October 24, 2024 • 36 mins
The final episode of our three-part series about migrant worker poetry in China. We speak to Maghiel van Crevel, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Leiden University. Maghiel has travelled extensively in China, meeting with and writing about the work of Chinese migrant worker poets.
In this episode, we look at questions of censorship in China and the importance of unofficial publications for the spread of migrant worker poetry (not to mention the wider Chinese poetry scene as well). We also discuss how some working-class writers come to be left out of what is considered 'working-class writing' with a specific look at the work of gay migrant worker poet, Mu Cao.
Full show notes including sources, further reading, photos, films and eventually a transcript are here on our website: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/wcl-7-9-chinese-migrant-worker-poetry/
Acknowledgements
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/working-class-history--5711490/support.
In this episode, we look at questions of censorship in China and the importance of unofficial publications for the spread of migrant worker poetry (not to mention the wider Chinese poetry scene as well). We also discuss how some working-class writers come to be left out of what is considered 'working-class writing' with a specific look at the work of gay migrant worker poet, Mu Cao.
Full show notes including sources, further reading, photos, films and eventually a transcript are here on our website: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/wcl-7-9-chinese-migrant-worker-poetry/
Acknowledgements
- As always, huge thanks to our patreon supporters who make this podcast possible. A special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda and Jeremy Cusimano.
- Our theme tune for these episodes is ‘A Young Man from the Village’ by the New Labour Art Troupe, from the Migrant Worker Home. Stream it here.
- This episode was produced by Jack Franco and edited by Jesse French.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/working-class-history--5711490/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome back to the final episode of our three part
series and Migrant Work above a Tree in China. If
you haven't listened to the other two episodes yet, I
suggest to you go back and listen to those first.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
You got twenty Ladders Shobo gon Do Las Young Dodgers.
Before we get started, just a quick reminder that our
podcast is brought to you by our Patriot supporters. Our
supports fund our work and in return get exclusive early
access to podcast episodes, add three episodes, bonus episodes, free
and discounted merchandise, and other content. For example, our Patreon
(00:50):
supporters can listen to all three parts of this series now,
as well as an exclusive Patreon only bonus episode that
goes into more detail about the mirkerot work at home,
some of the writers that we discuss and their influences.
Join us or find out more at patreon dot com
slash working Class History link In the show notes, you
might remember that this series is being produced and presented
(01:13):
with the help of friend of the podcast, Jack Franco,
so at this point we'll hand back over to him
wag Zone.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
In the previous two episodes, we've talked about the harsh
social conditions that Chinese migrant worker poetry comes out of.
We also discussed the important role poetry plays in Chinese society.
In this episode, we'll look at issues around censorship and
unofficial publications, as well as how the diversity of the
working class comes out in the diversity of working class writing,
asking questions about who gets included within the term working
(01:54):
class itself. We're joined again by mcgil Gancravell, Professor of
Chinese Literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, an expert
migrant worker poetry in China. McGill spoke to us about
working class poetry in China, what it is, who writes it,
and who it's for, and how it developed across the
last century, the development which is inextricably linked with the
(02:14):
country's communist movement.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Another way to look at this culturally specifically would be
the genealogy of working class writing in modern China. Now,
then you're really talking about the twentieth and twenty first centuries,
and you know, in very broad strokes, I could probably
carve that up into three periods. One, you know, the
specialists would call the Republican period, which is roughly the
(02:38):
first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the Civil
War between the Communists and the Nationalists, where it was
by and large and mostly, and I'm going to need
to sort of, you know, sweepingly generalize here a little bit,
it was by and large intellectuals who produced working class writing,
which means that we're talking about writing about the working
(02:59):
class as my people who don't necessarily speak from first
hand experience. There's an interesting debate about, you know, defining
working class literature, not just in China obviously, right, I mean,
is this about the firsthand experience of the author or
is it about something else? You know, is it okay
for you to not have lived that life but to
write about it. The second period would then be the
(03:22):
high socialist period, where the state actually massively gets behind
cultural production from the proletariat for the proletariat, more specifically
for the you know, workers, peasants and soldiers or gongwong
being in Chinese that were sort of the target audience.
Now there you have a very ambivalent situation because you
(03:44):
have a you know, what I call a politically a
dignified political subject, right, the worker, so to speak, the
vision of the worker. You have literature that is of
this worker, for this worker, perhaps by this worker, but
it becomes unclear who actually the writing, depending on where
you sit and what kind of archival evidence you have
access to, and so on and so forth. But you
(04:06):
have a literature that is, let's say, often very jubilant, right.
It celebrates the motherland, It is about say, you know,
it could be about the Korean War, it could be
about land reform, it could be about socialist re education,
it could be about the new oil rigs in the
Far West, etc. And then in the third phase, and
(04:27):
that's what we're talking about today, we move in what
you can probably call the post socialist period. And you
know what I said about a transformation of the proletariat
into a pre carriat. So that is another culturally specific
framework to sort of place this poetry, as it were.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
The literature of these different historical phases also ask questions
of what working class writing really means. Well. The second
and third phase is McGill mentioned, are both written by workers.
In the case of the former, that poetry isn't officially
recognized part of the ruling parties state building project. By contrast,
contemporary migrant worker poetry exists in the margins of what
(05:07):
is sayable in Chinese society. The possibilities open to poets
were and are in many ways limited, forcing them to improvise,
creating an exciting but risky underground movement of so called
unofficial publications or DIY poetry that are not within the
confines of state censorship and party themes. McGill is responsible
(05:27):
for a unique collection of unofficial poetry journals available outside
of China at Leda University. It is now largely digitized
and available online and you can check it out at
the link in the show notes.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
I think the first thing we'd need to do is
to reconsider what publication means. Right, perhaps if you ask,
you know, somebody on the street wherever, you know, your neighbor,
somebody who's not a specialist of this sort of thing,
has not been exposed to it, you know, what does
publication mean? They might say, well, you know, I mean
it's like a book or a journal, and it's probably
got the stamp of a publisher on EDM ISBN number,
(06:01):
that sort of thing, and you know, that kind of
definition is not going to get us anywhere if we
talk about this kind of cultural production. So publication, to
me essentially is producing something could be a literary text,
it could be music, could be you know, you name it,
whose audience you no longer control. Right, If I write
(06:22):
a poem, and let's say I live in you know,
under a politically oppressive regime, and my poem is politically
sensitive and I'm worried about it, then I might, you know,
show it to one of my best friends, but I
might not even give them a copy. I might read
it to them once and then burn it. And all
of these stories are documented. Right, this happened in China.
It happened in other places in China, for example, during
(06:44):
the Cultural Revolution. So controlling your audience, but the moment
that it is out there and the audience is no
longer something that you control, this stuff can travel. Then
as far as I'm concerned, we're talking about publication. So
then you enter into this phenomenon called unofficial publication. And
(07:04):
as it happens, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, for historical reasons
and contemporary reasons, there is a very strong tradition of
unofficial poetry publishing in China. It's a hugely impressive and
fascinating DIY circuit, and it's really interesting because there's many
many shades of gray between the black and white sort
(07:27):
of extremes of the spectrum of state sanctioned, state supported,
state driven literature orthodoxy on the one hand, and let's
say truly underground, politically sensitive, dangerous texts on the other
there's all these shades of gray in between. I think
this matters a great deal also to the migrant work
of poetry at the Battle of poetry that we're talking
(07:48):
about today. And then you see every possible permutation of
let's say, print and online and official and unofficial. So
there's official publications in print and online, those unofficial publications
in print and online, like I said, blogs, social media
and so on and so forth. And that means that
(08:09):
in order to get a sense of how this poetry
entered the public realm in the sense of being published, well,
you need to cast your net wide, and you need
to discard any illusions of control over actually getting the
data that you need because you're not working through the
formal circuits of catalogs in libraries and bookstores kept by
the publishers themselves and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
For me Giel, this almost functions as a form of
work in glass organizing in a country where independent trade
unions are non existent and labor unrest is frequently repressed.
This is particularly relevant for migrant workers who are already
legally marginalized, with little or no access to formal employment
associations or aid. Their decisions to publish and organize unofficially
(08:53):
is a way of claiming this marginal space for themselves,
much like the migrant workers home in Peterson we encountered
in the previous episode.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
As to organizing in the context of talking about working
class history and working class literature, as you know, one
topic related to working class history, again, we need to
clarify what that word means. If you're talking about labor organization.
There is very little of that in the bottom up
sense of the word, in the union sense of the
(09:23):
word in contemporary China, in the People's Republic of China,
So that is basically out. And the moment that you know,
initiatives like this raise their heads there is you know,
the boot's going to come down. That's basically going to
be a repressive movement by the government because they simply
won't have it.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
One example of the boot coming down on work as
initiatives is a struggle which took place at the Shunjun
Jassic Technology Factory in twenty eighteen. Parts of an organizing
campaign origining among Maoist students, a group of workers at
the Jassic factory started a petition for unionization, which was
signed by about eighty workers were approximately ten percent of
the workforce At this point. Employees found out about the
(10:06):
union drive and fire the ring leaders. When the sacked
workers demonstrated outside the factory, they were attacked by police,
resulting in more protests, this time outside the police station.
Multiple waves of repression subsequently came down and the workers
and their supporters, with dozens of activists arrested and Peaking
University disbanding their Marxist study society. The crackdown also expanded
(10:29):
to include labor activists with no connections at all to
the struggle at Jassic, and in the wake of that struggle,
the Chinese state became even more hostile towards labor activism.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Organized and could also mean something else, and that might
be interesting to what we're talking about today, because you know,
literature happens through institutions, right just like other cultural productions,
through universities, through bookstores, libraries, through learned societies, through reading clubs,
through you know, the list goes on, and that kind
(11:01):
of organizing obviously has been happening in China around this poetry.
And that takes us straight back to what I said
about Shase of Gray, because they're very interestingly, we don't
get a picture that says the people that write migrant
worker poetry are inherently and automatically going to be in
(11:23):
opposition to the government line, and so they're going to
be have to be quiet and careful and do this
in the margins, and you know, let nobody get wind
of it and be sort of careful and tread carefully
in what they write about. It's not as simple as
that at all, because in fact, the government looking at this,
and the government, in its turn, I guess, trying to
(11:46):
place this in a genealogy of workers literature in the
people's public of China, a tradition that it is proud of,
is going to also support this writing. So it's not
as if this is some sort of phenomenon that's going
to be stamped out at the first opportunity. That very
much depends on the message that's coming out of the
poetry in question.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
The relationship between these unofficial publications and poets and local
or state power is ambiguous and not clear, cup Will.
China has a long and proud tradition of work of
poetry that the state is keen to embrace. They are
equally careful that expressions of dissent are carefully managed. This
reality of censorship molds the expression of migrant worker poets.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
The first thing that I'm made to think of as
a China scholar is that the leading role of the
Communist Party, you know, that's enshrined in the constitution of
the People's Problem of China, and in practice that means
that the party very effectively I mean, well, that's a
(12:50):
complicated discussion, but yeah, I'm going to say that very
effectively rules the place right and you've very definitely got
to hand it to them. And that's not meant to
sound sort of, you know, cynical about it. But it
is a large and difficult and complex place, and the
challenges for the government also and especially in regard to
(13:12):
governance of the working population are immense. So to really
simplify terribly, so to speak, there's a choice that they've
been faced with ever since the reform and opening up
era started four to five decades ago, of keeping labor
cheap in order to make their way into the global
(13:34):
capitalist system at high speed, to become a part of that,
to ramp up productivity, to create jobs, even if these
were precarious jobs, even if they were three D jobs,
and so on and so forth. On the one hand,
and the desire that I very definitely ascribed to the
Chinese government to make life more livable and make life
(13:58):
better and advance the sort of economic standards of life
for the working population, that is a big, bad dilemma
to deal with. But when it comes to organizing and
to union work, the truth of it on the ground,
as established by scholarship and by good investigative journalism, is
that the grassroots voice is welcome as long as it
(14:23):
doesn't question, you know, policy and that dictates that flow
from that.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
That that.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Land on these people from on high. Again, with apologies
for a very unoriginal metaphor, but that is how it works, right.
You need to toe the.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Line by three D jobs. Mguil is referring to the
three d's he spoke about in Part one that define
the conditions of many migrant work. Is that is dirty, dangerous,
and demeaning.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Now, one of the things that the Chinese government is
very good at, and this is not a sarcastic comment
but a truly sincere comment, is to tread that very
fine line between allowing people to vent frustration, to discuss
their situation, to reflect on it, to reflect on other
possible futures, etc. On the one hand, and a lot
(15:15):
of this is happening on social media, and prior to
social media, was happening in other places and continues to
do so right all kinds of in person settings as well,
of course, the fine line between allowing people to vent
right on the one hand, and allowing them to actually organize,
to institutionalize networks, to build a budget, to develop leverage
(15:39):
in economic terms, to develop, for example, you know, effective
mechanisms of going on strike. And if you look at
the records that are kept by the Chinese government and
are actually in the public domain and often cited in
foreign media and scholarship as well, on labor unrest in China,
you know we're talking about I think you know of thousands,
(16:01):
if not more, but I might have this number wrong,
but you know, it's a very high number of so
called incidents per year per annum, and these are documented.
This is, you know, people I don't know barricading a
police station because of local situation surrounding pollution or other issues.
So it's not as if there is no labor unrest,
(16:23):
but the moment that this comes close to seriously organized action,
that is when the state steps in.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Migrant worker poetry is therefore an important grassroots voice depicting
the lives of precariously employed Chinese migron workers, but sometimes
gets lost when thinking about the night base. So they're
not just important reports about the lives of real people.
They are also poems that need to be read as
works of art, and doing so force as a reader
to usk why and how we read about the working
(16:52):
clas experience.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
As soon as we start talking about, for example, working
class writing, but then also a bit more broadly we
talk about, you know, subaltern writing or subaltern cultural production
and then sub alternity. You know, it can be a
working class background or working class conditions. It can also
be being a woman. It can mean being gay, It
(17:15):
can mean having the wrong ethnicity in the place that
you're at right, I mean one that is not appreciated,
that is discriminated against, and so on and so forth,
and so you get the prefixed literature, you get the
literature that is called workers literature, you get the literature
that is called you know, women's literature, aboriginal literature, prisoner's literature,
(17:37):
queer literature, and so on. And then the question bounces
right back at you, and it can come from various quarters, right,
it can come from left field or from where you've
expected it that says, okay, so it's this real literature, right,
or do we need to prefix it and in order
to justify it? We're only going to read this because
it's about workers or buy workers or for workers or
(17:59):
whatever we take an interest in the working class. Are
we only going to read it because we feel it's
important that women's emancipation happens and therefore we're going to
read this stuff. Or are we going to read it
because it is that particular thing that humans do. I mean,
they speak in various voices, and they use this very
particular voice that we call literary. And there's something about
this that does something to us, and sometimes we want
(18:20):
to dance to it, or it makes us cry or laugh.
And I don't think that debate is going to go away.
And I don't think that, for example, migrant worker poetry
or working class literature at large, you know, never mind
the point about class, you know, the question of class formation.
I don't think that they're going to fall on either
side of the fence anytime soon. I think it needs
(18:43):
sometimes a fairly aggressive, ongoing conversation of saying, can we
just sort of dislodge ourselves? And it really matters who
this we is? Right? Who are we referring to? Am
I referring to my academic environment? Am I talking about
a community that I'm somehow a part but also feel
like I've been flown into, as in the Chinese poetry scene,
(19:04):
where I've been around for yeah, years and decades and
people know me, but I'm a stranger and I leave again.
I'm the insider slash outsider thing, right, and ethnographers like
to talk about, So who's the we that we're talking about?
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Some of these issues around prefixes and insider outside of
status can be seen in the work of Mortau a
pen name meaning grass on the grave, one of China's
foremost LGBTQ poets.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
I've been in touch with morshow since twenty sixteen. He
wrote to me at one point when I was doing
field work and I was kind of visible on social
media in China, and I'd known his work, but i'd
never met him in person. Wonder he dropped me an email,
and it was actually fairly indignant, or it became indignant
as we proceeded to have had this exchange. And the
(19:52):
gist of it was, so you think you're doing research
on battle of poetry, migrant worker poetry, but you know,
you haven't really looked at my stuff, and I'm a
migrant worker poet, and you know, everybody calls me something else,
and you know, in everybody else's defense, I should note
here that Muta had a website in the colors of
the rainbow flag for a number of years, so you know,
(20:13):
you get pigeonholed. It happens, right, But his point is
really valid around the year two thousand, when this stuff
was really still beginning to happen. He actually has poetry
in those unofficial journals that is, you know, has titles
like what It's like to be a battler, right, or
(20:33):
a migrant worker pre carrier's worker. This dug this Chinese
work that we've been circling for a while. So he
should get this recognition.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Despite being a migrant worker who writes poetry about the
migrant worker experience, Mutau is rarely considered a migrant worker poet. Rather,
it's his sexuality that takes precedence and how people define
his work. Motau demonstrates how some groups come to be
left out, how people think about who the working class is,
the fact that his experience of his sexuality is in
(21:02):
separate from his experience of class.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Now, Moutol was born in the nineteen seventies in Khunan,
which is one of these provinces that supply a large
proportion of the migrant workers in contemporary China. And you know,
he went out to work, I think, as his sisters did,
and had a fairly shocking story before then of his
(21:30):
life at school in a very repressive school system, where
he ended up, you know, having a conflict with a teacher.
And now that's kind of a big thing in certainly
a rural educational environment in China. It was actually hard
for me to imagine that a pupil could have a
conflict with a teacher, which may have been naive on
my part, but what I've read about that sort of
(21:53):
thing and Also, what I've heard from him kind of
explains this idea of well, it doesn't really happen because
education is right very tightly in rural context like that,
and it's not as if you have any right to
even speak up. But apparently he did. So there was
this conflict with a teacher. It was a long running conflict.
Parents got involved, asked him to apologize, the school asked
(22:14):
him to apologize. He refused to apologize. He was kicked out.
So that was the beginning of the working life. This
was when he was about fifteen. He came also, you know,
from a broken home, substance abuse and other things, violence,
and so he started making a building a life of
his own as a migrant worker, basically as a precarious
(22:37):
worker at the very very very bottom of the food chain.
And then one point, you know, he got involved with
somebody who said, I'm going to take you along. There's
this place I want to take you to. So, you know,
this person took him to a park I think in Dondola,
Provincial capital. And I'm just simply quoting from an interview
I did with Mortar during field work and said, so
(22:59):
he said, yeah, and he explained to me what homosexuality was,
and all of a sudden everything made sense, and I
realized I was gay. And he said this to me
in a very matter of fact tone during the interview,
and I was wondering how this worked for him, and
how he could kind of say this in this way
(23:19):
in the light of his life story in which he
had not known about this thing. And the first introduction
to it was a place where you know, people went cruising,
right where you'd meet other homosexuals, and all of this
was on the sly because this was not meant to
be out in the open obviously, etc. So by hook
or by crook, this is another example of this incredible
(23:42):
urge to write. He began writing poetry, and he's another
example of these people who know their way around the
tradition and read widely in classical poetry but also in
contemporary poetry. And the Internet came around, and musshow was
clever and was quick to see that the Internet was
(24:02):
going to be the next big thing, and he somehow
taught himself, you know, to be a programmer and to
build websites, to know that this thing was around, and
to join you know, chat rooms and all these various
media that you have and had on the internet in
China at the time, and to take poetry online. And
he was one of the earliest people who did this.
(24:25):
And there was a reason for this because he was
gay and he was writing about being gay, and he
was doing this in very graphic terms, not only in
graphic terms, but also in very graphic terms, right including
same sex scenes that you know, left very little to
the imagination in the good sense of the word. And
(24:45):
so he actually came out as gay in an unofficial
poetry journal in the year two thousand run by one
of his closest friends who's an ecological activist now who
published you know, best friends, and they came from the
same place as well, poetry in this journal. And it's
so incredibly courageous, I mean, to publish this stuff, which
(25:07):
is very outspokenly gay in subject matter, you know, both
for the editor of this unofficial journal, because these things
can be stamped out right at the drop of a head,
and for the author of course, for Morthau and Morsaw
is just eminently fearless, very impressive person also in personally
to interview, gentle direct, fearless and I think you know
(25:32):
you've got the evidence. You don't need my ethnographic field
work to know that it's fearless if you look at
what he's done.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
It's important to understand the context that Mortal was writing in.
Homosexuality was only decriminalized in China in nineteen ninety seven.
It was only in two thousand and one, so one
year after Mutsau came out as gay in an unofficial
poetry journal, that being gay was no longer considered a
form of mental illness and well, in more recent years,
LGBTQ plus identities in cities like Paiging and Shanghai can
(25:59):
be expressed through dedicated cultural spaces. They still remain taboo,
as can be seen in the twenty seventeen law on
Internet Regulation, where online content can be edited or even
banned if it concerns what the state deems abnormal sexual behaviors,
such as same sex relationships. This context is essential to
understanding the importance of Mortar's work. Now we'll hear his
(26:22):
poem working for the Boss in a Black Factory, translated
and read by mcgil Vankroull. A black factory in China
refers to the type of factory that makes a complete
mockery of any sort of labor rights or protections, providing
informal or illegal employment, usually isolated from the public, with
workers often living and site.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Working for the boss in a black factory. This is
a privately owned black factory. They will lock away your
ID and your wages. The boss is eating well, big
fat babyface. He's happy for eighteen out of twenty four hours,
and for precisely that period of time, sixty garment workers
(27:05):
rush around with no breaks. The men are bent over
like skinny dogs. The women's eyes are red like a rabbit's.
They are overworked. They eat and sleep together, and the
women's buttocks often rub against the thighs of the men.
But there's no sex drive in any direction. It's almost
(27:29):
breakfast time. That good old thug of a cook jerks
off like crazy and shoots his load into the vat
of porridge. This matter is duly observed by the boss,
and for some reason he suddenly gives him a raise.
So you know, I'd call this vintage multar poetry, not
(27:50):
just because he wrote it almost twenty five years ago,
but also because what we see is a very recognizable
mix of something that is ultimately political rage. Right there
is rage there but ultimately this is this is about
social relations, political relations in society, but also human compassion
and a great deal of black humor that you know,
(28:11):
sort of threads its way throughout his erva as well,
and it breaches taboos, which is something that you know,
Musa has done fairly fearlessly for the last couple of decades.
Not just political taboos. There's other poetry where he's more
explicitly political, for example, when he talks about the police force,
or he talks about politicians, but also in this case
(28:33):
a taboo on sexuality and on sort of you know,
non sanitized representations of sexuality. And this is a taboo
that has appeared in various shapes and guys is throughout
the history of the People's Republic of China and is
there still today. So in that sense, I think it
(28:54):
is a really important sort of milestone text in the
larger context of battler poetry, also because it reminds us
of the need to take an intersectional perspective and to
not just, for example, classify this person as China's first
openly gay poet, which is something he also is, right,
(29:15):
which is a person he also is, but you know,
one of China's earliest battler poets and one of the
most explicit ones, And in that sense it reminds us that,
you know, literature is just as complex and messy as life.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Mortal's work in exploring the daily experience of a gay
migrant worker is able to question more than one aspect
of today's China. More critiques China's neoliberal economic reforms and
the oppressive black factories that have come with it by
focusing on another part of the social margins, the sexualization
that defines a migrant worker experience. For the critic Conwei
(29:50):
Boo most place as a migrant, working class homosexual poet
also questions away homosexual identity has developed in China following
its decriminalization in nineteen in ninety seven, providing an alternative
view from the more visible middle class homosexual circles in
major cities to which he has no access.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
One of the best appropriations of political jargon ever has
to be the term comrade poetry or comrade literature in
China meaning gay literature right queer literature by extension.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
You know.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
One of the top scholars in this regard is Barhumwey
at the University of Nottingham, who's done more than anybody
to bring cultural production and queerness to a wider public,
not just including academics. And he's also one of the
first who wrote on Mutau, on this poet in an
academic fashion and stress the importance of an intersectional perspective,
(30:48):
meaning we're not going to look at this person from
a single perspective and essentialize them down to their homosexuality
or essentialize them down to their migrant workerhood or their
poverty or their you know, leading role as an internet poet.
I mean that's a perspective I could work with. I could,
you know, write on internet poetry and make Muhol a pioneer.
(31:08):
And people have probably done this. So this intersectional perspective
is very, very interesting, and it takes us to a
poethood that is full of sarcasm and humor, and the
fearlessness that I talked about just now is visible, among
other things, in this biting sarcasm about you know, local
(31:32):
government officials and what they do when nobody's looking. Take
a wild guess. It is brilliant when he has a
poem about uncle policemen and you can say this sort
of thing in Chinese much in the same way you
could do this in English or in Dutch for that matter.
This is, you know, this avunckilar feeling of it's going
(31:53):
to be this protective person, that the wonderful policeman who's
going to make sure that we're all going to be safe,
who arrest somebody, and this somebody is actually the protagonist
of the poem. And then, as it turns out, you know,
uncle policeman arrests him I think because he's stolen a
bicycle or some sort of thing, and takes him home
(32:14):
and grooms him and you know, makes love to him,
and this is all very spectacular, and he says, you know,
the mirrors on the wall of the apartment came crashing down,
and this was the extent of their love making, et cetera.
And Uncle policeman was in high heaven and so was
our little culprit, you know, words like that. So it's
I mean, it's sarcasm from start to finish, and it
(32:36):
brings in all of this stuff of you know, political
power relations brought down to the level of you know,
the power of a policeman on the street in an
authoritarian society. But also you know, queerness, homosexuality, and the
rest of It's incredibly rich, He.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Got the lad.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Dodgers that marks the end of our third episode, and
China's migrant worker Poets. We hope that these episodes have
given a few glimpses into the lives and experiences of
people all to offer hidden from sight, not only literature
and art, but more generally. Despite their place at their
center of global capitalism, the likes of Juang Xiao, Chong Shuli, Joe,
Usha Shaohai, and Moutau, among many many others take us
(33:25):
back to the original meaning of poetry to make these
workers of so many different walks of life are poets,
whether it's on the assembly line or putting pen to paper.
Please read and share their poetry. You can find all
the poets and poetry we've spoken about in the show
notes and in the online transcript tells you.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
We also have a bonus episode where we go into
more detail about some of the topics we discussed in
the main episodes, like the relationship between more of a
work of poetry and the Chinese state, the New Labor
Art troup whose music we're using for these episodes, and
the international reception of Chinese mirgant worker poets like Jungshau
Chong and shule Jur. That bonus episode will be available
(34:12):
soon exclusively for our supporters on Patreon. It is only
support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make
these podcasts, So if you appreciate our work, please do
think about joining us at patreon dot com slash Working
Class History link in the show notes. In return for
your support, you get early access to content, as well
as ad free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch and more.
(34:36):
And if you can't spare the cash, absolutely no problem.
Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give
us a five star review on your favorite podcast app.
If you'd like to learn more about microt worker poetry
in China, then check out the web page for this series,
where you'll find images, a full list of sources, further reading,
and more. We've also got a great selection of books
available about Chinese history and our online store, and you
(34:59):
can can get ten percent off them and anything else
using the discount code wh podcast link in the show notes.
Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible.
Special thanks go to Jameson D. Saltzman, Jazz Hands, Fernando
Lopezoheda and Jeremy Kuzumano. Our theme tune for these episodes
is a young man from the village by the new
(35:21):
labor Art troup from the Migrant worker Home on the
outskirts of Beijing. Thanks to them for letting us use it.
You can buy it or stream it on the links
in the show notes. This episode was edited by Jesse French. Anyway,
that's it for today and I hope you enjoyed the
episode and thanks for listening. Listener Jing bingbos y'a, jing
(35:45):
jingu cool Galaina.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Wana coumento. Do the code
Welcome back to the final episode of our three part
series and Migrant Work above a Tree in China. If
you haven't listened to the other two episodes yet, I
suggest to you go back and listen to those first.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
You got twenty Ladders Shobo gon Do Las Young Dodgers.
Before we get started, just a quick reminder that our
podcast is brought to you by our Patriot supporters. Our
supports fund our work and in return get exclusive early
access to podcast episodes, add three episodes, bonus episodes, free
and discounted merchandise, and other content. For example, our Patreon
(00:50):
supporters can listen to all three parts of this series now,
as well as an exclusive Patreon only bonus episode that
goes into more detail about the mirkerot work at home,
some of the writers that we discuss and their influences.
Join us or find out more at patreon dot com
slash working Class History link In the show notes, you
might remember that this series is being produced and presented
(01:13):
with the help of friend of the podcast, Jack Franco,
so at this point we'll hand back over to him
wag Zone.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
In the previous two episodes, we've talked about the harsh
social conditions that Chinese migrant worker poetry comes out of.
We also discussed the important role poetry plays in Chinese society.
In this episode, we'll look at issues around censorship and
unofficial publications, as well as how the diversity of the
working class comes out in the diversity of working class writing,
asking questions about who gets included within the term working
(01:54):
class itself. We're joined again by mcgil Gancravell, Professor of
Chinese Literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, an expert
migrant worker poetry in China. McGill spoke to us about
working class poetry in China, what it is, who writes it,
and who it's for, and how it developed across the
last century, the development which is inextricably linked with the
(02:14):
country's communist movement.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Another way to look at this culturally specifically would be
the genealogy of working class writing in modern China. Now,
then you're really talking about the twentieth and twenty first centuries,
and you know, in very broad strokes, I could probably
carve that up into three periods. One, you know, the
specialists would call the Republican period, which is roughly the
(02:38):
first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the Civil
War between the Communists and the Nationalists, where it was
by and large and mostly, and I'm going to need
to sort of, you know, sweepingly generalize here a little bit,
it was by and large intellectuals who produced working class writing,
which means that we're talking about writing about the working
(02:59):
class as my people who don't necessarily speak from first
hand experience. There's an interesting debate about, you know, defining
working class literature, not just in China obviously, right, I mean,
is this about the firsthand experience of the author or
is it about something else? You know, is it okay
for you to not have lived that life but to
write about it. The second period would then be the
(03:22):
high socialist period, where the state actually massively gets behind
cultural production from the proletariat for the proletariat, more specifically
for the you know, workers, peasants and soldiers or gongwong
being in Chinese that were sort of the target audience.
Now there you have a very ambivalent situation because you
(03:44):
have a you know, what I call a politically a
dignified political subject, right, the worker, so to speak, the
vision of the worker. You have literature that is of
this worker, for this worker, perhaps by this worker, but
it becomes unclear who actually the writing, depending on where
you sit and what kind of archival evidence you have
access to, and so on and so forth. But you
(04:06):
have a literature that is, let's say, often very jubilant, right.
It celebrates the motherland, It is about say, you know,
it could be about the Korean War, it could be
about land reform, it could be about socialist re education,
it could be about the new oil rigs in the
Far West, etc. And then in the third phase, and
(04:27):
that's what we're talking about today, we move in what
you can probably call the post socialist period. And you
know what I said about a transformation of the proletariat
into a pre carriat. So that is another culturally specific
framework to sort of place this poetry, as it were.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
The literature of these different historical phases also ask questions
of what working class writing really means. Well. The second
and third phase is McGill mentioned, are both written by workers.
In the case of the former, that poetry isn't officially
recognized part of the ruling parties state building project. By contrast,
contemporary migrant worker poetry exists in the margins of what
(05:07):
is sayable in Chinese society. The possibilities open to poets
were and are in many ways limited, forcing them to improvise,
creating an exciting but risky underground movement of so called
unofficial publications or DIY poetry that are not within the
confines of state censorship and party themes. McGill is responsible
(05:27):
for a unique collection of unofficial poetry journals available outside
of China at Leda University. It is now largely digitized
and available online and you can check it out at
the link in the show notes.
Speaker 3 (05:39):
I think the first thing we'd need to do is
to reconsider what publication means. Right, perhaps if you ask,
you know, somebody on the street wherever, you know, your neighbor,
somebody who's not a specialist of this sort of thing,
has not been exposed to it, you know, what does
publication mean? They might say, well, you know, I mean
it's like a book or a journal, and it's probably
got the stamp of a publisher on EDM ISBN number,
(06:01):
that sort of thing, and you know, that kind of
definition is not going to get us anywhere if we
talk about this kind of cultural production. So publication, to
me essentially is producing something could be a literary text,
it could be music, could be you know, you name it,
whose audience you no longer control. Right, If I write
(06:22):
a poem, and let's say I live in you know,
under a politically oppressive regime, and my poem is politically
sensitive and I'm worried about it, then I might, you know,
show it to one of my best friends, but I
might not even give them a copy. I might read
it to them once and then burn it. And all
of these stories are documented. Right, this happened in China.
It happened in other places in China, for example, during
(06:44):
the Cultural Revolution. So controlling your audience, but the moment
that it is out there and the audience is no
longer something that you control, this stuff can travel. Then
as far as I'm concerned, we're talking about publication. So
then you enter into this phenomenon called unofficial publication. And
(07:04):
as it happens, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, for historical reasons
and contemporary reasons, there is a very strong tradition of
unofficial poetry publishing in China. It's a hugely impressive and
fascinating DIY circuit, and it's really interesting because there's many
many shades of gray between the black and white sort
(07:27):
of extremes of the spectrum of state sanctioned, state supported,
state driven literature orthodoxy on the one hand, and let's
say truly underground, politically sensitive, dangerous texts on the other
there's all these shades of gray in between. I think
this matters a great deal also to the migrant work
of poetry at the Battle of poetry that we're talking
(07:48):
about today. And then you see every possible permutation of
let's say, print and online and official and unofficial. So
there's official publications in print and online, those unofficial publications
in print and online, like I said, blogs, social media
and so on and so forth. And that means that
(08:09):
in order to get a sense of how this poetry
entered the public realm in the sense of being published, well,
you need to cast your net wide, and you need
to discard any illusions of control over actually getting the
data that you need because you're not working through the
formal circuits of catalogs in libraries and bookstores kept by
the publishers themselves and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (08:31):
For me Giel, this almost functions as a form of
work in glass organizing in a country where independent trade
unions are non existent and labor unrest is frequently repressed.
This is particularly relevant for migrant workers who are already
legally marginalized, with little or no access to formal employment
associations or aid. Their decisions to publish and organize unofficially
(08:53):
is a way of claiming this marginal space for themselves,
much like the migrant workers home in Peterson we encountered
in the previous episode.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
As to organizing in the context of talking about working
class history and working class literature, as you know, one
topic related to working class history, again, we need to
clarify what that word means. If you're talking about labor organization.
There is very little of that in the bottom up
sense of the word, in the union sense of the
(09:23):
word in contemporary China, in the People's Republic of China,
So that is basically out. And the moment that you know,
initiatives like this raise their heads there is you know,
the boot's going to come down. That's basically going to
be a repressive movement by the government because they simply
won't have it.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
One example of the boot coming down on work as
initiatives is a struggle which took place at the Shunjun
Jassic Technology Factory in twenty eighteen. Parts of an organizing
campaign origining among Maoist students, a group of workers at
the Jassic factory started a petition for unionization, which was
signed by about eighty workers were approximately ten percent of
the workforce At this point. Employees found out about the
(10:06):
union drive and fire the ring leaders. When the sacked
workers demonstrated outside the factory, they were attacked by police,
resulting in more protests, this time outside the police station.
Multiple waves of repression subsequently came down and the workers
and their supporters, with dozens of activists arrested and Peaking
University disbanding their Marxist study society. The crackdown also expanded
(10:29):
to include labor activists with no connections at all to
the struggle at Jassic, and in the wake of that struggle,
the Chinese state became even more hostile towards labor activism.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Organized and could also mean something else, and that might
be interesting to what we're talking about today, because you know,
literature happens through institutions, right just like other cultural productions,
through universities, through bookstores, libraries, through learned societies, through reading clubs,
through you know, the list goes on, and that kind
(11:01):
of organizing obviously has been happening in China around this poetry.
And that takes us straight back to what I said
about Shase of Gray, because they're very interestingly, we don't
get a picture that says the people that write migrant
worker poetry are inherently and automatically going to be in
(11:23):
opposition to the government line, and so they're going to
be have to be quiet and careful and do this
in the margins, and you know, let nobody get wind
of it and be sort of careful and tread carefully
in what they write about. It's not as simple as
that at all, because in fact, the government looking at this,
and the government, in its turn, I guess, trying to
(11:46):
place this in a genealogy of workers literature in the
people's public of China, a tradition that it is proud of,
is going to also support this writing. So it's not
as if this is some sort of phenomenon that's going
to be stamped out at the first opportunity. That very
much depends on the message that's coming out of the
poetry in question.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
The relationship between these unofficial publications and poets and local
or state power is ambiguous and not clear, cup Will.
China has a long and proud tradition of work of
poetry that the state is keen to embrace. They are
equally careful that expressions of dissent are carefully managed. This
reality of censorship molds the expression of migrant worker poets.
Speaker 3 (12:26):
The first thing that I'm made to think of as
a China scholar is that the leading role of the
Communist Party, you know, that's enshrined in the constitution of
the People's Problem of China, and in practice that means
that the party very effectively I mean, well, that's a
(12:50):
complicated discussion, but yeah, I'm going to say that very
effectively rules the place right and you've very definitely got
to hand it to them. And that's not meant to
sound sort of, you know, cynical about it. But it
is a large and difficult and complex place, and the
challenges for the government also and especially in regard to
(13:12):
governance of the working population are immense. So to really
simplify terribly, so to speak, there's a choice that they've
been faced with ever since the reform and opening up
era started four to five decades ago, of keeping labor
cheap in order to make their way into the global
(13:34):
capitalist system at high speed, to become a part of that,
to ramp up productivity, to create jobs, even if these
were precarious jobs, even if they were three D jobs,
and so on and so forth. On the one hand,
and the desire that I very definitely ascribed to the
Chinese government to make life more livable and make life
(13:58):
better and advance the sort of economic standards of life
for the working population, that is a big, bad dilemma
to deal with. But when it comes to organizing and
to union work, the truth of it on the ground,
as established by scholarship and by good investigative journalism, is
that the grassroots voice is welcome as long as it
(14:23):
doesn't question, you know, policy and that dictates that flow
from that.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
That that.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Land on these people from on high. Again, with apologies
for a very unoriginal metaphor, but that is how it works, right.
You need to toe the.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
Line by three D jobs. Mguil is referring to the
three d's he spoke about in Part one that define
the conditions of many migrant work. Is that is dirty, dangerous,
and demeaning.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Now, one of the things that the Chinese government is
very good at, and this is not a sarcastic comment
but a truly sincere comment, is to tread that very
fine line between allowing people to vent frustration, to discuss
their situation, to reflect on it, to reflect on other
possible futures, etc. On the one hand, and a lot
(15:15):
of this is happening on social media, and prior to
social media, was happening in other places and continues to
do so right all kinds of in person settings as well,
of course, the fine line between allowing people to vent
right on the one hand, and allowing them to actually organize,
to institutionalize networks, to build a budget, to develop leverage
(15:39):
in economic terms, to develop, for example, you know, effective
mechanisms of going on strike. And if you look at
the records that are kept by the Chinese government and
are actually in the public domain and often cited in
foreign media and scholarship as well, on labor unrest in China,
you know we're talking about I think you know of thousands,
(16:01):
if not more, but I might have this number wrong,
but you know, it's a very high number of so
called incidents per year per annum, and these are documented.
This is, you know, people I don't know barricading a
police station because of local situation surrounding pollution or other issues.
So it's not as if there is no labor unrest,
(16:23):
but the moment that this comes close to seriously organized action,
that is when the state steps in.
Speaker 1 (16:32):
Migrant worker poetry is therefore an important grassroots voice depicting
the lives of precariously employed Chinese migron workers, but sometimes
gets lost when thinking about the night base. So they're
not just important reports about the lives of real people.
They are also poems that need to be read as
works of art, and doing so force as a reader
to usk why and how we read about the working
(16:52):
clas experience.
Speaker 3 (16:54):
As soon as we start talking about, for example, working
class writing, but then also a bit more broadly we
talk about, you know, subaltern writing or subaltern cultural production
and then sub alternity. You know, it can be a
working class background or working class conditions. It can also
be being a woman. It can mean being gay, It
(17:15):
can mean having the wrong ethnicity in the place that
you're at right, I mean one that is not appreciated,
that is discriminated against, and so on and so forth,
and so you get the prefixed literature, you get the
literature that is called workers literature, you get the literature
that is called you know, women's literature, aboriginal literature, prisoner's literature,
(17:37):
queer literature, and so on. And then the question bounces
right back at you, and it can come from various quarters, right,
it can come from left field or from where you've
expected it that says, okay, so it's this real literature, right,
or do we need to prefix it and in order
to justify it? We're only going to read this because
it's about workers or buy workers or for workers or
(17:59):
whatever we take an interest in the working class. Are
we only going to read it because we feel it's
important that women's emancipation happens and therefore we're going to
read this stuff. Or are we going to read it
because it is that particular thing that humans do. I mean,
they speak in various voices, and they use this very
particular voice that we call literary. And there's something about
this that does something to us, and sometimes we want
(18:20):
to dance to it, or it makes us cry or laugh.
And I don't think that debate is going to go away.
And I don't think that, for example, migrant worker poetry
or working class literature at large, you know, never mind
the point about class, you know, the question of class formation.
I don't think that they're going to fall on either
side of the fence anytime soon. I think it needs
(18:43):
sometimes a fairly aggressive, ongoing conversation of saying, can we
just sort of dislodge ourselves? And it really matters who
this we is? Right? Who are we referring to? Am
I referring to my academic environment? Am I talking about
a community that I'm somehow a part but also feel
like I've been flown into, as in the Chinese poetry scene,
(19:04):
where I've been around for yeah, years and decades and
people know me, but I'm a stranger and I leave again.
I'm the insider slash outsider thing, right, and ethnographers like
to talk about, So who's the we that we're talking about?
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Some of these issues around prefixes and insider outside of
status can be seen in the work of Mortau a
pen name meaning grass on the grave, one of China's
foremost LGBTQ poets.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
I've been in touch with morshow since twenty sixteen. He
wrote to me at one point when I was doing
field work and I was kind of visible on social
media in China, and I'd known his work, but i'd
never met him in person. Wonder he dropped me an email,
and it was actually fairly indignant, or it became indignant
as we proceeded to have had this exchange. And the
(19:52):
gist of it was, so you think you're doing research
on battle of poetry, migrant worker poetry, but you know,
you haven't really looked at my stuff, and I'm a
migrant worker poet, and you know, everybody calls me something else,
and you know, in everybody else's defense, I should note
here that Muta had a website in the colors of
the rainbow flag for a number of years, so you know,
(20:13):
you get pigeonholed. It happens, right, But his point is
really valid around the year two thousand, when this stuff
was really still beginning to happen. He actually has poetry
in those unofficial journals that is, you know, has titles
like what It's like to be a battler, right, or
(20:33):
a migrant worker pre carrier's worker. This dug this Chinese
work that we've been circling for a while. So he
should get this recognition.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Despite being a migrant worker who writes poetry about the
migrant worker experience, Mutau is rarely considered a migrant worker poet. Rather,
it's his sexuality that takes precedence and how people define
his work. Motau demonstrates how some groups come to be
left out, how people think about who the working class is,
the fact that his experience of his sexuality is in
(21:02):
separate from his experience of class.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Now, Moutol was born in the nineteen seventies in Khunan,
which is one of these provinces that supply a large
proportion of the migrant workers in contemporary China. And you know,
he went out to work, I think, as his sisters did,
and had a fairly shocking story before then of his
(21:30):
life at school in a very repressive school system, where
he ended up, you know, having a conflict with a teacher.
And now that's kind of a big thing in certainly
a rural educational environment in China. It was actually hard
for me to imagine that a pupil could have a
conflict with a teacher, which may have been naive on
my part, but what I've read about that sort of
(21:53):
thing and Also, what I've heard from him kind of
explains this idea of well, it doesn't really happen because
education is right very tightly in rural context like that,
and it's not as if you have any right to
even speak up. But apparently he did. So there was
this conflict with a teacher. It was a long running conflict.
Parents got involved, asked him to apologize, the school asked
(22:14):
him to apologize. He refused to apologize. He was kicked out.
So that was the beginning of the working life. This
was when he was about fifteen. He came also, you know,
from a broken home, substance abuse and other things, violence,
and so he started making a building a life of
his own as a migrant worker, basically as a precarious
(22:37):
worker at the very very very bottom of the food chain.
And then one point, you know, he got involved with
somebody who said, I'm going to take you along. There's
this place I want to take you to. So, you know,
this person took him to a park I think in Dondola,
Provincial capital. And I'm just simply quoting from an interview
I did with Mortar during field work and said, so
(22:59):
he said, yeah, and he explained to me what homosexuality was,
and all of a sudden everything made sense, and I
realized I was gay. And he said this to me
in a very matter of fact tone during the interview,
and I was wondering how this worked for him, and
how he could kind of say this in this way
(23:19):
in the light of his life story in which he
had not known about this thing. And the first introduction
to it was a place where you know, people went cruising,
right where you'd meet other homosexuals, and all of this
was on the sly because this was not meant to
be out in the open obviously, etc. So by hook
or by crook, this is another example of this incredible
(23:42):
urge to write. He began writing poetry, and he's another
example of these people who know their way around the
tradition and read widely in classical poetry but also in
contemporary poetry. And the Internet came around, and musshow was
clever and was quick to see that the Internet was
(24:02):
going to be the next big thing, and he somehow
taught himself, you know, to be a programmer and to
build websites, to know that this thing was around, and
to join you know, chat rooms and all these various
media that you have and had on the internet in
China at the time, and to take poetry online. And
he was one of the earliest people who did this.
(24:25):
And there was a reason for this because he was
gay and he was writing about being gay, and he
was doing this in very graphic terms, not only in
graphic terms, but also in very graphic terms, right including
same sex scenes that you know, left very little to
the imagination in the good sense of the word. And
(24:45):
so he actually came out as gay in an unofficial
poetry journal in the year two thousand run by one
of his closest friends who's an ecological activist now who
published you know, best friends, and they came from the
same place as well, poetry in this journal. And it's
so incredibly courageous, I mean, to publish this stuff, which
(25:07):
is very outspokenly gay in subject matter, you know, both
for the editor of this unofficial journal, because these things
can be stamped out right at the drop of a head,
and for the author of course, for Morthau and Morsaw
is just eminently fearless, very impressive person also in personally
to interview, gentle direct, fearless and I think you know
(25:32):
you've got the evidence. You don't need my ethnographic field
work to know that it's fearless if you look at
what he's done.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
It's important to understand the context that Mortal was writing in.
Homosexuality was only decriminalized in China in nineteen ninety seven.
It was only in two thousand and one, so one
year after Mutsau came out as gay in an unofficial
poetry journal, that being gay was no longer considered a
form of mental illness and well, in more recent years,
LGBTQ plus identities in cities like Paiging and Shanghai can
(25:59):
be expressed through dedicated cultural spaces. They still remain taboo,
as can be seen in the twenty seventeen law on
Internet Regulation, where online content can be edited or even
banned if it concerns what the state deems abnormal sexual behaviors,
such as same sex relationships. This context is essential to
understanding the importance of Mortar's work. Now we'll hear his
(26:22):
poem working for the Boss in a Black Factory, translated
and read by mcgil Vankroull. A black factory in China
refers to the type of factory that makes a complete
mockery of any sort of labor rights or protections, providing
informal or illegal employment, usually isolated from the public, with
workers often living and site.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
Working for the boss in a black factory. This is
a privately owned black factory. They will lock away your
ID and your wages. The boss is eating well, big
fat babyface. He's happy for eighteen out of twenty four hours,
and for precisely that period of time, sixty garment workers
(27:05):
rush around with no breaks. The men are bent over
like skinny dogs. The women's eyes are red like a rabbit's.
They are overworked. They eat and sleep together, and the
women's buttocks often rub against the thighs of the men.
But there's no sex drive in any direction. It's almost
(27:29):
breakfast time. That good old thug of a cook jerks
off like crazy and shoots his load into the vat
of porridge. This matter is duly observed by the boss,
and for some reason he suddenly gives him a raise.
So you know, I'd call this vintage multar poetry, not
(27:50):
just because he wrote it almost twenty five years ago,
but also because what we see is a very recognizable
mix of something that is ultimately political rage. Right there
is rage there but ultimately this is this is about
social relations, political relations in society, but also human compassion
and a great deal of black humor that you know,
(28:11):
sort of threads its way throughout his erva as well,
and it breaches taboos, which is something that you know,
Musa has done fairly fearlessly for the last couple of decades.
Not just political taboos. There's other poetry where he's more
explicitly political, for example, when he talks about the police force,
or he talks about politicians, but also in this case
(28:33):
a taboo on sexuality and on sort of you know,
non sanitized representations of sexuality. And this is a taboo
that has appeared in various shapes and guys is throughout
the history of the People's Republic of China and is
there still today. So in that sense, I think it
(28:54):
is a really important sort of milestone text in the
larger context of battler poetry, also because it reminds us
of the need to take an intersectional perspective and to
not just, for example, classify this person as China's first
openly gay poet, which is something he also is, right,
(29:15):
which is a person he also is, but you know,
one of China's earliest battler poets and one of the
most explicit ones, And in that sense it reminds us that,
you know, literature is just as complex and messy as life.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Mortal's work in exploring the daily experience of a gay
migrant worker is able to question more than one aspect
of today's China. More critiques China's neoliberal economic reforms and
the oppressive black factories that have come with it by
focusing on another part of the social margins, the sexualization
that defines a migrant worker experience. For the critic Conwei
(29:50):
Boo most place as a migrant, working class homosexual poet
also questions away homosexual identity has developed in China following
its decriminalization in nineteen in ninety seven, providing an alternative
view from the more visible middle class homosexual circles in
major cities to which he has no access.
Speaker 3 (30:09):
One of the best appropriations of political jargon ever has
to be the term comrade poetry or comrade literature in
China meaning gay literature right queer literature by extension.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
You know.
Speaker 3 (30:25):
One of the top scholars in this regard is Barhumwey
at the University of Nottingham, who's done more than anybody
to bring cultural production and queerness to a wider public,
not just including academics. And he's also one of the
first who wrote on Mutau, on this poet in an
academic fashion and stress the importance of an intersectional perspective,
(30:48):
meaning we're not going to look at this person from
a single perspective and essentialize them down to their homosexuality
or essentialize them down to their migrant workerhood or their
poverty or their you know, leading role as an internet poet.
I mean that's a perspective I could work with. I could,
you know, write on internet poetry and make Muhol a pioneer.
(31:08):
And people have probably done this. So this intersectional perspective
is very, very interesting, and it takes us to a
poethood that is full of sarcasm and humor, and the
fearlessness that I talked about just now is visible, among
other things, in this biting sarcasm about you know, local
(31:32):
government officials and what they do when nobody's looking. Take
a wild guess. It is brilliant when he has a
poem about uncle policemen and you can say this sort
of thing in Chinese much in the same way you
could do this in English or in Dutch for that matter.
This is, you know, this avunckilar feeling of it's going
(31:53):
to be this protective person, that the wonderful policeman who's
going to make sure that we're all going to be safe,
who arrest somebody, and this somebody is actually the protagonist
of the poem. And then, as it turns out, you know,
uncle policeman arrests him I think because he's stolen a
bicycle or some sort of thing, and takes him home
(32:14):
and grooms him and you know, makes love to him,
and this is all very spectacular, and he says, you know,
the mirrors on the wall of the apartment came crashing down,
and this was the extent of their love making, et cetera.
And Uncle policeman was in high heaven and so was
our little culprit, you know, words like that. So it's
I mean, it's sarcasm from start to finish, and it
(32:36):
brings in all of this stuff of you know, political
power relations brought down to the level of you know,
the power of a policeman on the street in an
authoritarian society. But also you know, queerness, homosexuality, and the
rest of It's incredibly rich, He.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Got the lad.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
Dodgers that marks the end of our third episode, and
China's migrant worker Poets. We hope that these episodes have
given a few glimpses into the lives and experiences of
people all to offer hidden from sight, not only literature
and art, but more generally. Despite their place at their
center of global capitalism, the likes of Juang Xiao, Chong Shuli, Joe,
Usha Shaohai, and Moutau, among many many others take us
(33:25):
back to the original meaning of poetry to make these
workers of so many different walks of life are poets,
whether it's on the assembly line or putting pen to paper.
Please read and share their poetry. You can find all
the poets and poetry we've spoken about in the show
notes and in the online transcript tells you.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
We also have a bonus episode where we go into
more detail about some of the topics we discussed in
the main episodes, like the relationship between more of a
work of poetry and the Chinese state, the New Labor
Art troup whose music we're using for these episodes, and
the international reception of Chinese mirgant worker poets like Jungshau
Chong and shule Jur. That bonus episode will be available
(34:12):
soon exclusively for our supporters on Patreon. It is only
support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make
these podcasts, So if you appreciate our work, please do
think about joining us at patreon dot com slash Working
Class History link in the show notes. In return for
your support, you get early access to content, as well
as ad free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch and more.
(34:36):
And if you can't spare the cash, absolutely no problem.
Please just tell your friends about this podcast and give
us a five star review on your favorite podcast app.
If you'd like to learn more about microt worker poetry
in China, then check out the web page for this series,
where you'll find images, a full list of sources, further reading,
and more. We've also got a great selection of books
available about Chinese history and our online store, and you
(34:59):
can can get ten percent off them and anything else
using the discount code wh podcast link in the show notes.
Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible.
Special thanks go to Jameson D. Saltzman, Jazz Hands, Fernando
Lopezoheda and Jeremy Kuzumano. Our theme tune for these episodes
is a young man from the village by the new
(35:21):
labor Art troup from the Migrant worker Home on the
outskirts of Beijing. Thanks to them for letting us use it.
You can buy it or stream it on the links
in the show notes. This episode was edited by Jesse French. Anyway,
that's it for today and I hope you enjoyed the
episode and thanks for listening. Listener Jing bingbos y'a, jing
(35:45):
jingu cool Galaina.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Wana coumento. Do the code
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