Dark, cracked skin, large knuckles holding a thin chin, and a vacant gaze, the image of young migrant workers in southern Sichuan is unforgettable in Zi Zi Yi’s lens.
In the 7th Hou Dengke Documentary Photography Award, Wang Ziyi’s work “Labor Market” was nominated. Wang Ziyi, a former middle school teacher, has been photographing the Panzhihua labor market since 2007, recording the large number of laid-off workers, Yi people from Daliang Mountain and farmers from surrounding townships who come here to find a living. They eat baked yams, stay in 3 yuan a night hostels, and live on the strength of their hands to do work every day.
Sichuan is a large inland province with the largest social workforce in the country. Since the reform and opening up, farmers have left Sichuan on a large scale to work, and hard-working, simple and optimistic has become their collective image. Panzhihua is located in the south of Sichuan and is home to many ethnic minorities. Wang Ziyi remembers that around 2009, this narrow square was once crowded with thousands of people, and their waiting was usually unanswered. 2013, under the influence of the trend of returning population in the central and western parts of the country, the labor market gradually cooled down, and the “Sanyuan Inn”, which was hard to find a store, also closed down. ” also closed down.
During the nearly decade-long filming process, Ziyi experienced the crowded and depressed labor market in Panzhihua, Sichuan.
The following is Wang Ziyi’s own account.
Mineral water is a luxury
Now that people are scattered, it’s impossible to shoot.
The last time I went to the labor market at Dukou Bridge in Panzhihua, I just turned around and left with a sigh. The negative second floor of the dozen or so job agencies were particularly hot, but now they are almost out of business. There were some older laborers standing sporadically at the edge of the square, looking (listlessly) as if they had little to look forward to. When I passed by with my camera hanging, they were all alert.
This labor market is connected by stairs into three levels, the top square is where people gather, and the lower two levels have job agencies, restaurants, hotels, and temporary stops for coaches. It is next to the Ferry Bridge, on a major traffic road with a five-way junction, looking across from the factory of Pangang.
When I came here to photograph in 2009, thousands of laborers filled the open space of the square. Yi people from Liangshan, farmers from villages and towns around Panzhihua, and laid-off workers from Pansteel all came here to find jobs and make a living.
At four or five o’clock, the crowd dispersed one by one. Those who were richer went back to their rented houses; those who were not in good condition were taken to a hotel on the next hill to sleep in a bunk for three dollars a night; those who had no money at all went under the bridge and spread their bunks to sleep.
I teach politics in a local high school, when there is no class to come here to shoot, less than twice a week, more than four or five times. Until fewer and fewer people appeared on camera.
“It’s like throwing bait into a pool.”
Here, everyone pins their hopes on their hands and earns a living by their strength. But most of the time, they can only cross their arms over their chests and wait.
The number of times I can see the recruiting boss is minimal. The van with the boss stopped at the side of the road next to the square and with just one shout, “Eight people! ” and the workers flocked over like a school of fish, like casting bait into a pool.
The lucky ones were picked off, and the rest continued to wait with their hands crossed over their chests for the next day. There are also those who are particularly lucky to be selected by the boss and sent to more distant factories such as Xinjiang, where they are paid two hundred a day and do not return for a long time. People are envious of this kind of work, stable, no worries about tomorrow.
In this square, the treatment is relatively substantial, is skilled and young and strong men. A little older, often only to go under the brute force, work tired, less money. There are many teenage children, arms are still thin, timid eyes, most of the day without saying a word, squatting in the corner, shining a side invisible.
A few stops away from the ferry bridge labor market, is the bamboo lake garden labor market. The part-timers there are younger, the girls can go into the city to do domestic work, and the boys go into catering, which is a little easier than manual work. The Yi women are the most disadvantaged, they have no skills and don’t dress fashionably, so they have to go to carry cement.
The laid-off workers from Pan Steel stay here the longest. They form groups, pile up with their loud voices to put on a show, and when it’s hot, open up their labor uniforms to reveal their bellies. They either talk about last night’s “happy” with the price of a bowl of noodles, or about which one is lucky enough to find another 200 days of work, but no one talks about their families No one talks about their families and worries about tomorrow. No one talked about their families or their worries about the future. They were unaware of the difficulties of life.
The Yi people from the mountains were easy to identify, they used to squat, hunch their shoulders and look around fearfully. Most of them wore cheap suits to try to look decent, and when they went to do manual work, the only suits they had were quickly splashed with paint.
In this square, both men and women, young and old, Yi and Han, are like commodities waiting to be picked.
Meeting Luo Ying
The day I met Luo Ying, at noon, these laborers appeared in my camera for the first time.
In the winter of 2007, I ran into eight Yi women on the street, all of them old and young, each carrying a basket behind her, half a meter high. The oldest one blew her nose and almost threw it at me. It was this handful of snot that caught my attention.
Luo Ying attracted me. She was the youngest in the middle, with dark, rough skin and freckles all over her face, I thought she was at least 20 years old, but when I asked, she was 15, about the same age as the students in my classroom.
They stopped in front of a truck and filled the huge basket with bricks and soil behind them, carrying it one trip at a time for two hours to finish loading the truck. In the middle, three people were cut by bricks, one with a large gash that needed stitches. They turned out the old clothes prepared, pulled off a wrap, the action is skilled. After this trip, eight people share a hundred dollars of work, no one is willing to go to the hospital. I ran to buy hydrogen peroxide and gauze, the gauze wrapped in her foot, white and eye-catching.
After a few days, looking for four trips, I inquired about Luo Ying’s home. Standing in front of the abandoned bomb shelter, I could not help but wonder, this place can really live?
A thin underground ditch sticks out from the hole, and a row of wood is nailed to the hole, that is the door. Luo Ying’s family of three lives inside, the rent is 200 yuan a month. The rent collector pulled a wire at the entrance of the hole, which is the only power source here. Their furniture is only two beds, one for their parents and one for Luo Ying, placed in the tunnel where they can’t walk. They ate, washed dishes, and used the water that flowed from the ditch in the cave. The cave was dark and damp, and once the light was seen, centipedes crawled around on the floor.
That night, one dish and one soup. A few slices of fatty meat, no more than two taels, plus some sweet potato vines plucked from the mouth of the cave. The soup was cooked with dried cabbage brought from their hometown, no oil, just a little salt, which I found hard to swallow. But Luo Ying was happy, “We have meat today! “
It was eight o’clock after the meal and Luo Ying and her mother were nowhere to be seen. When I asked her father, I learned that the mother and father had gone to work again and returned at 3 or 4 am. Luo Ying’s father was drinking with his friends, and he drank a bottle of beer every day, which was almost a third of Luo Ying’s bricklaying pay.
I learned that day that Luo Ying had been engaged in a “baby marriage” with a man who was only 11 years old, the same age as my daughter in elementary school. I told her that this was unreasonable and that she should withdraw from the marriage. She didn’t react much, but said that it would cost 40,000. Except for eating and working, she hardly spoke and even looked a little numb. Being determined by someone else’s fate seemed as natural to her as being bandaged with dirty clothes after an injury.
In the evening when I returned home, I looked at the photos and saw them sitting on the roadside, their hands dark after carrying bricks, sewing clothes in their hands, but their faces could not see the sadness. I had to admit that they needed to be fed, and I cared about equality. In fact, we could not reach a real communication.
The distance of one meter
After saying goodbye to Luo Ying, I did not intervene in the life of any of my subjects again.
In nearly a decade of shooting, my camera was less than a meter away from them, psychologically, but I intentionally kept my distance, not even asking their names. I hung my camera on my chest, passed by them, and pressed the shutter when they looked at the camera without thinking. I’ve been to the “Sanyuan Hotel” twice and photographed drug addicts and prostitutes, and I was instinctively scared when I saw them.
The barrier between people, it is real and does not have to be hidden.
Around 2014, I met Luo Ying again, she was still carrying cement, and looked much older. Her child was sitting on the sidelines with a messy face of snot, and she couldn’t spare a hand to manage him. Like Luo Ying’s father who never appeared at the site, here, I also did not see her husband.
Over the years, every time I thought of this girl, who was my daughter’s age, her rough skin, her fate of being married off early, and seeing her children still trapped in the same trajectory of life, I fell into a daze. These situations cannot be changed by me taking a set of photos for her or giving her some material help. All I can do is to keep recording them so that more people like me can see them in the city.
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