Gender, Class, and Capital: Female Migrant Workers’ Writing in Postsocialist China and Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry

Abstract

This article takes Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry as an example and investigates Chinese New Women Workers’ writing under the postsocialist and neoliberal condition. It begins with a critical survey of the emerging discourse of New Workers’ Literature in China, followed by positioning Zheng’s depiction of female migrant workers’ dagong experience within the women’s question in contemporary China. I read Zheng’s writing from the combined perspectives of gender and class, investigating the way in which the sexuality of female migrant workers is remodeled or reproduced by capital and their labor. Finally, I explore how their labor, essentially governed by capitalist logic, contributes to their quagmires in developing sound gender identity and effective class consciousness. I argue that Zheng’s portrayal of female migrant workers resonates with the development of new workers and new conditions for women and helps to build a unique case representative of New Women Workers’ Literature in postsocialist China.

Notes

1 See Mao Zedong, Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1971).

2 See Lin Xiu 林秀, “Culture and Activities: Knowledge Spectrum of ‘New Workers Literature and Art” (“Wenhua yu xingdong: ‘Xin gongren wenyi’ huayu de zhishi guangpu” 文化与行动：“新工人文艺”话语的知识光谱), in Discussion of Creative Works (Chuangzuo pingtan 创作评谭) no. 2 (2021): 39–42; Xu Gang 徐刚, “Media and Events: Issues Regarding Self-expressions of ‘New Workers Literature’” (“Meijie yu shijian: ‘Xin gongren wenxue’ de ziwo biaoshu wenti” 媒介与事件：“新工人文学”的自我表述问题), in Discussion of Creative Works (Chuangzuo pingtan 创作评谭) no. 2 (2021): 42–45; Wang Hui 汪晖, “I Have My Own Name”: Preface to New Workers in China: Loss and Rise (“‘Wo you ziji de mingzi’: Zhongguo xin gongren: mishi yu jueqi xuyan” “我有自己的名字”——《中国新工人：迷失与崛起》序言), in New Workers in China: Loss and Rise, by Lü Tu (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 2013), 1–12; Zhang Huiyu 张慧瑜, “Creating New Workers Literature in ‘Other’s Forests’” (“Zai ‘bieren de senlin’ li chuangzao xin gongren wenxue” 在“别人的森林”里创造新工人文学), in Discussion of Creative Works (Chuangzuo pingtan 创作评谭) no. 2 (2021): 34–38.

3 Ping Zhu, “Why Does Workers’ Literature Matter?” World Literature Today 95, no. 2 (2021): 29. Also see Hui Faye Xiao, “The Sound of Silence: Chinese Domestic Workers’ Literary Writing,” World Literature Today 95, no. 2 (2021): 38–39.

4 Zhang Huiyu, “New Workers’ Literature,” Trans. Ping Zhu. World Literature Today 95, no. 2 (2021): 31. Also, see, Zhang Huiyu 张慧瑜, “Another Form of Cultural Writing: The Meaning of New Workers Literature” (“Ling yizhong wenhua shuxie: xin gongren wenxue de yiyi” 另一种文化书写：新工人文学的意义), in Literature and Art Criticism (Wenyi pinglun 文艺评论), no. 6 (2018): 37.

5 Li Duo 李舵. On Labor—In Memory of Xu Lizhi: The Possibility of Growing from “Migrant Workers Literature” to “Workers Literature” (“Laodong lun–Jinian Xu Lizhi: Cong ‘dagong wenxue’ dao ‘gongren wenxue’ de keneng” 劳动论——纪念许立志：从“打工文学”到“工人文学”的可能). https://www.sohu.com/a/433357013_260616.

6 Li Yunlei 李云雷. A Reader of Studies of “Subaltern Literature” (“Diceng wenxue” yanjiu duben “底层文学”研究读本). Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubenshe, 2018.

7 Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, (London: Bloomsbury, 2011).

8 Maghiel van Crevel, “Misfit: Xu Lizhi and Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige),” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, no. 1 (2019): n17, 110.

9 Luo Gang, and Tian Yan 罗岗、田延, (“Watch Others’ Pain From the Sidelines: ‘New Workers Poetry,” “Subaltern Literature,” and the Spiritual Condition of Contemporary China” (“Pangguan taren zhi tong: ‘Xin gongren shige’ ‘diceng wenxue’ yu dangxia Zhongguo de jingshen zhuangkuang” 旁观他人之痛——“新工人诗歌”“底层文学”与当下中国的精神状况), in Literary and Artistic Contention (Wenyi zhengming 文艺争鸣) no. 9 (2020): 28–38.

10 Haomin Gong, “Toward a New Leftist Ecocriticism in Postsocialist China: Reading the ‘Poetry of Migrant Workers’ as Ecopoetry,” in China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions, edited by Ban Wang and Jie Lu (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 139–57.

11 Translated by Xiaojing Zhou. Zhou, Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021). Translations of Zheng’s poems in this article are all mine unless specified.

12 Translated by Zhou.

13 Translated by Eleanor Goodman. Zheng Xiaoqiong, A Needle Hole Through the Constellations (Chuanguo xingsu de zhenkong 穿过星宿的针孔), trans. Eleanor Goodman (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2019).

14 Zheng Xiaoqiong, Records of Women Migrant Workers (Nügong ji 女工记) (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2012), 20.

15 Translated by Goodman.

16 Ibid.

17 Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans., Alec West (New York: International Publisher, 1972).

18 Zheng, Records of Women Migrant Workers, 21.

19 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Vol 1), trans., Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 33.

20 I owe this idea to Lü Tu 吕途: Lü Tu, New Workers in China: Culture and Destiny (Zhongguo xin gongren: Wenhua yu mingyun 中国新工人：文化与命运) (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 2015), 171–73.

21 Hui Faye Xiao, Youth Economy, Crisis, and Reinvention in Twenty-First-Century China (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 140.

22 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1978), 5.

23 Zheng, Records of Women Migrant Workers, 10.

24 Translated by Zhou.

25 Translated by Zhou.

26 Zheng Xiaoqiong, Poems Scattered on Machine Platforms (Sanluo zai jitai shang de shi 散落在机台上的诗) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui chubanshe, 2009), 57–58.

27 Haomin Gong, “Ecopoetics in the Dagong Poetry in Postsocialist China: Nature, Politics, and Gender in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 267.

28 Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 138.

29 van Crevel, “Misfit: Xu Lizhi and Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige),” 104–106.

30 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1991), 81, 78.

31 Ye Song 野松, “A history of mind that testifies to the age: An impression of Zheng Xiaoqiong (“Yinzheng shidai de xinling shishi: Zheng Xiaoqiong yinxiang” 印证时代的心灵史诗——郑小琼印象), in Seawind of Canton (Yuehaifeng 粤海风) no. 2 (2019): 86.

32 Lawrence C. H. Yim, The Poet-Historian Qian Qianyi; quoted in David Der-wei Wang, The Lyrical in Epic Time Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 10.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Haomin Gong

Haomin Gong is an associate professor of Chinese at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. He is the author of Reconfiguring Class, Gender, Ethnicity and Ethics in Chinese Internet Culture (co-authored with Xin Yang) and Uneven Modernity: Literature, Film, and Intellectual Discourse in Postsocialist China. He co-edited with Sheldon Lu two volumes: Ecology and Chinese-Language Cinema: Reimagining a Field and Essays on Chinese Ecocinema.