All factories are alike; each unhappy worker is unhappy in their own way. For the British-born, Ireland-resident author Claire-Louise Bennett, the working-class climate is “an abrasive and in-your-face world, yet … much of it seems extrinsic and is perpetually uninvolving. One is relentlessly overwhelmed and understimulated all at the same time.”¹ Overwhelmed by understimulation, the bodily toil yet mental disengagement of manual labor is the paradox that animates the masterful novel-in-verse On the Line: Notes from a Factory (2021), by French writer and worker Joseph Ponthus, translated by Stephanie Smee; or the indestructible plastic (2026), by Northern Irish poet and worker Matthew Rice. Both are autobiographical poetic narratives of contemporary factory work. Ponthus enumerates at the opening of his book: “The stench / The cold / The shifting of heavy loads … / The production line / The modern slavery.” Or, as Rice writes: “Once, in this building, a kid clocked off night shift / for good at the end of a rope, / another’s heart gave out at 3 a.m. / performing a task as menial as mine.”

Physical toil, then, is mechanical drudgery, but the work of the mind lives poles apart from the work of the body. The proof? The fact that Ponthus’s and Rice’s products of the imagination—poetry, literature, art—even exist. There is an Aristotelian whiff to the rhapsody in which these writers hold their creative potential: “I write like I think when I’m on my production line,” writes Ponthus. “Mind wandering alone determined / I write like I work / On the production line.” For these author-laborers, then, the mind–body problem is real.

Ten thousand miles to the east of Ponthus’s Brittany and Rice’s Belfast is Xiao Hai’s Beijing. Also a writer and worker, primarily in poetry but also in electronics, garments, and parcel delivery, Xiao Hai has composed a memoir of his life as a Chinese poet-worker in the 2000s and 2010s, Adrift in the South,translated by Tony Hao. Adrift in the South centers less on the physical and psychic violence of the Chinese production line—and by extension, of global consumer capitalism—than Xiao Hai’s pursuit of sublimity from within the factory campus’s “stench of burnt plastic.” His ordeals began in 2003 in Shenzhen, one of China’s first special economic zones, about a thousand miles south of his native Henan, when he was 15. “Finally! I thought,” he writes. “Now I get to work in a big factory … I was a child laborer.” But:

When I looked up again and found myself imprisoned on the factory floor, it was like I could see my youth being devoured by the machines around me. I knew now that without poetry I’d never be anything but a blue-collar worker for the rest of my life, focused on making another 2000 yuan every month.

For Xiao Hai, just as for Ponthus and Rice, sublimity is not about making ends meet on 2000 yuan per month. Instead, it means poetry, nature, beauty: “The language of poetry sliced like a bayonet through the layers of numbness I had accumulated over the past few years … I had anaesthetized myself from all emotion.” In his late 30s, after more than a decade of manual labor, Xiao Hai makes his peripatetic way to a community of writer-workers at Picun Village in Beijing, where Adrift in the South commences—“I walk the alleyways of an urban village …”—and which he still haunts today as the manager of a local thrift shop, a job that allows him to maintain his writing practice. “Most important are the friends who read poems with me on the riverbank, out in the wild, and around dinner tables. … They’re the ones who give me the conviction to keep on writing.”

Adrift in the South owes its nonlinear narrative to the unorthodox circumstances of its creation: The first chapter was originally a stand-alone essay penned in 2019, published online in Chinese, and translated by Hao for the 2024 Granta issue on contemporary Chinese literature, based on which Granta Magazine Editions commissioned a full-length autobiography. (Xiao Hai’s original Chinese text for Adrift in the South will be published in China in 2026.) The result is as much a narrative of new Chinese workers—from which to mine a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese market for both goods and culture, as critic Kevin Schoenmakers demonstrates—as it is the emotional map of a young Henanese man’s coming-of-age, working for the Made in China stamp while learning how to be someone. “I have but one humble wish: to live like a human, with dignity,” writes Xiao Hai, at the end of his narrative. “That’s all I can ask for. That’s all.”

Beware to those who read Adrift in the South solely as a cautionary tale about the Chinese state without considering the international flows of goods and power.

Xiao Hai’s story in Adrift in the South could easily figure as a testimony in 24 City, Jia Zhangke’s acclaimed 2008 docudrama, which intersperses its talking-head monologues with wide-angle shots of the Chengdu military hardware factory where its speakers once worked. The factory is about to be demolished, its campus rezoned for luxury apartments. About two-thirds of the way into the film, the four-meter-tall Chinese characters proclaiming the name of the state-owned factory—“成发集团,” “Chengfa Group”—towering like Dr. Eckleburg’s eyeglasses over F. Scott Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes, are removed from their post over the two-story-tall factory gates. Six men winch them to the ground, one after another, on two ropes. The factory facade, framed symmetrically à la Wes Anderson, is colorless against a backdrop of white smog.

24 City shares somber tales of displacement, exploitation, and loss, largely determined by the Chinese state forcing industrialization’s hand in the mid-20th century. One woman at Chengfa Group cannot afford to return to her native Shenyang for 14 years. Another is forced to abandon her three-year-old son in the name of national security. And in 15-year-old Xiao Hai’s unique blend of production-line misery, loneliness is the main ingredient:

An intense loneliness that penetrated through the concrete floor beneath my feet, splattered over the assembly line, glazed the unfamiliar faces of my coworkers below the fluorescent lights. It soaked through the pile of earpieces of my workstation and infected every cell of my body. It was an unprecedented loneliness, and by the end of my second evening it had set all my hopes and teenage innocence aflame.

But Shenzhen is also the concrete jungle of his youth, scintillating with the euphoria of possibility: a kindred friend at his second factory calls it “The City That Chases Dreams.” It is the scene of his “first time getting trapped on an illegal bus; my first time cutting open a finger with a blade on an overnight shift; my first time washing under a tap after an evening shift in winter…” You only come of age once. But writing in 2019 at 32 years old, analogizing his adolescence to “wild lychees, growing larger and redder as the weather got warmer,” Xiao Hai’s image almost meets Sylvia Plath’s infamous shriveling fig tree, wherein:

from the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. … I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.²

With every day he spends as a disposable unit in the motherland’s spiral of growth, Xiao Hai’s lychees wither too, “the fatigue from my first day of work … yet to dissipate” 23 years later. “When I passed the display windows of the Nike store [in Beijing] I spotted something familiar,” he writes: “The sweatshirt I had sewn at a factory, but now featuring a price tag of 700 yuan, about the same as I would have been paid for two weeks.” This is as close as Adrift in the South gets to critiquing the system of rampant consumerism, more nefarious in China for the masquerade of the communist party: “I just couldn’t understand the economics of it, couldn’t understand why wealthy people were able to loaf about and spend so much while workers were barely surviving, despite being trapped on production floors from spring through winter.”

As for Xiao Hai’s lychees: Should he remain in Shenzhen? Should he return to Henan  and find a wife, as his parents so clearly wish for him? Should he try his hand at selling popcorn, real estate, poetry? “At least in the world of fiction,” he reasons, “I’d never be haunted by floor plans and investment rates.” And if “the year I spent assembling language-learning devices in Shenzhen” or “the nights I worked overtime at the fabrics factory in Dongguan” or “that difficult time in Ningbo when I was taking the bus into the job center every day … all seemed better than what I was doing now,” that was just “the way it was with the past.” Picture now the leathery, lizardy skin of a lychee: its slow, soft browning in the life of the mind of the factory worker, its flesh mottling invisibly beneath, ripening to its death on a tree.

Xiao Hai is 17 when he begins to study and write poetry, and 24 before he turns toward contemporary free verse. “Where are the great men of the past / And where are those of future years?” he reads from “Song on Ascending Youzhou Terrace” by Chen Zi’ang, who lived in the early Tang dynasty. Poetry sharpens Xiao Hai’s gaze on the natural world—“sunlight pour[ing] over the sea and the hills and shroud[ing] the island in a golden dream”—and tempers his irony with its elegiac lyricism. Poetry bursts into the narrative as it burst into his life, an incorruptible compulsion: “My problem was that I only felt alive when I was writing.” Xiao Hai’s own poems, also translated by Hao, serve as epigraphs to the later chapters of Adrift in the South:

Oh cities, you cried, show me the way

and let me rest my feet

But all cities did was watch you trudge

through their meandering streets

Or:

“Don’t worry,” you said, “Mother Nation”

Even though every alley you’d taken was blind

And all you’d managed was to get lost yet again—

“That was great,” you said, “Mother Nation”

Hao’s invincible translation is a feat of balance: between Xiao Hai’s sardonicism and sincerity, the judicious restraint of his prose and the immediacy of his poetry, the inexorable transformation of experience into memory. One especially forceful passage, set during Xiao Hai’s first visit home, maps decades of toil against a quasi-feudalist conception of inevitable predestination, molded by Time:

That autumn, back in my hometown, I watched three generations of farmers hunch their backs in the shade of ploughs and, powerful bodies beside frail ones, carve deep crevices into the dirt of the central plains. Time had overlain their silhouettes on this earth, autumn after autumn, and once the snow melted and the spring wind arrived, it would cut another wrinkle under their eye hollows. I noticed how rough their hands were, the way their sweat beaded on to the land. But despite all that had been harvested here in these fields, neither my ancestors nor my fellow villagers had ever managed to scrape past the poverty line. They were in the grip of fate.

Though the entirety of Adrift in the South is in Hao’s translation, Xiao Hai’s poems have also been translated in World Literature Today (by Tammy Lai-ming Ho and Lucy Coleman respectively), and his debut collection, Sisyphus on the Wenyu River (温榆河上的西西弗斯), was published in May 2026 in Beijing. (Its English-language rights are available.) One must imagine Xiao Hai working, loading sacks of clothes from warehouses into vans and from vans into the thrift shop, “the rock … still rolling”³; but also—his fate firmly in his own hands—still reading and writing in Picun Village, even as the walls of its Museum of Migrant Workers come down around him, “thousands of bricks vanish[ing] in a cloud of dust.” Indeed, according to Hao, Xiao Hai is “‘gregarious, entertaining, infectious,’ ‘a hot and happening member’ of the Picun Literature Group who ‘loves the camera and the camera loves him.’”

In their April 2026 issue, the Baffler ran a symposium piece entitled “The Profession That Does Not Exist”: “a partial history of the hidden labor” in the USA “that makes possible the poems, stories, essays, books, and periodicals you read.” How is “cultural capital,” the forum asks, “underwritten by capital capital”? Is there an empirical reason why Xiao Hai and Ponthus and Rice, writing from different production lines in different literary traditions within different national economies, have all espoused the verse form? Is it because “once the machines were turned on”—abrasive, extrinsic, perpetually uninvolving—“I no longer had any time or headspace to think, let alone to pick up a pencil and jot down words,” let alone interlinked, successive paragraphs of narrative prose? Do the material conditions of writing poetry answer the mind-body problem?

“At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments” (so generalizes Granta editor Thomas Meaney), the moral danger would be to equate the creative and physical oppression of factory labor specifically with Chinese Communism or the specter of menace’s “economic miracle” or the broader polarity of an industrialized “Orient,” rather than with the structures of global capitalism itself. (In April 2026, the Wall Street Journal published a promotional excerpt from Adrift in the South, detailing Xiao Hai’s childhood as his family’s third child under China’s One-Child Policy, and which happens to critique Chinese society’s general sexism, and the strict regime of the family planning office: an interesting selection for a newspaper not known for its leftist credentials.) Where do the products of Xiao Hai’s labor, and that of millions of other workers, go? No farther than the West. “It’s possible that the screen of your very own phone was produced at the same factory during some 3 a.m. night shift,” he writes.

But that’s not the core of Adrift in the South. Beware to those who read it solely as a cautionary tale about the Chinese state without considering the international flows of goods and power, or as an indicator of China’s failing economy from the vantage point of their made-in-China laptop. The specter haunting Xiao Hai’s Shenzhen is poetry, and poetry is the rock he rolls incessantly uphill.