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