I have one foot in the factory and one hand on the sun / dreams have nowhere to go / reality cannot hide
In the flowing workshop where fluorescent lights shine day and night / We live like robots
I have one foot in the factory and one hand on the sun / It looks like I’m walking on the road / Who knows where to go?
Under the rumbling engine / Who can hear the heart bursting loudly / I have one foot in the factory
In this strange city of familiar walls / Repeated days I want to find a living hope
In this real wandering / humble freedom / absurd game / I want to find a piece of the light of my soul
This is a poem written by Xiao Hai when he was working in the workshop, called “One Foot in the Factory and One Hand on the Sun”. The factory was the place where he stayed from the age of 15 to 28. His identity as a part-time worker and the monotonous life under the roar of machines were the reality he had to face, while the sun was the symbol of his dream. Xiaohai is from the countryside, born in 1987, his real name is Hu Liusai, named Xiaohai to pay tribute to the poet Haizi.
Over the years, Xiaohai has been to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou and Nanjing, all of which are the fastest growing cities in China. But he does not know much about these cities, he rarely really go around to see the daily life of these cities. The workers, the factories and the surrounding environment and buildings are his biggest perception of a city. During his 12 years of working in factories, Xiaohai has made radios, installed screws in electronics factories, and stepped on sewing machines in garment factories. Like countless workers under the working tide, he spent most of his time under the incandescent lights in the workshop, and he felt that the lights, like the hot sun, wiped out his passion for life.
He was unable to change this, so he began to write poetry, which was both a means of resistance and a way for him to find a place for his passion for life. With each additional line of poetry, he felt that his inferiority, ego and pain were more comforted and dissolved, like an analgesic. However, as a new day began, new pain came to him, and he began to write new poems again. With this cycle repeating itself, he felt that life was not in vain.
After work, Xiao Hai returned to his place, flipped through the books, and had a moment of solitude again.
Among all the places where he worked, Xiao Hai liked Meishan Island in Ningbo the most, which was the place where he had stayed the longest. In his narrative, it is a very beautiful place. In spring, peach blossoms filled the whole island, and there was the sea right in front of him. Xiao Hai thought it was so beautiful. That factory is also not busy, in an abandoned school, there are only a few dozen workers, there are not too many bars, after work to watch the dusk sunset. Xiaohai said that the beauty of that can dissolve the monotony of the machine, repetitive depression.
When I met Xiaohai, he had already left the factory and was working in a second-hand clothing store outside Beijing’s Fifth East Ring Road, with a salary of only 2,000 yuan a month. Xiaohai’s daily job is to go to the warehouse to pull clothes and sell them at 1/10 of the market price, and the people who buy the clothes are all working people like him. The store is run by a charity organization, but it has not been paid for some time because of the epidemic. Even so, he is still satisfied with this life because it distances him from his past life and allows him to stop being wrapped up in the roar of machines. The amount of attention paid to the charity by the outside world also gives him some hope that someone might not see the poems he writes.
Here is his autobiography.
At the factory
I was born in a village in the eastern part of Henan Province. In 2003, when I was less than 16 years old, I went out to work. For more than ten years, I lived in a factory. Our village is very big and consists of several natural villages. When I was young, the village did not pay much attention to children’s schooling as a whole, and our four siblings, the eldest sister, dropped out of school early to work at home. When my older brother and I were in junior high school, my parents said that the family’s conditions were not good and that they could only pay for one child to study, so my brother and I had to make a choice. My brother was a repeat student, better than me in science, we all think he will have a future, so finally my brother stayed home to continue studying.
At that time, part-time work was already a trend, and my cousins had long gone to the south with their luggage and would only come back during the Spring Festival. They were dressed in new fashion, spoke a not very fluent Mandarin, and used the money they brought back to help build a house for their family, which made everyone look at them with enthusiasm. They also told me about the outside world, which was vast, trendy and crowded with people, a hustle and bustle that I could not imagine. At that time, it was relatives leading relatives and old folks leading old folks. I would have liked to go along with them, but they thought I was too young and left quietly after New Year without calling me.
I was very disappointed. My mother took out 1000 yuan to send me to a technical school to learn sewing, and the school promised to recommend me to join the factory after I finished my studies. A group of us followed the teacher of the technical school to Shenzhen. This was my first time on a train, no ticket, the carriage was full of people, I found a place to squat at the pool of the two carriages interface, I do not know how many bridges and tunnels through, we arrived in Huizhou, and from Huizhou to Shenzhen Henggang by bus. At that time, Shenzhen was the time when the cheap labor processing industry was developing rapidly, and there were factories everywhere. The teacher of the technical school sent us to an electronics factory, which had nothing to do with what we learned in school. Later I learned that the technical school sent us to the factory and the factory would give them money.
The factory was making radios and the salary was 300 yuan a month. I was assigned a simple job – using a knife to scrape the plastic mouth on the plastic case of the radio that had just been processed. The factory was closed one day a month, and the rest of the day was spent working more than ten hours a day, often working overtime. I remember one night shift, I dozed off, and the sharp blade cut my hand at once. I lasted until the end of the shift, when my fingertips were already swollen, and finally my roommate helped me deal with it. I’m young, they call me “big kid”. In the factory, every once in a while, someone would come to check if child labor was illegal, and the team leader told me to stay in the dormitory in the morning.
Students from a university came to make a documentary, and Xiao Hai was their main character.
I did my first job for two years, sending money home once every two months to subsidize my elder brother’s studies. I rarely left the factory, the world outside was so big that I felt strange and scared. The factory was like a Russian nesting doll: the outermost layer was the factory, followed by the plant, the workshop, then the assembly line, the job, and I was set in the innermost part, repeating one action mechanically every day, all of which produced muscle memory. Because of fear, until my brother also dropped out of school to work, I returned home for the first time in the New Year, when I had been away from home for four years. We took a bus from Hunan to Hubei, all the way to the mountains, and when I saw the plain, I knew I was getting closer to home. The family has changed a lot, there is an electric car, Mom and Dad have also aged, hair are gray.
The second job was in a garment factory, in Dongguan. The factory produced Hong Kong fashion, Japanese children’s clothing, and soccer uniforms. The process I did was to roll a line on the clothes, roll a line to give 9 cents, later reduced to 5 cents, working 15 hours a day, until my eyes were dizzy and my mind was cloudy. Sometimes I was so sleepy that I couldn’t support myself, so I sneaked to the roof on the pretext of going to the toilet and set an alarm clock to sleep for 5 minutes. The climate in Guangdong is not very different throughout the year, and staying in the factory all day long, I felt that I had no concept of spring, summer, autumn and winter.
There was no wind, no support, no idea of change, but I didn’t know what to do. Like everyone else, I was looking forward to winning the lottery to bring me a better life. One more lottery ticket was one more hope, so even if it was raining heavily, I would go out and buy one without stopping for the day. One time I dreamed of lottery numbers and I ran all the way to the lottery, but unfortunately I didn’t win later. Only once did I come closest to winning – on my way to buy a lottery ticket I met a banana seller, who ended up swapping my money while I wasn’t looking, and the ticket didn’t get bought; within two days I heard that someone had won 15 million yuan. When I left that factory, I took all the lottery tickets I had bought to the roof of the building and scattered them down from above, in droves, and at that moment, I felt especially sincere.
Writing poems
If the first four years of working in the factory were still fresh, in the later years, there was only patience left. Over the years, I have been to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou and Nanjing, each city is very big, but my memories are all in the factory. Sometimes I think, I am obviously a part of this city, also doing things for the development of the city, but that strange and alienated feeling is always with me, I am always an outsider, floating in the most invisible corner of the city.
There were many rules in the factory that I could not understand more and more. One factory was very strict with us, starting the day shift at 8:00 a.m., but every time we had to call a morning meeting 10 minutes earlier to explain the production situation and assign tasks. The factory had strict rules for tardiness: if you were late once, the team leader would criticize you in front of the team; if you were late twice, you had to write a review and “recognize the mistake of being late”; if you were late three times, you had to pay a fine of 50 yuan because you “repeatedly failed to change”. I think this is very disrespectful.
At night, Pi Village is still lively, and Xiaohai likes to go here for a stroll.
The factory is also divided into low season, high season, some stages are not busy, do not need to work at night. But one factory I worked in, because we had a fixed salary, required workers to stay at their posts at night, even if there was no work. You would see a strange sight, the whole night the shop was lit up and everyone just sat there talking and bragging. I was confused. I didn’t want to chat, and I didn’t know what I could do, so I went to memorize some poems, the earliest of which were Tang poems and Song lyrics, and I memorized three or four hundred of them, and I went through the dictionary twice. I recited “Night of the Spring River Flowers and Moon” to my fellow workers, and they thought it was very well written, but it had nothing to do with us. When they were not working, most of them went to Internet cafes to play games or chatted in the dormitory, which was probably a way of paralysis for them.
One day, I saw a book of Haizi’s poems on the street in Suzhou, it was an old book with the time and place of the original purchase written on the title page. There were fields of wheat, earth, grain and vegetables in Haizi’s poems, which made me feel warmed by being from the countryside. So I started to learn to write modern poetry, something closer to my real life. I felt that I was as lonely as Haizi, and I learned from his poems to be sincere, to face my lonely soul and life sincerely. I regard him as my brother, so I call myself “Xiao Hai”. I once wrote a poem in tribute to him.
In the night when the moon rises / Have you gone to the grassland again / I seem to see / In your face / reflecting the beauty and desolation of the Gobi / In your lush beard / Is the grassland growing / I clearly see the sheep gnawing at the sadness and strength of the grassland
The name of the poem is “Haizi, the brother with the long beard”.
I later learned about Xu Lizhi, a worker at Foxconn who also wrote poems and jumped off a building in 2014. He wrote a poem called “Rental House”, which I was impressed by – “A space of about ten square meters / is cramped, damp, and does not see the sun all year round …… Whenever I open the window or the wood door / I am like a dead person / putting the lid of the coffin, slowly Push open.” I understand that he does not see a way out of life and does not know the meaning of his existence. I also worked at Foxconn in Zhengzhou. Whenever I think of this time, it always feels like a dream. I always have a picture in my mind of the 4:00 a.m. winter morning on the way from work, the howling north wind, the flying snow, the various vendors, the silent and bright moon, the lonely stars, and the large group of workers walking with indifferent expressions. In fact, my heart has leapt down from the stairs many times.
Xiao Hai, who lives in the suburban Pi village of Beijing, goes to the next village to get a haircut, where he has been living since he came to Beijing in 2016
I wrote poems back then, all in a few words and a few sentences as I saw fit. These papers might be statements, loading orders or overhaul orders, and most of what I wrote were my gripes and complaints. If I wrote something during the day, I would go to an internet cafe at night and transcribe it into my QQ space. When writing emotional catharsis, handwriting is too scribbled, if not copied down that day, you can not recognize what you wrote later. Sometimes the word can not be recognized, just change a word, but perhaps the initial word is the best. Writing is like talking, talking to yourself, there is no point in communicating with people in the workshop, it is better to communicate with yourself like this. As long as I can record what I was thinking, my mood, my feeling, my loneliness will be relieved, equivalent to a relief and comfort, like an analgesic. The next day, the power of this consolation will diminish and I will start writing a new one.
I also thought about changing careers, for a while I came out of the factory, to work as a salesman, selling MSG, gold pipes, and massage devices, but after a while, I gave up, I can not stand the false things. I also learned to make roast duck in Suzhou, after learning to sell for a week felt uninteresting, and left; also sold popcorn, but none of the things can make me immediately see the hope of life.
I was confident of my talent and I wanted to prove myself. I went to The Voice of China with a pile of stuff I had written, only to have the show say that registration had long since ended. I went back to the talent show and read a Tang poem on one of the shows. I said on the show that I wanted more people to feel the charm of traditional culture, but the judges’ teachers said I was too monotonous and suggested I wear Tang Dynasty clothes and read in a ranting style, and then that was the end of it. I am always tossing and turning, but I can’t toss anything, I am extremely enthusiastic, and I am splashed with cold water again and again by the reality, it is that kind of a state.
After there was no place to go, I had to go back to the factory. But I couldn’t stay any longer, and the time I stayed was getting shorter and shorter, some for a few weeks, some for three or five days, and some for one day. My family didn’t know I was going through this, they only knew I was working outside. They were also all out there, working hard to survive, and it was hard to pay much attention to me. At that time, our family was like a microcosm of the times, with relatives from all over the world, all away from each other: I was in Suzhou, my father was in Guangzhou, my brother was in Zhejiang, my brother was in Lanzhou, and my mother was picking cotton in Xinjiang.
I was stumbling around, running around, following my own feelings, and was eventually thrown off the train of the times.
Back to reality
I always feel that my personality is very floating, not as down-to-earth as my peers. I have been living in a dream for so many years, writing poems, listening to rock music, and thinking about being known by people through being famous. I didn’t think about buying a house, I didn’t get a driver’s license, and I didn’t think about buying a car. In other words, I had no concept of life. I think this probably has something to do with my life in the workshop. I stayed from the age of 15 to 28, which is the golden age of a person, the stage of life and worldview formation. But this period of my life was all in the factory, and I was wrapped up in the era of rolling south.
Basically everyone around me got married, had children, and many hard-working people bought houses in foreign countries. Only I, wandering back and forth between the various factories, the time just passed. I am now living without material things, without ideals, without shame. 23 years old before, reading a few poems I was satisfied, I felt too happy. Now I can’t, I can’t cheat myself anymore, or rather I can’t heal myself anymore, life still has to return to the fireworks. These are the realities I have to face now.
Xiaohai went to dinner with his friends, and there is a lot of joy in living here that the workshop where he used to work can’t give him
The biggest problem is getting married. As I get older, marriage becomes less and less desirable. My aunt once introduced me to a girl, Zhengzhou, the family conditions are good, the father is a veteran, the mother is also retired. I was very thin, weighing only a hundred and some pounds, the girl had more than 160 pounds. We both walked down the street, the contrast was obvious, and I thought someone must be watching us. We saw a few movies and ate a few times. She always ordered steak, I was weak in my heart, always eating steak, my salary is only 2,000 yuan, how can I afford to eat. Later she may think that we two are not suitable, and broke up.
Up to now, I’ve been on no less than 50 blind dates. If written on paper, it is a ten-year dating history. The earliest blind date was in 2009, I was riding an electric bike to the blind date’s home, accompanied by a relative. But at that time my mind was on my own ideals, I didn’t have much idea about getting married, so I made the mistake of going over. I saw the wedding bride price rise all the way from the earliest few thousand to 10,001 yuan (taking the meaning of one in a million), and within a few years it rose to 80,000 yuan, and now it is 180,000 yuan. Not only that, but also to have a house and a car. My family does not have a car, and now I have to borrow a relative’s car for a blind date. Every time before going, my dad has to give me height increase insoles, he is afraid that the woman is too short for me.
These years I have not saved any money, but the good thing is that relatives are very supportive of me, saying that the bride price of money is willing to come together to me. My parents said they would borrow money to get me married, but I can’t find anyone yet, which is too sad for them. Now there are fewer and fewer girls in the countryside, who have a girl, matchmakers can take boys all day and night, the first one just left, the next one went in. My mother often do my thinking, and told me that dating girls who are divorced is no problem, only those who have been hurt know how to cherish; have children is also okay, born not raised pro. She is more enlightened than I am, I think they are more receptive to the changing times than I am and more able to change at their own pace.
There are almost no young people left in the village today. The old family is like an arena, comparing whose children make more money and whose family builds a better house by marrying a daughter-in-law. I was obviously the one who failed. in 1997, our family built a tiled house, and in 2007, we knocked it down and spent more than 100,000 yuan to build a building. in 2015, the style of my house was eliminated, and my brother built a new house with more than 200,000 yuan earned from his part-time job. He bought his own house in a foreign country and said this house for my wedding. I sometimes think about the heart is very hard, so many years I was floating outside, my new house are turned into an old house, sometimes the wind will blow off a few tiles. My mother has long prepared my wedding bedding, but once it was chewed by rats.
Xiaohai likes rock music, and he says that the moment when all the emotions spill out, he will also sing
I came to Beijing in 2016, flew from Hangzhou, it was my first time to fly, bought a discounted ticket, arrived at 2 o’clock in the middle of the night. I arrived in a village outside the sixth ring road of Beijing. I came to Beijing to attend the Earth Folk Concert. I had written a lot of poems in the workshop and I wanted to sing them. I read a poem at the concert. After reading the poem, I came back to real life, needing to survive, and I had to find a job. One day I changed three jobs. At that time, I was working as a waiter in a store in Sanlitun. After three days, my boss said I was not suitable and told me to pack up and leave. I thought of a Southeast Asian restaurant next to Yonghegong, which I had interviewed for before, and the other party agreed to let me go. I took my luggage and headed that way, but on the way I saw a restaurant in Unity Lake that was hiring, so I went over and served plates for an hour. I felt that the Chinese restaurant was too tired, so I took my luggage again and went to Yonghegong.
For me, I can’t go back home, and I can’t stay in the city. But if we compare, the outside world is more like a haven. In this village, no one evaluates me, no one knows me, I have a nodding acquaintance with anyone, everyone is busy with survival and life, and do not care about other people’s business. I sell clothes in this second-hand store, and although my salary is very little and I can’t pay on time, I at least have my own time, which allows me to still touch my ideals. My mother thinks my current salary is too low, she has recently planned with me, let me go home in the summer to get a driver’s license, and then go to work in a factory in the south, she said there are many girls in the south. I said, “Mom, I first went to the south, right?”
For Xiao Hai, there is no going back to his hometown. Instead, the outside world is like a haven where no one judges him and no one knows him
When will happiness come in the end? I first wrote a poem called “Lady Luck Patronizes Me”.
Some people say life is like a song / I want to ask what it sings / I have been struggling but still have nothing / Is it the wrong way I am starting to wonder / I want to find a direction / to be brave and pioneering / The stars should be the brightest one / Lady Luck patronizes me / to get what I want / Lady Luck patronizes me / to have what I want / If life is like a trip to the clouds / I would like to give all of my youth Passion / With the original persistence / Waiting for the twist of fate again / An innocent heart is shining / Waiting for the dream to come true / Blossom
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