Chinese literature has recently experienced a boom of “migrant workers’ writing”—largely autobiographical works produced by individuals involved in the nation’s sprawling gig and service economy. From deliverypersons to housekeepers to drivers, these marginalized laborers reveal in their writing the hardships and intersectional complexities that their positions make them vulnerable to, testifying to the thanklessness and extreme demands of their essential roles, and thus giving a pivotal view as to what constitutes the nation’s varied and persistently hegemonic social fabric. In this essay, Jianan Qian gives background to this rise and its unveiling of public secrets—the truth of what it takes to keep the enormous engine of China humming.
1.
I first heard the voices of the migrant workers not through literary works, but through popular songs. In 2010, a music video of two men singing Wang Feng’s “In the Spring” went viral on Chinese internet; in the shaky images captured by a handheld camera, the singers—later known as the duo Xuriyanggang—stood bare-chested in a cramped rented room. They were tanned, their faces and necks reddish from long hours of outdoor labor. In raw voices, they sang the chorus:
If one day, I grow old
and have nowhere to turn,
Please bury me,
Bury me in the heart of the spring.
In the original music video, Wang—a Beijing native and now an established musician—is looking nostalgically back on the spring of his youth, when he was a nameless music school student dedicated to his dream. The line “having nowhere to turn” sounds melancholic in his voice, perhaps signaling the common anxiety of aging, but in Xuriyanggang’s version, it indicates a future of being aged and homeless, speaking to the literal reality of the migrant workers looking towards it. The hukou, or household registration system in China, restricts its citizens’ access to education, healthcare, and pensions to their place of birth; thus, for many rural-born Chinese whose truncated education have forced them to take up labor jobs in major cities (turning them into “migrant workers”), they may still be deemed illegitimate residents after spending most of their lives in the cities they helped build, and thus are subject to displacement.
2.
Around the same time in the early 2010s, the voices of migrant workers also began to gain attention in the literary world. By committing their raw experiences to writing, they introduced the reading public to a stream of narratives that outline the deprivation, denial, and reduction consequential to the hukou system. Amongst them was Xu Lizhi, a young assembly-line worker at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, who recorded his angst in poetry. In one of his most circulated pieces, he wrote:
I swallowed a moon made of iron
They called it a screw
I swallowed the industrial sewage, the unemployment files
and youth cut short by bending over the machines
I swallowed the hustle and the displacement,
the pedestrian overpass, and life overgrown with rust
Painting the torment of his bleak reality into a painful bodily distortion, Xu described a life condemned at its very origin. Were he an urban-born youth, he might have gone to university and found work in publishing, but his rural birth had ruled out this and other possibilities. Tragically, in 2014, Xu jumped from a rooftop, ending his life at the age of twenty-four.
Though exceptional, Xu’s writing is not an exception. In fact, some of the most widely read or best-selling literary works in today’s China are written by migrant workers. In 2017, Fan Yusu, a nanny for a wealthy family in Beijing, published an online personal essay titled “I Am Fan Yusu.” Within a day, this piece was viewed over one hundred thousand times and caught the attention of national and international news outlets, highlighting a desire to consume such stories of honest confession and class divide in a time of economic turbulence. In 2023, Hu Anyan’s debut nonfiction work, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing was published by Insight Media (now out in Jack Hargreaves’s English translation), and soon appeared on several national year-end booklists. Within a year and a half, it sold a sensational number of nearly two hundred thousand copies.
Between 2023 and 2024, more debuts by or about migrant workers emerged: Zhang Xiaoman’s 我的母亲做保洁 (My Mother Does Cleaning), Hei Tao’s 我在上海开出租 (I Drive a Taxi in Shanghai), and Wang Jibing’s 赶时间的人：一个外卖员的诗 (Always in a Rush: the Poems of a Deliveryman), all of which were included in national booklists. While it remains unclear if these migrant workers’ voices will enable significant social reform, their visibility is a promising start.
3.
Works about and by migrant workers have been given many names: grassroots literature, battler literature, migrant workers’ literature, new worker literature. Now, after the most recent boom, a new term has been coined: laymen’s writing. Several scholars have traced this literary scene back to modern Chinese literature’s early emphasis on ordinary people and the working class; as the scholar Xiang Jing reminds us in a recent essay, “ordinary people’s literature” was precisely what Lu Xun envisioned in the 1930s as the future ideal of Chinese writing.
Surveying the representation of domestic workers in Chinese literature, scholar Hui Faye Xiao points out that due to historic educational and resource inequalities, literary works about domestic workers were almost always authored by professional writers who had never worked such jobs. With voices like Fan Yusu’s and the emergence of Picun, the workers’ home on the outskirts of Beijing that unites aspiring literary voices, Xiao is delighted to see workers finally picking up the pen to write their own stories. Their voices are invaluable, comparable to the slave narratives in US literature, with the reality of social injustice and inequality being revealed in stark, graphic accounts, made even more powerful by intimate, first-person narration.
Born and raised in an impoverished village in Hubei, Fan Yusu begins her essay with a striking line: “My life is a book unbearable to read through, bound together with cruel awkwardness by the hand of fate.” In a seemingly nonchalant tone, she recalls how her mother raised five children almost single-handedly, each one “a source of tragedy.” For example, her eldest sister was given an overdose of medicine at just five months old, which impaired her intelligence. Still, their mother never gave up and tried all kind of remedies, until the eldest sister “had a fever at the age of twenty; she died when treatment failed.” Throughout the text, the poignancy of her voice works to pierce the conscience of urban residents, who, at the very least, are born with social benefits unimaginable in the ruralities, with the difference between them extreme enough to recall ancient monarchical systems. Writing about the billionaire’s mistress she worked for, Fan likens the young woman’s pandering to that of a concubine in an imperial court. “In moments like this,” she writes, “I get all confused, not sure whether I am living in the prime of the Tang Dynasty, the Qing Empire, or the socialist new China. It’s not like I have supernatural powers. Neither have I time-traveled.” Satirizing the progressive narrative urban residents take for granted, Fan incisively reveals how certain power structures—particularly when intersecting with gender—remain unchanged.
Hu Anyan’s voice is more patient and measured, tour-guiding readers through the intricacies of the delivery industry. He explains how delivery workers are assigned areas, why floors occupied by seniors are better than those rented out on short-term leases, and why many new couriers last less than two months—all of it culminating to signify a widening social divide. For the members of Beijing’s contemporary middle class, it is highly unlikely that any of their relatives or friends will have worked as a delivery person. They may enjoy the efficiency of having parcels arriving daily to their doors, but know nothing about those who have made their comfort possible. Hu’s book fills this gap, demanding that delivery workers be recognized and humanized.
Within the term “laymen’s writing,” there’s a subtle clue. At first glance, the term seems to erase these authors’ shared identity as socially and economically marginalized individuals—but given these explicit book titles, many of which emphasize their author’s job titles, an added emphasis on their social group may be unnecessary. Instead, by contrasting these authors with those who have received elite literary training, the term suggests that laymen’s voices are authentic, straightforward, and accessible, as opposed to a professional voice that could be crafted, obscure, or esoteric. The term also raises suspicions about the legitimacy of representation; safeguarded by college degrees and a middle-class lifestyle, how can professional writers truly understand the everyday struggles of migrant workers, and how could they attempt to capture their voices?
Books and testimonies like Hu’s, then, form an archive of precious primary sources that professional writers could treasure; to truly portrait all the echelons and layers of contemporary Chinese society, a writer might need to read volumes of accounts like Hu’s—or even work for months as a courier—to render an authentical fictional voice that could represent a member of the working class. However, the question emerges of the established writer’s role in capturing these realities. If migrant workers can speak for themselves, why should professional writers feign their voices? If these autobiographical notes contain historical truth, why create realist fiction, which always seems to distort reality to some degree?
There are discernible flaws in many of these “laymen’s texts”: their detailed events are largely flattened to the chronological; they lack sophisticated devices to create subtext; certain sections are loose or wordy and could use refinement. But perhaps, instead of seeking to speak for marginalized groups, professional writers today could serve as their teachers or editors, helping to polish up these first-person accounts. That is precisely what Zhang Huiyu, a Peking University literary professor, did for years at the workers’ home of Picun, and perhaps it is also what Lu Xun envisioned nearly a century ago, that Chinese literature would one day have room for anyone who wished to tell their own stories. This possibility may only come alive when those who are adept in the craft of storytelling could share their skills with the ones whose stories should be most heard.
4.
These questions are on my mind as I struggle to flesh out a migrant worker character in my own novel-in-progress—a struggle less practical than ideological. Despite having conducted extensive research and interviews and completed a full draft, I still wonder if I—born with a Shanghai hukou—have the right to “colonize the mind” of a migrant worker. It’s a concept that has been prevalent in my Southern Californian PhD program, largely in reference to white supremacy—but when I question China’s regions and social classes with this logic, it brings up the same sense of guilt and shame.
It was not until I read Zhang Yueran’s novel Women, Seated, translated into English by Jeremy Tiang, that I began to approach these questions differently. Though the novel begins with a derailed kidnapping plot, it doesn’t rely on melodrama. Instead, it explores the inner life of Yu Ling, a nanny for a wealthy Beijing family. Conditioned to self-sacrifice as a woman from a rural town, Yu Ling’s backstory is no less cruel than Fan Yusu’s real life.
As Hui Faye Xiao observes, domestic workers have been staple figures at the intersection of gender and class since the dawn of modern Chinese literature. Sharing this view, Women, Seated offers knowing nods to Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterpiece The Remains of the Day, which dismantles the staple figure of the butler in the British literary tradition. The parallels are rich: both protagonists sacrifice their personal lives for their masters; both novels use portrait paintings as metaphors; and in one chapter of Women, Seated, a character named Amy even mentions Ishiguro’s novel to Yu Ling. While Amy focuses on the butler’s moral failure in serving a Nazi sympathizer, Yu Ling asks whether the master had a child. The conversation shifts completely:
“It would be different if there was a child. You watch a child grow up day by day, that’s your achievement. You’d never feel you’d completely wasted your time.”
“That’s true.” Amy pondered her words and smiled. “Now I understand why I felt there was something missing in the novel. You’re right, it would be completely different if there was a child. Even the children of the Nazis were innocent and deserved to be treated well. . . .”
The novel thus offers a striking feminist perspective by highlighting Yu Ling’s agency. Whereas Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro’s novel, prioritizes so-called history-making events in his house, Yu Ling directs her care to the kitchen, the yard, and the child, which offers her a sense of sanctuary and peace. As a result, while Stevens remains deluded about his purpose, Yu Ling does not; she views caring for the seven-year-old boy not merely as a job but as a human duty.
Beyond exposing the oppression Yu Ling suffers as a rural woman and migrant worker, Zhang Yueran also emphasizes Yu’s ability to create connections. As a bridge between the wealthy and the poor, Yu Ling perceives moral ambiguities on both sides; the wealthy family is corrupt, but the debt-burdened poor may commit horrible acts for money. Yu Ling’s position thus recalls the potential to recognize similarities within disparities, and at the end, with her employer’s family detained and charged for fraud, Yu Ling remains alone in the mansion, watching the video of the boy’s previous birthday party. Speaking on Howards End, E. M. Forster’s novel of English class relations, American critic Lionel Trilling famously interpreted its central question as: “Who shall inherit England?” The same motif—Who shall inherit China?—is visible in Women, Seated, and Zhang Yueran’s answer is: a migrant female worker who has witnessed her fair share of systematic evil, but who has not yet lost her innocence and capacity for compassion.
With that in mind, I see more clearly the potential of literary fiction that employs rural workers’ voices. In Lu Xun’s short story, “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” the writer reveals how intellectuals can fail to connect with a working class whom they aim to illuminate, yet certain works by accomplished writers have also successfully painted a broad, Tolstoyan portrait of society by excavating the philosophical and humanist pulse between social representations. Wang Anyi’s novel Fu Ping, for instance, works against the elitist culture of Shanghai and its discrimination against migrants from northern Jiangsu Province, assuming the latter’s poverty and coarseness. By telling the story of a migrant girl from that area, Wang suggests that the resilience, wisdom, and gentleness of migrants have instead nourished Shanghai’s largely materialistic culture.
5.
While living in Southern California, I found it amusing that people there overused the word “legit.”
“The new app is legit,” they said, meaning trustworthy.
“This music album is legit,” they claimed, meaning high-quality.
“Is that Chinese noodle place legit?” an Uber driver once asked me. “I like dan dan noodles,” she added before I could respond. I looked at her—a friendly non-Asian woman perhaps in her late forties—and suddenly realized she used “legit” to mean “authentic.”
As a first-generation immigrant myself, I’ve found it hopeful that if a derivative meaning of “legit” is “authentic,” then perhaps it won’t be long before the logic goes the other way around: what is authentic or high-quality is hence trustworthy, and ultimately legitimate. In contemporary Chinese literature, I wish that one will soon be able to apply the same equalizer for the works of migrant workers. While authors must demonstrate the artistic merit of their works to affirm their legitimacy, authenticity should be a sufficient quality to give an individual the right to represent themselves. Perhaps one day—not too far in the future—the honesty innate in these narratives will lead to a greater recognition of their writers’ precarity within the social fabric, opening a path towards their legitimacy and equality within the societies they have constructed.
Jianan Qian is a bilingual writer and translator from Shanghai. She has published four original works in her native Chinese. In English, her words have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Millions, The O Henry Prize Anthology, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Towson University in Maryland.
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