Introduction by Kaiser Kuo

I first encountered Zheng Xiaoqiong’s writing in Iron Moon, a collection of Chinese worker poetry skilfully translated by Eleanor Goodman (2016). What struck me then about her poetry, and what remains true in this prose selection, is Zheng’s attentiveness to the texture of migrant-worker life. She restores dignity not through political theatrics, but through rigorous sensory detail: the clang of metal, the sting of dust, the smell of dirty socks, the fluorescent fatigue of factory nights, and cramped dormitories where shirtless men play cards and chainsmoke. She records the world as it is felt by the people who move through it. In doing so, she opens a space in which they can be seen as individuals – complicated, vulnerable and never reduced to symbols.

These subjects are caught in a trap that has structured millions of lives over the past four decades. On one side lies the village: impoverished, agrarian and socially stifling. On the other lies the city: dazzling and modern, but also cold, precarious and brutally indifferent. Zheng’s writing captures the psychic tension of that in-between space – the feeling of being suspended between two worlds, belonging fully to neither. She resists both the standard, agency-stripping sweatshop narrative and the counternarrative of migrant labour as liberation from rural drudgery.

Patterns emerge across provinces and generations: young people whose schooling stopped because families could not afford the fees; ethnic minority children from remote mountainous communities labouring in the industrial south; women leaving home to escape constricting expectations, only to encounter new forms of gendered exploitation; men watching years slip by under the grind of overtime. But these patterns never feel generic. Zheng approaches each person individually, letting their memories and private cosmologies make themselves known.

Zheng can do this because she has lived this life. For more than a decade, she was based in an “urban village” outside Guangzhou – one of many such dense enclaves where migrant workers negotiate despair. She worked factory jobs, sleeping in those same dormitories. Between 2006 and 2015, she interviewed people in alleyways, restaurants and rented rooms, assembling a kind of oral history of the great migration to Guangdong. The resulting manuscript, Woman Worker, edged close to citizen journalism – a perilous vocation in contemporary China. Much of the text was considered too sensitive domestically, and Zheng has refused to accept the extensive redactions that some would-be publishers have demanded. So the book has never been published.

These narratives offer a window into Zheng’s life and work. The experiences they chronicle are often harsh – stories of exploitation and violence in the shadows of China’s industrial rise. But Zheng never frames her subjects solely through suffering. She captures flashes of solidarity, humour and stubbornness. Her sensitivity is humanising, holding both the structural and the intimate in view: the vast demographic movement of internal migration, and the individual lives that give it moral weight. She is a participant and an observer, a sympathetic advocate – but not an activist.

Goodman has continued to translate her work for publication, including a collection of poems, In the Roar of the Machine, and the chapters of Woman Worker that appear here for the first time. Her translations preserve the steadiness of Zheng’s gaze. These are the stories of people who built modern China, but were rarely invited into its narrative. Zheng listens to them. And because she does, they enter the record not as anonymous labourers, but as full human beings.

Zhao Fang’s Story

I met Zhao Fang 17 years after she’d left her village. Born in the late 1970s in the northern lake region of Hunan, she’d married a man from the mountains of southern Jiangxi. In nearly two decades, she had rarely gone back to either province, and instead floated around Guangdong between Dongguan and Shenzhen, living the factory life. When we met, she was working as a sewing machine operator in a wool textile factory in Dalang, Dongguan. As her son played on the floor of their rented apartment, she told me the story of why she had decided to leave home. “There was just nothing for me there,” she began. “I couldn’t stay.”

Zhao Fang never graduated from middle school. Her grades had been mediocre, which made it unlikely that she would have passed the high school entrance exam, and her family couldn’t afford to send her to vocational training. So she chose to quit altogether. All those years later, she still remembered the details clearly.

It had been the busy farming season. Most of Hunan cultivates two crops of rice annually. After the early summer crop has been harvested, the fields are immediately tilled, and seedlings planted for a late crop – this is known as a “double hustle”. Back then there was no farm machinery in the village. Zhao Fang was the family’s principal labourer, the most expert at both planting and harvesting. As she told me this, she pointed to her son: “This generation has it a lot better than mine did.”

Zhao Fang showed me the scars on her little finger. “This is from cutting rice stalks. Where I’m from, everyone my age has scars like this on their hand.” Later, when she took me to meet some of her fellow villagers living in the city, I paid attention to their left hands. Just as she’d said, they each had scars on their forefinger, middle finger or pinkie. Some scars were shallow, others deep – all childhood injuries.

In order to sit for the eighth-grade advancement exam, students had to attend an additional month of instruction in August. This cost 60 yuan and 15 kilograms of rice, for the teacher’s overtime and the school lunch. Zhao Fang’s parents didn’t have the money. They told her to attend the first few days of classes, and promised to pay the teacher later. But she was too embarrassed to do so, and stayed home to continue with the rice planting. That was the end of her studies. “I remember it to this day,” she told me. “Because of that measly 60 yuan in school fees, I couldn’t finish middle school.” She still seemed to hold it against her parents.

“There was nothing for me to do in the village other than help with the farm work,” Zhao Fang said. After quitting school, she stayed at home, often quarrelling with her mother. There were no jobs in the village, and a nanny position that her mother tried to arrange for her fell through.

After a few years, she told me, “I really didn’t want to stay at home any longer. I had turned 17, and although it seems so young to me now, at the time I felt like an adult and I wanted to be in charge of my own life. If I’d stayed at home, a matchmaker would have come to the house when I turned 18. In a year or two I’d be married, and I’d be repeating the life my mother had.” She continued: “Sometimes I’d sit in the kitchen and watch my parents bustle around the wood-burning stove. Since our village was poor, we burned branches, rice straw, cotton stalks… things with a lot of debris. My mother would come back from the paddies with her trouser legs rolled up and her hands still covered in mud, and she’d go straight to the stove to light a fire to cook our food and to boil feed for the pigs. When she bent down to shove rice straw into the belly of the stove, dust would cover her hair. The choking smoke made her tear up. I told myself that I couldn’t repeat my mother’s life. I wanted a different kind of life – I had to leave the village!”

“I had to leave!” A whole generation of rural youngsters felt this yearning. They didn’t know where they could go or what they could do, or what the outside world would be like. But they knew their future lay in some faraway place, in distant cities and factories, not in their backwater villages. They knew that hardship and setbacks were likely if they migrated, but that didn’t affect their determination to leave home.

Most of Zhao Fang’s classmates chose not to take the high school test, and they couldn’t afford a vocational education either. She herself was not given the opportunity to train as a hairdresser or a seamstress, so instead she stayed at home and helped out on the farm. In the agricultural off season, she often biked over to her classmates’ homes to hang out. She wasn’t the only one with ideas about leaving. One of her classmates went to Changsha to be a nanny, while a few others with connections there became sales clerks or sanitation workers, to the envy of their classmates.

The village was remote, without telephones or internet, and news arrived by letter or word of mouth. This is how Zhao Fang learned that a classmate’s cousin was working in Shenzhen, Guangdong. He apparently earned 700 or 800 yuan a month – more than the village teacher, or many of the local government employees.

The village was full of stories about Guangdong back then. It was said that businessmen from Hong Kong and Taiwan came there to set up factories; there was gold just waiting to be grabbed. If someone dropped a five-mao coin in Shenzhen, no one even bothered to pick it up. Zhao Fang tried to calculate how much she could make in a day by collecting these coins. She laughed as she told me this, and my laughter mingled with hers. I was in school in Nanchong at the time, and my strongest impression of Guangdong was also of five-mao coins lying everywhere on the ground. I’d had the same idea as Zhao Fang – to go there to scoop up all that abandoned money.

The 1990s in rural China was an era of Hong Kong films, old-fashioned VCRs, fuzzy TV screens, and constraint; the odour of cheap cigarettes and foot stench and sweat stink and talcum powder… these are defining childhood memories for an entire generation. Cinema shaped our image of Guangdong, close as it was to Hong Kong. We imagined it as a city with a criminal underworld, romances, machetes, brotherly love, dead bodies lying in the streets, sudden wealth, fancy cars, glitzy hotels… a city that was flourishing, luxurious and debauched.

Riding on jam-packed buses through rural areas back then, one would often encounter a ridiculous scam. A doddering old man in shabby clothes would open a soft drink and, jolted by a bump in the road, accidentally spill it onto a stylishly dressed younger man. The young man would stand up and grab the bottle, as if to hit the older man with it – but, on hearing a rattle, he would instead pour out the soda and find a little metal token inside, indicating a prize of 80,000 or 100,000 yuan. The other passengers would erupt. The young man would then loudly declare that the older man had won the lottery, at which point someone else would say that he’d have to go to Guangzhou to collect his prize. Then his accomplices would loudly discuss Guangzhou, asking if the old man knew how to get there, or where to go to collect the money. (The idea was to convince the other passengers to pool their money to buy the supposed “winning token”.)

Early on, a boy from Zhao Fang’s village went to work in Guangdong, but he hadn’t done so well. Returning home disappointed, and not wanting to reveal the truth, he would retell story after story about what he’d seen of “the world”, about the legendary Guangdong, where triads brawled with knives on street corners and the businessmen drove ritzy cars. All of this only deepened Zhao Fang’s fantasy about the south of China. Every story of the south has its own highlights: the assembly line, factories, bars, young thugs, prostitutes, trafficked migrants, the speed of Shenzhen, special economic zones, Taiwanese bosses, toys, assembly line workers, ID cards, travel passes, shelters, temporary residence permits, migrant workers, bonanzas…

Then Zhao Fang met another classmate’s older cousin, a fair-skinned boy who’d been in Guangdong for two years. His family had been very poor, but now they had built a new multistorey house. He didn’t have much to say about Guangdong, only that he worked in a toy factory, spraying lacquer paint for 12 or more hours a day, and that he earned 700 yuan a month. If she was willing to endure a little hardship, she could join him at the factory. All she needed was an ID card, a migrant permit, a travel pass and a family planning certificate. It was the first time Zhao Fang had heard of such documents. She came to learn that life is constituted of even more documents and the numbers on them.

A month later, Zhao Fang and a few others followed her classmate’s cousin on the road out of the village. It was March of 1993. She remembers that the day she left home was clear and sunny, a beautiful spring day.

Ahong’s Bitter Tears

“Someone brought me out here.” Ahong held a white Esse cigarette, long and thin. Mint flavoured, refreshing and feminine. She held it for a long time without taking a drag. The way she held it seemed practised, and she rarely raised it to her mouth. She watched the smoke curling up slowly in spirals that grew wispy, then dissipated, and eventually disappeared. She watched the wisps for a good while.

I remembered that she always held her cigarettes like that, staring silently at passersby, taciturn, her eyes vague and empty. I remembered her fingernails were painted deep red and blue, with sparkling rhinestones embedded in them. I remembered her drinking coffee at a Hong Kong-style cafe on a lazy afternoon, on the other side of the glass from the workaday world and its bustling streets, along which young women strolled in seductive outfits, lined on both sides with hotels, karaoke bars, dance clubs, restaurants, beauty salons, lingerie stores, sex shops…

I remembered her voluptuous voice, as yielding as a ball of glutinous rice, sticky and sweet, so soft it made one feel boneless. I remembered her long eyelashes, red eyeshadow, subtle lipstick, and her elegant, traditional, Chinese-style dress. I remembered her poise and attractiveness. I remembered that we met three times, and that each time she left an entirely different image in my head: the girl next door, a fashionista, this cultured beauty. I remembered she was always in the midst of transforming herself.

Three times she gave me a different name: first Ahong, then Aling and then Jeffer. I still don’t know what her real name is. But I prefer to call her Ahong, because that was what she called herself back when she seemed like any girl from the neighbourhood, when she was delicate and lovely, with the barest of makeup. Her fragile appeal had long lingered with me, and although I had no misconceptions about her line of work, I couldn’t really put the two things together. She was engaged in the sex trade, and in her profession, you could ask anything – except for someone’s real name.

“Why did I leave home?” She lit the cigarette, and its chic slimness was as alluring as her pale fingers. She sighed. “I left a decade ago to do this sort of work, first in a salon in a town near Shunde, then in Shenzhen, then for a while in Foshan, and then finally I settled here in Dongguan.” Her casual tone made it seem like she was narrating the events of someone else’s life.

“I was born in a poor village, and my family was probably the poorest one there.” She lit another Esse. Her family farmed a large embankment reclaimed from a lake, on which they planted two crops of rice each year. Her father’s parents had died when he was young. In the collectivist era, he lived with seven or eight other orphaned boys in the village production team’s communal housing.

I asked Ahong why so many kids had lost their parents, but she didn’t know. The second time we met, she told me she’d phoned her father to ask him. He said that between 1959 and 1961 a lot of people had died of dropsy. Others had starved because there was no food, though their deaths were also listed as being from dropsy. Ahong’s retelling was hazy. She wasn’t interested in the deaths of her grandparents, whom she had never known. Even her father’s impressions of them had grown vague. Her father and his older brother depended on each other for survival during that brutal time. Whenever she reached this point in the story, she repeated something her father often told her: when he was small, because they didn’t have rice, their uncle dug up lotus roots from the lake. Even now, her father refused to eat lotus root.

Ahong’s father was very industrious. He banded together with seven unmarried men on the production team. During the day, they worked together in the fields, and in the evening, they played cards, gambled and caroused in the production team dormitory. They were thrifty, spending what little they earned to survive.

In 1978, following the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, the communal agricultural collectives were gradually disbanded, and the production team’s farming implements (ploughs, harrows, hoes, sickles, windmills) and livestock were returned to individual farmers. Once the plots were redistributed, the communal housing was also torn down, and the other bachelors were left with nowhere to live. Some sought refuge with an uncle or stepfather; others sold the plots and implements they’d been allotted and left to work as fishermen along the lake, or went to the city as migrant labourers. Ahong’s father had nowhere to go and no relatives to turn to, so he stayed in the village. He went to Huzhou to cut reeds to build himself a thatched hut.

After the division of land into privately owned plots, as the countryside suddenly underwent a revival, most of those bachelors sold their share of the farming implements to Ahong’s father for instalments of cash. A hard worker and adept at farm labour, he brought in good harvests. During the busy seasons, he lent his plow ox to help others. His life was much better than it had been during collectivism, but he was a man used to playing cards, smoking, eating and drinking to excess. He never made plans further than a day’s work, and so had no prospects for a family.

The next year, one of the bachelors returned. While working as a fisherman, he had married the daughter of a lakeside family. His wife had a younger sister who’d been sickly as a child, but who could work. She was tall, not particularly clever, but not too stupid either. She was also pregnant, and no one knew who the father was. Now that her belly was growing big, they were desperate to marry her off.

In the early 1980s in rural China, an unmarried man older than 25 was considered a hopeless bachelor. Ahong’s father was already 28. At his friend’s suggestion, he married the pregnant woman. Although Ahong knew he wasn’t her biological father, he loved her so deeply that she never cared.

Ahong’s father had always wanted a son, but her mother gave birth to three girls. Family planning rules were very strict. When her mother got pregnant again, she took Ahong to her aunt’s house to hide from the local officials. Even so, they were found out. They had left their own house vacant, but the officials still cleared every last thing out of it to pay the fine. They confiscated her mother’s dowry of a bed and a cabinet, their piglets, and even some unhusked, still-damp rice.

Poverty, utter poverty – that was the word Ahong used the most. Every year it was impossible to pay the school fees. Because they were always behind, she dreaded going to school, worried that the teacher would press her for money. They couldn’t even afford her textbooks. All Ahong could do was sit in the back row and listen uncomprehendingly. Her grades were poor, and she was often kept back. She left school at 15, still only in fifth grade.

In the 1990s, Ahong’s village saw its first wave of workers leave in search of jobs. The women did so before the men. Around 1995, some women went to Guangdong to work in the sex industry. The village still maintained its ancient ethical codes, and malicious gossip followed those who turned to prostitution, but such moral high ground quickly subsided under economic pressure.

The group of women working as prostitutes gave rise to a group of pimps. Most of them were young men who would go into the villages and lure girls into leaving for Guangdong. One pimp noticed Ahong, who had been at a loose end for six months. He invited her to a nearby town and drove her to a video arcade on his motorbike, a rare sight in the countryside. She felt special as they zipped down the roads. He bought her clothes and lipstick, and she grew closer to him. One day she followed him south. At 16, she started working as a prostitute at a salon in Shunde.

Ahong said she had let her father down. After she left, he looked everywhere for her. When he discovered what happened, he went to the pimp’s home to get her back - and was beaten up badly by several young pimps there. Her father had never left the village, and had never been on a train. He knew that Ahong had been swindled, but he had no idea how to find her. He borrowed from loan sharks and hired others to look for her, but he only got scammed. Ahong felt guilty about what had happened to him, but after working in the trade for seven years, she had learned to live with it.

She lit another cigarette. She said that at first she despised the pimp who had deceived her. She was so young then, and didn’t know anything. But she also said she couldn’t have stayed at home. Most of the other girls her age had left the village, following the pimps, willingly or not. Ahong sighed. “The pimps have changed our village. You go back and see that people are used to it. There are so many girls doing it. And besides, it brings in good money.”

The Liangshan Workers

In 2006, in Shipai township in Dongguan, I met some workers from Liangshan. They all came from Meigu and Zhaojue counties. Their sharp-wittedness seemed laced with a faint timidity, and they moved in their own circles. In fact, they were eager to speak with other workers, but were too shy to do so. Most of them were Yi – an ethnic group I have much affection for. Until I met them, my main associations with the Yi were of the Liangshan mountains, the Torch Festival, lakes, poetry, shamans, the Bimo religion and scripture masters. Even these words connected with them seemed poetic.

The Liangshan workers I met were mostly young; quite a few of them were child labourers. Their deeply tanned skin made them look older, but their eyes told me they were still children, probably between 15 and 18. Some of them appeared even younger, closer to 12 or 13, if that.

I’d encountered child labourers before, when I worked on the assembly line and in other jobs around industrial zones. But it was still a shock to see so many children from the same area. What remains in my memory are the young girls. They were so thin and small for their age – and so guileless. These Liangshan workers were not free labourers. Their parents had signed a contract with – or rather made something approaching a ‘sale’ to – a foreman who promised them 10,000 yuan a year per child. Sometimes it was more like 5,000.

I lived for eight years on the assembly line: at electronics factories, toy factories, plastics factories (where I was an injection mould operator), hardware workshops (where I was duty manager) – I had experienced them all. I was familiar with the hard physical labour and institutionalised overtime that such jobs demanded. As I looked at these children’s faces, it was too painful to picture them there.

Abu told me he was 17, but he seemed even younger. He smoked, trying his best to look tough and worldly. Among the four or five workers from Liangshan that he roomed with, he had arrived first, four years earlier, and he was their leader. They all came from the same township, although not the same village, and they worked for the same foreman.

I spoke with Abu for two hours at a table outside a convenience store in the industrial zone. I offered to buy him and his friends some water, and later something to eat. He told me about many horrifying things that had happened to the group. He mostly talked about the others, peppering his anecdotes with phrases like “so I’ve heard… ” Given all his efforts to appear tough, I only half-trusted what he said, and suspected the rest wasn’t true. Then he took me to see their lodgings, which were dark and dank with the smell of cigarette smoke, mouldering clothes, old socks, sweaty feet, mildew and piss. Four people lived in this room of little more than 10 square metres. There was only one bed. When I saw the abject conditions in which they lived, I was more inclined to believe his stories.

Abu frequently complained of exhaustion. When he first arrived, he was not prepared for the hard labour, working for at least 12 hours a day, plus overtime for rush orders. During my own years on the assembly line, every day was like living in a state of constant exhaustion. Fatigue became my sole experience. We got up at 6:30 AM to reach the workshop in time for the morning meeting at 7:15 AM. These lasted 15 minutes, and usually involved being reprimanded by the duty manager. At noon we ate lunch and had a brief rest; then we resumed work by 1:30 PM. At 5:30 PM, we got off for dinner and to wash our clothes. Overtime started at 7:00 PM and lasted until 10:30 or 11 PM. Every day was a repeat of the previous day, every month was a repeat of the previous month. Assembly-line workers do one motion for just a few seconds, or even a single second, and then repeat it tens of thousands of times per day.

Abu liked to tell me about the tough crowd he ran with. He said that the foreman who’d brought them there was now rich. He drove a swanky sedan that everyone – shady or not – recognised on the roads, and they were all expected to toady to him. He threw his unfinished cigarette on the ground, his eyes gleaming with envy. Then he thought of something else: “You wouldn’t know this, but Yi girls marry young. They’re engaged to someone by the time they’re 13 or 14.” He went on: “The Yi are dumb, we’re not as clever as the Han. We’re not good at school, so we get married young and have kids. And since we’re dumb, we’re poor.”

Abu said he didn’t like Yi girls, and was going to find a Han wife. Han women had pale skin and were prettier, but they wouldn’t give him the time of day. When I asked him if he was engaged, he didn’t answer. Instead, he changed the subject to the Liangshan girls in his group. The pretty ones were often compelled to sleep with the chief. He said the chief had slept with lots of girls, including Han like me. “What do you mean by ‘the chief’?” I asked. He looked at me with disdain, bemused that I was ignorant of something that basic.

‘The chief’ was either a foreman or enforcer. “Enforcer?” Abu explained that some workers ran away when they couldn’t bear the conditions, and that the enforcer’s job was to track them down, bring them back and beat them senseless. Abu abruptly lowered his voice and said, “You wouldn’t know this, but two years ago, someone ran away twice, and the chief and his enforcers beat him to death in Chang’an. In this city, if someone kills an outsider, no one cares.”

“Are you saying if someone dies, even the police don’t take notice?” I asked.

“The chief has connections,” he said. “If he kills someone, he’s not worried. He’ll just buy his way out.”

Abu said he would like to become an enforcer within a year or two. When I asked him how one did so, he didn’t answer. Perhaps he didn’t know. What he knew was that, if he were one, he could pick any girl he liked to sleep with. Besides, their job wasn’t hard, and it didn’t involve manual labour. Abu was on to his third cigarette when I asked him about his injury. It was on the back of his left hand, a deep scar where the skin looked different. He’d been burned by a plastic injection machine in the toy factory. “That’s nothing. Some people get their fingers chopped in half.”

Axiang

The first time I met Axiang, at his corrugated iron-roofed shack in Dongguan, he told me how excited he had been when Hong Kong and Macau were returned to China. This ordinary shoe factory worker, who originally came from a village in the deep interior, recounted how his bosses had paused work for these occasions. Axiang had gone to the public square to watch the festivities, and then back to the factory canteen to follow the live broadcast on TV. Several years on, he still couldn’t hide his excitement.

It was now 2002, and I was working with a fellow villager of Axiang’s at a toy factory. We stood beside each other on an assembly line producing plastic robots. I attached the left leg and she attached the right. Axiang’s factory wasn’t far from ours; many people from his village worked in the vicinity of that industrial zone.

Axiang lived on the corner of an alley in Dalang, Dongguan, in a dank, low-ceilinged, brick-built rented shack. On blustery days, the wind would howl through the gaps in the roof, and on wet days, the rain seemed to drill through and dampen everything inside. When my coworker and I went to visit him there, we found him and the others sitting on the bed playing cards bare-chested, smoking the worst cigarettes. It was early April, and already hot. The electric fan whanged about trying to keep up as the men played and shouted, sweat trickling down their dark chests. The hot air in the room grew entangled with the cheap cigarette smoke.

The 20-odd square metre shack cost 180 yuan per month. Across from the plank bed provided by the landlord, Axiang and his transient roommates had spread a thin mattress on the floor. They bought a set of metal bunk beds from a secondhand market, onto which they haphazardly tossed wooden buckets, suitcases, a big woven bag full of plastic coat hangers and crumpled clothes. Soap dishes, laundry detergent and sopping, just-washed clothes were set on the greasy windowsill. Smelly socks soaked in a cheap plastic tub.

To the left of the door was a blackened kerosene stove and a worktable – a filthy piece of plywood balanced on stacks of bricks – with a bamboo cutting board and kitchen knife, two blue plastic basins, two red colanders, a bottle of Liby dishwashing detergent, a litre of peanut oil, an open package of salt with a white plastic spoon and a few bottles of condiments like soy sauce. The nearby window’s metal frame was rusty and splattered with oil. To the right of it, a few nails had been driven into the wall, from which dangled a spatula and wok, whose blackened bottom had marred the white paint beyond recognition. In a dark, damp corner on the other side were several water bottles filled with kerosene.

We sat chatting on low, mismatched stools made of cheap pressed plastic. If a larger person had tried to sit on them, the legs would have surely snapped. Other stools in the room were made of factory plywood, with three layers of ply for the legs and two for the seat, all held together with flimsy nails from a factory nail gun. The plywood tended to split, and occasionally, with the slightest shift of position, the seat would break straight down the middle, toppling the person to the ground. The table had been welded together from bits of factory iron. It was crude but solid, with a thick slab of roughly cut wood on top. I knew Axiang had made it himself from discarded scraps.

Axiang had come to Dongguan in 1996, when he was 26. He was the youngest of nine siblings; their father had died when he was 17. He hadn’t found a wife and his mother was growing old, so he went to Guangdong to look for work.

In Axiang, I saw the 1970s. Or rather, I saw the remnants of the youthful ideals of that generation. They believed that the return of Hong Kong and Macau brought their country glory, and wanted to share in that elation. They still felt a fervent enthusiasm for their homeland. They wanted to discuss grand topics like the Olympics. They clung to their dreams even as they lived ramshackle lives in cramped, damp shacks.

Axiang worked in the shoe factory’s midsole workshop, pulling moulds for 12 hours a day, earning 600 yuan a month, enduring revolving day and night shifts for years. His face had an eerie pallor and his eyes were oddly hazy, like many assembly line workers. Still, he was full of fervour and liked to expound loudly on grandiose, distant matters, from the collision of planes over the South China Sea to the 1980s clashes between China and Vietnam. He almost never told stories about work, and didn’t even want to mention his coworkers or the shoes that his Taiwanese-owned factory produced. Rather, he wondered about when China would recover Taiwan.

After five years at the factory, Axiang hadn’t saved any money to speak of. Still, he was loyal and generous, and as word of his factory job spread, people from his village showed up in Dongguan, and he would try to help them find a job and accommodation. Later I heard from my coworker that Axiang’s factory had folded, and its three Taiwanese owners each opened their own shoe factories. Axiang followed one of them to Shilong, where he was promoted to team leader of the sole section, in charge of some 40 workers. This allowed him to find more jobs for his fellow villagers.

He settled on a girlfriend from the same village who was 11 years younger, and they returned home to arrange the match. Following the exchange of the bridal gifts and dowry, they’d planned to get married during the New Year holiday. Instead, she took up with another man. Axiang hadn’t even gone home to try to get his money back, but his neighbours took care of it for him. Every household from their village sent someone to his former fiancée’s family home to make trouble until they negotiated. Axiang then married a woman from Chongqing, had two children, and got divorced.

I saw him again eight years later, in 2010. In the interval, Axiang’s factory had moved repeatedly, from Dalang to Shilong, from Shilong to Shiwan in Huizhou, from Shiwan to Baiyun in Guangzhou. I don’t know how he got my number, but he was hesitant on the phone, saying he needed my help. After I got off work, I took a bus from Tianhe to Shijiang township to see him. He was as skinny as before, and time had washed away his previous vitality. He seemed bone-tired, though he still wore a smile as he smoked. He did not talk much as we crossed the decaying industrial zone.

I was used to the atmosphere: the four- or five-storey factory buildings, the dormitories, the tightly locked iron gates and high perimeter walls with evergreens planted along them. Through a narrow window in a low building beside the gate, I saw two security guards in a room with a computer and a few monitors that showed surveillance footage from the factory’s workshops, dormitories and warehouses. We walked through to a five-storey block of rented apartments, and he told me about a fellow villager who had worked in a print shop for 11 years until he had been let go. He’d heard a rumour that the dismissed workers were entitled to compensation, but the factory refused his application. Axiang had thought of me and wondered if I had some way to help his friend.

I followed Axiang to a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor. It was messy, cluttered with suitcases, tables, chairs and overturned buckets. Four or five men were there playing cards, shouting out their moves. When they saw me come in with Axiang, they froze and took me in. I was an unfamiliar woman, though perhaps Axiang had told them about me. They were all very polite. A bare-chested boy of 18 or 19 stood up bashfully, entered one of the bedrooms and came back a few moments later wearing a T-shirt. He seemed embarrassed, uncertain where to look. He stood behind the other men and shyly watched them play cards.

Axiang called one of them over. Mr. Li was 47 and graying at the temples. He had come to work in Guangdong in 1995. In 16 years had been with more than a dozen factories, inching his way up from a workshop mover to an assistant manager of the gravure printing press that had dismissed him. Axiang wanted me to help Mr. Li with his workplace dispute, but instead Mr. Li dwelled on his experience at printing presses, describing the techniques used for different materials, the skills needed to manipulate ink in reverse and surface printing, and the proper way to mix and recycle new and old ink. His pride in having clawed his way up from the lowest-level labourer to a master printer was evident.

And yet this confident and experienced printer had been made redundant. He was lost and furious, and felt completely disempowered. Where Axiang’s generation had been idealistic, Mr. Li’s older cohort had lived through China’s turbulent years. They had grown up in an era of terror and chaos that had enveloped them like the air they breathed. The experience lay latent in them, unseen and unfelt, and could manifest involuntarily.

Anger and frustration had transformed those turbulent years into a mirage of equality, like a water lily burgeoning in the mind. Mr. Li now felt nostalgic for that “fervent and chaotic time”, imagining that some “saviour” would once again arise as a champion of justice. Powerless in the face of an unfair reality, the buried memory of an illusory “equality” from his youth and the common poverty of that time offered him some comfort.

His emotions welled up; I could only listen. Over the years, I’ve become accustomed to men like Mr. Li recounting their stories. After being repressed for so long in their factories, they accumulate litanies. Thousands of these men spin like gyroscopes through these places, in high-pressure print shops, amid roaring machines, with unending extra shifts, exhaustion, overwork, going on shift, getting off shift, sleeping, eating – this daily toil encompasses their entire lives. Now that he’d left the factory, he seemed to have finally managed to pour his heart out. There, in the cramped room, he made his plans to leave Shijiang.

As for Axiang, his idealism had finally been worn away, and he was now a less certain man. From 1996 to 2010, he’d put in 14 years in the shoe business, and like Mr. Li, he had become a skilled worker. But he no longer discussed grandiose, distant matters. He started talking about how his factory had moved many times, relying on Hong Kongese, Taiwanese, Japanese and American financial backing. He’d faced these different versions of the capitalist system, always on the bottom rung, experiencing starkly different management styles, and unavoidably absorbing knowledge from the outside world.

The last time I saw Axiang was in 2015, in Lilin, near Huizhou, where his factory had moved from Baiyun. He’d grown even more subdued. He punched his code into the door pad and we went up the stairs to his rented room on the third floor of a new six-storey building with yellow-tiled walls. There were five units on each side of a central corridor, with entrances at the front and back. He pointed to an open door, from which the sound of a television drifted, and said it was his place. A middle-aged woman, Axiang’s partner of several years, greeted me with a smile. His fellow villagers had told me that she was from Chongqing and already had a son and daughter, both of whom had dropped out of school to do manual labour there. She was two years older than Axiang and worked in the same factory. They’d never officially registered their marriage.

Over the past few years, Guangzhou’s shoe industry had undergone a rapid decline, as such labour-intensive industries relocated to the Chinese interior, south-east Asia and India. Workers had gradually retrained in other trades, and fewer villagers were seeking Axiang out for a job. His own factory had tried to hold on. He’d been in the business for 20 years, and all he could say was: “There are fewer factories here, fewer people.” He recounted how his friends had moved on to the Yangtze River Delta, Beijing, Changsha, Wuhan, Xinjiang or the north-east. Some had put down roots in the city, and only he was continuing to stick with the factory, drifting between cities in the Pearl River Delta. He had no idea where its next relocation would be. He seemed bemused and distressed. As he started to recall the old days, I sat in his small, rented room of 20 square meters – with its little balcony, kitchenette, cold-water shower and toilet, and even a television, computer and internet – and remembered our earlier meeting 13 years ago, in that dank, low-ceilinged shack with a roof of corrugated iron at the end of the alley and the blackened kerosene stove…

Axiang no longer spoke about grandiose, distant things. Now he asked me questions about pension insurance. He’d got used to urban life. Even if he couldn’t live in factory housing, he would stay in the city rather than return to his village.

A decade earlier, Axiang and I had both been torn between two internal forces: the distant, quiet, impoverished, traditional villages that remained our ancestral homes, and the reinforced-concrete city, inaccessible and bristling with hostility, where we intended to put down roots. At the mercy of economic fluctuations, we travelled between the city and the village as though pushed by invisible tides that washed over city and village alike. Amid this relentless back and forth, villages had begun to imitate the city. In Axiang’s village, most people had moved out of the mountain passes and built houses along the main road or on the outskirts of nearby towns. Fewer and fewer people remained in the mountains.

When I first met him, Axiang had wanted to make some money and return home, but that idea had been scrubbed out of his head. Among his generation, more than half of those who came to the city were eventually compelled to return to their villages.

Although we live in the silence and deprivation of the lowest rungs of society, where hard labour and poverty constitute the flow of life, we still believe that the world will improve with our efforts. We haul our heavy luggage, finding a way out of poverty-stricken villages, along roads that are rough and mired in mud. But we still believe that we shouldn’t compromise or accept a mediocre life; we must preserve our inner ferocity, and maintain a dream’s distance from the world – a distance that gives us the motivation to pursue our ambitions. I’ve faced the implacable reality many times, and tried to tell myself: don’t waver, don’t be weak. Otherwise, this era will engulf you.