Book Description
When Xiao Hai turned fifteen, his family paid a vocational-school teacher 1,200 yuan to find him a factory job in Shenzhen. So began fifteen years spent moving between the garment mills and electronics factories of China’s fast-growing southern cities.
 
Adrift in the South is a memoir of life as a migrant labourer in the twenty-first century, making iPhones and baby clothes, hand-stitching football shirts and cutting plastic into radios. Here, Xiao Hai reveals the alienation and tedium of factory life, the small indignities and indifference of the larger system. And he tells the story of how poetry led him somewhere unexpected: to join a small community of artists living, working, and studying together on the outskirts of Beijing.
 
This memoir is a landmark text from China’s migrant worker literature movement, a grassroots group of writers providing an unvarnished account of what life is like for the 300 million migrant workers powering the world’s second-biggest economy.
 
About the Author and Translator
Xiao Hai was born in Shangqiu City in Henan Province in China. At fifteen he moved to Shenzhen to join the workforce, moving between cities and factory jobs while writing poetry in his spare time. He is the author of the poetry collection Sisyphus on the Wenyu River, and translations of his poetry have appeared in World Literature Today and Chinese Literature Today
 
Tony Hao is a Connecticut-based Chinese-to-English literary translator and writer. Authors he has translated include Taiwanese novelist Tong Wei-Ger, Chinese short story writer Ban Yu and Chinese essayist Xiao Hai.