Eleanor Goodman and Kaiser Kuo

Join Eleanor Goodman and Kaiser Kuo for a discussion of Zheng Xiaoqiong, a poet and writer who depicts the world of Chinese migrant workers.

Zheng Xiaoqiong burst onto the Chinese literary scene in the late aughts, after years toiling in the factories of Guangdong. She was among the first writers to depict the grinding toil – and as importantly, to evoke the inner lives – of the hundreds of thousands of rural youths whose great migration to the coastal region has powered China’s manufacturing revolution.

Her work drew its power from the weight of lived experience (“I arrange my life on plastic products, screws, nails / on a tiny employee ID...my entire life”). But it was also stylistically remarkable, combining a classical address with documentary observation (“Toiling in the rain blown by the wind / off-kilter staggering a mother’s / heart crushed on the phone she talks with her eight-year-old son), and featuring stark physical descriptions that seemed to verge on metaphor (“I remember this iron, iron that rusted over time / pale red or dark brown, tears in a furnace fire”).

Eleanor Goodman has done more than anyone to bring Zheng’s work to an English-speaking audience. Last June, NYRB Classics published In The Roar of the Machine, Goodman’s translations of a wide-ranging selection of poetry from across Zheng’s career. And last December, Equator published “The Makers of Modern China,” a selection of chapters from Woman Worker, Zheng’s oral history of migrant workers in Guangdong. (Only parts of the original manuscript have been published in Chinese, because its often-shocking contents were considered too politically sensitive.)

As Kaiser Kuo writers in his introduction to that piece: Goodman’s “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.”

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