home: in the back of a truck a group of young men, strangers to each other, helped load motorcycles. If the authorities checked, the legitimate goods would give cover for the illicit passengers. Guo Fulai, a blacksmith in his fifties, wrote about sharing a shed with a dozen men on a job. Bored and lonely, they near-unanimously voted to keep a rat as their collective pet. ‘This Beijing rat is so pretty,’ one of them said. ‘How do you know this rat is from Beijing? They don’t carry identity cards,’ another shot back.

These eye-level accounts document the particular moments and conditions of the authors’ lives. They no doubt resonate with the countless migrant workers across the country, who have few ways to express themselves, administratively or artistically. It also challenges wealthier readers. As in many places, the prevailing narratives of modern life in China, political or commercial, are shallow versions of the real thing. Take the rise of shopping malls in recent years: in Shanghai alone, there are now 400 of them. Upwardly mobile influencers and consumers are obsessed with new trend-setting brands and rave about Michelin-starred restaurants. The mall cleaners, on the other hand, live in fear of the hype and crowds. In 2023, Zhang Xiaoman, an office worker who invited her mother to live with her in Shenzhen, published the book My Mother is a Cleaner. She describes how, to maintain an optimal environment to inspire spending, cleaners are assigned impossible goals: ‘For every customer who walks into the mall, everything they lay their eyes on has to be clean,’ Zhang writes. If only there were less foot traffic, the cleaners secretly wish, they wouldn’t be inundated with ‘so many footprints to mop, so many fingerprints to wipe, so many milk teacups, dirty tissues, hair, leaflets and masks to pick up’. Another book from last year, I Delivered Packages in Beijing by Hu Anyan, describes the highly segmented lives of delivery workers. The computerized systems they rely on are often unreasonable, so are the human managers who tell employees to strive for ‘above and beyond’. One of them asks his subordinates to help take out their customers’ trash; another makes the case that an imminent pay cut is really a raise in disguise. One demanding customer berates Hu with the American-sounding slogan ‘the Customer is God’. Hu blurts out: ‘But I have to serve so many Gods every day.’ Despite himself, before quitting the job, Hu found himself tenderly bidding a silent farewell to his clients. ‘I felt as if I had participated in and witnessed parts of their lives: their homes, their families, their pets and their different personalities and manners.’

Writers and editors are often hard-wired to distrust obvious storylines. The usual instinct is to explore unusual conundrums and unanticipated twists of fate. This mentality is partly what fueled the popularity of the Fan Yusu story. As one editor put it, ‘It creates this intriguing image: late at night, a middle-aged nanny is engrossed in Leo Tolstoy and Maupassant.’ But what happens next? For middle-class readers living in capitalist societies, the undesirable everyday realities of poverty and exploitations are not just unsurprising, but bone-deep knowledge that dictates their life choices – trying hard to get into good schools, hanging on to dead-end desk jobs and seeking therapy in consumerism. If a story builds a certain kind of tension, a reader might reasonably expect a resolution. There is, unfortunately, no clear way out: Sisyphus still pushes the rock, to borrow Xiao Hai’s favorite metaphor for the daily grind.

Making garments in Suzhou, Xiao Hai often wondered, ‘Am I creating value or am I producing trash?’ He sat at his post in an electronics workshop ‘day in and day out / wielding a soldering iron / on the youthful dreams, lonely longings and feelings of being lost / melding them all onto tiny resistors’.

‘When you chat with friends, you can’t be all pain and bitterness. In poetry, I’m closer to my soul,’ Xiao Hai told me. He prefers being known by his nickname, which means ‘Little Sea’. It reimagines his small life and connects it to something bigger. ‘When people call me Hu Liushuai, I feel like I’m back in a factory,’ he said.

*

For much of the twentieth century, the idea that Chinese literature and art should be focused on – and sometimes created by – the working and farming poor was not at all unusual. In the 1930s, some of the most revered writers in modern Chinese literature, including Lu Xun and Ding Ling, formed a secret alliance of left-wing writers and wrote to promote the Communist cause to the public. By the mid-century, they had prevailed, so to speak. In Mao’s China, writers and scholars were officially tasked with connecting with the peasants and the working class: to be their microphone, if not their voice. They went on assignments similar to Roosevelt’s Federal Writers’ Project, collecting folktales, poems, and getting to know the experiences and perspectives of the salt-of-the-earth that the party proclaimed to serve. This kind of fieldwork was known as ‘caifeng’, or ‘collecting the wind’. A 1963 volume recorded a line of lyrics from southern China, ‘Everything belonged to the slave-owner, only the songs belonged to me.’

All writing in the early days of Communism was geared toward class criticism. Stark inequality, the literature of the time asserted, was a matter of the past. A 1950s hit about a titular ‘White Haired Girl’ who hides in a cave to escape a landlord’s abuses is still performed by ballet troupes today. Zhou Bapi, a greedy landlord from a 1955 novel, who mimics the roosters’ crow to make his laborers start working earlier, continues to be a shorthand for unreasonable bosses. Some literary journals dedicated columns to publish the work of non-professional worker and farmer writers. Hong Zicheng, a Peking University professor of literature, describes how leftist literature or, to be precise, ‘Worker-Peasant-Soldier’ literature became ‘the only legitimate existing form’ in this period, and dominated not only the subject matter of literature, but also the way in which writing was distributed and received.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s wife, the actress Jiang Qing, propagated a rubric for how characters should be created: in short, first, authors had to focus on positive characters, and then zoom in on the most heroic characters. The work that resulted was often varying degrees of dullness. Who wants to read stories without delicious villains and superfluous characters with too much going on in their heads? This cultural shift also contributed to the intensity of the political drama of the times: audiences primed to look for outsized heroes felt at home in a cult of personality. Weary of the predictable patterns of this style of writing, authors began to focus on hyper-realistic depictions of life in the 1980s, and for the most part avoided politics. The aversion was natural enough, but it began limiting the scope of Chinese literature from the other direction.

In a vastly changed country, what was once an orthodox style of writing has now been reborn as a curiosity in the work of the migrant writers. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, China’s population was mostly rural, and people worked and lived not far from where they were born. Today, the majority of the Chinese population live in urban areas. Migrant workers’ day-to-day realities are disconnected from those of their childhoods. The idea of ‘home’ is fading. Policy-oriented, top-down narratives from the likes of the People’s Daily and the World Bank like to celebrate this as progress without recognizing the underside: hundreds of millions of people – the workforce who transformed the country following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms – they often say, have been ‘lifted out of poverty’. Who are the most heroic characters here?

The stories being written by Picun writers and their peers show the effort and the ingenuity required to survive as migrant workers, builders of the economic miracle. They describe glaring injustices, prejudices and inequalities without editorializing these realities. One night in 2017, not long before the release of the One-Way issue, a fire killed nineteen migrant workers in a district not far from Picun. The authorities began inspecting buildings and evicting those who lived in the area, referring to them as ‘low-end population’. (Suddenly, the original title of the One-Way issue ‘Beijing Outsiders’ became jarringly pointed. Wu’s team changed it to ‘New Beijinger’.) Fan found this catch-all demeaning. ‘How can the vast majority be “marginal” or “low-end”?’ She turned to me, as if looking for reasons to trust. ‘I guess you must be on the side of the vast majority, aren’t you?’ She recited one of her first-grade lessons from 1979. ‘Workers, farmers, soldiers and scientists. What do you want to be when you grow up?’ The possibilities were endless, the line seemed to suggest, because it was a world in which, whatever path you chose, everyone would be equal.

*

In a noodle joint on the main street of Picun, I met with the nanny Li Wenli, who uses the pen name Meng Yu, or ‘Dream Drizzle’. She was enjoying her weekly day off. Delicate-looking and softly-spoken, Li wore a pink jacket, and she had an innocent charm about her. When she wasn’t on the clock, she liked to find a quiet place where she could draw or write. She showed me some of her work. In her pictures a long-haired woman is often at the center: she dances; she puts on a nice dress and has a cup of coffee; she enjoys the breeze; she wades into a body of water; she hugs her knees and cries. Li told me she’d had trouble falling asleep the night before, after reading a news story about a thirty-eight-year-old live-in nanny in Wuhan, who’d died with bruises and other signs of abuse all over her body. ‘I stayed awake thinking, why am I doing this job?’ she said. ‘Some employers will tell you at the outset, “Don’t get comfortable. I’ve bought you.” ’ Li was in her fifties, and her three children were all fully grown. A doctor had been telling her she needed to take things easy, but she had no realistic pathway to retirement. ‘My children are all married. They have jobs. This should be what happiness looks like. But I still feel bitter from time to time.’

Nannies might be paid better than cleaners, but that didn’t translate to more respect, Fan said. Stories about families beating their nannies are so common they often don’t make the news, but even when they do, people scroll right past them. ‘If the subject is a child from a wealthy family, then all of a sudden life is precious.’ I asked if she saw herself as a voice for those who were, as she put it, ‘filtered out’? ‘Everyone lives in their own isolation,’ Fan said. ‘I don’t think about writing in response to what’s in the news, or writing about what the readers are interested in. I don’t know this stuff.’ Her first publisher had suggested that she should write non-fiction – the genre that was expected of her. She disagreed, and insisted that the book she wanted to write was a novel. The publisher backed out. After years of fruitless conversations, she finally signed a contract. ‘Having a publisher who is willing to work with me made me stop thinking I was horrible at writing.’ But it was still very hard every time she faced the blank page, she said, lifting up the braided headband she was wearing. It turned out to be securing a wig over her thinning hair.

In Fan’s book, a mystical mulberry tree watches over the protagonist wherever she goes. It roots for her, while her romantic interests and employers fail to. She searches for more from life, but what she finds are menial jobs and deceitful people. Snide and disdainful remarks await her: ‘The temperament of a lady meets the fate of a maid.’ Only the tree spirit sees her for her, untethered from the station she is slated for in this lifetime. When I asked Fan what inspired her, she became animated. She had a hazy, early memory of picking mulberries from under a large tree. She returned to the same place when she was older, but the tree was nowhere to be found. She kept thinking about that tree, longing for the taste of its fruit. She asked her mother about it, and was told the tree had been cut down. ‘A seed fell down in my village god knows how many years ago, and it grew into that tree near my home,’ Fan said. ‘It’s a cold, mean world.’

Artwork by Ma Junyan, Fan Yusu and Xiao Hai, 2021
Courtesy of Sixth Tone