The Chinese Factory Workers Who Write Poems On Their Phones

Sometimes, one finds poets in the unlikeliest of places. "In recent years there have been a flurry of documentaries highlighting the hardships of China’s migrant workers, but the 2015 film Iron Moon drew attention to a very specific figure: the migrant worker poet. It follows several young writers battling economic and cultural prejudice in their attempts to sublimate 14-hour shifts on assembly lines into lines of poetry." 

This article is about these workers and how their work, both physically at manufacturing plants and in the writing of poetry, define and describe a moment in political, social and industrial history. They turn their brutal experiences of hellish hours, severed limbs and hopelessness into poignant portraits of the cost of convenience in the age of modern capitalism. They are not only up against the toils of their workplace, but also the prejudice against poets who are not highly educated. Those without formal education in poetry are often considered inferior, and writing is not considered a realistic path to upward social mobility. 

This piece highlights the necessity of seeing laborers not only as victims of an oppressive system but as humans, as artists. "The very act of writing these poems is self-fulfilling, a way for those without a voice to counter the detachment they feel from each other, from their work, from the things they make, and to reclaim their own sense of humanity. The poems also provide an opportunity for us not to lazily point fingers at China’s human rights abuses, but to think about our own casual complicity in these workers’ hardship." The work of these factory workers push us up against humanity's beauty, and simultaneously, its cruelty.