In the Roar of the Machine

by Zheng Xiaoqiong, Eleanor Goodman (Translator)

This book collects some of the most influential and moving work of the poet Zheng Xiaoqiong, who spent nearly a decade at the beginning of the century working in the newly created factories and warehouses in what has become one of the largest manufacturing centres in the world, southern China. Her poetry is full of the dramatic details of days and nights spent in physical labor, the din of the workshops, the acute dangers associated with working with heavy machinery, and the exploitation, abuse, and indignity workers are subject to given the pressures of global capitalism and a lack of oversight and protection. But the poems also speak of pleasure and of love, memories of the ancestors, the natural environment of southern China and her native Huangma Mountains in central Sichuan. Zheng writes moving portraits of her fellow workers, voices the rarely addressed issues facing women workers in particular, and paints a vivid picture of the vast population of migrant labourers, displaced from their homes and desperately seeking ways to express their experiences. She is a poet of this century, speaking to a community which consumes the products of this labour: from iPhones to Christmas decorations to the components of machinery used across the world.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2022

About the author

Zheng Xiaoqiong (Chinese name: 郑小琼) was born in Nanchong, a city in the southwestern province of Sichuan. After nursing school, she worked in a local hospital for a time, but, unhappy with the working conditions, she left in 2001. She headed to Dongguan, which, like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, is one of the major industrial cities in the south where many Chinese migrant workers have settled over the past decades in hopes of a better life. There, she worked on assembly lines in various factories. After a while, she started to write poetry in which the life of factory workers plays a large part. Soon her work was noticed. Around 2007, she broke through and she has published almost a dozen collections, won a great many awards, and been translated in various languages.

Reviews

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 5 out of 5]

silent and lonely as iron —
the darkness
in the midst of forgotten time, I see my youth
wriggling away through clean, transparent grief
withering in the vastness of my country

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Born in China in 1980 on the cusp of the nation becoming a world-dominant manufacturing behemoth, by the time Zheng Xioaqiong was 21, China’s manufacturing was running full-bore, providing steady employment and pay for tens of millions of people from the countryside who would otherwise live at subsistence level, at best. As a woman, and an internal migrant, Zheng Xioaqiong would be paid less than men who, like her, also worked shifts of 11 or 12 hours a day, seven days a week, not including mandatory overtime, with one weekend off a month, sleeping eight to a dorm room (likely unairconditioned at the time). The work is both tediously repetitive and dangerous. The women hope to find husbands. Barring that, they turn to prostitution or return to their villages empty-handed. Many women send the money they manage to save back home. (In one of Zheng’s poems, a pay of 1,000 yen is mentioned—presumably pay for a month of 11-hour shifts—which amount to less than $140. From this amount, a frugal worker might wrest $20 spare to send back home.)

Anyone who’s ever worked in a factory can recognize or empathize with the lines beginning “Life,” the initial poem from Zheng’s first collection, Huanmaling (2006), which sets the tone for the whole volume:
What you don’t know is that my name has been hidden by an employee ID
my hands become part of the assembly line, my body signed over
to a contract, my black hair is turning white, leaving noise and toil. . .

The line workers know each other by number only, cogs enumerated for ease of replacement. Yet, Zheng sees how her ant-like labor in a vast Chinese factory fits into a larger neo-liberal nightmare, described in “Industrial Age”:
At the US-owned factory Japanese machines run Brazilian mines
to produce iron pieces, Germany’s lathes shape France’s
coastline, South Korea’s shelves are filled with Italian parts. . .
And so forth, for another dozen lines.

Zheng’s collection Woman Worker (2012) consists of prose poem vignettes describing the lives, hopes, and disappointments of female factory workers, most limned as individual portraits. The collective “Middle-Aged Prostitutes”—women abandoned by lovers after becoming pregnant, some the sole source of their distant family’s income, placid in the company of fellow prostitutes, though impoverished.

Respite from eternal toil is found in nature (the Rose Courtyard poems) and poetry itself. From “To Give”:
The fading away of gentle youth
for many years life has been
like a dull word I’ve been revising
. . . I live in perplexity
turned melancholy by distant events
used up by drudgery, allowing a few words
to suffuse my life, like disgrace, grief,
loneliness—but there is a quieter word too: poetry.

Zheng’s poetry voices a demand for dignity and grace, one imbued with the dreams of humanity rather than the drive of industry.

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[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zheng is known for her migrant worker poetry (dagong) written from the firsthand perspective of mainly rural women who move to industrial cities to work as wage slaves. The Poet in this collection functions as a kind of adapted Emersonian eye: the all-seeing observer who can move from the courtyard or rural mountains to the polluted factory floors, witnessing women of all eras at once, from grandmothers of the past with their dignified and ancient communal traditions to the young migrant women of the present who have lost all identity and individuality as they are forced into prostitution to compensate for unlivable wages. Lychee trees pervade the early poems, which I interpret as suggesting the sweet fruit of a generation crushed by an arid existence in the assembly line factory. Once again, the Poet sees the trees as both flourishing (in the ideal rural past) and dying (in the grim urban present) as the industrial world chokes and pollutes their young lives.

In that sense, these poems are also masterpieces of Naturalist verse – proof that Naturalism should return as a defining literary genre of our time. Marriage becomes impractical. Families are hampered by the one-child policy. Women are forced to supplement their meager income through prostitution. Love is an impossibility when young womanhood is crushed by draining work, low pay, and life in the cramped worker dorms. Amid shattered dreams and identities reduced to (and concealed by) a factory ID badge, there is a yearning to return to the village. Sichuan is mentioned in the couple poems, standing as an ideal pastoral past that can never be recovered amid the industrial pollution. In the classic Naturalist tradition, both dreams of the future and memories of the past are equally impossible, stunted, or blocked: “memory lies in waste like a development zone.”

There are sections of this collection that remind me of the Moloch scene from Metropolis (1927), as the beast of industry consumes the migrant workers, whose suffering is concealed from the sight of Chinese citizens in the cities. The Poet sees, experiences, and communicates that suffering through her poetry. Highly recommended.

[Acce · Rating 5 out of 5]

An indictment of our world. I felt all reading this, and felt for all who live under the thumb of exploitation. And for what, to sustain the meaningless consumerist whims of those in the west.

“I remember their faces, their turbulent eyes and subtle/ trembling/ their calloused fingers, their rough and simple lives/ I say quietly: they are me, I am they/ our grief and pain and hope are kept silent and forbearing/ our confessions and hearts and loves are in tears,/ as silent and lonely as iron, or as pain”

[Claudia Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

stunning!! a work of art!! my favourite was ‘the mutating villages’, so plz enjoy a quote “house after house turns to fine powder, person after person enters the
yellow earth, souls missing for years gather by brooks and banyan trees only to collapse in an instant, thousands of years of preserved traditions fall and keep falling, excavators extend their enormous iron sawteeth severing the distant umbilical cord between my ancestors and me”

[Holly Pedersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the later ones better. Pretty grim but vivid

[Brad Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

poetry about modern day factory conditions tied with traditional chinese imagery around nature goes so hard