Migrations—A Feather

Abstract

“Migrations—A Feather” is one of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s recent works of fiction and her most experimental so far. Although the people and their experience depicted in this piece are fictional, they are based on historical events. Zheng yokes together two great migrations in China—one which lasted more than a century from 1671 to 1776, the other presently underway since the mid-1980s. In reconstructing the historical records of a clan’s chronicles, and fictionalizing the narrator, Zheng breaks away from traditional narrative strategies by leaving out the “story” and “characters” and emulates in part an idiosyncratically succinct classical Chinese style for narrating the two migrations on route, interlacing through juxtapositions their two movements in opposite directions, separated by more than two hundred years, yet linked by clan lineage. She employs distinctive styles and voices to depict drastically different experiences of the two migrations, and explores new possibilities of language and images to capture the speaker’s experience, thoughts, feelings, and imaginings shaped by dehumanizing environments of the factory, capitalism, and market economy. As she pushes the boundaries of literary genres, her magical, surrealistic images and poetic language enact resistance to oppressive systems and forces, in a manner distinct from her earlier works. Moreover, this historical fiction is also about life, death, time, history, imagination, and transformation. The transformation here is more than dehumanization and environmental degradation by industry and capitalism. It is taking place in the migrants’ ways of living, thinking, and feeling, as embodied by Zheng’s innovative use of form, images, and language, which suggest new ways of writing fiction by crossing boundaries of genres.

Notes

1 For more information, see Chen Shisong 陈世松, The Great Migration: Interpretation of the History of “Huguang Filling Sichuan” (Daqiantu: “Huguang dian Sichuan” lishi jiedu 大迁徙：“湖广填四川”历史解读) (Chengdu: Sichuan renming chubanshe, 2016).

2 William T. Rowe, Crimson Rain: Seven Centuries of Violence in a Chinese County (Stanford: University Press, 2006), 141. Also, see, Yingcong Dai, The Sichuan Frontier and Tibet: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 16–22, 18–19.

3 See R. V. Des Forges, “Book Reviews—Research on the History of Chinese Peasant Wars (Zhongguo nongmin zhanzheng shi yanjiu 中国农民战争史研究).” The Journal of Asian Studies, 41, no. 2, (February 1982): 350–52. Also, see, Robert Eric Entenmann, Migration and Settlement in Sichuan, 1644–1796 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 35.

4 Willard J. Peterson, ed., The Cambridge History of China. Volume 9: The Ch’ing Dynasty, Part 1: To 1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 481–82.

5 Zuiai Jun 最爱君, “The Truth Story of ‘Huguang filling Sichuan’”(Huguan tianchuan zhengxiang “湖广填四川” 的真相), The Folk History, Sponsored by the Centre for Chinese Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, n.d., http://www.mjlsh.org/Book.aspx?cid=4&tid=5582.

6 Peterson, 481–82.

7 The fifty-fifth year of the Reign of Emperor Kangxi is 1716, a leap year, Bingshen year (丙申年) in the lunar calendar, the Year of the Monkey. Emperor Kangxi, ascended the throne at age eight, took over the reins of government when he was 14, and ruled for 62 years (1662–1722), making him the longest reigning emperor in Chinese history.

8 Shunqing, Sichuan is present-day Nanchong City. Zheng Xiaoqiong is from the rural area of Nanchong.

9 This Gengchen year (庚辰年) is 2000, the Year of the Dragon.

10 In ancient China, when parents die, children were expected to show their gratitude by adhering to the practice of filial piety. According to stricter filial-piety code of conduct, children in mourning would eat and sleep by their parents’ graves, and not marry or hold celebration activities for three years.

11 Establishing clan halls is an old Chinese tradition. When clan members migrated to settle down in different places and if their population reached a certain number, they could consult with their former patriarch to open a new clan hall. This tradition was eliminated during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, but now it is being gradually restored in some places.

12 Both Fuling and Qianjiang are in Sichuan Province. The watershed between Jialing River and Han River, Daba Mountain is the geographical boundary between Sichuan Basin and Hanzhong Basin. Its ridge is generally about 2,000 meters above sea level.

13 Tudou (土豆 Potato) is a short video platform owned by the Chinese Alibaba Culture and Entertainment Group.

14 These lines are from “Travelling down the River” (She jiang 涉江), a poetic chapter by Qu Yuan (屈原) of the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) collected in Songs of Chu (Chuci 楚辞). Qu Yuan’s poetry is considered representative of the new poetic form and style known as “ci” (辞) emerged in the Kingdom of Chu during the Warring States period. In “Travelling down the River,” the poet narrates his journey of exile to the South and expresses his determination never to return to comprise his moral principles or give in to the corrupt government.

15 These two lines are from a poem by Libai (李白, 701–62) written about 753 after the poet learned that his good friend Wang Canling (王昌龄) had been demoted and sent to a remote area of today’s western Hunan and eastern Guizhou provinces.

16 According to the author, “the sorrows of green beans” alludes to the fact that in the factories there were several food poisoning cases caused by undercooked green beans. After the incident, green beans were banned in the canteens of some factories owned by big corporations. Zheng Xiaoqiong’s email letter to the translator, January 4, 2021.

17 The phrase “flower gardens and rice paddies” (“huayuan daocao” 花园稻草) refers to cities and villages, implying the stark differences between the urban and the rural in China as the author explains. Zheng’s email letter to the translator, January 4, 2021.

18 All those places recorded are in Sichuan, each marks a point in the speaker’s ancestors’ migration route moving closer to the final destination, Nanchong. Wusheng is about 100 kilometers south of Nanchong, Zheng Xiaoqiong’s hometown, known as a capital of fruit and silk. Jialing is about 19 kilometers east of Nanchong, and Shunqing is a district of today’s Nanchong.

19 Shaoguan and Nanxiong are in Guangdong Province. The fictional narrator has left her home in Nanchong, Hunan Province and arrived in Guangdong, where her ancestors used to live.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiaoqiong Zheng

Zheng Xiaoqiong (1980–) moved to Dongguan in Guangdong Province as a migrant worker in 2001 and began to write poetry. Her poems and prose appeared in Shikan (Poetry Journal), Shanhua (Mountain Flowers), Shi Xuankan (Journal of Selected Poetry), Xingxing (Stars), Tianya (Horizon), and Sanwen Xuankan (Journal of Selected Prose). She read her poems at the Third National Prose and Poetry Meeting and the Twenty-first Young Poets Meeting. She won Liqun Literature Award from the literary magazine People’s Literature in 2007 and the Zhuang Zhongwen Literary Award in 2008, and was listed as one of the “Prominent Writers Born in the 1980s” in 2007. Her poem was listed in the prestigious “2018 Literature Leaderboard” in The Yangtze River Criticism.

Xiaojing Zhou

Zhou Xiaojing is professor of English and Laurence Meredith Professor in the Humanities at University of the Pacific. She is the author of Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers—a collection of eco-critical essays on and translations of Zheng’s poems about women migrant workers in China. Her translations of Zheng’s poems appeared World Literature Today; Verge: Studies in Global Asias; and the web of Poetry International Festival Rotterdam. Her other critical writings on Zheng’s work include, “‘Slow Violence’ in Migrant Landscapes: ‘Hollow Villages’ and Tourist River Towns in China,” published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; and “Scenes from the Global South China: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetic Agency for Labor and Environmental Justice” included in Ecocriticism of the Global South, edited by Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran. Her recent article “Ethical Relations in Migrant Worker Poetry as Testimony” is forthcoming from a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Journal of The Autobiography Society.