“In the Roar of the Machines”: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry of Witness and Resistance

Abstract

To approach Zheng Xiaoqiong’s work is to confront issues of internal Chinese migration, global capitalism and income disparities, the contemporary Chinese poetry scene, geopolitics, the world economy, feminism, wage discrimination, and worker’s rights—all before one even addresses the most important part: Zheng’s own unique poetics. Although Zheng has published several books and her work has been enthusiastically received in China and in international poetry circles, her poetry has typically been viewed within a very narrow rubric, namely the category of “migrant worker poetry” and the identity-based appellation of “migrant worker poet.” This article approaches Zheng’s work through the lens of translation into English, and situates her and her writing within the larger literary and sociological circles in which she places herself. In so doing, this study attempts to provide a less restrictive and more nuanced view of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s oeuvre and overarching poetic aesthetic.

Notes

This essay will be revised as the introduction to Eleanor Goodman’s new translation volume, The Roar of the Machines: Selected Poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong (forthcoming from Giramondo Press in 2022).

1 Zhou Xiaojing, “Scenes from the Global South China: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetic Agency,” in Ecocriticism of the Global South, Vidya Sarveswaran, Swarnalatha R., and Scott Slovic, eds. (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015): 62.

2 Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼, Woman Worker (Nügong ji 女工记) (Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 2013).

3 Maghiel van Crevel, “Walk on the Wild Side: Snapshots of the Chinese Poetry Scene” (MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2017): 39.

4 Jack Linchuan Qiu, Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016): 15.

5 Maghiel van Crevel, “Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry,” Chinese Literature Today, 8 no. 1 (2019): 127–45.

6 Zheng Xiaoqiong, Rose Manor (Meigui zhuangyuan 玫瑰庄园) (Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 2016).

7 Zhou Xiaojing and Zheng Xiaoqiong, Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers (Lanham: Lexington Books, forthcoming).

8 Gong Haomin, “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, ed. Jie Lu and Ban Wang (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2021): 148.

9 https://www.sohu.com/a/290849451_816239, my translation, last accessed on February 5, 2021.

10 A monthly journal produced by the Guangzhou Writer’s Association.

11 van Crevel, “Walk on the Wild Side,” 101.

12 Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996): ix.

13 While I use the term “feminist” throughout this article to express Zheng’s commitment to women’s voices and betterment, as Shih Shu-mei and others point out, the word must be taken as highly nuanced outside of its Western context. Shih Shu-mei, “Is Feminism Translatable,” in Comparatizing Taiwan, ed. Shu-mei Shih and Ping-hui Liao (New York: Routledge, 2015): 169–89.

14 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 25.

15 I have written about translating Zheng Xiaoqiong elsewhere from a different perspective. See Eleanor Goodman, “Poetry, Translation, and Labor,” in Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs, ed. Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019): 45–67.

16 Sun Wanning, “The Worker-Poet as the Ethnographic Partner: Documenting the Emotional Pain of Rural Migrant Women,” in Positions: Asia Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

17 Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eleanor Goodman

Eleanor Goodman is an award-winning translator and author. Her first poetry collection is Nine Dragon Island (2016), and her translations include Something Crosses My Mind: Selected Poems of Wang Xiaoni (2014), Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Workers Poetry (2017), The Roots of Wisdom: Poems by Zang Di (2017), and Days When I Hide My Corpse in a Cardboard Box: Poems of Natalia Chan (2018). Her translation of the poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong will be forthcoming in 2022. She is a Research Associate at the Harvard University Fairbank Center.